I set up the boat today so I could get pictures. I’ve got five shots that I felt were worth sharing. The first is a wide-angle shot showing the boat next to our van. The van is Chevy’s 15 passenger beast, about 20 feet long. The boat’s specs say it is 11 feet long. The…

I just got my property valuation and tax notice for the house. What I found therein amounts to a mixed bag of good and bad news. My land value went up somewhere in the vague neighborhood of 33.3333333333333333333333333333333333 percent. The value of the house itself went down by about 26 percent. This makes for a…

A few weeks ago, we bought a couple of innertube-y towable things that came with the tow rope, but I’m completely at a loss as to how it attaches to the inflatable, or to the boat. The tube has a cover with a loop made of strap material, and the two ends of the tow…

Every two years or so, we organize a reunion of Kathy’s family and friends and descend on a campground. The last one was two years ago in the Island Park area near Yellowstone. You can read a little about it here. This year, the craziness is happening at Pineview Reservoir, for five nights, from August…

Our cat, which has the name Sparrow, has always been an avid bird watcher. She’s also tried many many times to catch the birds, but without success. Suddenly, two days ago, she figured out what she was doing wrong. We found some feathers and a head on the floor. Yesterday, she brought in three more…

Today I am finally back to work after our Mirror Lake vacation. The time off started on July 17th, so I was off work for 11 days counting weekends and holidays. The actual trip was July 18th through the 23rd, five nights. My wife has two posts about our trip, but I did want to…

Today while I’m at work, my new boat is arriving. On Friday evening while we were out fishing, the trolling motor arrived. It turns out that the particular model I bought is not quite what I was expecting – it’s a 24V motor rather than 12V. This means that I need two batteries instead of…

The paint man at Home Depot gave me the information I need to get boat names painted on inflatable boats. I put it into practice by inscribing a name on the little inflatable boat. This is not the best picture, because the flash resulted in a lot of light reflection on the letters. I made…

The boat naming thing is hard. I got several great suggestions in addition to the ones I got here. In the end I chose to name her “River Tam.” It’s female and watery, two things that make for good boat names. It’s also deeply rooted in sci-fi, which is important to me. I just know…

Not even the slightest pretense at being prophetic, mysterious, or cryptic here. Fortune cookie from Smith’s at 8th and 9th: I literally laughed out loud when that came out of the cookie.

Tonight I learned that I can do a far better job of putting new monofilament line on my reel than the shop at Sportman’s Warehouse. I don’t know whether they chose substandard line, put too much tension on it, or both, but I loaded new line myself by hand-cranking from a purchased spool and had…

The wife and I have been brainstorming a bit and have come up with a few more contenders. Give us your opinions and any other suggestions! T’Pau Rosie Cotton The Purl The Crochety Purl Katydid Kobayashi Maru Kaylee River Tam Gray Havens Tar Valon Dante’s Sixth The Amyrlin Seat My Squishie

Last night very late, I bought a boat. It’s a Sea Eagle 9 , the Fisherman’s Dream Package. We got the last used unit they had, which saved us $50, so I added a few accessories to the order. The expected delivery date we were given by the automated system is July 9th. We plan…

Conjured up a little new coke for my website. 🙂

When did it become acceptable for installation programs in Windows to have completely inaccurate progress bars? It’s become universally acceptable for an installation program to lie to you about how much of the installation is complete. Some programs install quickly, others give you enough time that you could have a bathroom break, or go down…

Kathy found this awesome watercraft [warning – PDF]. It’s a FoldCat 440fc. This is the fishing boat we’ve been looking for. Anyone got a couple thousand dollars they don’t need? 🙂

Just FYI, the immediate issue that led me to seek a server replacement was a lack of backups for the data. I host stuff for other people, and although in theory they should be backing up their own stuff, the reality is that they probably aren’t. My initial survey of my storage situation led me…

I’m in the market for a server replacement for the machine that runs this blog and a number of other domains. It needs to be as cheap as possible What I’ve got now: Pentium Celeron 1.7Ghz one 80 GB drive one 200 GB drive 1.5GB RAM The drives are set up with an 80GB software…

Today’s xkcd comic is a good reminder that there is always a person with real feelings at the other end of the wire. As usual, there is great hover text.