The Time Sink

Man, am I behind! I owe emails every which way (yeah, like for nearly a week! Nothing personal; I'll get caught up ASAPish); and the posts I mapped out in my head keep getting pushed back by events at home (mandatory naps, among other things). ...but I'll get it in gear as the week progresses.

How about we do a bit of a news/preview post to start the week off? Upcoming this week? Maybe another alpaca (how about a ten day old baby?), koi (carp, if you're crass), cactus flowers and Tiffany is getting married! (Ann, I've had one question about gifts?) ...and on the tech side, an update on web browsers for both 32 bit and 64 bit boxes (I'm following the purists away from Firefox) and perhaps some commentary on a database front end builder (yep, web applications are sucking up my time; there looks to be a serious target I can hit there).

...and on the home front, Daniel is doing very well in Summer School; he's also becoming a little OS agnostic: Sunday he used my laptop (his older IBM Thinkpad, Ubuntu 7.04) to work on a paper for class; and when he realized he could hit the laser printer in the garage from it, he kept rolling on the project in OpenOffice and knocked out a four page bio on Woodrow Wilson from start to finish. ...and while he's tied up with school, Brad has become my assistant in 'all things yard' and is helping dig up the water and drain lines we need to reset for the planned front patio. Oh, and the agapanthus seem to have survived the move: there's a flower spike on one of them (hmmm... Photo op). Yeah!

Yesterday's photo? That's a solar array set up to take someone "off the grid". Most of them in this area are located on rooftops, but this guy has some fallow land off to the west of his house where he's set up two pretty good sized arrays. I'm betting he's independent of the grid much of the year: that photo was taken around 0800, and you can see there's already plenty of sunlight hitting the panels. ...and since the shot was taken just last week, that means we're seeing pretty much the highest sun angle of the year. Yeah, he's set...

...and the way things work out here, any excess power he produces flows back into the grid and literally spins his meter backwards. Sure, he won't see a check from the local power agency, but he'll rack up credit for use next winter when the fog settles in.

...and us? Probably. We have enough room on the roof for at least one panel bank next to the pool's solar panels (water heating, not electricity). ...and yes, we'd like to have a use for the roof besides gathering the summer heat and passing it through to the attic.

Ummm... Okay, Lightroom 1.1 came out today and Lightzone figured out their upgrade path for basic users. Yeah, I've been playin'...

No post...

The work week is done; the yard is mowed; I managed some blading; the oldest got some serious night driving in...

Let's see... I changed the wheels and bearings out on the blades! No, that was the only 'completion' thing for today... Yeah, long overdue, and matching up well with the demise of my twenty year old Polar heart rate monitor. Darn, I'll miss that thing. ...but I have a replacement that I've had sandbagged since a sale a year ago, so I'll pull it out.

Yard work took center stage again this evening, with me loosening dirt in trenches and Brad clearing them out and uncovering pipes. Man, what a convoluted batch we're dealing with: the guy who landscaped the front of the house for the contractor way back when must have just missed some of the contractor's pipes coming into the house when he trenched. That, and it appears he didn't much care about separating lines. We keep thinking we're finished and then run across another line as we lay our the new drain lines.

...and the day became a day of ... well... It more or less never got off the ground.

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

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