The Time Sink

One Father's Day card:

I had my eye on the coolest present for you...

...but those darned little cranes, just when you think it's lined up, and you hold your breath, and you   c a r e f u l l y   lower the wheel and Whammmmmooooo!!!! It snaps back empty...

Breaks my heart every time...

Better luck next year!

I think we'll just have to go along with the "June 21 means Summer" routine... Yeah, last night I just couldn't see the point of firing up the oven to heat the kitchen when the AC was running to cool the house down. I mean, we're not yet at the "fry an egg on the sidewalk" stage, but once again the temperature gauge on the BBQ is showing 150 most of the afternoon...

Yes, you do remember correctly: I don't grill, but that's by choice: I can't see standing in front of one furnace while standing under another one. ...but since I was already hot? Sure. (Well, that and the fact I can place her grill in the shade by the Japanese garden for a nice wind tunnel effect!)

Leftover lasagna was supposed to be the dinner of choice, but that's where that oven thing came in: I just have this deep philosophical problem with firing up a heat generating 220v circuit in an area where I have another 220v circuit cooling the place (call me strange). So I made up a tray from a couple of layers of aluminum foil (we have extra since we don't have to make the hats as often since the aliens moved) and put that on her grill to heat while Brad and I hosed off the deck.

...and that lead to "Hey, I wonder if that chicken sausage Mom bought would grill up okay?". ...and that lead to a beer because you just can't have sausage cooking without beer available, -neh? (The gatorade is the post blading drink of choice...)

So the deck got cleaned, the sausage turned out okay (we'll BBQ it next time rather than grilling it), the house stayed cool, and we found out we can cook lasagna on the grill!

I spent the evening dinking around with the iMac; I think I have almost all the pieces of the puzzle in place that will let me try it out as the "Coast Machine" this season. I still have to work on my file transfer system a bit, but that may be covered too.

Mostly I'm trying to get things together before the weekend... I have a habit of letting things pile up and having last minute things throw me off. I'd really like to be ready by Monday and then be able to just head out later in the week without having to do much more than pack the van...

Summer? The "Lazy Days of Summer"? The "Summertime, and the livin' is easy", Summer? Let's recap yesterday evening...

I'd gone in to work a bit early figuring I'd leave early to blade and maybe walk the workout off a bit before dinner. I managed half of that: I bladed, but as I was leaving, so were Brad and a couple of friends, heading around the block to do something at their place. ...and Daniel was dressed to go out (oh, yeah, there's a youth group thing at church. Okay). ...and I came back to find Brad and his bunch back here and in the pool and Shelley's dinner plans off by just a skosh meaning I'd have to grab a quick shower and go pick up the gal she'd invited to dinner. I can do that...

So I try to cool down in the shower, but hey, it's plenty hot outside and I'd had a good workout so my temp just wasn't coming down all that quickly. No problem, that's what car AC is for. So I go get the friend and as I'm pulling back into our place, there go Brad and his friends off to the other house (for dinner it turns out). ...and rather than trying to bolt my food down to make the connection to haul Daniel and one of his friends to the church deal, I just cool it for a few and then take care of getting them where they need to be on time...

I got back from that run and served my dinner while the ladies were finishing theirs. ...and I managed to answer email for a bit, but then it was time to haul Shelley's friend back to her place. ...only here's Daniel coming back from his gig via the other parent, so he went with Shelley to drop the friend off and here comes the phone call from the parents of Brad's friends to say when he was coming home.... Now. Oh...

Okay! So I stood by and recovered him back to the mother ship and got him into the decontamination chamber (a shower to wash off the day's grass and dirt, pool or no pool). ...and then Shelley and Daniel were back and Daniel needed his shower while Shelley needed her shot so she can get to bed early because she and Brad have to be somewhere by 0600...

Ummm... I took it easy last night? Yes, as a matter of fact I did. A couple of posts, some time reviewing/trouble shooting a site for a friend, some email catchup and that was it!

What's on the agenda for today? Sleep. ...and then some sleep. Oh, and blading. ...and making sure I have all the pieces of the iMac puzzle for the Coast run for the 4th. ...and sleep. Food maybe. Driving: none!

Well, I learned something else about the ol' iMac and Mac OS 9.2.2 yesterday: you can read DOS volumes with it. Yeah... After all the messing around I've done with it and not wanting to hose things any more than they already are (I mean, come on, having to use a router and external modem to handle dialup?), I was running out of ideas on how to store and retrieve the flash memory dumps from the cameras when we're over at the coast. Storing on the iMac wasn't the issue; getting them to the Windows HDD was...

The game plan was getting down to dumping the cards onto the iMac and then moving those directories over to the the main network by recopying to the cards and using the card readers on each machine. That would work better than the ZIP disks that were my only other common denominator between systems. The other option was bring up a server again and ftping things about...

Then I had the little external HDD die... I'd put a hosed 2.5" 2 gig drive on a USB hookup a week or so back to test; the iMac found the dead drive and formatted it just fine. Yesterday it couldn't find it. Well... That drive had been marked as "bad", so maybe it really was <g>. ...so I tossed the spare to the spare's spare in the holder and had the iMac take a look. ...and it showed me a full install of the software suite for one of the Fujitsu web tablets! Whoa!

I spent some serious time deleting files, transferring files and moving the HDD back and forth from the Win2k box to the iMac just to see what would happen. Once I cleared all the Windows centric files off, neither box much cared about transferring files at all. So it seems I have a way to backup my camera cards and move things where I'd like them once we get home.

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"Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke, "Technology and the Future"

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