The Time Sink

Ah, gee, the rains are back. ...and for the entire Easter week it seems. The one dam has the "main drains" going full tilt and the spillway is spilling away in anticipation of even more rainfall in the hills as the week progresses. This Summer should be interesting for the watermasters as they deal with the snow melt: usually by now it's pretty well along; this year the local skiing places are still open!

...but not open this week out here are the public schools. Yep, it's Easter Vacation! Time for the kids to stay home with Shelley who is staying home with the kids that are staying home on a rainy week. ...and time for me to definitely spend lots of time at the office <g>!

Last night we fit another bit of the home music test system into place; I tossed iTunes 2.04 at the iMac and he caught it and ran with it (to misuse a metaphor, and out of season at that!). ...but it lets us look at building an mp3 library from the stuff we own and either place it on an external HDD associated with the iMac or on an NAS device and let the iMac control the stereo feed to the conventional equipment. ...lots and lots to play with.

...and lest we not mark the day properly, today is B-rad's twelfth birthday:

Yep, condolences or congrats to Shelley or me and we'll pass them along. I'm thinking we'll be eating out tonight...

Thank you to everyone who sent along birthday greetings to Brad! He had a very full day what with playing with friends and dropping by my office for a while, dinner out and a movie in... How can I say it: Our youngest is now twelve years old!

...and for those who asked about that calla background photo, it's not a composite or even a 'created' piece. The shot itself first appeared last April and translated well to print. I made a small version and have it on one corner of my office desk. Something about the refraction from the ceiling lighting off the CD stack (in the foreground of the photo below) created the 'spot' in the middle of the photo. That and a reflection to give the cloud effect caught my eye the other day. ...so of course I took a shot with the small camera:

A bit of geekery today: Sunbelt Software isn't a new player on the block by any means, but they've recently teamed up with a place called CastleCops to take a shot at the phishers of the world. It's called PIRT and involves a submission form for the source code of the phisher's email or target goal's URL.

AT&T's Brightmail still nails almost everything, but one or two get through every so often. Usually I ignore them and just report them back to AT&T; but every so often there will be one that obviously involves a hacked server, and I'll take the time to try to let the technical contact or webmaster know. PIRT is easy enough for me to keep open in a Firefox tab and just toss in the source (and payload URL) whenever someone wants me to update my nonexistent Chase account...

...and the rains are back! Thunderstorms today and rain maybe through Monday? I'm thinking this is one heck of a way to run a Spring. I mean, it would be 'normal' if this were the mid-west, but this is the land of Sunshine: we should be in the eighties by now. Ah, well, I'll be griping about the heat and the air quality soon enough...

Who me? Slept... Bladed... Worked...

More rain, both morning and evening; but a good day out in the rural spending time with baby goats, rams, a trampoline and friends. Oh, sure, there's more to the story than that, but it will have to wait for another day...

Click image for larger version

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

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