Today is a sad day, but also a hopeful day. It is time to say goodbye to an old friend, my Fender Telecaster guitar. It is going to a good place, it will be under the tree for a friend’s high school aged son, who wants to learn to play guitar. Still, it is not without some reflection of my past, that is now going away. It isn’t particularly rare, or exciting. It started life as a new...
Today, at noon, we started our holiday shutdown, so I am off work for a whole week. I am going to do plenty of reading, maybe some bicycling, fawn over my boys, and in general relax. However, I have the itch to do a project. Since our little Oregon Scientific weather station is getting a little tired, and the replacements all seem to suck, I am going to make a little weather station. Plenty of...
Last Sunday, I cold feel the start of a cold or flu in its infancy. Felt out of sorts, and funky. Got some meds and Monday, I felt good enough to go to work, assuming that I had dodged the bullet. Ha. Tuesday, I had a trip to Boston for a tradeshow, and apart from the usual dehydration of airplane travel, it was normal., almost uneventful. But at dinner, I knew something was coming. Not to be...
Last weekend I finished the 12 seasons of NCIS that are available on Netflix. Not quite a binge watching, but a pretty addicting stretch of TV. While this isn’t a surprise, I often watch old TV shows and series on Netflix, I usually get to a point where I give up. Either the story line becomes tired and stale, or I get bored, and move on. Rockford Files and Columbo are two examples where I...
Since we moved back from Arizona last year, we are a lot closer to our families, and we need to take advantage of that. Of course Barbara has been much more proactive than myself, but that is no excuse. Last year we visited my sister, Tracey and her wife in their home in Mountain Ranch, California. A lovely place nestled in the hills of Calaveras county, and a modest 2.5 hour drive away...
Earlier this week, I got a Facebook message from my sister. Their iMac was behaving poorly, lots of spin-y beachballs (the “I’m thinking” on the Mac OS-X), so I asked the usual questions. What model iMac is it? (from the about and system report) How much memory is there? How big is the disk, and how much is used (from DiskUtil)? All the standard things, but the DiskUtil reported...
Back in 2010, I was looking for a note taking solution. I had a taste of the Microsoft solution, OneNote, but being a “Mac” person, and the fact that OneNote wasn’t cross platform, and I went looking for a solution. The obvious choice at the time was Evernote. Cross platform, and while it wasn’t as flexible and convenient as OneNote, it was serviceable. Over the years, the...
In the last installment, I had raved wildly about Apple’s then new ‘Music’ service. Same price as Spotify, filled some holes that Spotify had in their library, and since they have my entire collection in their cloud, they have the inside track on offering suggestions that I will enjoy. Add to that the fact that Spotify’s curated playlists had been somewhat stale and I was...
As a Performance Bike “member“, I get a free subscription to Bicycling Magazine. I find that every month, I almost (barely) enjoy thumbing through this rag because it is chock full of hilarity. I have written on it before, and this may be my last installment. Like most print magazines, their once vaunted position of the monthly dissemination of information, learning, and relevance has...
In this year’s balloting for the biggest douche in the Universe – Drivers, we have a new winner. A position that has been literally owned by BMW drivers so long, it seemed hereditary, has finally been overtaken by Audi drivers. BMW drivers have held the top position for so long it is almost prehistoric. From the fact that they seem to come without turn signals, and that speed limit...