And it was pretty sucky. Nothing we do seems to make our project manager happy. All we can do is keep meeting our deadlines, which so far seems manageable.

The computer workstation I put together from left-over parts for L several months ago has been doing some strange, unreliable things lately. Also, the work we are doing involves software that has been taxing both her machine and my 3 year old Acme laptop.

So, in order to make our lives a bit more pleasent in this respect, something I didn’t write about last month is that we did some research on computer hardware prices and availability and decided to order a pair of identical machines with reasonable up-to-date specs from the local PC Club store.

It was strictly a business decision. Anyway, the Twins, as we call them, should be ready in a week.

In other news, one of our trees has some kind of disease, powdery mildew or something like that. (Mildew? Here? Apparently.) Yesterday, we popped in to Home Depot to get some plant spray, and also some new carriage bolts with locking washers, because the foot rests on the elliptical trainer are coming loose in mid-exercise. (Now fixed!)

A long-awaited delivery arrived today from Amazon. (With Amazon, if you order over a certain amount, the shipping is free. Rather than fill up the order with things we don’t need, we tend to wait until there are enough things that the limit is reached anyway. This does mean sometimes waiting on a few things.)

Exciting goodies included in this package are:

• The latest audio CD from RUSH, “Vapour Trails”, hopefully it won’t be too pungent – it got mixed reviews, but we’re seeing them in September so at least I’ll be familiar with the new songs;
• An audio CD from EMI Classics, a collection of French Opera Arias by Natalie Dessay with the Monte-Carlo Philharmonic Orchestra. I heard one of the pieces on this on the radio several months ago that kind of blew me away (Air des clochettes from Lakme) and Lisa tracked down the appropriate disc for me.
• The original Broadway production soundtrack of RENT
• Stephen Wolfram’s “A New Kind Of Science”, a humongous hard-back with 20 zillion pages of small type and many pictures of cellular automata. Is this guy a genius or a madman or both? I expect I will take quite a while to digest this one, and to decide which he is.
• The just release DVD of “Yes – Live in Amsterdam”, from their Symphonic tour with an Orchestra. We watched some of this during dinner, and it is really good. A much more polished and well-balanced rendition than the 2nd show of the tour we saw in Henderson last July.

For dinner this evening I went crazy and cook/prepared two recipes from one of Lisa’s Thai cookbooks: A very hot green soup based on Tom Yum Gai; and a simple tomato and lettuce salad with a dressing of crushed garlic, chilies, lime juice, sugar, and oyster sauce.

Now we’re almost out of food, so I think tomorrow we *have* to go shopping.

Here’s the full quote from today’s Las Vegas Review-Journal’s Entertainment column by Mike Weatherford:

For prog-rock fans of the British institution Yes, the return of flashy keyboardist Rick Wakeman is big news. Local buyers were less sure if that translated into enough extra ticket sales to boost the group back into arenas after a few stops at the Hard Rock Hotel and House of Blues. The Las Vegas Hilton ended up offering a smart compromise: Two nights in its 1650-capacity theater on August 24 and 25. Tickets go on sale on Thursday.

Now, assuming this isn’t just a rumor… (After all, the other venues in the Yes itinerary are “stadium/arena”-type, so to suddenly play two nights in a “club” in Vegas seems a little weird.)

Of course I’ll be getting tickets for one of the shows at least. Derek and Teresa will be with us at the tail end of their Summer vacation from about Aug 20 – Aug 29, so… I figure they’d both like to come to the show with us.

Assuming I get confirmation that this isn’t a psychotic fantasy hallucination on my part, I’ll be trekking down to the Hilton later this week to get tickets.

Sunday. Last weekend we were going to do something for Father’s Day, but Stan wasn’t feeling well, so as an alternate celebration we invited Stan and Jeanne to come over for a lamb roast.

Not the usual sort of thing for us, a lamb roast. However, two things combined to make this happen.

1. Our culinery hero, Alton Brown, of the Food Network’s “Good Eats” programme, did an episode called “Grill Seekers” in which he roasted a boneless rolled leg roast in his charcoal grill.

2. Our local Sam’s Club bulk store had boneless rolled lamb leg roasts for sale.

Anything Alton explains, we can do.

And we did. Low and Slow, except it was hard to keep the grill “low” when the ambient temperature is 103 degrees and the sun is shining on the grill lid. So it wasn’t that slow – more like 1 hour before the interior of the roast had reached 130 degrees. A nice sprig of rosemary from our garden kept the roast company, smoking away like anything.

To tell the truth, the exterior of the roast was perfect, but the interior was still on the glassy side of pink for my tastes. But everyone agreed the experiment was a success! Next time, lower and slower.

We finished off the evening watching a DVD of “O Brother Where Art Thou” which is a great film if you haven’t yet seen it.

Well, it’s confirmed. RUSH are playing the MGM Grand Garden Arena on September 21st. Our home town! This time, rather than use TicketMaster and get random seats, we’ll pop in to the box office and see if we can choose good ones.

I suspect that I will not “need” to see RUSH in concert more than once – the truth is that their recent CDs have not really appealed to me that much, so this is more of a nostalgia thing for, getting to see them at least once. And maybe they’ll play “Tom Sawyer” from ’79. Or even older stuff. They tend to be good about putting surprises from their past into their set, so who knows?

Our replacement network hub arrived today. A netgear DS116, with 16 ports to replace one of the 8-port ones that died. I removed the surviving 8-port hub and installed the 16 port, and now we have 15 ports available for computers to plug into. This is actually 3 more than we had with the two 8-port hubs, because 2 ports are used up when you stack the two hubs together, and one of the ports on the old one wasn’t working anyway.

You can’t be too rich, too thin, or have too many network ports.

With the new hub installed and running, we discovered that my “temporary” network cable labeling system was beginning to break down. The white electrical tape with black felt pen numbers was peeling off, leaving a nasty sticky residue and some doubt as to which cable was which.

Time to check out Home Depot and Radio Shack for cable labelling systems. It turns out that my ideal solution – clear shrink wrap over paper labels – was not going to work because of a) lack of availability of clear shrink wrap, and b) a minor technical difficulty in that the shrink wrap sleeve would have to be of a diameter sufficienty large to clear the RJ45 plug on the end of the cable, but then have to shrink more than 50% to be snug on the fairly thin CAT5 cable.

So, plan B – inkjet printed labels, cut up with scissors and then taped to the cable with transparent packing tape. We’ll see how long that lasts…

Oh – and while I was out, I got a haircut.

We had a partial solar eclipse here this afternoon. I knew about it in advance thanks to Sky And Telescope Magazine’s website, but then I forgot about it. When I went outside at about 4:00pm and noticed the quality of light I commented to myself about how mild and clear the air felt.

Then I was putting some trash in the bin in the garage and noticed the dots of sunlight streaming through gaps and pinholes around the garage door, forming little circles with bites out of them… and then I remembered.

During a partial eclipse, the Sun is still bright and eye-damaging as ever, but the sunlight is less intense. The shadows are sharper and the light seems kind of golden-tinged. It really is quite special. And anywhere that sunlight shines through a small enough hole to land on a flat surface, you see a little image of the Sun missing a portion covered by the Moon – literally the Moon’s shadow.

I tried using a makeshift pinhole viewer, but I found the best results were obtained by holding a pair of binoculars up, pointed at the Sun, with a sheet of cardboard held behind the eyepieces to catch the image.

Cool!

After being hauled into our business unit leader’s office first thing this morning, (along with Jim the associate developer/HR guy ) we found ourselves being asked how exactly we managed to annoy so many people in the business unit yesterday. After that, things could only get better.

Which, after a “meet the team” meeting (which we would have had yesterday except there were all sorts of conflicting schedules going on), they did.

However, I don’t think it’s over yet. There is something going on in this business unit that we’re not aware of – and probably won’t find out. I figure on there being at least three separate agendas being followed, and some of them are conflicting. I think it is not our fault that some team members found our presence difficult.

I don’t think we are the only paranoid ones here, is what I’m saying.

Well, we found out more about how we came to be transferred to this business unit, and as long as we keep Bill, our business unit leader (Agenda #1) happy, and do good work, we should be ok.

We had lunch at P.F. Changs with Becky, our project lead (agenda #2), and she seems pretty happy to have us working on her project. She is a control freak, although with good reason, and as long as we keep her happy, we should be ok.

At 5:00pm we got ready to go downstairs (limo at 5:15) and most of the team members came and wished us a good flight, etc, so there didn’t appear to be any lingering bad feelings. We could find very few traces of anything that might have caused the meeting we had first thing with Bill and Jim. Did Jim the AD/HR guy contrive a personal crisis for his own purposes? (that would be agenda #3.)

Enough! We enjoyed our direct flight home. The in-flight film was Monsters, Inc, which we had seen but was worth a second viewing.

Got the car, drove home, fell into bed at around midnight.

We get up nice and early this morning, packed the kid’s luggage into the car and drive Derek and Teresa to Stan and Jeanne’s. We would have liked the extra day with them, as previously planned, but this dratted Chicago trip can’t be helped. We expected that they would spend the day swimming, eating, and sleeping, and that Stan would drive them to the airport tomorrow morning.

We drove back home, I changed into Chicago-ready clothes, we adjusted the thermostats, grabbed the cats and put them into their travel pods, and drove off to the airport for our 1:30pm flight.

I hope it’s obvious that we were stopping by the Creature Comforts animal hospital and pet boarding facility to drop Kami and Karma off for a few days!

They had a neat system of cat boarding cubicals whereby any adjoining “cell” could be joined to the one above, below, and on either side. Kami and Karma had a cell each, and the trapdoor between them was lowered so that they could wander back and forth. Additionally, because there were no other cats below them, the litter pan in one of them was lifted out and I saw that the pan rested securely in a hole in the floor, so removing it opened up a trapdoor to the cell below. So initially at least, they had four cells to explore, although we had been warned that they were expecting more boarders later on.

With the cats safe, we drove off to McCarren airport, parked, and checked in.

It was just as well we got to the airport two hours in advance of our flight’s departure time. The new security procedures seemed to cause more of a delay than I would have expected for a mid-day, mid-week flight. To be honest, I don’t really think that the security checks as I experienced them are going to stop anything from being carried on the plane that wasn’t already getting through the pre-9-11 checks, but I’m not an expert. I can’t say that I felt “safer” because of the new procedure either.

Our flight was late taking off (although not, I think, due to the security overhead) and we started getting a little anxious about our connecting flight in Denver. (Normally Vegas to Chicago would be a direct flight, but last-minute cost-effective arrangements can yield some wrinkles like this.) As it happened, we would certainly have missed it, excpet that bad weather in Chicago had delayed our connecting flight as well, so there was no need for rush.

Chicago was overcast and foggy, and after we picked up our bags, as per our arrangements, we called the limo company to announce our presence. (The Acme office is in an outlying town from Chicago called Downer’s Grove, and apparently it is cheaper to hire a limo than to hire a car or take a taxi, according to our new business unit admin person.)

When we checked in to the hotel it was 10:00 pm and we ordered room service and fell asleep  promptly, after setting the alarm for 6:00 am.