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You are viewing the most recent 25 entries.
9th February 2010
8:07am:
CRX wouldn't start again Sunday night. At least it waited until I got back from that huge trip. Then, when we went to jump it, a second problem appeared: the latch to open the hood failed, so we couldn't even reach the battery, which then added "tow" to the equation. :-( My mechanic had recommended this electrical-system specialist, so (Madison and) I walked there to arrange the tow. On our return, Neighbor Mike returned my earlier call, and he was able to both circumvent the hood latch issue as well as jump the car, so we drove it to the new garage, canceled the tow, and walked back. Needless to say, no courier work yesterday, but I kept busy doing some work that Kelley needs, so it was all good. Walked to the gym and back, and later walked to see Southside Landlady. The last trip was six miles round trip, and I probably put in a total of ten miles altogether yesterday, perhaps more.
8th February 2010
10:24am:
CRX is having electrical issues again. At least it waited until I got back from that killer trip! Plus, it looks like the hood release latch snapped off, which just made this far more expensive, as it went from a friend jumping the car to likely a tow. {Sigh.}
2:44am:
Richard Paterson, master blender at Whyte and Mackay, whose company supplied the Mackinlay's whisky for Shackleton, described the find as "a gift from the heavens" for whisky lovers.
"If the contents can be confirmed, safely extracted and analysed, the original blend may be able to be replicated," he said.
"Given the original recipe no longer exists this may open a door into history." Source: Shackleton whisky recovered after 100 years in polar ice
2:28am: Centralia, PA
"State officials say the fire continues to burn uncontrolled and could for hundreds of years, until it runs out of fuel." Source: Few remain as 1962 Pa. coal town fire still burns
7th February 2010
4:24pm: There's no business like snow business....
Bethlehem to Bethesda and back, then Newark to Pittsburgh (with Madison Twittering as shotgun) in severe snowstorm. 1,269 miles in 2 days and 3 hours. I was pretty fried, to say the least. The major roads (20 mph) and detour around the Turnpike (7 mph) were tough enough, but then I hit the last few miles of local roads. Pittsburgh got a foot and a half of snow by this point, with yet another half foot still expected. Got stuck three times, plus stuck behind some stuck trucks once. Irony: one time was right at the toll booth, trying to get off the Turnpike. Hope E-ZPass doesn't charge me multiple times or penalty for the back-and-forth motions. With two miles of switchback driving left to the client's site, I was strongly tempted to leave the car and simply walk straight up the mountain. It would've been less than a half mile on foot, admittedly climbing about two hundred feet. Instead, I got stuck one last time, and took a few miles of detour to press on. At my very last turn, I saw the street wasn't yet plowed, a half dozen vehicles parked at the base, and everyone's footprints tracking a path the rest of the way up. Since this particular business runs 24/7, I had assumed that the vehicles belonged to their workers, and so I followed the path on foot myself. It turns out that this was a private road, "only" one block away from my destination, and that this other business had no connection to where I was really going. I also managed to trigger an alarm, which dragged someone out through the unplowed snow in their truck. Mind you, by now, I've been over a day with almost no sleep. I'm less than a quarter mile away, (after driving almost 400 miles to Pittsburgh), and I guess I figured that the correct street would also be unplowed, so rather than trek back down to my car, why not just climb up? Yeah, no road or path, minor vegetation, 18+ inches of snow, not really dressed for winter bushwacking, and maybe a hundred foot climb ahead of me. (Perfect for geocaching, right, ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) mortonfox?) OK, yes, my brain was pretty fried, problem-solving mental processes compromised, and I just wanted the nightmare to be over already. I climbed. With the medical specimen box. How much more could possibly go wrong? Y'know how there's a strong, low-frequency cracking sound in the snow just before an avalanche? Yeah, neither did I. Thankfully, I was (mostly) above where the snow gave way, and there was no one below me. It was kinda neat, no damage done, and someone's going to be scratching their heads when they see my footprints (and boxprints) climbing (crawling?) up and away from that area. The client's staff was very happy to help treat me for frostbite once I made it up there, since they'd been bored silly, and management forced them all to spend the entire night at the office with little to do. With their kind help, I was able to recover pretty quickly, and they drove me back down the mountain to my car in their own company plow. (D'oh!) Madison was happy to see me again, and we started on our long trip back home.
5th February 2010
5:57pm: Posted using TxtLJ
EWR/PIT flt can'd; no surprise. Now i gotta drive. Normally 6h without stops. With major snowstorm, may not b back til sunday. Plus i gotta grab the dog.
3:27pm: Posted using TxtLJ
3 pair eyes, (2x), c how they fly, (2x), i've got 2 get thru a half foot of snow; get 'em on2 a plane, & then GSO! 3 pair eyes. (sung 2 tune, "3 blind mice")
7:37am: Posted using TxtLJ
in DC. They're expecting 2 ft snow.
4th February 2010
1:40pm: Drunk driver had 49 children in 16-seat taxi
Wed Feb 3, 1:05 pm ET JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) – A South African minibus taxi driver five times over the legal blood alcohol limit at breakfast time was arrested on Wednesday for transporting 49 children in a 16-seat vehicle. The 26-year-old man was pulled over at a routine check-point in KwaZulu-Natal province, where traffic officials found the children, aged between three and 13, crammed on top of each other for the morning ride to school. "The man is now behind bars," Colin Govender of the Road Traffic Inspectorate said. The driver is due to appear in court on Thursday. With the soccer World Cup just months away, police are cracking down on rogue taxi operators in the hope that foreign visitors will use minibuses to get around the country. Millions of mostly black South Africans use minibus taxis to travel between townships and cities, although many of the vehicles are barely roadworthy and fatal accidents are common. (Editing by Paul Casciato) (Source)
1:29pm:
Jumped car at the office. Mechanic thinks he fixed the problem, just a loose battery connection. (The jump just reconnected it.) Went to Quakertown to transfer my interest in the Prius to Alida. Update: This transfer had been in the works for months; it has absolutely nothing to do with Toyota's recent problems, (which do seem to be mounting).
12:07am:
One of my dollar bills traveled at a speed of around a mile per year.
3rd February 2010
11:51pm:
Got to the office from JFK an hour ago, driving company van #1, only to find that my personal car battery had died. I quickly checked to see if I had left a light on, but I hadn't, so I'm confused as to what happened. The boss let me take the van home, on the condition that I lug this one box inside for the night. I'm guessing it's valuable, but didn't get a chance to look closely. A lot of the associated docs are in Hebrew; it's headed for Tel Aviv.
5:40am: "... at Allentown, on the River Lehigh, by the Little River Lehigh..."
Just getting home from an EWR cargo run now. It's been snowing all night. My day started around 4am yesterday, with an eyeball run up to Wilkes-Barre. I still have to return the vehicle, but I'm going to sleep first. Completed the Get (Jewish divorce process) Tuesday. It was long, somewhere around three hours altogether. A good deal of that time was spent with the Scribe slowly writing each individual Hebrew letter with a quill and ink. I did ask if I could publish the contract here, but I can't. It was understandably emotional at the key point where the divorce actually occurred, when I put the document into Alida's hands, and she then turned and walked away.
31st January 2010
1:47pm:
I had stated earlier how autoresponder companies are making good coin, and I wanted to quantify that for my own marketing. One of the sources I found was actually from an interview with AWeber from Friday; don't think you can get much fresher data than that. :-) They claim 75k customers, each paying $19/mo or so, which works out to $17M/yr. (Source) GetResponse claims 100k, at $18/mo, for $22M/yr. (Source) So I think I'm headed in the right direction with seq.tw.
28th January 2010
11:54pm:
Back in August, I had spent a day "working" as an extra for an upcoming movie, A Convenient Truth. Well, it looks like the movie's on hold, still looking for funding, but they did end up using the back of my head in the very first scene of the trailer:
7:09pm:
It's bitter cold out, with a strong wind chill. It wasn't this bad this morning, when it took me four hours to get back from Trenton. The predicted snow arrived, but much heavier than anticipated, resulting in poor road conditions and tons of accidents. One was a jack-knifed tractor trailer, which must've led authorities to the conclusion to shut down 78 in both directions for this mountain. I was stuck in traffic without moving for an hour and a half, until it struck me that I could simply use my GPS to find a detour, which in turn ended up being rather trivial: I just took 173 around the mountain, from exit 11 to exit 7.
26th January 2010
11:16pm:
This is the title of a typical incendiary blog postMovie made by chimpanzees to be broadcast on television ... As an aside, it's rather scary to see how many editing errors are made in an article published by the friggin' BBC!
3:05am:
Grrr... I watch TV and movies very rarely. When I went to Blockbuster a month ago, they were just* starting up a program where, if a movie wasn't in the store, one could order it delivered from a presumably much larger warehouse. OK, this makes total sense. They have the service somewhat connected to their website; again, logical. So, I thought today, why not just go to the website directly to request a new rental or purchase? Except if you do that, they require you to sign up for their ongoing, monthly service. Which completely does not meet my needs. Now, sure, I well understand why they're doing this. But something doesn't seem very efficient, to require me to physically visit the store for a one-off rental, especially since the store clerks then have to go to the website to manage this. You'd think that they would want to offer convenience for me and additional efficiency for them by letting me do this online directly and increase the chance of getting my business. I might even be willing to spend an extra buck or three to avoid the store.
*I was order #000000004!
23rd January 2010
10:08am:
Finally finished (with the help of a RentACoder) fine-tuning the "main" seq.tw query that I wrote over a week ago. Learned a lot of the stuff that I'd forgotten back in college.
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