Sep.03.2007

It's Labor Day today. Summer vacations are history.... campers are coming home, cabins are being closed up (except for the diehards who wait until Columbus Day to do that), kids are back in school.

Had breakfast at Bickfords with my best buddy, then he went home to mix concrete for his wife and I came home to seal a countertop for my wife (who is working this morning).

Started to draft my policy statement on the science-religion conflicts going on in the USA today.... shouldn't take me more than a year to complete that.

Weather is perfect, as viewed from this porch.... laptop toolbar says it's 82F and there is a nice breeze going by..... no animal activity whatsoever out on the lawn.

A guy just drove by on a recumbent bicycle.

Yesterday I dislocated my finger (for the first time in my life). Very weird feeling.... it was bent way disgusting but it did not hurt at all and took me a minute to understand what had happened. Then I got upset but calmed down immediately and just grabbed it and yanked it back into place.... works fine again.

A guy just drove by in a recumbent Porsche.

Setting Bones, etc....

The Duke (that'd be John Wayne to you) essentially defined the American man for at least several generations. I'll spare you further rants on that topic.... but it's a fact, like it or not.

In the movie Red River (193X), he applies his manly sensitivity to an injured friend, as follows....

The Duke is walking back to the covered wagons after a fight of some sort. Bodies are scattered aplenty.... he stares straight ahead. His friend is lying on the ground screaming that his arm (leg ?) is broken... scream scream scream .... the Duke backs up a step, grabs the guys arm and yanks it back into place without even looking at the guy (who REALLY screams now).... then keeps on a-movin' down the line.

That's when men really were men, you think, huh?

Sep.04.2007

Wentworth cancelled my Thermo course today because only one person sign up for it. Am feeling displaced at the moment.

Called someone for an estimate to pave the driveway.... will meet him saturday. Dropping my car off for 20k mile tuneup tomorrow. Dropped my chain saw off for a tune up today .... haven't started the thing in 2 years. Today i trimmed trees with a hand saw... didnt break any bones but my wrist is numb. reconnected my basement headset phone to the house line. Moved 90% of my DVD's into a single 3 ring binder case, and freed up about 15 feet of livingroom shelf space. Played minigolf by myself before driving to school.... i won.

mike is planning major surgery on my desktop PC in between wasting his time fixing up his house

Sep.06.2007

Wentworth e-mailed and asked if i'd teach one or two of several choices of day course. We are going round and round on that now .... the idea of facing a class of 19 year old whipsnaps is kind of ....hmmmmm.....

Mike says my computer is almost ready, but he is off to the white mountains tomorrow ... which are of course my future burial grounds, i love them so much.

working on a new bookcase, so i can free up the basement back shelf for experimental equipment (aka tech junk).

Sep.11.2007

Finished little bookcase .... lab / tech area started along back shelf ..... (couldn't resist posing frankenstein amongst the heat exchanger gizmo)

Sep.16.2007

yikes, i forgot to pay quarterly taxes (again) yesterday .....

but the good news is mike brought my desktop PC back all fixed. UBUNTU / GNOME setup. i am happy now . i was up until early this AM playing with the configurations. the new version of gnome is a little too gimicky for me regarding visual effects (title bars are transparent ) and window behaviour (windows behave like window shades - which i do like - and also kind of evolve onto the screen rather than popping up sharply - which i dont like). and had to tweak some of my TCL applications which are computer / monitor specific. also need to reload the xmahjonng tilesets that Mohave needs.

i discovered that my personal critical applications are:

all of those work just fine, and my bread and butter TCL applications (SantaFe and Peratyk) look good....

moved the drill press to the shed shop alongside the table saw ... looks good.

however, because i hit it with a hammer, my thumb hurts a lot.

Sep.17.2007

had breakfast with mike at cliff's cafe in townsend. had 2 poached eggs on top of hash, and a grilled muffin. the waitress promised that it would lower my cholesterol.

mike had an appointment with an orthopedic dr. to address the increasing level of pain in his shattered kneecaps..... and i am recalling that i was about mike's age when i realized i was no longer the baby boy of my youth.

next time you see mike, ask him if he will ever RUN down a mountain again.

decide that i need real electric power out in the shed.... or maybe i just need something to keep me busy.

Sep.18.2007

It is done ...wire runs underground from garage to shed thru 3/4" pipe. Not yet connected to live voltage. Covered over nicely... need to grow plants around vertical pipes up wall.

Constitutional Americans

Since we the people no longer care about the rights of the people (our own selves included !), let's screw it all and turn America and it's beautiful Constitution over to people who care. I say we all head down to the sea and jump in, and let better people inherit the blessings we have decided to dump in a trashcan.

Alternatively, let's have a serious revolution and start over..... no forget that ..... there aren't enough Americans left to win a revolution .

Sep.19.2007

Patty is a VP at my bank; she called and asked me if i'd like to work with 10 - 12 year old kids in a junior achievement after school program. we talked about that and it is a possibility.... the JA people have tons of material to work from. its after school (2 - 3 PM) one hour a week with an optional hour to help kids do there homework. im not sure about signing up for homework duty but told her JA looks like fun kind of, but i have to wait for WIT to decide yes or no on day school courses for me.

see my posting about Patty.

all the details of the shed internal electricals are done on the shed end. am now working the garage end.

Sep.23.2007

had breakfast with mike and isaak (sp ? ) then went to a flea market and bought some other people's stuff .... isaak got in for free since he's young and i got in for $1 since i'm old .... mike paid full price since he's ugly... i got work gloves for $1 ... how can you go wrong for $1 ? isaak bought a green rubbery ball of spagetti like threads that i am not sure the purpose of but it was obvious to isaak.

i wrote a simple shell script to resize a large batch of pictures from a digital camera ...
for filename in P1000*.JPG
do
convert $filename -resize 600 -quality 80 "web"$filename
done

then i sat outside in the shade and read the new yorker and drank wine while deb lay on the sofa in front of the TV ..... i am reminded of the idle, rich players in the opening scenes of the great gatsby !!!.

L sent an e-mail about matthew's elbow....

Hi there.

Short note to tell you matthew got hit with a bball during yesterday's game and fractured a bone near his elbow. Dr. did not think it was anything serious ... just put him in a sling and said to follow up with ortho for a second opinion. He is not in too much pain but I am sure will be using his injury for all the attention he can get around here! But he is fine. Also it was not his pitching arm which is VERY GOOD.

L

Sep.25.2007

should have stayed in bed today .... i feel fine but the day was a waste even though i got out of bed.

19" LCD monitor burned out ... black screen of death. the spare 17" works fine.... how do you burn out a monitor? .... but actually the 17" monitor looks slightly nicer for some reason.

mike got me squared away with the various music players on my computer ... but i claim most of the credit since it was me who found the unconnected speaker wire that miraculously fixed everything.

{table saw topic}
the table saw needs attachments and accessories .... as deb says "it's so important to accessorize"..... i can't cut very wide boards ... it's a geometry problem.

an internet search reveals that i need to make a "sled" because no table saw has adequate support for wide boards and the first thing woodworkers do when they buy power equipment is spend weeks and weeks making accessories for it.

a "sled" looks like this ...

another neat gizmo to make is the miter gauge fence

The IGI website.

Sep.27.2007

at long last ... the driveway project gets under way today ....

8 hours later, the old driveway is gone (including sidewalk concrete), gravel is laid and compressed and base coat is down and rolled.... these guys showed up with *all* the heavy equipment this morning and a 5 man crew and made great progress today and impressed me.

this is what $105,000 will buy you ....

Sep.28.2007

paving guys woke me up at 7AM to get the car out of their way .... they had already emptied the garage of stuff !!

it is now 10:00AM and they are done and paid and gone.... job looks great.... let's see what a few new england winters do to it (hehehe).

Sep.30.2007

i was looking for a high note to close out the month.... and i found it on an ubuntu linux forum ..... how to get my epson cx3810 scanner-printer-copier to work.

like all things linux, it took 2 hours and 5 seconds to do.

after chasing the white rabbet down the hole for 2 hours, i found the solution on an ubuntu forum.... simply add this one line to a file ...
usb 0x04b8 0x0818

all features now work just fine

here is my first ever scan on this PC... and now i think i'm so cool...