All posts by djones

computers, weather

I’m Still Here

5 Comments

I know! I didn’t post yesterday, nor have I been able to comment on the blogs I follow for the last couple of days. When you replace the main interface machine, you can waste a lot of time trying to decide what to save and what to throw away to the bit bucket.

I finally decided (after booting 5 different linux distros) to go with openSUSE for the moment. (And I preserved at least some of my old XP environment by installing it into a VirtualBox VM.) So now that your eyes are glazing over and you are wondering what the blank the idiot is talking about, I’ll mosey on into the real post. (See – patience is a virtue!)

Today was a day of massive weather shift. This weekend, L and I got to enjoy mid 70’s both days, but then this morning the winds began howling and it spit a bit of rain. It never got above 45 all day and by afternoon it was below freezing with 50 to 80 mile and winds. I hate this kind of day because the windows rattle and anything outdoors feels like you are being chopped to death with little itty bitty blades. Needless to say, Molly was not overjoyed with the winds ruffling her coat amidst her mope over the departure of L early this morning for the mountains.

It was windy enough that Mom called from the nursing home and suggested I not bother to venture over to see her today. It wouldn’t have been a problem; I only live about four blocks from the nursing home where she is. I think it really had more to do with the fact that I’ll have to be packing all of her stuff up to bring over to her house tomorrow when she gets to escape back home. Although she’ll be pretty much house bound for the next 6-8 weeks, she clearly can’t wait to get back to *her* home. Can’t say that I blame her.

In other pressing news, I’m sure you will all be overjoyed to note that the vote came out in favor of keeping the the dubious LinkWithin widget at the bottom of the posts. The end result was 66% in favor of keeping the widget, 33% didn’t care, and no one voted to remove. So evidently some people like it and some don’t care, but no one was annoyed enough to want to see it go away.

My own suspicion is that 90% of the readers of this blog read via a reader like Google Reader or Bloglines or … and only click through to comment. That is backed up by the stats that say I get ~60 page views a day but closer to 150 subscriptions to the two feeds that come off this page. Thus they don’t care about the widget since they only see it when they are interested enough to comment. What do you think?

Along those same lines you’ll remember a while back I was disappointed about the paucity of sex searches landing visitors here at this site. Well, I may have interesting changes to report next time.  
(What A tease I am.) 

Well, off to get notes ready for the council meeting tomorrow night since it will be a long day tomorrow, what with getting move moved and settled.  

banquet, computers, weather

A Late Quicky

5 Comments

This will be a quick post since I am struggling to avoid strangling a computer that runs everything OS fine except for Windows XP. And then it just kicks up its heels and dies. Actually I suspect it is more the SATA disk controller than anything else. XP is old enough not to have deep grained support for SATA so it may be time to say goodbye to XP forever and start running one of my favorite Linux distributions on it.

Tomorrow evening is the annual city employee appreciation banquet. It’s always interesting. Municipal employees tend to be somewhat clique driven by department. I.e. the sanitation people don’t hang with the street people who don’t hang with the water treatment people who … So you end up with a lot of smaller groups that sort of ignore each other. And of course the temporary blips on the radar like the city council members are usually given a bit of a cold shoulder as well. (I suspect more from awe than from dislike. Just kidding!) It’s interesting because we used to give awards and service pins and associated spiels, etc. The employees finally stood up and admitted they’d much rather just have a a good supper with casual dress and no hot air from the likes of me. So that is what we have done for the past several years and it really seems to work better and be considerably less boring.

It was close to 70 again today, so Molly and I took our walk later in the day to enjoy the twilight. Sometime in the next few days it is going to turn cold again. The forecast for Tuesday has a high of 40 and possible snow and rain. Of course that means believing the weather people are going to get it right; here in Colorado that is a rare occurrence. When L and I used lived in LA, we always joked about how it paid to be a weather person in an area where you could see all the weather coming at you from huge distances and the only question was sunny or real sunny. (It all came in from the Pacific Ocean with no land features to change it for hundreds of miles as it rolled in.) Made them look like paragons of accuracy. You don’t get the same luxury when there are mountains and huge land masses that heat and cool to drive the vertical circulation.

Back to the recalcitrant computer. It was the last of the machines here running a Microsoft OS natively, but that may be over soon. Don’t do anything I wouldn’t.

friday high five

Five Ordinary …

11 Comments

Time once again for

Five Ordinary People From This Week I Admire
  • The 90 year old gentleman that was visiting at the nursing home. He just came to visit since it meant so much to his late wife when she was there when people came to visit. From what the staff said, he visits at least once a week and asks who hasn’t had visitors to make sure he visits them. And he has been doing it for years now. (And a spry gent he was, too. He still drives truck to Omaha (~400 miles) and back at least twice a week because, as he put it, “… sitting in the house doing nothing would kill me.”)
  • The young mother with a little one in a stroller and a toddler in hand who stopped to ask the elderly gentleman carrying a bag of groceries as he wobbled down the sidewalk if he needed a hand. As busy as she was, she still thought of the needs of others and offered to help.
  • The young man who pushed and talked to his young brother on the swing set for the entire two hours I was walking in the park. From the bits of conversation I overheard, he was home on leave after boot camp and had missed his little brother and vice verse.
  • The squirrel that likes to sit in front of the parlor window at the nursing home and entertain one and all with his (or her) amusing antics. Much better entertainment than TV. (Technically not a person, but an honorary one for the nonce.)
  • The lady of indeterminate age who was trying desperately to voice command train her Basset Hound in the park. (Our previous dog was a Basset and they are notorious for not listening.) This one didn’t listen or obey, but the lady remained calm and was so obviously loving to her dog that you couldn’t help but root for her. Maybe she’ll get lucky some year.

Time to get back to the ailing computer that is trying to give up the ghost tonight. I hope it will survive!

quickie

Thursday Quickie

9 Comments

I spend a lot of time here talking about our dog Molly. In the interest of giving equal time to others, I present the cat without a hat:

In other news, Mom gets to come home from the nursing home on Tuesday. She was pretty stoked about the news.

writer's challenge

I Used To Think …

18 Comments

I used to think ….

that growing older was mostly experiencing things in the same way as when I was younger, but just choosing a different balance of things to experience. That meant it wasn’t necessary to savor the complete sensory fullness of each and every moment because it could and would happen again in the future. Now in late middle age, I have come to realize that growing older involves so much more than simple choice of what to experience in what proportion. It involves a complete change in how our senses react and are interpreted internally. And that has immense consequences for the whole idea of the repeatability of experience.

It seems that our very senses change in the way they respond to the world around us as we age. Some sights are not as vivid as they once were whereas others trigger new and powerful emotions by association with the past. Sounds have new and different timbres as the frequency response of our ears changes; music we once thought could not be improved upon now sounds so-so; music that we once deemed merely good now sounds great. The sensitivity of touch changes so that textures take on whole new meanings. A baby’s skin still feels soft, but in a different way than it did in our youth. And the callouses that time and use have created on our fingers means that smooth is a different experience now than it was in younger days. In some ways aging leads to a mutability of experience much akin to the LSD trips popular in our youth.

So now I think that growing older consists of experiencing the world in new and different ways, even if it is the same objective experience from my younger years. And that has consequences in how I view and interact with the world and my possible experiences of it, both in the future and now in the present. It makes me realize there will never be another moment just like the current one in my experience. That in turn means that the current moment is important to savor in all it’s fullness. There will never be another one just like it in my life because even if the same conditions were to recur, my sensory intrepretation of the experience will be at a minimum slightly different. That also implies one should not let life get in the way of fully experiencing all that happens. Now matter how dark or dim the present and future may seem, each experience should be enjoyed fully in the now; there will never be another like it.

That is what I used to think and what I now think. What do you think?

This is a response to Mama Kat’s writers challenge for this week. Click on over and join in.