View 499 December 31, 2008 (original) (raw)
Wednesday, January 2, 2008
Another day. It is said that LA will have 10 inches of rain shortly. My neighbor has an elm tree. It is, alas, not a Dutch Elm, so all the Japanese Beetles I have imported have failed to infect the darned thing. Every year it fills my rain gutters with leaves and little seed pods. It does this monthly. No matter how often I clean them, each year when there is a big rain coming I have two hours and more of work to do climbing ladders and running the hose through the gutters. Now one of the gutters leaks. I am hoping that it will dry enough to put Henry's into the leaky spots, and that the rain will hold off enough for that to dry a bit.
I do not like elm trees.
At least I got the things cleared out without falling off the roof and without having a heart attack.
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The good news is that we are getting a camera and all the equipment needed to do video podcasts. Whether they will be any use is another matter, but we will give it a try.
I have in mind using this background:
.
but of course that will mean cleaning off my desk and the other flat surfaces, and making things look a little more pleasant. It will also mean setting up more lights. Martin Winston advises
GE has some in blister packs that say "Daylight 6500K" in a big stripe up the side - same aisle as other
light bulbs.
which I will have to look for, and set up to give some decent lighting. I will probably want the camera set to show some of my desk, but the wall on the other side is close enough that it may not work. It may. I have a really good Vista Travel tripod to set the camera on. We can experiment with heights and angles.
What I'm striving for is something like the view one had of Amanda Congdon back when she did Rocketboom (and people actually watched Rocketboom). Not that I think I am as entertaining or attractive as she was, but the composition of the show worked pretty well. Of course I have a much busier background. The attractive part to me is that it shows my work space, and encourages me to keep it cleaned off; it's a hideous mess at the moment.
Of course I also have to have something to talk about, but I think I can manage that.
Incidentally, I find that Amanda does ABC News clips now, and she's at lively as ever. I found her at http://abcnews.go.com/Video/playerIndex?id=3897562&affil=wtnh but I haven't figured out the navigation of the web site yet, or even the frequency of broadcasts. I assume weekly. Ah. Poking around I find that her last weekly for ABC was last November. For some reason I missed all of them. I'd watch a weekly show if there were one, but I haven't found that.
She does a good show. I used to like Rocketboom, and I would watch her ABC show if it were still on. I suppose she'll find something else.
Anyway, we'll see what we can come up with that's interesting for my own videocast. I can pretty well guarantee I won't be as perky as Amanda.
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I tried to order a copy of Hillyer's A Child's History of the World the other night: they're in theory available new for $28, and I want one for my granddaughter. Alas, the site I tried to order it from said it took Visa then told me that since my card started with the Visa card numbers it couldn't take that card. This didn't seem reasonable. I understand the school Hillyer taught at is also offering the book, and I'll try to get it through them, but their web site is confused: they don't seem to actually offer the book itself, but instead want to sell some kind of course. I don't want a course, I want the book. I suppose I should keep trying, but I do get discouraged. Moreover, I get suspicious when a web site is difficult to deal with.
Last night I went to the local Post Office to mail the completed bills I'd paid, and discovered that the stamp machine wouldn't take any of my credit cards. It kept saying it didn't like them, one at a time; no generic message to the effect that the system was out of order. I suppose that's typical of government services: your time is not worth anything. You're not really a customer.
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John Carr, formerly Senior Editor for J. E. Pournelle and Associates Chaos Manor, has a letter about a newPiper Memorial fund, and Francis Hamit has a new essay on Print on Demand publishing. See mail.
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And it's probably time I got to work on something other than gutters.
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Only I didn't. I did manage to put Henry's roof goop in the cracks of the gutters. The rain won't come tonight so it should set up all right, and that may have fixed up those leaks. Of course it takes half an hour to get the Henry's off your hands after you do that, and then another ten minutes of lotion to counteract the turpentine, but what the heck. While I was at it, I fixed the outside mirror on my Eddie Bauer Explorer; someone had plucked it right out of its socket so to speak. Fortunately nothing was broken and it popped right back in.
None of this would have seemed remarkable twenty years ago, but I confess I no longer enjoy chasing down problems, climbing ladders, getting out the Henry's, figuring out how cars are assembled, and the rest of that. On the other hand, what with BYTE no longer providing an income, it's do it myself or not at all, at least until I get a couple of books out of the way. And you know what's coming next. Thanks to thesubscribers who keep this place going. Now if each of you would recruit one more...