Dale Miller

I think I need either a larger basket or a smaller cat.

It’s a beautiful day. The sun is shining, the sky is a brilliant blue, and the air is fresh from the overnight rain. It’s the kind of day that makes you glad to be alive.

I started the morning by finishing up a project that I started yesterday — running a phone line down to my storage building. It’s another of those projects that is easy for two people, but frustrating for one. I bought some heavy nylon line last night at Wal-Mart, because I couldn’t find my stash. There was a conduit in the ground for the alarm system, so I decided to use it. I disconnected the speaker and used it to pull a string through. Then I tied that wire and a length of cat5 to it and started pulling. The problem is that it’s a small conduit. it really needed one person pulling and another person feeding. I ended up tugging hard on the pull string and then wrapping it around a nail to keep tension on it, running back up to the house to feed a few feet of wire into the conduit until there was no more tension, running back to the storage shed, and repeating. It’s only about 80 feet, but took a number of trips. I feel like I’ve gotten my exercise for the day. But I now have a phone line in the storage shed. I’ve been wanting some additional wire there ever since I moved in. This will also allow me to do some low-voltage lighting control so I can turn the outside lights on from either end. I suppose I could run network down there, but I don’t see much need. Having to move things out of the way of the cable entrance also gave me the impetus I needed to straighten the storage room a bit. It still needs work, but it’s better than it was before.

I have no idea what I’m going to do with myself for the rest of the day. I finished the first book in a trilogy last night, so I may spend the afternoon reading the second one. I really need to go to the grocery store. I just didn’t feel like food-shopping last night at Wal-Mart.

I’m fairly proud of myself. I ran a phone line under the carpet to my desk so I wouldn’t have to have a phone wire across the floor. Then I unplugged the computer, moved everything out from under the desk, and thoroughly vacuumed the upstairs. I haven’t done that for several months. It looks much better now. I then proceeded to vacuum the stairs and all the downstairs except for the junk room spare bedroom. I swept the kitchen, and did all the laundry. My house is actually in pretty good shape at the moment. The only downside is that I decided to carry out a bunch of stuff that I needed to get rid of. It’s currently all sitting on the front porch. I don’t want to try throwing it in my trash can, since it’s mostly quite heavy. I have 7 large batteries from the UPS at work that I was using as a supplement to my computer UPS. Since two of the batteries died, and my UPS died, I don’t have any use for them. Unfortunately they weigh about 80 pounds each, and thus rather difficult to toss. I wonder what the penalty would be if I got caught throwing them into someone’s dumpster. I could probably get away with doing that at UALR, since they came from there originally. :) In addition to the batteries I also have three dead UPSs and some miscellaneous stuff. I’ll manage to get rid of it all eventually, but it’s just annoying (and heavy). I’m afraid that I might have hurt my back a bit moving all that stuff. It’s been giving me twinges all evening. I’m presently sitting at Sufficient Grounds (for the first time in quite a while), but I can hear my bed calling me even from this distance. As usual I have spent my evening observing pretty girls rather than having any interaction.

Today has already been productive. I decided that I had enough vacation time built up that I needed to take an occasional day off. Today sounded like a good day to stay home and clean up the house. The only thing I have cleaned in the house is the bathtub, but I’ve managed to clean up quite a bit more in the yard. I can now walk around two more of my trees without the need for protective clothing. That also means more to mow. :) If I keep this up I might actually be able to walk around my entire yard in a couple of years.

I wish I had a chain saw, but don’t really want to spend the money on one. I need to find a generous person that buys chain saws like Jack buys lawn mowers. I have several dozen bushes and small trees that I want to cut down. There is so much “stuff” in my yard I’ve decided that I’m just going to identify big trees to leave and cut down everything else indiscriminately.

I knew I was really perspiring when I was out working and came back in to find the thermometer over the front porch indicating 99°. No wonder I thought it was hot. Maybe I should give up on cleaning the house and spend the afternoon at lake Sylvia. It’s tempting, but so is taking a nap. :)

I have “new” clothes! I went shopping at Savers last night and picked up 8 shirts, a dress and three pair of jeans for about $50.00. Now I can throw away some of the shirts that are becoming rather threadbare. I like high-quality clothes, but I just can’t convince myself to spend the necessary money. My problem is that I can very easily go into Dillard’s and spend several hundred dollars on clothes. So I try not to even tempt myself.

Do you ever have one of those “duh” moments, when something you learned by rote suddenly makes perfect sense and you see the reason for it? I believe we all have our own ways of looking at the world. Some people understand some things, other people understand different things. I am reminded of a woman who used to work at UALR. To do a specific task on the computer system, she had her notes written out explaining exactly what to type. She had no idea what any of the commands did, nor did she care. She just knew that if she typed them all in she would achieve the result she wanted. Of course problems occasionally occur, and then she had no idea what to do. The error message (which was perfectly clear to the programmer) made no sense to her, because she didn’t have the appropriate frame of reference.

Okay, why am I thinking of that? I was reading through my photography book, and came across the first discussion on f-stops. When he covered it in class my instructor mentioned that we would be responsible for knowing the full f-stops when test time came around. I have known for years that each f-stop halves the amount of light from the one larger, but I had just thought of them as numbers, and hadn’t considered why those numbers. I was thinking about what the ratio was between 1.8, 2.8, 4.0, 5.6, 8, 11,16, and 22 when suddenly everything became clear. The square of each number is twice the square of the previous number. Of course that makes perfect sense when you consider that the f-stop is a measure of the diameter of the iris, and so the area of the opening is πr². I had just never thought of that before, and I don’t remember seeing it discussed in any of the photography books I have read. You are generally just told that each f-stop lets in twice (half, depending on direction) as much light as the one before. I feel like I just stumbled across something that was so obvious to everyone else that they didn’t see the need to mention it. It’s also possible that most people don’t want to know why something works, they only want to know that it does. Anyway, the result of all this is that I don’t have to memorize anything. I can always compute one full f-stop from any other full or intermediate stop (assuming I can do multiplication/division and square roots in my head).

Yes, I am truly a nerd.

Classes are back in session, women in short skirts are back on campus, and all is right with the world.

Well, it’s not actually all that great since all I do is look, but at least I can look. :)

My photography class has had two meetings now. I probably should not have taken Photo I and gone straight to Photo II, but I’ve never gotten credit for the first class, so it seemed like it might be fun. The air conditioning duct in the classroom has the roar of a small engine all the time. It’s really hard to hear the instructor. It will give me something fun to do this semester, though.

I woke up this morning feeling pretty bad. I always know that I’m sick when I awaken remembering a strange dream. This mornings dream involved having a car pull up to the front of my house and awaken me. I went to the door to find a bright yellow, badly customized convertible with a teenaged male and three females in it. One of the girls came up to the door to give me a balloon and a card, and another asked if she could spend the night at my house. I, of course, said yes. We went in the house and she started playing with the cats. That was when I woke up. It seemed quite real until I realized that the house was not only not mine, but not one I even remember seeing. Very odd.

I called in sick to work today, and went back to bed. After a couple more hours I was feeling better and decided to come to work anyway. That shows how sick I really am. :)

Last night I went to my photography class, which has potential. I took Photo I years ago for audit, but decided that I wanted to actually receive credit for it. I may be the only person in the room (besides the instructor) who knows what an f-stop is and why one would care.

Today had its good and its bad points. I managed to make the Banner job submission process work correctly on TRU64. It sometimes helps to go back to the beginning and check all the documentation. Since we copied the database we’re using over from the VMS system, that is the OS that we told Banner it was running. It seems that the job does different things depending on which OS is stored in the database. I suppose it never occurred to the programmer to simply test toe OS rather than relying on the database. Anyway, when the process knows it’s running under Unix things work much better.

That was the good part of the day. The bad part is that I think I trashed the main disk on Mark’s home machine. I was trying to mount one of the partitions, thought it was corrupt and attempted to fsck it in order to fix it. Unfortunately, what I didn’t realize was that it was half of a virtual disk set. I feel fairly certain I botched it beyond all repair. That wouldn’t be so bad if there was a good backup, but there wasn’t. I was trying to mount it in order to make a backup. :( I feel really terrible about it, since I think there are a number of things on that volume that were his only copy (and many that will be hard/impossible to replace).

I have felt like I am running on about half my brain so far this week. There’s nothing identifiably wrong, but I’m just not quite all here. There are those who claim I’ve never been quite all here, but lately it’s been even worse than usual.

Thanks to jbtipshus (who unfortunately never posts anymore) I now have a lawnmower!! I mentioned to him as we were leaving work yesterday that I was about to go buy one, and he offered to give me his old one. It’s almost exactly what I was about to purchase. It’s a Murray 3.5 hp 20″ cut mower. It runs beautifully and my yard is now back to a non-jungle state. I may yet decide that it’s going to become an engine-donor, though. I really like the high-wheel mower that I was using. So I may well combine the two and continue using that frame.

I find myself trying to tame the wilderness a little more each time I mow. I’m probably keeping up 8,000-10,000 square feet more yard than I was at this time last year. That’s probably a good thing. I have made the decision that if climbs or has briars it should be cut back. That’s a good philosophy, but in some cases I have to attack the vines with an axe or saw because they are over an inch in diameter. I’m making progress, though. I need to cut back a few small trees to allow others to grow. There are a even places that things are so dense it’s best to just cut it all down and start over. I’ve also discovered that previous occupants of this house decided to just toss rocks to the very edge of the mowed area rather than trying to actually get rid of them. That means every time I expand my mowed area I have to spend time clearing the rocks out of it. Of course, I am not much better about it. I’m just throwing the rocks farther out, but I’m at least trying to toss them 30 feet or so outside the area I mow. I don’t really expect to ever tame that much of the yard.

After working in the yard I had a shower and shaved everything. I hadn’t shaved my legs since last week, and the growth was bugging me. I feel much better when they are smooth. I need to give the folks as Sona LASER systems another call. I can’t afford it, but it certainly would be nice to not have to shave.

Now that I’m all clean and smooth I need to find something to do tonight. I’ve been trying to convince myself to go back to Discovery for a couple of weeks now without much success. I probably won’t go tonight either. I kinda want to get out of the house and go to dinner or something, but I kinda don’t. Being here all alone is sometimes depressing, but sometimes being alone around a bunch of couples and families is worse.

mirell is now back from his European trip. He seemed to thoroughly enjoy himself. I’m quite envious. He has much more initiative than I did at that age. (Actually, who am I kidding — he has more initiative than I do now.)

Oh, what happens to a tree that has had a large vine growing up it for years.

I convinced myself to get out of bed and come to work. I think that was quite an accomplishment.

Today is just another of those days I don’t feel like dealing with life. I want to pull the covers over my head and pretend that the rest of the world doesn’t exist.

The rain last night was interesting. I always enjoy a good thunderstorm. It’s not quite as nice when I’m driving home in it, however. It’s much nicer to enjoy it from the comfort of my warm, dry house.

So I guess I have decided on the cheap lawnmower at Home Depot by default. I’ll probably stop and get one on the way home tonight. Then I have to figure out how to dispose of the old mowers. I don’t want to emulate my neighbors and just throw them out in the woods. That may end up being what I do anyway, but I don’t like that idea. I’m not even sure where the Perry County landfill is, and I don’t have a good way to transport them in any case. Carrying a new, clean mower in my car is one thing, but the old ones are somewhat grimy.

Oh, I have one Gmail invitation if anyone wants it. First to send me an email asking for it (domiller@gmail.com) will get it.

Update: It’s gone