At the County we work a “Flex-Schedule”. This means that we have every-other Friday off. Its great not only because of the long weekend every other week, but also because the Fridays we are here, the HelpDesk traffic drops to almost nothing.

Therefore we have scheduled all day on the work Fridays as “Engineering Day” its a chance to work in the lab, up at a radio site, or at one of the other locations in the 6200 square miles of Cochise County  for 9 to 10 hours straight. Its a great way to concentrate on learning something new or to delve into  a project that requires an uninterrupted chunk of time and concentration.

Today (for me) was delving into Exchange tuning and working with snapshots in VMware… its good to lube your brain with something other than paperwork and politics!

Seems to have been a long few weeks of Mondays. Addressing other department’s problems because of their lack of communication and poor planning. It’s difficult and I often find my patience wearing thin with the whole thing these days.

I really think I need a vacation… any one have any great suggestions?

Men live in a fantasy world. I know this because I am one, and I actually receive my mail there.
– Scott Adams

Ok, Space Opera to be clear…

I just finished Peter F Hamilton’s ” The Reality Dysfunction“.

Its the  first volume of  The Nights Dawn Trilogy and I found it an excellent mix of both science and the “paranormal”. Hamilton blends the two together very well. His action sequences and character development really set the tone for the whole series. I have high expectations for the rest of the volumes.

I downloaded (legally!) the next book for a read on my ebook reader to see how I like treading that way. At least ts going to be much lighter than the paperback at 1050 + pages!

I’ve  been drawn to space opera since reading the Foundation series by Asimov as a boy. I think its partly the huge span of SO along with seeing the various story-lines spin up and then come together in one place. But its also that I like good characters. They become comfortable friends whom I really hate to see go away at the end of the story….

So if you are in the mood for a good book, I highly recommend it though make sure you have nice strong forearms!

I spent part of the day upgrading the netbook to Ubuntu 9.04 and I must say, it is an amazing distro. The upgrade from 8.10 was painless and it looks and runs great on the Lenovo even without the netbook remix.

If you haven’t played with it, I encourage you to give it a try. You can downloaded it here.

It was a long Friday and Saturday. The girl had 3 friends over on Friday and for a sleep-over and they were up ’till 1am. I got up early on Saturday to make pancakes for the crew while we sent Jess North to Phoenix for a Mom’s Day weekend out.

The rest of Saturday was spent at Lowes picking up all the needed parts in order to overhaul the swamp cooler. Once returning from our expedition to Sierra Vista, I spent the remainder of the day rebuilding said cooler after shoveling out piles of Pigeon debris from the nest they decided to build in the cooler housing.

Evening was spent with pizza and then collapsing into bed, the cooler keeping the house well, nice and cool…

Jess came back form Phx early today, seems her hosts played Halo all night in the room she was trying to sleep in. She finally gave up and just came home. I have tucked her into bed and started the meat sauce for her Mom’s day spaghetti dinner.

The rest of my day is going to be spent with a nice cold beer reading my book!

Going to be in PHX tomorrow night. Any suggestions of things to do?

Anybody remember “The Stand” ?  

Well, I am not sure this is “Captain Trips” but it is a bit scary and I think we will just be keeping a close eye on it. No need to head to the Zone yet.

Fox News said that there has been an outbreak in Queens NY and New Scientist has another article here.

4/26 Update – Interesting pandemic map from Google.

Check it out on RPG Countdown.

She is amazing my Jess!

Wrongway (our cat) discovered a half dozen Mule Deer in our back yard this morning. We could not figure out what the darn cat was stalking and looked out under our big Alligator Juniper and there they were.

Seemed to be an older female and five juveniles. They are pretty common through here in the evenings and early mornings, but have not seen them out this time of day before.

They moved out after I started taking pics, but I managed to catch a couple good shots. Click on the thumbnails and enjoy!