Nature Coast Journal
Friday, March 8, 2002
The Will McLean music festival is on for this weekend. My fourth year. This year I'm going late Friday (today) afternoon in time for the potluck supper. I'm camping in the van tonight and Saturday night. More Florida folk music than you can imagine!
I'll take the djembe and the little keyboard and maybe the bass box, so I can sit in on some of the campfire pickin' and singin'.
I'll tell you more when I get back.
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Wednesday, February 27, 2002
I guess since David linked me in his latest log that I had better bring this thing up to date. Not only did the family visit me but they saved me the problem of hassling with airlines and from freezing to death in the "bitter cold North".
Now I can put of the airline thing until late April and/or take a nice long driving vacation up the East coast in Late June.
But boy the house is quiet with those kids gone!
That DSL line I mentioned on January 8 has really been working well. I had a wireless access point gadget I've been itching to try out. Unfortunately the wireless thing that plugs into my old old laptop refuses to work with it. So in comes David with his modern notebook and a wireless thing that works. He fiddled around with the setup and he was connected!
Now that my one remaining client has come through with more $$, I can (must) buy a new laptop. It will then be connected by wireless.
I hated to drop my digitalusa.net account but the DSL had to be earthlink.net because of the tie in with my local phone company (Sprint) and the fact that digitalusa only supports ISDN at best. They are a great ISP otherwise. But earthlink is working fine and now I have all my web stuff over there. I tested earthlink and its dialup works fine so they are their own backup.
It's nice owning one's own domains. I have them parked over at mydomain.com and so when I change suppliers, I only have to change some pointers and no-one knows any difference.
My usual Florida weather report: while the kids were here the weather cooperated nicely with daytimes in the mid 70's and fairly sunny. When they left we had a couple of rainy days and the last week has been warm and sunny. Tonight, however we will go down into the 20's and stuff will freeze. High tomarrow only 50. But back to the 70's by the weekend. I can't wait 'till we get into the 80's and 90's for the rest of the year!!
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Tuesday, January 29, 2002
8:45 P.M. So now the house is presentable. The weather warmed up a week or so ago. Almost hit 90 F. today. Cool air coming in the window now though.
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Sunday, January 27, 2002
Stuff happened in the past week. My 20" monitor blew. The thing was so heavy I barely could lift it from the table to a cart. I don't think I'll even try and get it fixed. Out to the curb with it. I rearranged the computers so all three go through the switch box and am using the new View Sonic View Panel VG181 on everything now. It's a really nice monitor.
I got a bunch of stuff done for my client up in New York. Boy the new DSL line really shines when controlling his stuff via PcAnywhere. I still like programming in raw Foxpro (for dos no less). It's fun and gives me something "real" to do with the system.
I am a dyed in the wool straight line programmer. Have never learned C++ or visual Foxpro or any of those strange new languages. Foxpro (enhanced xbase) C or forth or apl or assembler or html or even basic :-( are nice straight forward procedural languages and I can handle them. Of course I have a lot of my own subroutines I use over and over, but I don't understand encapsulation. I suppose I could learn, but at this age I'd rather do something else with my time.
Now I have to "pick up" the whole house. Cleaning person coming on Tuesday. The UU choir is having their annual party at my house Thursday night.
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Monday, January 14, 2002
Don't know where to begin. Went to the Crystal River Manatee festival Saturday afternoon. An awful lot of arts/crafts booths. A lot of food booths. I was pretty careful with them after picking up some food poisoning at the Homosassa fair in November.
Sunday was the "Sunday Sampler", an afternoon of good, live, Florida Folk music. And afterwards a potluck at Mem's & Margaret's with some real nice pickin' and singin' into the evening. I discovered that I could really sit in with my little blue Kawaii keyboard. The thing is small enough to hold in one hand while playing with the other. 48 voices.
Today I finally got to Harry Potter, before it disappears from theaters. I really loved it. It followed the book pretty well. If it had followed the book exactly it would have run 5 or 6 hours!
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Friday, January 11, 2002
I arraigned for guys to put that super mylar film on all my windows, so today two guys are having a great time installing it. I'm not particularly worried about smash-ins but it's nice to know that it will be a lot more difficult for some passing vandal/thief to break a window.
The main reason I got it is for flying debris. Beverly Hills has not experienced a real hurricane in anybody's memory. But we have had some windstorms on the fringes of a hurricane. So I decided that I didn't want a window to break and let in the rain and wind. The mylar film seemed to be a good idea.
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Wednesday, January 9, 2002
I wrote Congressman Rick Boucher giving him my support for changing the DMCA. He has been talking well about the problems and is introducing some ameliorating legislation.
I also wrote my own Congresswoman, Karen Thurman, urging her to support Rick Boucher. Unfortunately I wrote her in the past on the subject and her reply indicated she hasn't a clue.
The last couple of nights here in West Central Florida have been below freezing. Frost all over everything and delicate plants zapped if left uncovered. Daytime temps in the 50's We will be in the seventies in the daytime by the weekend though.
The DSL is working great! Fabulous! I can get internet radio very well now. And a Microsoft fixit 4+ mb download took less than a minute.
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Tuesday, January 8, 2002
So the guy did come yesterday. So now I have a nice new DSL line working through a new router. My various computers can all use it. Now that I have it what am I going to use it for?
Well, I have a static ip address. This means I can start playing around with web hosting. Just as an experiment, mind you. I'm still going to let various providers host www.billchess.com www.ncuu.org www.bhrassn.org
More later.
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Friday, January 4, 2002
Well! After waiting all day for a non-existent Sprint telephone service person, I still don't have a DSL line. They were due in the morning. I got a call that they were running late and would be here in the afternoon. I called at 6 p.m. and was informed that they all went home and (maybe) they would be out on Monday.
But I have learned and accomplished a lot in preparation. Got a new Cable/DSL router which makes it a lot easier to run my network. Even if it turns out the DSL won't work here- the whole setup will work with RoadRunner which is a definite option.
It looks like most of the instability experienced with the new computer was due to too much memory. It looks like it just won't run stable with 758mb. 512mb seems to be working ok.
More tomorrow- have to go out to an interesting meeting this evening. Tell you about it later.
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Monday, December 31, 2001
Happy New Year! (in 3 hours EST or so)
Today I've been doing "work for hire." My one remaining client (up in NY) wants some new data analysis reports on his business. So I wrote the first one and will use most of the parts to write the second one. Programming in Foxpro for Dos is a real snap (if you have been programming in a dbase dialect for years and years.) My client has a heck of a time getting people to produce stuff in a timely manner various for other stuff he has going. I must admit I found him some of said software, but took no responsibility for any of it.
And of course, if I go away, it will cost a fortune for anyone else to take over the stuff I do. The original software dates to the mid 80's and has layer upon layer of patches and new stuff I have put together. And like all "good" programmers, I don't understand documentation (really!)
Thanks to the internet and PcAnywhere, I can work down here in Florida on a system in New York.
Not doing much tonight. Going to watch the ball drop on TV. In spite of the favorable Widows to Widowers ratio, I'm staying home alone. I've still got some memories to put at rest.
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Saturday, December 29, 2001
I'm beginning to think the new computer is a bit flakey. Long story, but today I did a 4+ hour memory test using some pretty good software. It tested fine. I did a scan of the 40 gig hard disk. It tested fine. But still I get unexpected lockups, mostly when making long .wav recordings from the audio tape player. But xp apologizes before rebooting while 98 just freezes. But once I even got xp to freeze up. I hate hardware!!
Next I suppose I have to open up the box and start replacing cards (like the sound card) until it starts to work ok. I found once that the computer is sensitive to what card is in what slot and if they are wrong there get to be interrupt conflicts. I hope it's not the mother board though!!
Today I drove up to Ocala (40 minutes or so) to the Barnes and Noble. I spent 2 or more hours looking over computer books. Bought O'Reilly's book "Running Linux". It seems to have more useful information than the others. Also bought the Osborne book "The Complete Reference Windows XP" (my apologies to the authors but I am too lazy to look them up).
I can't run either without knowing a lot more than I do.
Weather was a bit windy today but we hit 70. Only expected 60 but we had bright sunshine. While I was up to Ocala I bought a new winter jacket. It should be nice here over just a t-shirt in early winter mornings, and just maybe I'll get up to NY in February to see David and the family.
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Friday, December 28, 2001
I built up a new computer this month (amd1400, 40gb, 20gb, 768mb ram, etc etc). I've got Mandrake Linux running on the 20gb and just put up WinXP on the 40gb. So far I can say that neither one is what it is cracked up to be.
I'll be working to really learn Unix from the command line. That's the only way I can see to properly configure Mandrake Linux. Its gui interfaces sometimes work and sometimes do not. But I feel it's the way to go for my future.
The Winxp and the major Linux gui interface have something in common. I don't know who stole from whom (but I can guess). They both take advantage of the newer resolutions (800x600) to give very smooth graphics optimized for something greater than 640x480. So the screens are "prettier". On my new computer Winxp seems as flaky as ever with occasional explanation screens, apologizing for having to go re-boot.
With xp, loading an ap from the win98 days, the icons for the ap are gross. They blow up to very pixilated view. Luckily my EZ Viewer 3, in spite of the pixilated icon runs very well and shows beautiful pictures. I heartily recommend it as a simple but powerful picture editor and slide show generator. www.gjcsoftware.com will get you there.
Guess I'll have to buy an xp tech book and yet another Linux technical book.
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Thursday, December 27, 2001
ISDN lines!! We don't have DSL available and RoadRunner just came in recently so I have ISDN. When it runs right it's pretty good at 128 kbs. But on several occasions it didn't work. I got the telephone guy out. He checked the line and said he could find nothing wrong. But after he left it worked fine.
So now, only half the ISDN line is working and I only have 64 kbs. Called Sprint. On hold 15 minutes so far. Grrrr. Think I'll check out RoadRunner- it would be cheaper and faster (but more reliable?? who knows.)
Later, ISDN seems to be working after resetting the modem while talking to the guy. But more important!! Found DSL is finally available here in Beverly Hills. Ordered the whole package including static IP address!!
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Tuesday, December 25, 2001
Everything mentioned below went off as scheduled. At the Christmas Eve service I easily found people willing to read. Everyone picked up on their cues with no problems. The organist was right in there with the carols. All I had to do then was the one page introduction and the final "blessing". Lots of mulled cider and goodies followed.
Christmas dinner was yummy too.
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Monday, December 24, 2001
Well, I guess David's web pages are all working again. Too bad about how some supposedly reliable business (such as OnePine) can just go out of business with no warning to their customers.
Even down here in West Central Florida, when Hitter.net decided to go out of the isp business we got some warning (and good preliminary roomers too). Of course they hoped to make out by selling their customers to Earthlink. I didn't bite and went with digitalusa.net instead.
But being somewhat of a cheapskate, I had not contracted with my isp to park my domains there. Instead I park my domains with mydomain.com and redirect everything to the web pages which come with my isp account. So when it came time to change addresses, I simply changed the pointers at mydomain.com.
Of course, if mydomain.com ever goes out of business, I'll be in trouble. So will several hundred thousand other domain holders.
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Tonight is Christmas eve. We at NCUU are having the same ole' Christmas Eve service I've been putting on forever- the same one I used to use at First Unitarian Society of Rockland County (NY). So now two congregations are using the same format. It's designed to last just 30 minutes so the kids don't get restless. It consists of a bunch of familiar Christmas carols interspersed with readings of the KJV of the Christmas story from all the available references, with a little sermon-on-the mount and some very old writings by others. It's the most Christian service we ever have. The old legends need repeating once a year.
I've got a turkey thawing in the cooler. Tomorrow morning I'll take it out, stuff it, and put it in the oven. Then over to my mother-in-law's where the other fixings are and three of us will have dinner. The we'll take a whole bunch of stuff over to a friend's house (who is recuperating from a triple bypass) so she and her sisters can have Christmas dinner without having to come over.
I miss the kids, but I'm against freezing.