Hi there,

It's blog time again. Actually, what I really want to do is put in a link for anyone who wants to look at the pictures that I took at the Thanksgiving. There's also a few other pictures from backstage at Whitney's play at school.

We had a great time. The weather was very good though it has been warmer on Thanksgivings before. We did the traditional turkey on Thursday and on Friday we had some old and new friends by for some oysters and other stuff. There's a few pics from the Bird Island walk and the last pics show houses falling into the sea over on Ocean Isle. It was good to see everybody again and we're looking forward to going back this summer though that will be a while.

So here's the link:

Pictures from Thanksgiving 2005

Enjoy!!

Last night I fixed supper and decided to photo-document the event. However, I haven't gotten around to doing it yet. Just to remind myself how all this works in the Blogosphere, I'll show a shot or two of the meal's creation.

Here's a bit of the meal's ingredients.











Well, I gotta go now. It's time for Desparate Housewives. I'd hate to have to buy it from Steve Jobs if I missed the episode.

Hi there fans of Philip's Blog. I haven't written in my blog in a couple of months so I'm going to try to start back up. I don't think the world can stand to go so long without bits of wisdom from yours truly.

So today I'll start slowly. My wife is taking me furniture shopping today. I tried to arrange some major surgery and a root canal but I didn't have enough advanced warning so I guess it's shopping for me instead.

Well shucks!

So long for now.

Good Morning! It's been about 2 weeks since school started back. As I mentioned earlier, my wife has started teaching seventh grade math, a new career at the half century point. Well, we're still into it 24/7 but I think she likes it OK. I'm dealing with it right now. Hopefully, in the coming weeks, we'll get some of wife and mom back into our lives as the new becomes more routine.

I can tell you one thing for sure, teachers aren't paid much for the work they do.

Good Morning!

School has started back and life takes on a new sort of pace. I'm trying to adapt. This year things are going to be a bit different. First and foremost, my lovely wife has gone back to work. When we moved here from New Jersey, she was pregnant and decided to take a year or so off with our new baby. Well a year stretched into 14.

With my son off to college and my daughter getting a bit more independant, my wife was getting antsy to do something. The fact that I was out of work and not making much money with my little business venture may have also have influenced her thinking. Anyhow, she decided that she didn't want to be a scientist anymore, which was what she used to be, and that she preferred to return to her roots in math. So she decided to get a teaching degree and teach math to hormone addled middle school students. She entered a program called NC-Teach, a state program designed to allow people, primarily in the math and science fields, to quickly get teacher certification. Good math teachers are hard to come by apparently. It's a total immersion teacher training thing where you go to school at all kinds of irregular hours and do lots of homework.

Anyhow, she did the whole banana and got a job. I may talk about that at another time. I sure the travails of teaching will make for some interesting stories. The reason I started writing this blog entry was to explain why I have time to write this today. The job she took requires her to get up at about 5:30 in the morning. She tries to be quiet when she gets up but I started slamming the Snooze every 10 minutes to try to get a bit more sleep and eventually, I decided it wasn't working. So now I get up. But I have to take my daughter to school at 8:00 so that gives me two and a half hours to kill. So first, I go for a fast walk in the dark. My walk takes about 2o minutes. Then I have some coffee and a poptart. Then I wake up my daughter and then I log onto the computer and check email and the web for news and other things and then I shower and shave and then I take my daughter to school and I go to work. Today I tried to insert a blog session and if I write a bit less than today it might just work. But Today, I'm out of time and need to jump in the shower.

So bye for now!

We just got back from taking my oldest son off to college. For reasons that I don't fully understand but will learn to accept, he decided to attend a small Quaker school about 10 hours from home. Let me just say that saying goodbye was one of the hardest things I've ever done. I'll get used to it eventually, I guess. But it won't be easy.

I think he'll do well and I believe that the school will be good for him and also, that he'll be good for the school. It's small enough that he'll make an impact and I think it will be a positive one.

And he'll also get good grades or he's coming home.

Hi there,

It's blog time again. Actually, what I really want to do is put in a link for anyone who wants to look at the pictures that I took at the beach. I used Picassa to export them into a bunch of web pages and I uploaded the whole thing into my web site. The pictures don't have anything to do with my web site but it's a good place to post them so that anyone can get to them quickly.

So here's the link:

Pictures from the Beach 2005

Hey, that was pretty easy. Enjoy!!

Hi there. It's Monday. We went to Sunset Beach last week and had a really good time. Sunset Beach is a really nice beach in NC. Some say it's the best. One of the reasons is that for some cause or another, sand is piling up on Sunset while it's washing away from all the other beaches. This leads to a very wide flat beach with very fine sand (at least by east coast standards). So it's good for building sandcastles, spreading out without being on top of other people and letting your kids run loose. That allows you to relax and drink beer all day while you talk with old friends about other people who aren't there.

This year we had a bigger crowd than usual. We had some friends down from Pennsylvania for a few days who stayed with us. My cousin from Chicago stayed next door. Her brother-in-law and family had another house. My sisters and another cousin had another house and an old friend from my home town got another house. I was particularly glad that my buddy from Tabor stayed for the week. When he visited in past years, I was always worried about him driving home at night after too many beers. Also, his wife, an avid NC State fan in a sea of Carolina fans, always adds spice to any discussions of ACC athletics.

I may say more later but for now, I'll post a couple of sandcastle pictures. The timing of the tides made this a good year to build sandcastles. Low tide occurred about 11:00 AM on Monday and moved up about 52 minutes each day. The result is that after you build a sandcastle, you get to watch the tide destroy it rather than going in for supper, knowing that some unappreciative pre-teen jerk kid was going to kick it in. I build my castles for God to destroy, not some some unappreciative pre-teen jerk kid. Plus, I like to watch the destruction myself.

Bye for now.

Before
After

Hi there! A couple of days ago, I decided to try out the new picture posting feature they've added to Blogger. I'm going to the beach in a couple of weeks and while I'm there I like to build sandcastles. So I decided to post a picture of one of my castle creations from the past. But when I navigated away from this blog editor, I lost my blogging for that day. So here I am back again to try to put that picture in my blog. Here goes:

Whoops! It showed up on the side. Oh well. That's me in the middle with various family around and one of my masterpieces in front of us. Pretty soon that ocean behind us will compete with pre-teens roaming the beach to see who can do in the castle first. The pre-teens usueally win.

Well, gotta run. Bye.

Short post today. It now appears that you can easily add a photo to your Blog without having to host it somewhere like I've done with other photos. In other words, Google has some room for you if you don't send in too many. They probably get that from all that unused 2 gig allotments that they give to G-mail customers. I know that I'm only using about 2% of my 2 gigs. So here's a photo:

I got it from Slashdot. Putting it here is probably some sort of violation of something but maybe not since it comes from the open source everything should be free crowd. Bye.

Hi, I'm back again. I just looked at the photo and it looks like crap. I think the photo has one of those transparent backgrounds. I think I need to change my template so that everything is white in the background so I won't have to worry about whether the photo posts are transparent or not. I'll do that later.

I'm back again. That's better but it still has a box around the picture. I'd like to get rid of that but I'll leave it for now.

Bye.

Time for a new post. This post has nothing to do with my life in a big way. It's just a rumination on what I plan to do the next time I buy a computer.

OK, here we go. Over the last 21 years, I've always had a computer. When I finished by PhD and went to work at a crappy company, I figured it was time to indulge and buy a computer. I thought about it a lot but my wife (new wife at the time) didn't seem too hot on the idea. She worked as an x-ray crystallographer at another big crappy company and looked at a computer screen all day and didn't seem too interested in looking at one when she got home. Eventually she even had a VT-100 terminal (a real one, not an emulator) hooked up to a 300 baud modem so she could work from home. Besides personal computers costs a lot of money back then. Around that time the Mac came out and I was enthralled. I played with them a few times and I was hooked. But she said no.

Imagine my surprise when some friends were visiting from our old school and lo and behold, delivered an original 128K Mac for my very own. It was an anniversity gift from my wife purchased at the academic discount by our friends. ($1300 vs. $3000). Happy! Happy!

Unfortuantely, reality soon set in. It was a cool computer but it was next to impossible to program if you weren't gonna do it for a living. I wanted something like Turbo Pascal for the mac. And I wanted it free. Unfortunately, we'd already spent the money budgeted for home computers for the next seven years.

Over time, I acquired some software and did a little programming and played with my Mac as I watched it slowly but surely become almost useless. Still played games and things but it was becoming uber underpowered quickly.

After seven years, my wife had changed jobs and was working for a University as a crystallographer and I was getting sicker of my company all the time. So I started looking for a new job in a new place. When I found a new job in a new place, I convinced my lovely wife that seven years was enough time and that when we moved we wouldn't have that lucrative academic discount so now was time for a new computer. We got a IIsi with a 13 inch color monitor. I know that 13 inch sounds really bad, but that was one nice looking monitor and Apple tended to call a monitor by it's viewable size whereas the PC world called a monitor by the size of the truck used to ship it.

After seven years, it was still doing OK but some apps were a bit slow and the internet was starting to come on board. The real kicker happened when I upgraded our copy of Office to the newest version and it took 50 seconds just to load Excel. My wife used Excel to do the budget and that was intolerable. Of course, that was my plan all along.

Our timing was actually pretty good. I'd been eyeing a new mac for a long time and couldn't figure out what to buy. We finally decided to take the plunge just after the 233-G3 had come out. This was a good thing. The G3 was probably the biggest speed jump in the Mac line and by waiting, we got a computer that has served us admirably for the last seven years and still seems to be running strong. But there are a few things that are starting to break. A few years ago I tried OS X on a G3 and it's a non starter, so we can't take advantage of any of that iStuff. The old browsers (there are no new ones) are starting to break on some web sites. The 233-G3 was pre-USB and the PCI cards don't work with a lot of things.

So we bought a Mac in 1984, 1991, 1998 and now it's 2005. Any student of linear algebra knows that it's time for a new one. What to buy? It's become very clear to me that any machine today is probably fast enough for most everyting we need and the only reason that hardware doesn't last is the software/hardware conspiracy that requires continous upgrades so that they can continue to make money.

So what is it? iMac, PowerMac, MacMini or a laptop. Somehow, I've never been crazy about that all in one model that Apple has sold over the years though I liked the original. Monitors and CPUs seem to break and become obsolete at such different rates that I kind of like them decoupled. Do we wait for Mac on Intel? I don't think so. I still have a lot of software that runs on System 9 that I'd have to replace. I couldn't possibly justify repurchasing hardly any of it but I like to know that I have it. So I'm thinking a mini might be nice. Takes up a lot less space. Still runs OS 9. Doesn't costs an arm and a leg though it costs a butt-load more than Apple would have you believe. Looks cute and might even make it's way into the living room. The PowerMac is just too big and pricey for our usage. And I don't really like a portable for the house. So a Mini it is. We'll probably wait for a speed bump or a price drop and I'll try to get as much of that sexy stuff as I can when I buy. Sexy stuff is the superDrive, 1 gig of ram, airport and bluetooth, wireless keyboard and mouse and maybe a really cool LCD monitor. Like I said, it won't be cheap.

So those are the plans. Now I have to figure out how to make our old G3, really start looking like the dog it needs to be to get my lovely wife on board.

A couple of things worth mentioning. I have bought a Dell PC laptop in the last year for my company that is going out of business. I needed the PC because I was planning on selling some automation that was driven by VB-6. I'm trying to make this one not count as a computer. I also bought some Apple stock about 1990. After 15 years, it's only a fair investment and that's been true only because of the run up of the last year. But it's been fun to watch.

Well, gotta run for now.

bye

Good Morning,

Today I'm going to write something just to keep it looking like I'm using this blog. That's in the event that Google has some kind of auto-bot that scans the blogs and checks to see if you actually write something in your blog. One day I might become prolific again.

I want to figure out how to post pictures easily. I have Picassa on my machine, so I've covered the first step to letting the big G take over my desktop. I wonder if the big G will ever come to represent the evil that the big M now represents to many computer users. If they do it's gonna be a much easier slide into dependency given that little that they've given me so far has cost anything (I did use Adwords for my company). I think they see the advantages of cheap disk space. Time to go to work.

Bye

Again, Long time, No post. I'm going to try to start up again with the daily postings but it will probably be difficult. I mean for these post to be mainly mundane crap about my life with occasional opinions that will get me in trouble. It's Memorial Day weekend. Went to my sister Carolyn's house for a little family gathering last evening. Turns out that last weekend she was at a party and mentioned that she was having a party and invited a bunch of other friends so it was a pretty big party. There were some of her old friends that we hadn't seen in a while and a few new friends, mostly neighbors. Nice people and a few kids and some dogs running around. Real American.

I had a couple of beers over the course of the evening. That's 2. Could be a sign of getting old that I'm perfectly satisfied to drink only 2 beers over an entire evening. I did eat a lot.

Work is going OK. I wouldn't say it's the most exciting thing in the world but, with a bit of work and patience, it can get better. Patience is key.

I've got to do some work in the yard today. Spread some mulch and kill some weeds. I kill weeds with Roundup. I bought a plastic bottle of the concentrated stuff about 17 years ago. I think it was about a pint for maybe $30. Amazingly, it's still pretty potent. A half capfull in a squirt bottle and you can wipe out all the weeds in your yard. And if you're careless, you can also wipe out patches of grass like I did a few years ago. Actually, I think someone else, whose name will go unmentioned, was responsible for the grass killing but I accepted the blame for reasons of domestic tranquility. I need to go easy with the stuff. It's half gone and I want it to last till I die or at least till all the weeds acquire resistence to it.

This is the first Sunday since the church choir has taken off for the summer. So we're skipping today. Haven't done that for a while. Hope the Lord will forgive me.

Enough for today. Time to kill weeds and spread mulch.

Long time, no post. Today I start a new job. I've put my company on a low hum to sell out my inventory. Could be an interesting day. Later

There was something on the Daily Show tonight about bloggers. They're changing the world or something. I guess it's kind of cool to have a blog. So I have one, but I don't feel all that cool. I wish I could find something interesting to write.

I'm staying up late so I can pull some shirts out of the dryer when they get dry. If I leave them overnight, they'll be hard to iron with the industrial strength wrinkles that set in around 3:00 AM in the morning.

I got a request from some Russian dude to put a link on my web site (www.innovasyn.com) to his company. It's a chemistry company that provides compounds to other companies. They can make them cheaply because they employ chemist in Russia that don't have anything to do and will work for peanuts. That's why I don't have a job now. I've got a list of about 3,475 companies and he asked that I add his company to that list. He's got a list of 6 things and I asked that he add my company. So he did. It didn't seem like an even trade to me but he seemed satisfied. Then he asked if I could also post a friend's web site. It's more of an informational web site rather than a company. So it got better billing in a different link place. But I get so few hits that I don't know if there's any difference between the two.

I recently checked out the new MSN search. I did a search for "parallel synthesis" which is the realm in which I'm trying to do commerce. My company was listed around 14th. It's about the same on Yahoo. On Google, it's about 365th.

In the catagory of "all good things come to those who wait", I bought 100 shares of Apple stock for $35/share, about 15 years ago. It's been an interesting ride. Lately, it's actually turned into a reasonable investment. It's increased in value by about 5-fold, about 11% a year for the last 15 years. I could have bought about a year ago and gotten the same return, just a lot faster. But I wouldn't have enjoyed those exhilirating roller coaster-like drops that I experienced when the dot com bust came.

Well, enough of that. Time to go hang shirts.

Hi there!

For all of you out there anxiously awaiting my each and every word each day, relax. I'm still alive. It's just hard to find something to say each and every day. But it's time to try to start again. Well that's all you get for now. Bye.