Ending The Year
[Post backdated to 12/31/02]
Started the day at 1:00 a.m. by canceling the Dell order and placing a new one. Heavy rain started at 1:00 a.m. In the afternoon, Maria and I went to see The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. We didn't do anything special for New Year's Eve.

Finally, the end of a long year. Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out.

Having started this blog in June, I end the year with post #646. 

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Dell, Garage, Fondue
[Post backdated to 12/30/02]
According to Dell, the only way to change order configuration at this point is to cancel and resubmit.

More garage cleaning with Maria.

We went for our first visit to Bryan's new apartment. His roommates Mike and Emily, are out of town for the holidays. Bryan and Katie made us dinner; cheese/bread fondue followed by fruit/chocolate fondue.

Maria and I then went driving around town to view the Christmas lights on various homes. Most of the lights were already gone. 

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Garage
[Post backdated to 12/29/02]
Maria and I began major garage clean up, a long overdue project. 

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Dell Order Change
[Post backdated to 12/28/02]
Heavy rain several times during the day. Emailed Dell to change the configuration of my Dimension 8250 order to improve video card. In the evening, Maria and I watched Ice Age on DVD. 

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Movie Night and Studio 8 Movie
[Post backdated to 12/27/02]
Maria and I watched the extended DVD edition of The Lord of the Rings for 3.5 hours. After she went to bed, I went through some of the extra audio commentary features.

Spent much time arguing with Pinnacle Studio 8, trying to import a tiny mpeg movie from the HP Photosmart 850 digital camera. I finally went on the web to find a video format converter. After using AVIedit, Studio 8 was able to import the HP mpeg. I finished a quick-and-dirty video, with titles and sound track, before going to bed at 2:15 a.m. 

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Shopping and Movie Night
[Post backdated to 12/26/02]
Maria met Crystal at 6:30 a.m. to go shopping. I went shopping in the afternoon. Kids and Chihuahua Lola were here for dinner, then we all watched DVD of The Scorpion King and Spider-Man. 

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Christmas Day
[Post backdated to 12/25/02]
Our kids were here for dinner. Bryan also brought Lola The Chihuahua. 

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Mountain Lion
[Post backdated to 12/24/02]
Our neighbor said their uphill neighbor saw a mountain lion down by the stream, on a log that separates their two properties.

Dinner with Maria at Stuart Anderson's Black Angus.

Bryan stopped by to visit with Lola, his girlfriend Katie's Chihuahua. 

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New Faucets
[Post backdated to 12/23/02]
New faucets were installed today in the kitchen and three bathrooms. It took the contractor 6 hours to do all the work. I was home and he worked the whole time, not even stopping for lunch. Plumbing hardware is more expensive than drugs; the hardware alone for just the bathrooms was $1,200. 

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New Toys
[Post backdated to 12/22/02]
Ordered Dell Dimension 8250 for January 2003 delivery using Dell's Employee Purchase Program. The configuration selection appears a bit more limited than their standard offerings, but I receive a better discount. I found everything I needed, which is all that mattered.

Why now? I want to start editing old 8mm and VHS family footage. The laptop I use every day, provided by my company, is an inappropriate place to do that, even if it had sufficient CPU horsepower and hard disk space. The iMac (1999) and Powerbook (2000) we bought for Maria were possible candidates, but are too slow (iMac) and out of disk space (Powerbook). I plan to upgrade the Powerbook drive so she can use iPhoto with her new digital camera. However, the PC systems in the house were the most out-of-date and thus first in line for upgrade. Other than my company-owned ThinkPad, the fastest PCs in the house are all 200 MHz antiques. Even someone of my limited brainpower would not attempt to run Pinnacle Studio 8, or any other video editor, on such a platform. Thus, onward and upward, again.

Yes, I could build my own system again, but I'm getting old and lazy. Over the years I've tossed out piles of motherboards, floppy drives, hard drives, and other junk from my old systems. If you set the Wayback Machine far enough, I was no stranger to a soldering iron, building an Imsai 8080 in the old MITS Altair 8800 days. However, this time, I wanted a commercial system with manufacturer's warranty and tech support. As I said, I'm getting old and lazy. Not a pretty site, but facts are facts. I'd rather spend time learning to edit old family videos than assembling and debugging another system.

[begin rant] What operating system will I use on the new machine? Our son, the lovable Linux geek, insists that real men don't run Windows. Every version of Windows I've used, from Windows 2.0 to Windows XP Pro, crashed regularly, though each version was marginally more stable than the previous. The Windows 2000 I use daily on my Thinkpad is hardly a stable platform, and Windows XP Pro on another Thinkpad is nowhere close to the stabilty of Linux. The Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) is still a familiar site to Windows XP users. So, why use Windows? Because IT people in the business world, such as myself, have been willing to settle for "good enough". If Microsoft's 200 biggest customers told them to go fuck themselves and switched to Linux, the security and stability of Windows would improve in more than just baby-steps. That ain't gonna happen, and Microsoft knows it. Thus, we get "good enough". I have Linux installed on a ThinkPad for testing, but have not spent any time with it. It continues to call to me. Until I heed the call, maybe I'm not a real man. Do real men settle for "good enough"?[end rant]

Bought Pinnacle Studio 8 at Fry's. Also picked up a 128MB secure digital (SD) memory card for Maria's HP Photosmart 850 digicam. I downloaded the Studio 8 evaluation copy in the past and played with it on and off (mostly off) for a few weeks. I learned enough to find it worth the purchase price. I installed Studio 8.3 from the CD on a Windows XP/Thinkpad testbed, then updated to the 8.5.5 beta from the Pinnacle website. 

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WEP Key Woes
[Post backdated to 12/21/02]
Spent much time messing with WEP security key to get Windows XP machine back on our wireless network at the house. I'd forgotten that the machine was not tested when we revised the security keys on the Windows 2000 and Powerbook OS X Jaguar laptops. Since I could find no way to enter a hexadecimal WEP key in Windows XP, I had to use an ASCII text key. Since the hex WEP key used on the other machines could not be rendered in ASCII, I had to select a new key. I then had to change the WEP key on the Windows 2000 and Powerbook laptops to match. That leaves the Linux laptop still needing rework. I did not make notes when son Bryan set up the WEP key on that one. Guess I'll have to wait until the next time he comes by to change it. All of this just so I could easily move some MPEG files between the machines as part of Pinnacle Studio 8 capture testing. Sigh... 

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What's a Weblog?
[Post backdated to 12/19/02]
My thanks to Juha Haataja of Universal Rule in Finland for pointing me to Halley.

What's a Weblog?. Halley's Comment writes about weblogs:

1. A weblog (or blog) is a daily online diary on the Net where you write and publish at the near-same moment to a few million of your closest friends, except only about 20 people actually read what you write. Each entry is called a "post" and the person writing a weblog (or "blog") is called a "weblogger" or "blogger."
2. A blog is a love letter, scribbled on three-hole paper and scrunched up all sweaty in your hand that you try to pass to the cutest looking guy in class and he drops it and walks on it and then your friend goes to retrieve it and bring it back to you, unread while you die a thousand deaths.
3. A blog is a new medium as new and weird as the novel was a few hundred years ago. It's a medium that has embedded news, non-fiction narrative, fiction, poetry, graphics, music and most importantly hyperlinks to all other media which gives it its quintessential differentiating characteristic -- it can NOT exist outside of the web. It's a purely networked form. Writers love it because (oh shit, shall I spill the beans, it's EXACTLY how they think and experience the world. Scary, eh?) Talk about baggy monsters.
4. It's telepathic training wheels -- that is, it's a very early stage on the way to the REALLY big next big thing -- brain-to-brain telepathic transfer. Bye bye telephone, bye bye writing, bye bye fortune cookies, bye bye every other way you used to communicate. Blogs open up people's minds, you travel the road with them, see it all through their eyes. It's all we've got now, but soon enough we'll all be in bed with each other, embeded with each other I mean.
5. Blogs are embarrassingly textual and visual now, but will soon be audio/video. Don't hold it against them. They're trying to get there asap. You will hear them talking soon. Yes, that A/V guy who was a putz in 8th grade will be king. Just get used to it.
6. Blogs are one of the last places where you can still tell the truth.
7. Blogs are one the first places where women are finally telling the truth.
8. A weblog is good way to make friends, visit friends, love people and not leave your house.
9. A weblog is my head, open to you, day and night, at your convenience. Come on in. Please take your shoes off at the door, I hate having to vacuum after you leave.
10. A weblog is watching brains at work, especially watching brains with the ultimate prosthetic device -- everyone else's brain and the whole net connected. Weblogs let you watch people learning at lightning speed. Awesome to witness.

[Universal Rule]

 

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New digicam
[Post backdated to 12/19/02]
Big storm today but the power stayed on. New stovetop not installed because it did not fit, even though measurements were made before purchase. Bought digital camera at Circuit City for Maria to use. Discount and bundle wasn't too bad. It should arrive with their main shipment tomorrow. Selected the HP Photosmart 850, which is  4 megapixel with 8x optical zoom. Tested the Olympus 3 megapixel with 8x zoom for a few days first but it was more expensive with lower resolution. I've done a lot of shooting with a Nikon Coolpix 990 that I'm able to borrow from work. Love the lens quality on the Coolpix, and also enjoy the unique rotating housing. Will be interesting to see the Photosmart lens results. I'm holding my breath with this camera purchase from non-traditional vendor. 

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Let There Be Light
[Post backdated to 12/18/02]
Woke at 6AM to find the power still out. This second outage now stands at 50 hours. Once again, ran the generator for a few hours before going to work. When I returned home, the power was on. There is another storm coming so we scramble to do laundry. (We did not want to run the dryer on the generator.) A new stovetop is supposed to be delivered tomorrow. Found the circuit breaker feeding one refrigerator had popped some time during the day. Maybe a glitch when the power came back on. Mailed the first batch of Christmas cards. This is the first time in several years that any cards were mailed before Christmas. Have not mailed any Christmas presents yet. 

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Another Day Without Power
[Post backdated to 12/17/02]
Woke up this morning at 6AM to find the power still out. Ran generator for several hours to cool the refrigerators before leaving for work. Maria checked on neighbor Doris and offered a trip into town for breakfast. Maria went to clear the cul-de-sac drain grates but someone had already done it. Maybe Sandy, who is staying with Doris. Luckily, not much rain during the day. Maria started the generator again at 4PM. Doris did not answer when I checked on her this evening. I found she was having dinner with Ed and Claudette. Bob and Marilyn A (who are also without power) stopped by to take a shower. Printed 50 copies of the family Christmas photo on Epson Stylus Photo 780. Bill and Camie returned. Shut down the generator at midnight. This second power outage has now lasted 44 hours. "On the seventh day, God invented the generator, and saw that it was good." 

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The Storm Continues
[Post backdated to 12/16/02]
Heavy rain started again at 1AM. I awoke at 6AM to discover we were without power, which had been off since 4AM. Ran generator until 9AM when I left for work. Maria then ran it for about 1.5 hours in the early afternoon to cool the refrigerators.

A landslide, on Highway 17 into Silicon Valley, closed one lane for a while this morning. This was immediately adjacent to a major repair done by the state a few years ago. They must have been perturbed to see where the slide was located.

Started the generator again at 6PM. Ed and Claudette, other "neighbor-sitters" from down the hill, could not get any response from our neighbor Doris. Claudette finally roused her by tapping on the bedroom window; turns out she had been sleeping. We were not taking any chances; you have to watch out for each other here in the forest.

Went into town and bought more gas for the generator. The fallen trees, which had blocked the road earlier, were cleared out. The boulder was still in the middle of one lane. Noticed a retaining wall near the road had collapsed on someone's property. Wall debris and mud covered one lane on the drive into town.

A brief period of heavy rain started at 9:45PM. Turned off the generator at 11:45 pm to get some sleep. 

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Love My Generator

Started the generator again this morning about 9:00. Tried to reach the 'senior-aged' woman next door to have her over for breakfast. No response. When her caregiver arrived, we found she had already gone out to breakfast with the neighbors from down the hill.

More Photoshop work. Finished splicing in our son, then spent several hours retouching various items out of the picture. Finally turned the thing into our Christmas card for the year. Only printed a few before the ink cartridge ran dry.

Maria helped re-decorate the Christmas tree at Crystal and Nate's. The tree is still down on our mountain road, now accompanied by a 5-foot high boulder.

Shut down the generator at 3:00 when the power company restored service. Running the generator for 6 hours takes a full tank down into the reserve zone. Love my generator, a Honda ES6500 that we've had for 11 years. Total 26 hours without grid power. Pretty common during winter in the mountains of central California. The rain was not very heavy, and stopped for much of the day. According to the weather report, another ass kicking starts tomorrow. A big one.

Here we go again...

 

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Busy Stormy Saturday

Heavy rain today. Maria worked at the college most of the day and briefly attended the wedding of their departmental assistant, Beth. Wonderful young woman and a great worker. Power failed at our house at 1:00 p.m. I got some reading done by a well-lit window, not needing the generator right away.

Decided around 3:00 to stock up on more gas for the generator, found the road closed with a tree and wires down. Circled back through the woods to a freeway entrance and proceeded into town. Found all the power dead there too; nobody pumping gas. Drove to the next town, filled the tank in my car and all the spare gas cans from the garage. Finally arrived home and started the generator before 5:00. 

Tried to get the senior-aged woman next door to join us, since the generator over there is unusable for a few more days. No deal. Her vision is bad; she wants to stay in her own place, where she knows her way around. Her caregiver, and the neighbors below us on the hillside, also tried to convince her, to no avail.

Meanwhile, Maria is in town at our daughter's place, helping put up their Christmas tree. Turns out that Nate did not seat the tree deeply enough in the tree stand. After the tree was up and decorated, the whole thing tipped over. Not a good start. They cleaned up the mess and decided to postpone the second attempt for a day. Driving home, Maria found the same tree down that I did, as well as a large boulder. By that time, someone had trimmed the tree enough to allow her to get underneath it.

We watched Men In Black II on DVD this evening, thanks to the generator. This was the first time we'd seen it, having missed it during initial release in the theaters.

Spent some time tinkering with Photoshop, trying to move my son from one wedding photo to another. This is the first time I've ever used Photoshop for a multi-layer project. I had to slice up the photo into several layers so that I could tuck my son in the middle. Got a good start on carving up the layers tonight.

Heavy lightning in the mountains around 9:30; not very common around here.

Finally shut down the generator at midnight.

 

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Rain, Birthday, Business
Heavy rain today on the central coast of California with more on the way. Phoned my younger brother Kirk in Alabama for his birthday. He retired this year; must be nice. His wife Cheryl just became a Quixtar business operator. Quixtar was once the on-line arm of Amway. Both are now Alticor companies. 

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Digital Camera
We bought a HP Photosmart 850 digicam for Christmas; 4 megapixel with 8x optical zoom. Tired of 3x and 4x optical zoom. Backordered at local Circuit City; should have in stock in a few days. 

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Celebration
Maria finished the last of 96 observations of student teachers for another university. All the student teachers needed these classroom observations to qualify for graduation. A scheduling nightmare over the last few months. We went out to dinner to celebrate the end of the lunacy. 

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Catch Up

• Backup various projects to CD-ROM.
• Put lights on Christmas tree.
• Delete many articles from news aggregator; even managed to read a few.
• Back-date some posts for last week.
• How did it get to be 1:00 a.m. Tuesday morning already? Rats...

 

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Sunday Gone In A Flash

• Printed mailing labels for Christmas cards. Still no telling when we'll get around to the cards themselves.
• Imported scans of all professional photos from Crystal's wedding into iPhoto on Maria's Powerbook. Filled up her laptop drive trying a test QuickTime movie of the photos. Need to find another approach; probably move photos to the shared PC/Mac external hard drive.
• Put up the Christmas tree; no decorations yet.
• Photoshop work on picture of Crystal's Shitzu puppy.
• Upgrade my (yes, legal) copy of Microsoft Office 2001 for the Mac to the new OS X version.
• Begin review of analog VHS video tape capture hardware.
• Spend some time with Pinnacle Systems Studio 8 video editing evaluation copy.

 

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Just Another Saturday
Finally had Costco install the new Bridgestone tires on my 2001 Celica GT-S before the rain starts. Tires rated for 149 miles per hour. Big deal. There aren't any road sections during my commute where you can hit much more than 80 mph. Even then, only for a minute or two.

Read and compared digital camera reviews on multiple Olympus models and the HP Photosmart 850.

Took Misty, the little Chihuahua, for standard shots at the vet. As usual, she was thrilled to get out of the house. Asked the doctor about her "baboon butt" due to chewing off two patches of hair, one on either side of her tail. He said one possibility is the stress of our daughter moving out, since she bought Misty and was the dog's closest companion. That absence, maybe coupled with the fact that daughter then bought a new Shitzu puppy and brought it over several times, letting it playfully chase Misty around the furniture. Stress? What stress? We don't allow the puppy over here any more.

Spent only a few minutes with the Pinnacle Systems Studio 8 evaluation copy.

Tried in vain to catch up on old news aggregator items.

Gasoline benchmark for my southern San Francisco Bay area town's el-cheapo gas station today is $1.589 / $1.689 / $1.789 for a gallon of 87 / 89 / 91 octane. 

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Eye Candy
I had to start somewhere in getting caught up with news aggregator items, so a visual piece should do...

Beautiful wind-walkers. Richard sez: "Theo Jansen has developed staggeringly beautiful machines that walk when powered by gusts of wind. Created to be 'art that evolves', he's now working on a way to store the energy to provide power when there is no wind. He likens this to muscles." Link Discuss (Thanks, Rich!)
[Boing Boing Blog]

 

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Party Time
Last class session for a course that my wife team-teaches. She decided to host a small dinner gathering, and the last class, at our house. They seemed to be having entirely too much fun during their last class. 

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The Race Is On
The first Christmas card arrived in the mail today. The race is on. Maybe I should update the mailing list so I can print our labels this weekend. I don't think the wife plans to give me much choice in the matter. {grin} 

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Welcome Back To Amazon
I don't spend much time on Amazon. Poked around there again today, looking for items to add to my wish list. While updating my credit card info, I found some UI design problems. Spent a lot of time poking around, enjoying myself. Good way to kill a lot of time. Always did like a toy store. 

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VPN fixed
After another 30 minutes on the phone with tech support at our VPN vendor, they offered another tweaks. Could not test from work, but it did the trick at home tonight. Transparent tunneling to the rescue. 

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Welcome To The Real World
Crystal and Nate came home to find the water no longer worked in their apartment. Seems the water service for the house is in the name of the people upstairs, who somehow neglected to pay the bill. Sigh... 

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PGP 8? Still Waiting...
According to an email, my pre-paid PGP encryption upgrade is ready. Following the link in the email takes me to a download pqt3. Under the column heading "Download" is text that says simply "No Download". No links anywhere on the page to get the software. A call to customer service elicits a promise to have another department issue a new license. Still waiting for that new license and link via email. PGP Corporation may write usable encryption software, but their e-commerce capability isn't anything to write home about. 

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Waaay Behind
I have not opened the Radio news aggregator for many days. Good luck trying to catch up now... 

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VPN Problems
A member of our corporate MIS team asked me to upgrade my Cisco VPN client because of glitches I experienced. I upgraded this last night and now I can no longer connect to work. Spent two hours working on this last night. Tonight I spent 40 minutes on the phone with the tech support guys at our third-party VPN provider. They fixed one problem with digital certificate import. Now I can connect with a secure tunnel, but the freaking tunnel won't pass any packets. Big pain in the neck. Now I have the latest software and no way to connect to work. Bite me. 

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Pinnacle Studio 8
I downloaded the evaluation copy of the Pinnacle Systems Studio 8 video editor on Monday. I'm toying with the idea of converting the old analog VHS videotapes and editing down onto CD or DVD. Ran into repeated glitches in Studio 8 user interface, which do not appear to make it into the generated movies. It may have received the PC Magazine Editors Choice last month, but the product would benefit from some kind of introduction. After you download and install the evaluation, you are left staring at the basic user interface. No pop-up wizard the first time you launch the product. No intro walkthrough from the Help menu. You just have to read the Help file and find your own way. Poor way to entice someone into buying the product. I need more time to play with this. 

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iPhoto on Mac OS X
On Sunday, I played with QuickTime movie generation. I made several test slide shows from wedding photos using iPhoto, one of which I posted here on Monday. A few iPhoto user interface decisions were interesting, but the package is very rudimentary. You are obviously intended to edit photos before importing them, as editing features in iPhoto appear very crude. Cute, but looks pretty limited. 

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QuickTime Test
For the many people rightfully hounding me about Crystal's wedding photos, I linked a sample on this Movies test page. More to come. 

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