March 2007

I spent last week, beginning on Tuesday down and out with a bad cold. I finally ventured out of the house yesterday morning, and that only because I was out of cold medicine and food. And guess what, it was pretty nice out. And today, the thermometer in my bathroom said it was over 70°F out there, so I’m sitting here writing this with all the windows open. It feels nice to air the place out a bit after winter, even if we’re probably going to get some more chilly weather before it’s time to break out the Hawaiian shirts for the summer.

Valleys & Snow

I’m still not completely over the cold, but I’m feeling a lot better than I was on Wednesday or Thursday. In fact, I got some things done around the house on Friday and today. Thursday and Friday I had three different folks over. First on Thursday was the plumber from Minneapolis Plumbing to disconnect the basement shower, fix the outside tap on the south side of my house, and fix the drain in my kitchen. Then on Friday, Dick from Prime Hardwood Floors stopped by to give me an estimate on sanding and refinishing the floor in the library/guest bedroom. And finally on Friday afternoon, Andy from Lee’s Workshop stopped by to give me an estimate on the bookshelves. It sounds as though all the contractors will be done before or near Memorial Day weekend, so that’s pretty cool.

This morning, I started tearing out the shower in the basement. It’s disconnected, but I had to pull the plumbing out of the enclosure and start taking the enclosure apart. I could tell I’ve been sick though, since I was just about half done when I was completely worn out. And I managed to cut one of my fingers on a piece of the metal trim, so I just called it a day on that project.

I’ve just about finished up the Arizona Photos, too. There’s one left from my initial set of picks from the bunch I took, and there might be a few more that will be worth posting when I go through them again, but it’s mostly done. Kirsten’s expanded on her writeup of the weekend, and covers things in much more depth than I would have.

Which is kinda sad. I’d meant to get out yesterday on the photowalk in Stillwater, so I’d have more photos once I ran out of Arizona stuff, but I wasn’t feeling up to it, so I might have a few days with no new photos. Then again, the lilies are starting to poke through the dirt in the front yard, so maybe the springtime weather will encourage me to get out and capture some of it. Which reminds me, to mention that most of my photos now are going on flickr. You can check them out, or subscribe to the RSS feed if you’re interested to see what comes out of my camera. And if you’re a baseball geek, and can tell me who this smile belongs to, I’d sure appreciate it.

I’m still working through my photos from Arizona. I’ve got almost half of them posted, and am sorta hoping to stretch the remaining ones (posting one per day or so) until the end of the month. Then again, I might get impatient and post multiples. But I think there are some nice landscapes, and some pretty decent spring training photos in there, so head on over and check them out.

Mountains at sunrise

Other than that, things have been pretty calm around here. Not to say I haven’t been busy, but nothing unmanageable. Last weekend was some catching up around the house, and a long-overdue visit up to mom’s. And hooking up my new UPS, two days after an hour-long power outage made my new computer sad. And trying to get my email client happy again after the power had failed while it was checking email and writing bits to the hard drive. Ouch. It’s still kinda screwed up, but at least it’s mostly usable again, which is an improvement over Friday.

This weekend, the Saints single-game tickets go on sale on Saturday. I suspect there will be some sort of gathering out in the parking lot, since the weather is supposed to be pretty decent. Probably won’t be building any snowpigs this year, though.

Took last Friday and Monday this week off from work for a long weekend, and I went down to Arizona for the weekend. Never been there before, and it ended up being a pretty fun weekend. It didn’t hurt that the temps were in the mid-80s most days (and it was, in fact, a dry heat), which felt pretty good after getting a couple feet of snow in a couple weeks here in MN.

Arizona-Sonora Desert Panorama

The photo is another panorama, stitched together from 8 photos taken with my D-200. Big! So big, in fact, that I had to scale it down to post it to flickr. Seems they have a limit of about 15000 pixels wide for images. Anyway, there was a lot of scenery like that, and I got pictures of much less of it than I wanted, but since we were gathered in a large group, I kinda expected that. I was busy socializing, rather than geeking out with my camera all by myself much of the time. Guess I’ll have to go back sometime. I’ll probably have more to say about the weekend once I’ve gone through more of the pictures, but for now, that’s pretty much going to do it.

On the home front, things are going okay. I got back, and got called into work immediately on Monday afternoon. Turns out I’d written a bug, and had to fix it. Which I guess is okay, since I probably shouldn’t have taken vacation just now, but the bug is fixed, the vacation was successful, and all seems to be well at the moment, so I guess it worked out. And I think that’s the note I’d like to end on for today.

It’s the time of year when people are walking carefully around here. There was just enough sunshine yesterday to start melting some of the couple feet of snow we got, but it gets cold enough again every night to refreeze it all. That makes for big ice-slicks in the parking lots and on sidewalks. I haven’t seen any pratfalls yet this spring, but I’m expecting one any time now. Probably from me.

But it’s actually starting to feel like spring. Sure, there’s still a bunch of snow, but the days are noticeably longer, and unless there’s a crisis, I’m now seeing sunshine both going to and coming home from work, and that’s improved my mood a lot. Plus, as I note in the last link, baseball has started, and that’s a good sign, too.

False Creek Panorama

Today’s photo is one from the fall of 2002, shot in Vancouver, BC. I’ve been playing with the stitching abilities in Photoshop, and turned a bunch of old photos into panoramas. This is one of those little things that makes me a happier boy. When I tried stitching these photos back in 2002, it was a lot of work, required specialized software, and the results still didn’t make me all that happy. Today, it’s a lot easier, and the software needed does a lot more than just stitching pictures together. And I can do it without throwing away resolution, which all the tools did five years ago. I’m hoping to get out with the camera this weekend and shoot some really big panos, just because I can.

We ended up getting over a foot of snow between Thursday and Friday. Much shovelling was involved, and I was kinda sore on Friday, but am feeling pretty good now. Sure, the sidewalk behind the house is down to just a single shovel-width, but it’s March, and even though it’s usually the snowiest month of the year, we’ve been getting enough sunshine that many of the shovelled areas are already completely clear.

The Master of All He Surveys

During my snow-day on Thursday, I set up my new computer. I was impressed by how easily the “transfer everything from your old computer” script thingie worked. Kudos to Apple for getting that right. I basically connected the two machines with a firewire cable, and let it just run. The only real glitch was the estimate of time remaining. When it said there were seven minutes left, I started defrosting some pork chops for dinner. An hour and a half later, I had defrosted, cooked, and eaten dinner, and washed the dishes, and it still said “less than a minute remaining” for another fifteen or twenty minutes. The weird thing is that the initial estimate (the first one I saw) ended up being accurate to within about ten minutes. It was just the ones when the process that was closer to complete that were wacky. I also still need to move the extra hard-drive from the old machine to the new, but that’s not a big deal. And the new pute is so much faster that I’m impressed by how quickly a lot of things run now.

Friday I went into work again, in spite of the snow. It wasn’t all that bad out. A lot of people were staying home, so even though the roads weren’t perfect, there just weren’t that many cars in the way. That was nice.

The one thing I had hoped to do and didn’t was get out to take some pictures of the freshly-fallen snow. I thought about it a few times, but never quite got around to it. Oh well. I’ve been going through the archives and posting some older pictures to my flickr stream. I keep trying to get at least one photo a day up there, but I’m definitely going to need to get out to get some new fodder if I’m going to keep that up. Yes, there are still a few good ones in the archives, but not as many as I’d like. Hopefully with the new puter set up, and the weather getting warmer, I’ll have less incentive to stay inside.

And I think that’s going to do it for today. I’m kinda light on the links this time, but I managed to post twice in a week, too. That’s something, right?

Sorry for the length between updates. Life was busy. Then it wasn’t so much, but it snowed. And once I got that dealt with, other things held my attention. But hey, today’s shaping up to be a snow-day. I’ve got a couple meetings I need to phone in to work for, but I’ve managed to continue keeping my home-network’s electrons from being polluted by work’s VPN, so it’ll be a light work-day, too. I’m betting the shovelling will make up for it. And perhaps, if I’m really lucky, some pictures of snowfall.

And that’s about it for this morning. I’m going to try to be better about updating this month, but I can see a couple bumps in the road to that plan, so I’m not going to promise results. Just that I’ll try.