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What I am reading: Stranger in a Strange Land
(Well, re-reading really) My memory is foggy, but I think this is the book that someone tossed at me in my sophomore year of high school. Written by Robert Heinlein, and originally published in 1961, it is one of the “must reads” in the SciFi genre. The premise is fairly simple. A manned expedition to…
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How sad is that: 100F is “comfortable”
I am fully acclimatized to the Phoenix (and Arizona in general) weather. Yesterday, I thought nothing about pulling on shorts and going for a 4 mile run at lunch time (95F when I left). Additionally, yesterday, it was 100F at the high. The lowest temperature this June (from my memory), and it felt very comfortable.…
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Diet Update
One of the hazards of dieting, and the process of losing weight is the inevitable plateaus that you will encounter. They are frustrating as hell. You know that you are not going overboard on the calories, and you are doing your exercise, but the needle doesn’t budge. I had been stalled at 214#’s for almost…
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Cleaning up my computer (Mac)
One of the problems with how well integrated and how smooth moving from an old, tired Mac to a new machine is that a lot of old cruft gets carried along. For the most part, since you typically upgrade to a faster, with more memory system, it isn’t a big deal to carry a lot…
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I feel like a failure – Gardening Edition
I think I need to turn in my Man card. I confess that I liked living in Tucson, because, we had xeriscaping that took almost no effort to keep up. It wasn’t elaborate, but it was easy. We moved to Chandler (suburb of Phoenix), and we have a small patch of grass in the back…
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Music Streaming – conclusion
TL;DR version: Spotify wins To round out the saga, I needed to make a decision on whether to keep Google All-Access or Spotify for my online streaming pleasure. If you recall, I signed up for a trial of the Google all access, and was comparing it to Spotify. While I am an Apple fan, I…
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The curse of being a “Techie” – Making things too complicated
I have always been adept at technology. I am sure that some of it is natural aptitude, and some is single bloody-minded-ness that I learned from working with many different computers and other “smart” devices for years (decades now). I am the person that all my family calls when they have problems with tech. But…
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More nostalgia – Technology – the PC Clone
After my Atari 8 bit and 16 bit days, I tacked hard into PC clone land. My first build was a Mylex motherboard, with 640K ram, and a 286 CPU. I remember buying the components from a variety of sources, but since this was pre-internet (probably 1986 or so) I didn’t mail order anything. Probably…
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The good ol’ days – Technology edition
Like everyone who makes it to middle age, I have a rich tapestry of memories. Today, while bicycling, I reminisced about my first computer, an Atari 800. The year was 1979, my freshman year of high school, and I got exposed to the new computer lab at school. It had (I think) 4 Apple ][+’s…