Category: Just Saying …

Over the weekend, there was a ‘dry’ thunderstorm that moved through the area (Northern California). Lots of dry lightening strikes, no rain.

The result was over 400 lightening-caused fires in the mountains north and east of here. Along with a few more grass fires and some more fires in the coastal area.

And the result of that is a bit of smoke in the air. Although we are getting a small breeze (our ‘air conditioning that cools off the nights), the temps here were about 100 on Friday/Saturday, cooling a bit to the mid/upper 90’s today. Not enough breeze to dissipate the smoke, though.

Hence the title.

Still working on the weight. This morning: 265.

…which is what I say when I figure that I am out of shape.

I weigh myself every day. (Yeah, I know.) And the weight has been creeping up. I’m finding that my legs (particularly my knees) are sometimes a bit stiff and sore as I walk or get up from a chair. And my pants are too tight.

I’m not really happy about all of this. But I am essentially lazy, so haven’t taken a whole lot of steps (literally) to rectify the situation.

But I have a plan. And I hope to stick to it.

1) I need to move a bit more. At work, I am usually sitting down at the desk. Not much movement other than fingers on the keyboard or moving the mouse around. So I wrote a silly little vbscript program that pops up a message every 20 minutes to get me to do some simple stretching and moving. I compiled it, and put it in my Startup group.

2) I need to eat less. I’ve always had the habit of cleaning my plate at meals. Part of my upbringing. And I usually find that by the time I push away from the table, I am really too full. So this part of the plan has to do with smaller portions. One spoonful of each dinner item. Put it on a smaller plate. And eat slowly.

3) Related to that, is snacking. I don’t snack much during the day, but will have one snack in the evening. New rule: no snacks after 7:00pm. Water is OK.

4) More water during the day. Two benefits, I think. First: more water is good for you. And second: more water equals more trips to that little room to get rid of all that extra water.

5) More posting here — every day. Each post will include the morning’s weight from the scale. That’s what the number is down there.

We’ll see how all this works.

267

One of the places I visit daily is here http://blogs.indystar.com/varvelblog , a daily blog of a editorial cartoonist.

This one made me chuckle http://blogs.indystar.com/varvelblog/archives/2008/06/stubborn.html , until I sadly realized how true it is.

I think that refusing to allow drilling of known domestic oil sources (and not allowing investigations of probably sources) is really stupid. Our congresscritters debate about carbon credits and complain about the price of gas, but don’t allow drilling on coastal waters.

And then China is going to drill in the waters off of Cuba, while we don’t allow drilling off of the Florida coast.

Nothing too exciting. At the office, fighting the usual spam wars. The amount of spam that has made it through the filters has increased in the past few days. Users are getting quite excitable, since they have been a bit spoiled by the 94% blocking rate that I am able to maintain. The blocking rate has dropped a few percentage points, and the volume of incoming mail has increased to about 700,000 messages a day. So have been doing some tweaking to get things back to normal.

Weather here is heating up a bit; temps in the 90’s, and some windy days yesterday and today. That has caused fire problems around the area. Grass fires next to freeways getting into some houses, causing some damage.

But no rain, flooding, and houses floating down the river. That’s no fun.

Some of that is happening in Minnesota, home of fellow Daynoter John Dominick. Haven’t heard from him in a while; hope all is well. Not that I can complain about other peoples lack up news, given the erraticness around here.

Part of Interstate 5 (I-5) in Sacramento is below ground level. And that part happens to be almost next to the Sacramento River, which means ground water problems. This “boat” section has been damaged enough by groundwater to require rebuilding. And the state Dept of Transportation decided to get it fixed fast, rather than over several months.

That required totally shutting down the freeway for 6-day periods to allow for 24-hour work.

I-5 is a major north-south freeway route. Lots of cars and trucks, not to mention the local commuters. Shutting it down is big news.

So the media got really excited. We all have to “Survive I-5”. Radio and TV warnings all the time, and a “Fix I-5” web site (www.fixi-5.com, if you are interested), with traffic cameras and warnings of apocalyptic commuting nightmares.

And the requisite media live cameras, breathless reporters, and more.

It is all starting to look like what happens when you kick an ant hill. Every media and publicist is scrambling this way and that. We all have to car pool. Or stagger our work hours. Or work from home. Or take mass transit. Or ride our bikes to work (yeah, a 30 mile ride each way).

So the northbound lanes closed Friday night. And all weekend hyper-reporters telling us that it’s going to be gridlock time.

Remember y2K? I had to be in the Y2K “emergency operations center” that New Years Eve. And it was quite boring. I left at 1230am, because nothing was happening.

Same with this “Survive I-5”. The usual backlogs, maybe a bit more. But no major commuter nightmare.

All those “media ants”scurrying this way and that.

Been working on a vbscript program that checks the update and anti-virus status of a group of computers, storing that info in a nice html file. Almost finished; testing takes about 10 minutes, since it talks to a whole ‘Class C’ IP address range.

And monitoring the anti-spam mail system. There’s a bit more spam that has slipped through our defenses, and it’s difficult to stop those. We’ve been pretty successful in spam filtering in the past.

Our users might be a bit spoiled, though. I get complaints if just a few (under 10) spams slip through each day.We’re blocking 94% of all messages (about 600K a day) as spam. That’s up a bit from the 90% a month ago. Still pretty impressive, though.

And still working on my latest secret money-making web site. Using some free (GPL) software, but there seems to be minimal support of one of the modules I need to use. I may have to delve deeper in the PHP code to fix things.

Here’s a starting point for some wasted time: http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Murphy .

Although some are funny, and most are true.

These might be appropriate for any weekend projects:

• Any tool dropped in a workshop will roll to the least accessable corner. Any object dropped on the way to the least accessable corner will land on your toe.
• Anything you try to fix will take longer and cost you more than you thought.

My addition to those: “Any project will require at least three trips to the hardware store.” I’ve been bit by that one several times.

As seen by my Home Depot bills.