Blogrilla

I dropped the car off at Herb Chambers this morning. Their garage doesn’t open until 7:30am. So I came in to the office first and spent an hour working before someone else came in, allowing me to go to the dealership with a clear conscience. Its been about 25,000 miles since I bought the car and I figured I should have them take a look at it.

I normally go to a place down the street I trust for basic maintenance. I also frequently go to Jiffy Lube for routine oil changes. Finally, the tire place down the street from me, Montvale Tire, seems to believe highly in customer service and I use them for any of my tire needs. The tires a little more expensive there, but they’ve taken care of me a couple of times when I needed them to.

For instance, my wife had a blow-out at the Mobil station across the street. She had to leave the car there. Fortunately, Montvale Tire guys didn’t mind going across the street to change the tire that I purchased over the phone. The owner of the Mobile station was pretty irked because the car had been parked on top of one of his tanks and he was expecting a shipment that day.

But that’s neither here nor there.

My point is that I value the service I get from Montvale Tire so much that I’m willing to pay a couple of extra dollars for their tires than go to BJ’s.

And I continue to despise dealerships. I’m already regretting taking the car back to Herb Chambers. They’ve bene fine to me, but I always feel like they’re trying to suck me dry for every penny possible. And I hate the way that makes me feel.

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Unbelievable.  Scientific American has a scathing indictment of how the Bush administration has twisted scientific results to fit their agenda or suppressed information that contradicts their policies.  What’s remarkable to me is that its not an article that the magazine can disavow or credit to someone else.  Its an open letter from the editors!  wow.

http://www.sciam.com/article.cfm?chanID=sa004&articleID=0001E02A-A14A-1084-983483414B7F0000

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I don’t know why, but the Hallelujah Chorus continues to choke me up.

Although I think my Windows Media labels are out of whack. They described this piece as “Peer Gynt Suite No 1 for orchestra, Op 46: Prelude (”Morning”)” and the one after it is called “Messiah, oratorio, HWV 56: Hallelujah Chorus”

it must be backwards… or offset. It *is* offset. The piece of music I know from cartoons as representing morning comes right before “Peer Gynt Suite No 1 for orchestra, Op 46: Prelude (”Morning”)” and is called “Rhapsody in Blue for piano & jazz band (orchestrated by F. Grofe): Finale”.

Something’s rotten in the state of Denmark.

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1. I took 30 minutes during work to go to the post office. Liz went out and got little Caroline a bunch of presents. She also got some for her mom and dad. Normally, if I’m very busy I will postpone my post office trips, but I hate to think of that little girl being stuck in the hospital. So, I needed to get the packages out the door.

2. A couple of weeks ago the passenger’s shoulder harness in my car got stuck in its housing and wouldn’t come out any more. I needed a big tune-up anyway so I made sure to put it on the list of things to look at. I have to drop it off tomorrow.

Good News: The passenger side shoulder harness spontaneously started working! Wonderful!
Bad News: The driver’s side shoulder harness is stuck.
*sigh*

3. Northeast Nursery in Peabody dropped off three yards of mulch today. I’m very excited. In years past I’ve gone to the nursery and picked up bags of mulch and transported it home and distributed it around the yard myself. This year, I ordered it by the truckload. I called up and explained that I wanted three hundred square feet of mulch three inches deep. Turns out that’s called three yards. the truck showed up today and dumped it all in the backyard! I can’t wait to get home and get a look at it. And then I guess I will need to borrow the neighbor’s wheel barrow. Lots of work!

4. Work continues to bite. The director who gave me a chance to take a leadership/coordination role has been transferred to a far-flung outpost and his previous job is now empty. Rats! My previous assignment is still valid and it doesn’t change very much for me, but its certainly disconcerting.

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Its raining again.

Today was ok.  We got some bad news.  A friend of ours from college has a three year old little girl named Caroline.  On friday they diagnosed Caroline with an advanced Leukemia.  I don’t know which one.  I understand that one’s platelet count should  be around 150 and hers was only 8.

It was a huge emergency and they started chemotherapy that day.  She and her mother will be in the hospital for the next month for sure. They say the prognosis for Caroline is good: 75% of patients recover from this type of leukemia.  I guess that’s good news.  Its kind of hard to call it good news, though, isn’t it?

We were both very shocked.  Our friend has a very large and generous heart.  Sadly she and her kids have gone through a number of tragic events, albeit none on this scale. 

We’re very worried for Caroline.

Faith is a big part of their lives, so maybe I’ll pray for Caroline.

In any case, the rest of our day was kind of off kilter because of this terrible news.  Liz’s mother got off just fine.  Me and the kids cleaned up the backyard and practiced t-ball and soccer.  We eventually went over to the school where they practiced riding bikes and whatnot.  We didn’t stay long — it was pretty miserable out.

Liz and I caught up tonight on Survivor and ate some Taco Bell.  I don’t really like Taco Bell, but it was good finger food. 

Tomorrow better go better than today.

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From Saturday, 4/24/04 @ 10:30pm

After we came home from the parade I had some work to do. Shortly thereafter me and the kids went over to the playground at Pine Banks park. The kids really liked it and wanted to know why I hadn’t brought them there. There’s a pond and covered structures for picnics. Lots of benches and tables. There were boy scouts cleaning up the brush and trash. They were doing a really good job.

Afterwards, Mary babysat while Liz and I took the kids out for lunch and ice cream at Friendly’s. That was also a good time. I have to confess that I was pleasantly suprised by how easy it was to handle three kids instead of four. Especially when the fourth one is a toddler.

We came home to rest up for a little bit before going to the boys’ soccer game.

I took Chloe and Grace to the playground for the first half of the game and ran into an old friend there. It was nice. Grace went nuts and had a wonderful time. Chloe spent the whole time in the giant sandbox. The boys had a good time at the game, too. I thought they did well-ish. I think they could both use more practice in basic ball handling but we can work on that. That kind of thing will just take practice.

On the way home we saw that a fair had set up at the knoll across from the high school. We went home and ate and after a short while we put Grace to bed. Then me and Liz and the three oldest kids went to the fair for the next few hours. The kids got to ride everything there several times. Well there were two rides that were too big for them. Some kind of a Peter-Pan-thing and a Zipper ride. I’ll see if I can track down some photos. We had junk food and they drove bumper cars and rode the ferris wheel. They had a great time. We wanted to stay for the fireworks but they weren’t scheduled to start until 9:30pm.

But nobody argued when I announced it was time to come home. They were so tired they went right to sleep.

Which is where I’m headed.

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We had a very good day today. As planned we went to the Melrose National Little League (MNLL) parade. We met up with Chloe’s baseball team, The Cubs, at around 8:30am. Mark Norton is coaching and he had all the little boys and girls corralled in the right place. I really have to hand it to him.

Their T-Shirts are white with red lettering. Truthfully it was chaos there for a while. There were hundreds of kids running around and laughing and giggling and yelling. And just at that time my boss called to say there was something wrong at work.

Fortunately, that was about the time the police escort and fire engines fired up their sirens. And to keep all from being lost the bagpipers got going. And just in case it didn’t sound like COMPLETE bedlam the street sweeper came by with a dump truck and two garbage trucks in tow.

wow, was it loud!

The mayor threw out the first ball. Our alderman played the national anthem on her trumpet. It was excellent!

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Well, tomorrow morning is the Melrose National Little League parade. The organization kicks off their season with a short parade escorted by police motorcycles and fire engines. The walk through this residential neighborhood at about 9am. Each team is dressed up in their uniforms and walk about a mile or so waving and grinning. There’s a palpable excitement to the event. The mayor always throws out the first ball. Our alderman, Gail Infurna, always plays the Star Spangled Banner on her trumpet.

Its always cold, too.

Since Ben and Gabe have been through it I have a pretty good idea of how to dress the short people.

This year its Chloe’s turn to walk. She’s been to three other parades as a spectator, but this is her first as a participant. I always drop the t-ball kid off with their coach and then walk about half way down the parade route to wait for them. I’m not sure I can drop my little girl off and just wait for her to show up. She’s known her coach since she was 1 year old. She’s known the other kids on her team the same length of time. She’s known all the parents for her whole life! And I know I have nothing to worry about, but it just feels wrong.

I’ll probably do it anyway.

I’ve already told the boys that they’re coming too. She went and stood around in the cold and sometimes rain to see them walk in the parade and they’re damn well going to do the same for her! Honestly, I didn’t get any argument from them on the topic — I think they’re looking forward to it. Or else they knew I wasn’t going to budge on this.

The boys have their first soccer game at 3pm, as well.

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Its been a busy morning of banging my head against a wall. We have this product called BugsEye from Requisite Technology. Its the software than handles the presentation and management of some of our electronic commerce catalogs. Our development system died a couple of weeks ago with no backup and I’ve been trying to put the pieces back together again. Its not simple software that just has to be slammed back together. Its complex and very manual.

I think I’m going to have to argue with my NT team that this stuff has to get backed up at least ONCE.

I have the database installed. I have BugsEye installed. I have JRun 3.0 installed. I have all the pieces installed, but I can’t seem to get them to talk with each other.

Its brutal. And its development for an underused system which means it gets bumped for almost every other task that comes up. But its fairly visible that this thing isn’t fixed yet, so I HAVE to get it repaired quickly and its just not happening. Right now, after passing the login screen it halts because I think IIS hasn’t given it permission to the POST verb. I’ve been getting as much info from our QA and production systems as I can, but so far nothing has fixed the problem.

ugh.

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I was finally able to start putting some of my electronic components together.  That is, the most basic ones.  I connected a 9V battery to a 10ohm resistor.  Then I added an LED and ran another alligator clip back to the 9V battery.

It Worked!!

Of course it did.  See?  I’m an evil genius.

I also tried out the same basic circuit on a breadboard and that lit up on almost the first try!  Where did I go wrong?  I had attached the negative connector to the wrong end of the circuit.  At first I was wondering why I didn’t blow out the LED.

1. Maybe they’re tougher than I thought
2. Then it occurred to me that they only allow electricity to pass through them in ONE direction.

So I played with alligator clips and hook clips and LED’s for about 30 minutes tonight.  Afterwards I thought I would see what the next chapter in my book holds.

POTENTIOMETERS!!

*sigh*

Now I need to find one of those.  I should really sit down and read the book and put together a parts list so I can put together a single order at one online shop.  At this rate I will wind up buying one item every week or two only to find out that I need to go back and get another item.

It would probably be the organized thing to do.

So, everything is going well here.  Ben and Chloe seemed interested in what I was doing.  Chloe wanted me to put the whole thing together tonight.  She even offered to apply tape to our floors so I could try it out tonight!

She’s sweet.  Here I am trying to get a stupid LED to light up and she wants me to slap the whole robot together and get on with it.  Truthfully, I did look at a variety of robots before deciding on this approach.  There are preassembled robots and robots that just need to be snapped together and some that require soldering and some with more involved kits.  And then there are some that are just schematics and diagrams!

I felt that if I was going to do this right I would need to learn about everything from the ground up.  I need to know about the electronics and propulsion systems and sensors and what-have-you.  And I think this book will teach me all that.

Its been maybe a month or so since I got it and while I haven’t made a lot of progress in piecing it together I am enjoying the low-level excitement of gathering the pieces together.

In fact, I may allow myself to get distracted in to other electronics projects.

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