The Time Sink

I'll post this only as a placeholder. The Net, at least on my part of the planet, is acting really wonky Sunday night. I can apparently upload, but I cannot seem to download with any consistency or speed at all. The connection shows good, but the monitor shows very little inbound bandwidth. ...and inbound email is tied to that, both webmail (-duh) and POP.

Well, that was a little weird Sunday afternoon and on into the night. After chasing my tail around and around a few times I finally figured out that the problem wasn't likely on my end (although a router problem was still a possiblilty, but only the receive side? Nah...) and went to bed with a couple of blind posts up. Things came up okay when I came home from work Monday and seem to be holding...

Nope, I didn't miss a day; life's just a tad busy between work and home... It's sad to be looking toward the weekend this early, but I just don't see projects happening until then. I do think I'm caught up on email, but man, the tech stuff is just waiting for the time to do the write ups.

Along those lines, the backup box is put together with the first OS loaded, but the Net crash we saw out here (SoCal and MidCal SBC dsl may be the services affected) distracted me last weekend. I do have an addendum on the Port 25 lockout SBC imposed (got yours, Cecil!) and how to opt out of that (and a bit about how the response by some IPP services set a flag on some of the monitoring services; but that will have to wait for a light homework evening...

Man, this is getting to be one heck of a Winter!!! Rain is cool (and much needed) but the weather pattern this year is so conducive to tule fog formation that we didn't even make it a full day today before the fog came back!

Yeah, no kidding. I recall mentioning to someone that earlier this week you could actually watch the fog develop and try to work against the breeze and the sun's feeble attempt to break through the cloud cover. ...but today took the cake: the day dawned clear and nice after a Hawai'i-like overnight rain, but after a sunny, beautiful morning the fog rose from the ground and we were back under our grey days once again!...

Done! ...at least with the work week; now it's time for the weekend's work. Yeah, we're a week behind on knocking out Brad's book report, so we need to get going on that. ...and I need to maybe try to finish up working on the backup box. ...but man, the hutch itself needs some attention before I try to put that into service.

Yeah, I may just take things apart here and clean up the wiring and such before I add too much more into the mix. ...and Daniel has no homework so that may let me run him through the install of a different video card on his gaming machine to see if we can get that one game going.

I'm guessing just a recap for the day? I finally got to sleep in a bit before the day's demands forced me from the bed. ...and at that I took a walk in the cold morning air even before coffee, just to wake up and see how I felt inside before I started the day.

That lead me to blading just after the coffee and before even looking at email or the web. ...and the weather pattern for the day just wouldn't let me get on track; we alternated sun, fog, and rain clouds. We continually shifted from cold and windy to bright and sunny and back again. Finally I just ended up puttering about and setting some things up for Sunday.

Well, having done the setup yesterday made today flow a little bit easier! Since I had the potting soil, I planted the salvaged bulbs from the giant dahlias from last summer.

Yeah, when they'd been blasted from the heat and looked to be dead, I'd moved the pots under one of the redwood trees and let the one low volume sprinkler keep them moist the rest of the summer and into the Fall. ...and when I checked on them last weekend I found mostly healthy bulbs. Coolness!

...and I'd been looking for some planters all Fall, and finally Target put some nice copper and wrought iron ones on final clearance this week. Things timed out just right and that's where the dahlias ended up. Oh, darn.. I just thought of something: I did leave one in the ground and shaded it every day. Nope, I need another planter; I think they'll live okay if I can keep them out of the direct sunshine, but that means the one will have to come up and be transplanted.

Click image for larger version

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

    Thanks for visiting!  
All content Copyright 1999->2005 Daniel C. Bowman. Most rights reserved.