Weekend Update - April 15th
Weekend Update
Lately, the last couple of days, it has been on the cool side, 68F / 19C for a high and breezy. Most of the days were cloudy and overcast at the beach. Today, it is currently sunny and mostly clear.
I had to go out for a short errand this morning. I drove by the sand and could see white caps on the ocean waves.
I did not see any young ladies in bikinis walking on the sand.
My local newspaper used to publish a weekly television listing book or magazine. I guess the television listing was not very important to the paper. It canceled publication effective yesterday. Now, they want me to use this full size page as a replacement. I am not certain that I see any reason for this since I can find a better listing with the programs in color codes through my Verizon internet account. This has become one more reason for me to cancel my subscription to the paper. Their coverage of business is limited and marginal at best.
In a way, this is sad. The local paper was once a great newspaper.
When Doug was here on Thursday, he said he really liked my Internet connection because you are hooked up to the Internet as soon as you turn your laptop and plug the Ethernet cable in. He was easily able to download an album during the day while he was at work.
Visitors
This was an off-week for visitors and web traffic in general. I sort of blame myself for the traffic fall off. I was off line for three prime blog posting days either with a broken computer or off at a faculty meeting at school.
We had visitors from Singapore [3], Poland, United Kingdom [8], Texas [3], Korea [3], Italy [3], Chile, Canada [2], Netherlands, Spain [2], Greece, Australia, France, Philippines, United Arab Emirates, and Japan.
One visitor stopped by and stuck around for nineteen minutes. I must have written something that was good.
I do appreciate all of you who took time out of your schedules to stop by and visit the blog.
Woman of the Moment
I found some more Mao Kobayashi photos so she will be with us for another day or two before she will depart. I am working on finding a new Woman of the Moment for later on this week.
The New Laptop
The new laptop is an IBM ThinkPad by Lenovo. It is the T60 model with the 15.5 inch – 40 centimeter wide screen display. I really like and enjoy this feature. It will take me some time to get used to the widescreen. For example, in the old laptop, the Word toolbar had to go on two rows. With the widescreen, it is all on one row so I now have to look for a specific function like bold face for example.
There is none of the annoying Microsoft start up chimes that populated the Windows XP version. I do enjoy the silence.
I think my favorite feature right now is the Screen Saver function. Under Windows XP, the screen saver rotated through all of your photos. Windows Vista allows the user to select a series of photos, so long as they are in the same folder, for the screen saver function. Eiko Koike is my current screensaver image folder. I enjoy this feature but it causes me to lose more productive time waiting for the function to start up.
It seems that personal computers are beginning to look more like a Formula One or a NASCAR race car with all of the decals and stickers on them. The T60 has the IBM ThinkPad, Windows Vista, Intel Centrino Duo, and ATI Graphics stickers on it.
I do like the biometric sign-on feature. This means that I have one less password to remember. I do have to keep my fingers so I can swipe one of them. I decided to keep the internal security level higher and require myself to sign on each time I come back to the machine.
I was able to copy my email address book from the old laptop on to my flash drive and then upload it to the new Windows Mail program that replaced the Outlook Express email program that I had used for years and years. One of these days, I may convert over to Outlook but that will be a long while from now I think.
One of my favorite programs will not work on Windows Vista. I liked to use the Microsoft TimeZone program to tell what time it was in various parts of the world. It has not been updated for Windows Vista. I am using the Iridium Global Time Converter program. It is an older and more limited program that was probably written for Windows 98 or maybe an even earlier program.
My least favorite thing about the laptop is I have a new personal dictionary. The personal dictionary in the old laptop was over two years old and it had lots and lots of my favorite words in it. Now, I am entering new words all of the time to create a new dictionary.
Teaching
I went to the quarterly faculty meeting at school on Thursday which was why I did not have a posting that night. I could have stayed home and been better off.
The school did serve pizza and cold drinks during the meeting. The pizza was not my favorite but I was hungry and I did not want to have a sugar low on my drive home after the meeting.
Mostly, the meeting was about everything except the faculty. The school director was passing out praise to the admissions staff, the registrar, the financial aid staff, and the recruiters. No mention of the faculty and our work.
It goes to show what is important with the school and it does not seem to be the educators.
We did learn about the new school director. Based on the early information, I am not impressed with the selection. The new director is from Atlanta and has never worked in an educational environment before; his prior work was in the funeral industry.
I live in Los Angeles, greater Southern California, with a population of almost 15 million people.
I find it incredibly strange that the school could not find some one with the same or better qualifications locally. By their standards, I am more qualified than the new hire. It also says the school is doing a very poor job of training internal candidates to become school director. There are seven other campuses in the Southern California district. I have to believe that there is at least one qualified candidate among all of the staffers who could have filled the position.
Doug
Doug called me on Saturday to say the “Maintenance Required” light on the dash of his Honda came on. It sounded like one of those spurious signals that you get with automobile computer chips. I have had one of those lights come and stay on for a period and then go out on its own.
Doug said he was going to have it checked at the dealership. I asked him to call me back when he was finished at the dealership.
A couple of hours later, Doug called back. It was nothing. The dealership opened the car hood and turned off the message light. Everything is back to normal.
El Gringo
I went to El Gringo for dinner tonight.
Jess the Server was there and she made the meal pleasurable for me. El Gringo is on the smallish side so the large group was particularly loud and annoying for me. I could have come back at a later time and missed them completely. Sometimes in life, you just take the lemons and hope you are having fish for dinner.
Dinner for me tonight was a large chicken burrito. It was very good.
That was my weekend gentle readers. I hope your weekend was great as well.
Be well and stay happy.
Lately, the last couple of days, it has been on the cool side, 68F / 19C for a high and breezy. Most of the days were cloudy and overcast at the beach. Today, it is currently sunny and mostly clear.
I had to go out for a short errand this morning. I drove by the sand and could see white caps on the ocean waves.
I did not see any young ladies in bikinis walking on the sand.
My local newspaper used to publish a weekly television listing book or magazine. I guess the television listing was not very important to the paper. It canceled publication effective yesterday. Now, they want me to use this full size page as a replacement. I am not certain that I see any reason for this since I can find a better listing with the programs in color codes through my Verizon internet account. This has become one more reason for me to cancel my subscription to the paper. Their coverage of business is limited and marginal at best.
In a way, this is sad. The local paper was once a great newspaper.
When Doug was here on Thursday, he said he really liked my Internet connection because you are hooked up to the Internet as soon as you turn your laptop and plug the Ethernet cable in. He was easily able to download an album during the day while he was at work.
Visitors
This was an off-week for visitors and web traffic in general. I sort of blame myself for the traffic fall off. I was off line for three prime blog posting days either with a broken computer or off at a faculty meeting at school.
We had visitors from Singapore [3], Poland, United Kingdom [8], Texas [3], Korea [3], Italy [3], Chile, Canada [2], Netherlands, Spain [2], Greece, Australia, France, Philippines, United Arab Emirates, and Japan.
One visitor stopped by and stuck around for nineteen minutes. I must have written something that was good.
I do appreciate all of you who took time out of your schedules to stop by and visit the blog.
Woman of the Moment
I found some more Mao Kobayashi photos so she will be with us for another day or two before she will depart. I am working on finding a new Woman of the Moment for later on this week.
The New Laptop
The new laptop is an IBM ThinkPad by Lenovo. It is the T60 model with the 15.5 inch – 40 centimeter wide screen display. I really like and enjoy this feature. It will take me some time to get used to the widescreen. For example, in the old laptop, the Word toolbar had to go on two rows. With the widescreen, it is all on one row so I now have to look for a specific function like bold face for example.
There is none of the annoying Microsoft start up chimes that populated the Windows XP version. I do enjoy the silence.
I think my favorite feature right now is the Screen Saver function. Under Windows XP, the screen saver rotated through all of your photos. Windows Vista allows the user to select a series of photos, so long as they are in the same folder, for the screen saver function. Eiko Koike is my current screensaver image folder. I enjoy this feature but it causes me to lose more productive time waiting for the function to start up.
It seems that personal computers are beginning to look more like a Formula One or a NASCAR race car with all of the decals and stickers on them. The T60 has the IBM ThinkPad, Windows Vista, Intel Centrino Duo, and ATI Graphics stickers on it.
I do like the biometric sign-on feature. This means that I have one less password to remember. I do have to keep my fingers so I can swipe one of them. I decided to keep the internal security level higher and require myself to sign on each time I come back to the machine.
I was able to copy my email address book from the old laptop on to my flash drive and then upload it to the new Windows Mail program that replaced the Outlook Express email program that I had used for years and years. One of these days, I may convert over to Outlook but that will be a long while from now I think.
One of my favorite programs will not work on Windows Vista. I liked to use the Microsoft TimeZone program to tell what time it was in various parts of the world. It has not been updated for Windows Vista. I am using the Iridium Global Time Converter program. It is an older and more limited program that was probably written for Windows 98 or maybe an even earlier program.
My least favorite thing about the laptop is I have a new personal dictionary. The personal dictionary in the old laptop was over two years old and it had lots and lots of my favorite words in it. Now, I am entering new words all of the time to create a new dictionary.
Teaching
I went to the quarterly faculty meeting at school on Thursday which was why I did not have a posting that night. I could have stayed home and been better off.
The school did serve pizza and cold drinks during the meeting. The pizza was not my favorite but I was hungry and I did not want to have a sugar low on my drive home after the meeting.
Mostly, the meeting was about everything except the faculty. The school director was passing out praise to the admissions staff, the registrar, the financial aid staff, and the recruiters. No mention of the faculty and our work.
It goes to show what is important with the school and it does not seem to be the educators.
We did learn about the new school director. Based on the early information, I am not impressed with the selection. The new director is from Atlanta and has never worked in an educational environment before; his prior work was in the funeral industry.
I live in Los Angeles, greater Southern California, with a population of almost 15 million people.
I find it incredibly strange that the school could not find some one with the same or better qualifications locally. By their standards, I am more qualified than the new hire. It also says the school is doing a very poor job of training internal candidates to become school director. There are seven other campuses in the Southern California district. I have to believe that there is at least one qualified candidate among all of the staffers who could have filled the position.
Doug
Doug called me on Saturday to say the “Maintenance Required” light on the dash of his Honda came on. It sounded like one of those spurious signals that you get with automobile computer chips. I have had one of those lights come and stay on for a period and then go out on its own.
Doug said he was going to have it checked at the dealership. I asked him to call me back when he was finished at the dealership.
A couple of hours later, Doug called back. It was nothing. The dealership opened the car hood and turned off the message light. Everything is back to normal.
El Gringo
I went to El Gringo for dinner tonight.
Jess the Server was there and she made the meal pleasurable for me. El Gringo is on the smallish side so the large group was particularly loud and annoying for me. I could have come back at a later time and missed them completely. Sometimes in life, you just take the lemons and hope you are having fish for dinner.
Dinner for me tonight was a large chicken burrito. It was very good.
That was my weekend gentle readers. I hope your weekend was great as well.
Be well and stay happy.
posted by Chuck Reinhardt at 5:49 PM
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