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Welcome To my Experimental Web-Log
2004
Henry Burgess
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Friday October 1,
2004 I ordered my new Dell back on September 16 and it's not due here until October 9 or so. So I am focused on bathroom repair and door refinishing. TTFN Monday September 13, 2004 I had lunch with three amazing people over at Microsoft today. It's refreshing and reassuring that people so smart are hammering away at problems that need solving. We can only wish that some of the smarts from MSR rub off on the product divisions. I am running Windows XP SP2 on one of my systems and I am not impressed. I would like to buy a Dell with a 3.6 GHz 560 CPU but the delivery date is more than a month out, ouch! Thanks to Spybot and hours of fooling around I was able to bring my son's computer back to something approaching normal. But I am not ready to put SP2 on that machine. The bright spot? I love my new Nikon D70! 6 megapixels ought to be enough for a while and it is cool to have it in an SLR package. Thursday June 24, 2004 Well? So one of the two new Western Digital 10k RPM SATA drives I installed in the main computer I use gave out the other day. This shortly after getting everything up and working again. It was a click of death. I switched back to the old system (ATA 60GB) and recovered many files from backup. Lost were stuff I was going to post here once I installed Frontpage. Sigh. On the home font we are moving stones from the back yard to the front to make a path down the hillside and putting a brick walkway in its place in the back. Along the way the existing walkways are getting pressure washed. My son is off to the University of Southern California this weekend for a moth of Guitar school and my daughter is off to a tour of Southern India soon. We were on the east coast for a college tour and took in the Boston Marathon, I'll post some pictures if they were not lost in the disk death. I got a power compound miter saw and replaced the molding in out bathroom remodel. I stained some molding to look like the cherry cabinet and it looks good with the marble top. I have a new mirror on order, this time with beveling, and once it is here it will be time to wallpaper and finish that project! I resolve to be a better Weblog poster! Saturday March 27, 2004 I just dropped my son off at the SAT this morning and it reminded me of when I took the test. It also reminded me of how testing is such a bad idea. One of the things that make the States great is inclusion. Foreign countries that have entrance exams loose a lot of good people who, for one reason or another, are not great test takers. Then there is Einstein flunking algebra. No doubt he flunked the test not the understanding. I can’t stand anything “Bush” so I see the No Child Left Behind program as more of a no good test taker left behind. Monday March 1, 2004 I just want to say that I very much enjoyed Absolute Friends by John LeCarré. He is just great. I like this as much as The Constant Gardner. Wednesday February 25, 2004 I have finished "The Last Juror" by John Grisham. I found this a finely crafted and enjoyable read. It’s a bit short at 355 pages. Get it and read it this weekend! I was surprised to see some negative reader reviews on BN and Amazon. Publisher’s Weekly got it right when they said “…heartfelt, wise, suspenseful and funny, one of the best Grishams ever”. Tuesday February 24, 2004 I read Time Bomb by Jonathan Kellerman on the plane recently. It is billed as "The New York Times Bestseller". While I do like Kellerman's Alex Delaware novels, and this was was page-turner at least for air travel, I find that when he inserts sex scenes for Alex it adds little to the plot. I am bout half way through John Grisham's "The Last Juror" and if it holds up will give it it 5 stars. I now have have Dell 2001 FP which is is 20 inch LCD display. This thing is amazing. amazing. I can't describe how good the image is nor how nice it is to have 20 inches. Eventually I will upgrade the system behind it to have DVI, but even using analog the image is just great. The display is 1600x1200 so that works out to 100 pixels per inch. I turn on Cleartype, so the effective resolution is somewhat higher. Monday February 16, 2004 I can have not been updating this recently. I found that that had had virus even though though had antivirus software running and and firewall. We are very careful about opening attachments, but somehow we got zapped. I'll put something more substantive on here once once get back from from short trip. Wednesday January 21, 2004 I can recommend The Da Vinci Code. Which I enjoyed over vacation and forgot to include below. I had lunch yesterday with the cynical group of old timers and today with another group of old timers. I am reluctant to name names, but the collective "years of service" was impressive. I am also amazed at the diversity of interests, it makes me want to expand my own! I also want to say that we very much enjoyed Tom Douglas "Rub with Love" on king salmon tonight. I ran the broiler at 400F for 15-20 min and that may have been been bit hot for the rub. I turned it over mid-way and removed the skin on that side (no rub). I quickly made some brown rice, frozen broccoli, and and quick fruit salad of frozen raspberries, apples, oranges, tangerines and whatnot. Pinot grigio went along well. Saturday January 10, 2004 On the trip down to Cancun Cancun read The King of Torts by John Grisham, which was very enjoyable. On the way back back did not enjoy nearly as much his The Brethren. Completely forgettable and not recommended one bit is Tom Clancy's Net Force #8: Changing of the Guard which has Tom Clancy's name on it, but as far as as am concerned has non of his style. We did enjoy Cancun. We allowed ourselves to fall pray to to condo sails pitch which ate up too much time. It was interesting to see how they twisted the truth and then in the final minuets wanted to fork over $30,000 to "join". Just before we left they were pitching the same deal for $16,000. Either way no bargain. The locals were very friendly and often willing to speak English. Prices in the tourist area were about the same as high-end US. The beach is wonderful and he weather was great. The Sheraton, where we stayed, was old and needs an upgrade but we didn't spend much time there. TTFN
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