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Showing posts from February 19, 2006

Expidite the expidited

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I am headed to the passport office this AM to get a new passport. I didn't have time to do the expidited renewal after getting back from Japan. So I made an special expiditing appointment with the passport folks in Atlanta. I am glad I only have to drive into Atlanta, not fly up to NY or Washington DC. It seems I have had to do some expiditing everytime I have renewed my passport. Passports are good for 10 years. When you get a new passport it is a time to ponder where you will be and what the passport will look like in 10 years. The pic belows shows the wear on my now cancelled passport. it was a 50 page book (the extra pages version) and 46 pages are fully used. Many countries require 3 empty pages to enter their country. So, I got full use of the larger size passport. If you need more pages, you send the passport in and they will "sew-in" more pages. The thickest passport I ever saw was at the Uzbekistan-Turkmenistan border. A truck driver I saw had a Uzbekistan passpo...
There must be a term surrounding the concept of analying but not understanding. I mean the alpha llama Professor can stare at me and a match, watch me strike it and light the heater so close, right next to my face with all his might and sadly will never figure out how to make his herd-friends warm when he wants. This is a fact of which I am certain. The same condition applies to watching something like the Nightly Business Report. You can talk about all sorts of stuff and show all sorts of graphs, how do you communicate what took you a lifetime to figure out to another individual? The llamas got their rabies shots the other day. In NY we have to have a licenced vet administer a rabies shot. Jim the vet said, you have to watch out, your llamas may give llamas a good name. It took about 15 minutes for Dr. Jim to get them all. He agreed, our llamas are well trained.
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It was cold this weekend; It got down to about 5 below on the farm. It was pretty windy and nasty until it got down to about zero. The cool air felt great. The wind was a pain. The llamas decided to hold up for most of it in their house until the temperature dropped and the wind calmed. They have the heater, their straw and each other. I decided to spend some concerted effort on CAD for the property. I am getting frustrated on my lack of progress on the plan. We have lots of concepts. I have the tools; let's get it on drawings with scales, numbers and realities. I am somewhat taken back that the GE low voltage switching system that seemed ubiquitous with remote switching is no longer made. I was relying on that stuff. I hope there is a replacement. I suspect there is. I have been getting a Debian (linux) machine going in the ham shack. My common sense and "off the cuff" realization continues to be that L inux is unix but since there is no real "paper trail...