- One of the coolest things happened yesterday. I found out that two people (Deanne and Ruthie) who comment on this blog and live about 3000 miles from here, having found my blog independent of each other, have known each other all their lives. It is truly a small world!
- Charlene sent me a link to a lady who makes tamales at one of the local farmers markets. Lorena has been thinking about doing something like that. I think it would be very cool and a good way for the kids to make some money even if it is a lot of hard work.
- We got the camera in the lab at NCSU up and running yesterday, transmitting images to the server on the internet. There are still plenty of bugs and not too much functionality, but it was still exciting. We will put up some links to the blog, images, and website where the research is described in the next few weeks.
- I got a new (to me) computer at work that is MUCH more powerful than my previous computer. That is always fun, but somewhat of a pain to transfer all the stuff over from the old computer.
- Ciara, the lady from the Johnston Community College Testing Services who administers the CLEP tests the kids have been taking called yesterday. She wanted to know if we would show up for a test this month. She has been great in the way she has helped us with the testing. We were not scheduled for a test, but we are such regulars there, she called us up just to make sure. She is really a pro at her job.
- The cat tower is still moving along, although we are stuck until we get some more carpet glue. This one weekend project is now in its second year, but it will be cool when it is done. Lorea, please remember to pick up a couple of tubes of glue for us today when you go to Christian’s guitar lesson!
- The great Betty Blonde one year anniversary T-shirt giveaway will start as soon as Kelly and Christian finish the T-shirt design and we get them ordered. They promised to work on the design today.
Month: July 2009
Our Fourth of July weekend was wonderful. We went to the Mathias home for a swimming party and barbecue and then to the fireworks at Lake Benson afterward. The event there was amazing; not just because of the fireworks, but also because the North Carolina Symphony was there. Christian took some pretty amazing fireworks pictures and we had a very nice time sitting around talking while the crowd dispersed a little before we left. The Thursday before, Kelly’s friend Danielle came to Raleigh from Statesville (her dad came for an appointment here), so she spent the weekend with us. Danielle’s mom, Terrie, brought two skirts she had made for the girls out of Goodwill ties when we meet so they could pick her up in 
Greensboro at a beautiful park there. The skirt went perfect with the Fourth of July blouse Kelly stitched for hereself. Of course, the kids all have a good time when they get together. Finally, we had our monthly potluck after our meeting on Sunday at the Steppes. All in all, it was a great weekend.
That being said, I spent way too much time working on computers over the weekend. I dragged an old computer downstairs to use in place of the USGS computer. I bought a gig of memory to get that going at a reasonable pace, loaded 
(almost) all of the software I need on it and then, after reading the series of comments from last week about backing my stuff up and getting scared that I was going to lose stuff again! I went ahead, bit the bullet, and bought three years of Carbonite, the online backup service. I have decided to do a hybrid version of Troy’s backup plan. His plan is to buy SD cards for his camera, then never erase them, just keep adding images to them. He puts them on his computer in addition to keeping them on his SD card. He only erases the pictures he does not want on the SD card and, when it gets full, he just stores it away as his backup. I am going to do that, then store them on Carbonite and a terabyte hard drive, too. At any rate, I am almost back to where I was when the computer broke a few days back.
I just called Lorena to tell her to pick up some carpet glue when she goes to Costco. We need it to finish the cat tower. Even though one of our computers broke, it is not going to slow me down much in terms of our computer project, it is only going to cause me to have to do more work. Nevertheless, the computer breaking and all these comments about what to do with the time gained from not programming for two hours per night has gotten me to thinking about what it would be cool to try to accomplish this summer OFF the computer. The FIRST thing that came to mind was the cat tower. Of course we read our book every night, too, and that counts, but I was thinking more about manual projects. So, one of my bride’s biggest complaints is that we have a massive number of books on the floor in the bonus room from six years of homeschool. Now, the thing we have to decide is whether to buy something old and nasty from Craig’s list to refinish or to try to do something from scratch. I am inclined to try to find something to refinish because I have done that before and very much enjoyed it. I will negotiate with the boss on that idea this weekend.
I went right to work on the Oregon USGS water particle inspection program right after I read aloud to the kids when I got home yesterday afternoon. I fixed a few problems, added a little functionality to the program, and then sat down for dinner with the family. I left the computer running while we ate and during a long talk with the one of the scientists in the USGS lab. When I returned to my computer, it was completely locked up. The computer is a nice Dell laptop that is only two years, so I was at a little bit of a loss as to why this happened. I fooled around with it for quite a long time, but could never really get it going right, so I switched over to the home computer to scan in Betty Blonde and send it up to our server. I found that our scanner was so old, it did not work with the new computer, so I had to get out our old printer-scanner with the printer that no longer works (an ugly sight that takes up too much room on the desk) so I could scan in a comic. After that, I had to download Python, GIMP, and the BleAX (Betty Blonde Accumlator of Comix) program I had written and get that running, too.
By the time I had that all finished, it was after 11:00. Then I had to start trying to figure out what to do about the broken computer. All my water inspection (the Oregon part) programming work is performed with that computer. Fortunately, Christian had figured out that there is a defective graphics chip/motherboard in that particular computer for which Dell extended the warranty. It is something that has happened to lots of people. So, even though I have a good backup, it is a day old and I will have to rewrite the code again if I cannot get it off the system before it gets fixed. I did not get much sleep last night, but maybe this is a sign that I should just stay off the computer through the Fourth of July holiday. It is a pretty good excuse to concentrate on eating hot dogs and watching fireworks, so I am going to take it as a sign even if it is not.
The lesson I learned is KEEP DOING MY BACKUPS!