Friday Morning, post-Thanksgiving

Well, I have worked or slept off my Thanksgiving torpor.

Thanksgiving was a most pleasant day, even though we were small in numbers - Liz and James (and, of course, Sammy) stopped in for a bit and helped us dispose of some food, and visited. I played with Sammy, and generally did not much else useful - but it was a most pleasant day.

We heard from Jamie, who is/was in Auckland, New Zealand when he called to give us his over-there phone number, and informed us that he had started his visit by jumping off a building that was over 200 meters tall. You'd have to know Jamie.... He told that to me, I told it to Phyllis, who promptly got pale and then realized if we were talking about it that it was either a very small building (like a doghouse) or it was some sort of adventure supported by cables or parachutes or some mechanism to assure that he did not impact the ground with a velocity greater than healthy.

He has a rental car, and is meeting a high school friend (and his family) in a place that is several hundred miles from Auckland in a few days to reclaim some stuff he left there when he left the last time he was in New Zealand. After a suitable visit and rest, he'll be headed to Australia - because it's there, I suppose, to look around, wander around, and take pictures until money runs low, then he'll work somewhere at something until he doesn't need to for a while. Maybe he'll be like my cousin John and get lassoed by some Australian lady - we shall see.  Having met Tracy (John's lovely wife) I for one wouldn't mind that at all. Meanwhile, he promises to keep his PICASA site updated with photos each few few weeks. Anyone curious can go to http://picasaweb.google.com/ijam357 and check it out. Right now, it has only a bunch of stuff from his trip across country, since flights to Australia leave from LA or somewhere out there and he was living here. He drove out, sold his car the day before he left, to someone who passed him on a freeway, stopped him and paid cash for it. Such luck we should all have - but that seems to be the story of his life.

I'm doing a little work this morning for a small credit union that I have served sporadically throughout the years - and this afternoon will be open, so I'll probably do some computer cleanup at home, or go over to church and install the ZIP drives I got for their newest computers. Phyllis and I have to decide what we're going to use the newly vacated space downstairs for, but we'll find something....

Otherwise, it is nice to be off until Monday.

Computers can be a PITA - I just got my Toshiaba Tablet working, and it decided it needed to put on some updates - which promptly broke Microsoft Explorer enough that I can't get a desktop up on it. Damn Bill Gates anyhow. So I guess I'll have to regress it as soon as I figure out how to regress a tablet (They are different....) I also discovered that when it is in tablet mode that the digitizer (the thing that makes the cursor follow the pointer on the stylus) has a quiet band on it - probably a loose cable connection which gets stretched when the display is rotated into tablet mode - so I will have to figure out how to get the display apart far enough to see how the cables are, and then figure out what to take off the bottom to see how the cable connections there look. At least, the tougbbook is working OK, although I still do not have the tiny toughbook working again. I fear I may have toasted its motherboard, so it may not come back for a while.

Computers are a curse. But I shouldn't schimpf at them because they pay my salary, too, and without at lest one that works, I'd have to talk to myself instead of scribbling for random visitors.

I just got the first ZIP drive in a chrurch and discovered a motherboard so new it doesn't know how to do IDE interfaces, so it is off to eBay to buy a couple of SATA motherboard to PATA device adapters to make these things functional.  Every time I think I'm almost there, someone moves there to elsewhere.  Keeps life interesting, not to mention occasioually infuriating.

Happy Day-after-Thanksgiving, everyone.