The best thing about my home workspace is the super-sized window onto the front walkway, which is only used by wildlife (people invariably use the kitchen entrance). So I just looked up from my screen to meet the intense gaze of a large gray squirrel on its busy way up the Japanese maple trunk five feet away (that includes the space inside the ( Read more... )

We've been home from Houston (with a side jaunt to Austin) for a whole week now and the sabbatical feels real at last, always excepting the upcoming Thanksgiving marathon -- Bakersfield and San Jose on consecutive days for two different T-day dinners. Happily my brother has decided to do a lovely pork loin, so I won't be faced with two sets of ( Read more... )

Apple is finally replacing B's mac Mini after 2 returns to HQ for a new logic board and hard drive and 4 round trips to the Apple Store in Sacramento (60 miles each way) to fix the intermittent kernal panics on the brand-new-from-the-Apple-store computer bought at the end of May ( Read more... )

So I've been down to the Apple store in Sacramento three times in the last 10 days (one hour each way) due to problem's with B's 3-month old mac Mini, which I'm convinced were problems with one of the recent updates. First, took it to the genius bar and ended up leaving it on a Sunday morning (they were mobbed). Three days later I went down to pick ( Read more... )

Spent the whole of last week  reacting to the exhaustiveness of Comic-on, wrestling with the new inventory database (wonderful but with some odd personality quirks), catching up with orders and trying to get unpacked. My open suitcase on the bedroom floor is almost empty, the dozen boxes stacked on the deck outside my office have been emptied and ( Read more... )

Whew! We spent the weekend and the first half of the week madly packing up boxes of books (and pulps and comics on B's part0  to the tune of two pallet loads including bookcases for next week's madness and excitement. The big truck (of which my two little pallets are but a fraction) is loading today, so anything else will have to be drug along in ( Read more... )

I had a post all written at the Portland Airport last Monday (free wireless! Woot!) but as the plane started to load and I tried to upload,  lj decided I wasn't me and the post disappeared into the ether. This discouraged me from trying again to wax somewhat eloquent about the lovely visit with
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Probably holding off to start falling tomorrow morning as we load the car for  *V*A*C*AT*I*O*N*. I have just completed all the technology updates for the trip...the laptop is synched with the desktop and the  updated database is copied over; the iPod has all the latest "Wait,Wait" podcasts and some new music; the Palm has updates of the database, ( Read more... )

Finally tackled the issue of reconnecting the now obsolete TiVo machine to the television and home theater controller without impacting the new DVR or the existing DVD connections. Cleverly, we had a VCR attached that we haven't been using, so mostly it was just a matter of transferring the cables from that machine to the old machine. After some ( Read more... )

grump. The lilac bushes were all leafy and pretty and then Sunday morning I went out to find all the new growth chomped to the nub; deer see my poor darlings as a salad bar. It didn't help the new growth that we had a thunder storm on Monday, followed by enough hailstones to coat the deck. Yesterday's intermittent sun melted the dregs of the hail, ( Read more... )