tiredGot the Scouts out for an Emergency Preparedness merit badge project, replacing the supplies in an elementary school's emergency materials stock. This school has a NICE setup, a former cargo container fitted out with shelves, and large rubbermaid totes for water, food, first aid gear, etc. etc. All paid for by the parent-faculty club, BTW, because the school district won't buy it. In California, earthquakes and all. Your tax dollars at work for someone else. Anyway, the Scouts worked hard and had fun. Good way to observe Pearl Harbor Day. The beacon on Mount Diablo is lit, and for a change the cloud cover is light enough for it to be seen.
My Wife finally gave permission to ditch her old iMac (a Sage) if I can get ten years of data off it onto her laptop. Among the obstacles:
- She wrote all her stuff in AppleWorks, which can't be read by Word.
- She didn't put .jpg or .gif extentions on her photos
- the iMac and the laptop do not have compatible file-compression tools.
So, I spent about four hours converting documents to Word, copying two gigs of data over a cable modem up and down (they can't speak to each other directly), and renaming image files. There are 2000+ files in the Photos directory, and less than half have extensions. Oh, my achin' fingers. Can't write a shell script to do it all for me, as there are weird punctations that will hose up any regex tricks. Well, it may be a while before she gets them. Something to occupy me in the idle hours when I can't sleep anyway, I guess.
One of the cool things I got for birthday was a new copy of "Hunt For Red October", to replace the paperback that died of old age. This is a hardcover published by the Naval Institute Press, on high-quality paper, with high-quality binding. Sucker's going to outlive me by a considerable bit. So thank you again Maggses!
The Kids start coming home again for Christmas soon! yay! My Wife and I drove around for a while tonight looking at peoples' light displays. Maybe I'll take some pictures and post them, we got imaginative neighbors.
And tomrrow starts another week at the bread-and-butter works.