Messages

I'm supposed to be next door in Sisters sometime in August, maybe we can meet up.  Enjoy the mountains; watch out for the wildfires!

It seems to have reached a learning plateau where most of the obvious (chinese and cyrillic character) spam is blocked successfully, but as mentioned, whitelist addresses end up in the questionable folder.  It seems to be working well enough for the limited use I give it.

I didn't know I needed a trampoline; why didn't they mention it?!

Of course, the raccoons would just hang out on the trampoline instead.  One has knocked the camera over twice now, trying to get at whatever makes the 'click' sound.

what's been just as interesting is the timestamps on each picture. That fox, a large raccoon, and an opossum will pass by within minutes of each other almost every night, sometimes several times.  Squirrels during the daytime, and rabbits maybe once a week either day or night.  The fox is ignoring the camera now, and the 'coon is convinced I might have hidden something edible inside. It was covered in muddy pawprints once.

I'm having entirely too much fun with my digital game camera.  Finally getting to see the after-hours inhabitants of my yard:

http://home.earthlink.net/~chessec/fxhead0224.JPG

A friend invited me to a naval miniatures wargame (a hobby I abandoned after I started working in the military simulation industry full-time); and suddenly I was rooting around in my basement for figures I painted several decades ago. By the end of the week, I was enrolled in a campaign, had designed a spreadsheet to track production points, and considering writing a mod to the combat rules.

I had been playing with a new game trail camera, on the small creek that runs behind the house.  The bobcat tripped the shutter 15 minutes before I walked down to pull the SD card out of it!  The curious thing is that other tracks in the fresh snow indicated several coyotes had been past the camera without triggering it, including one that stopped and sat at the base of the tree it as attached to.  This is the only decent photo I've gotten (but I think it justified the camera all by itself.)  One night-time shot captured the rear half of our local red fox running past the camera, tail flying out behind.  Still, I have high hopes for more.

Am back home again, and had a visitor to our yard Christmas eve.

Yay, indeed!  if I knew what control panel software did, I'd be sure to call customer support just to help out

ps: The never-ending roadtrip has me in Bremerton, WA this time. Ended the Hawaii extravaganza with a cold and bronchitis, so naturally they sent me where it rains.  My new motto: "Home before the leaves freeze to the driveway." Pictures to follow.

After many years of plotting I finally convinced my boss to send me to work in Hawaii for a few weeks.  So, of course, I just had to boast about it to you all. I have a half-day off today, so while others might be seeing sights, I chose to edit this picture on my tiny, no-mouse netbook.

welcome!

Ours is a very flat management structure, so lateral is possible.  We have workers, first line supers and the chief; all those jobs have the same skills set, and other  than personality issues, anyone can move into any of the positions.  I hate managing people, so I've avoided moving into a full-time supervisor position, preferring to be a temp project lead (both pay the same!).  I mainly want to get out from under an annoying supervisor. 
We have a large pool of part-time, quasi retired workers who come in to fill shifts, so I could eventually move over to that if I avoid burning my bridges first.  Some of those guys make more than I do with overtime; and as their average age is 67, there are constant openings. 

We (only slightly) joke that if we could hire zombies for those positions, we would.

>xepher.net started in 2001. That's only 8 years, and xepher.net has been online for 9 (as of >tomorrow)...

So on August 28th, xepher.net will be 50 in dog years!!!

Xepher, I've always admired your ability to pick up and do something completely different for a while, and land on your feet.
Meanwhile, I'm hitting burnout fast, I'm afraid.  I'm too set in my ways to actually leave this job after 20 years (I like the paycheck), but I'm getting bored. A lateral transfer maybe.

After all, our cutting-edge simulation software WARSIM 2000 (sic) will finally be out of development next spring!  Since we started work on it in '97, I would hope so....

Let me first preface this by saying IANAB, but as a bread consumer, I'll pass on two bread making tips.

My father-in-law was a professional, industrial baker for most of his life (he probably did several million loaves of wonder bread), so when he decided to bake a few loaves for the farmer's markets he made bread using high-gluten wheat like Xepher said.  Once he got the proportions right for the recipe, he switched production to a set of bread makers, using his recipe. They seemed to make no difference in the flavor, but with much less effort.  (bread while you sleep, what a concept!)

The second on is a banana bread recipe.  Take premade banana bread mix, and substitute mashed bananas for both the margarine and the oil.  Tastes great; and good for you.