Digital Choke Daynotes

 Monday, January 17, 2005       mail    link   the story

I'm back ... as threatened.

Friday morning I left for Salt Lake City, for a surprise 60th birthday party for my older (yes, older -- quit snickering in the back) sister. It was put on by her children who did a wonderful job of decorating the place, and of keeping the surprise.

The party theme was a 50's sock hop. They made a very large hoop of black/pink/white helium balloons. The tables were decorated with a checkerboard table cloth. The table centerpiece was a cardboard cutout of a 1955 Chevrolet convertible, with a balloon bouquet and a 45 rpm record. (For you youngsters, think of the record in the opening scenes on "Happy Days".) The tables were sprinkled with small musical note-shaped confetti, and there were cups of M&M's (plain and peanut) for snacking.

The walls were decorated with old record album covers, and the records themselves, along with more balloons and crepe paper. And some more balloons scattered on the floor.

The balloon hoop, which was about 35 feet wide, framed my sister's graduation picture. It was printed on a canvas sheet, about 4 x 6 feet in size. The kids had collected a bunch of family pictures (some quite old of our grand and great-grandparents), which were displayed as a slide show on a television.

The guests (about 50) arrived at 6:30pm, and we all visited a while. The guest of honor was scheduled to arrive at 7:00pm. Just before Linda's arrival, we shut all the doors to the room, turned out the lights, and were very quiet. Linda came in the door, and we turned on the lights and yelled "Surprise!", along with singing the Happy Birthday song. She was quite surprised.

After meeting everyone, we started dinner. It was standard 50's hamburger joint fare. Hamburgers and hot dogs cooked on the propane grill, served in plastic baskets with chips, potato salad, veggies/dip, and soft drinks.

Linda had a great time. Some of her college roommates were there, along with her whole family. My other sister (Vicki) and I were also there, so it was quite the family and friend reunion. She was quite surprised, and pleased. It was all she could talk about all weekend.

Saturday was spent being a bit lazy, just visiting some. Stacy (daughter) had come down from Idaho for the party. And her car needed a few items: a new headlight, windshield wipers, and some radiator juice; so I took care of that for her on Saturday.

She's also been having problems with her printer. It's an HP inkjet, and the ink cartridge assembly wouldn't move on it's rails. I tried a few things, but it was clear that the whole thing had failed. Inkjet printers aren't really worth spending money to fix it, so I wandered down to the local Circuit City to pick up a new one. I found another HP for $79. (I've had good luck with HP printers -- this one excluded -- so didn't have a problem getting another.)

So the weekend was enjoyable, visiting with family, and relaxing a bit. We had a nice Sunday dinner, then I got a ride to the airport for the ride home.

Today was a holiday, so Pam and I relaxed in the morning. After breakfast and catching up on reading the paper, I took the Ford F-250 truck over to CarMax to see what they would give me for it. It's a 2003 model, with the V-8 diesel, super-cab/XLT, with a towing package and a bit over 16K miles. It was Pam's father's truck. He bought it to tow the newer travel trailer (28 foot slide-out), but was never able to use either due to his advanced case of leukemia. He passed away last year, so it's not needed. We did use it a bit this last year, but it's time to sell it.

CarMax offered $24K for it. The "Blue Book" price ranges from about $25-30K (the low value is what you would expect to get as a trade-in, and the high value is what you could expect if you sell it to a private party). The process was quite easy and efficient. Their price is reasonable, especially if you consider the expense and bother of trying to sell a vehicle yourself.

We decided to try the local weekend self-sell car lot. It's an area of the local college parking lot that does a weekend private party sale of vehicles (cars, trucks, RV's, boats, etc.), and charges only $25 for a space. They provide 24-hour security, and keep the keys to the vehicle. You post your price on the window, and lock the doors. A buyer can get the keys to start it up, but a test drive requires the owner's presence. They usually have about 100-150 vehicles there, ranging in price from $2k on up.

We figure that a weekend there might be a good idea. We'll advertise it for about $28K, which is a good price for that vehicle (full-size truck, big diesel engine, towing package, extra-cab with 4 doors, and very low mileage). If that doesn't work out, we'll probably let CarMax have it and be done with it.

After that, Pam and I went to see to the movies to see "National Treasure". Good movie; recommended. I usually don't see movies more than once, but this might be an exception. And we'll probably get a copy when it is released on DVD.

A quiet evening at home, catching up on email (and this). Staying inside where it is warm. Outside, cloudy and cold, but not as cold as in Minnesota, where John Dominik lives. Cold for this part of California, but mostly typical of this time of year.

 Tuesday, January 18, 2005       mail    link   the story

I've been playing with "Picasa". It's from Google (they bought the company), and it's a way to organize, edit, publish, print, and send your pictures. It's free, it's very powerful, but very simple to use. And it is quick. Once it has indexed all the pictures, you can easily organize them and fix them. I've been using it for about an hour, and am very impressed. It's better than the commercial picture editing programs. Very impressive. You can get it here: http://www.picasa.com/ . Highly recommended.

And it's also why tonight's post is quite short. Although I did fix the 'current' page's problem with a bad link. Thanks to John and Paul for taking the time to let me know about the problem.

 Thursday, January 20, 2005       mail    link   the story

Busy last night. Church meetings took up a lot of the time, along with a bit of shopping for my mother's birthday.

And I was working on Picasa again, using it to create a private web page of the pictures from my sister's birthday party. It builds the pages quite easily, just a couple of clicks and some fields to fill in. Uploading them all took a bit longer. Picasa doesn't have an FTP client, so I just used Dreamweaver MX (used to create these pages) to upload the private folder. Took a while because of the 62 pictures. I also haven't looked at the code that Picasa makes, but the result looks OK. I might do another set of pages this weekend that I'll post here for your perusal (or ignoring). But I really like the Picasa program.

Another thing Picasa does is create a CD slide show. My first try resulted in a 'coaster', but that could have been a media problem. I created four more today with a different brand, and it worked OK. The CD includes a viewing program that doesn't require a Picasa installation, so the resultant CD is very shareable. The docs say that it won't create a CD that can play in your DVD player, but haven't tested that yet.

I'm on a quest to determine if I want to install a DirecTV DVR box at home. Actually, I want to, but I don't want to run an extra cable on the outside of the house. As I understand it, the DVR box has two inputs, and both are needed to record one channel while viewing another. Seems like a weird setup; why can't the box split the signal between two tuner modules? Or is there an external splitter that can be used to split the signal from the single cable coming out of the wall into the DVR box.

My house is newer, pre-wired with cable, but a two-story. The family room is on the ground floor. I don't want to run an extra cable on the exterior stucco, and there's no easy way to run it inside the house. There is an unused cable connection in the room next door to the family room, and it would only be a short run for that cable to be extended to the other side of the wall.

But I have two satellite tuner boxes, and I believe there is a splitter of some sort near the dish. So I'm looking around for information about a way to use both inputs on the DVR box without running an extra cable from the dish. Any ideas would be welcomed.

Off to my mother's house for her 85th birthday party tonight. I'm bringing the laptop and will use Picasa to show off all the pictures on there.