Just need to make an entry to show that I am still alive. Spent the day running errands. Took off most of the day from work. Tonight is the annual meeting for Bofus Creative Enterprises. Should be fun. Dinner out and all of that.

Had to reload software on my primary PC after I allowed the resources to get too low which corrupted some files. I slicked it and installed Windows 98 SE clean. Added all upgrades from Microsoft. The system still would freeze after a while. Found an obscure patch which fixed a conflict between the Gigabyte motherboard which runs a VIA chip on it and the Realtek 8029 network card. Get it at http://www.realtek.com.tw/htm/faq/faq_1-3.htm if you have the same problem with this particular hardware configuration.

We had five inches of rainfall over the weekend. In Southern Florida February is our dry season. We typically get only two and one half inches of rain for the entire month. I guess this was caused by a cold front that was stationary over our area. The parking lot at work was filled with debris washed out of the landscaped areas. Mulch, wood chips, and other stuff are scattered all over the parking lot. It is just as well that it was rainy since we needed the weekend to recuperate from all the past events that have taken place. Of course, we spent most of the time watching the Olympics which we enjoyed very much. The downhill events brought back memories of Franz Klammer who was a star of the downhill many, many, years ago.

Back home again after a week in Roanoke. Got up this morning at 5:30 AM to be at the Roanoke Airport in time for our 7:50 AM flight back to West Palm Beach. Forecast in Roanoke was for 60 mph gusts and 30 degree temps. Florida was sounding good at that point. Our two hour layover in Charlotte, NC turned out to be much longer due to a delay in the flight we were catchng from their to West Palm Beach. Arrived in West Palm Beach this afternoon amidst a great crowd of other people seeking sunshine. Checked the Weather Channel web site after getting home and there was a 25 mph wind blowing in Roanoke with a 30 degree temp. With the chill factor it would have felt like 16 degrees. Good to be home after a tough week.

We are in Roanoke, Virginia now. We are here for Barbara's mother's funeral. She passed away on the 27th. We had planned to travel up to see her on February 14th but had to change our plans when we received the bad news. US Airways was very helpful in working with us to change the reservations on such short notice. Today is the funeral and will be very hard. Everyone is strong and doing well.

This is supposed to be an update capability from a wireless device. I am however updating this with my web browser through the wireless interface page.

BOFUS Enterprise Inc.
This is our new online ejournal. Bofus has developed an email interface to a web journal or diary. Instead of logging in to update it you just send an email to a designated address and within one minute the web site is updated with your new content. Pretty neat!

Here is an interesting feature I found out about. Post updates to your Blogger journal using your cell phone. Could be handy sometimes. Right now the capability is down due to some sort of hack into the site.

wapblogger - a WAP interface to Blogger, LiveJournal and other smart weblog-style tools

Christmas Eve Day in South Florida. It is supposed to be in the mid 70's today but a cold front is coming through tonight so we will have a cold, for us, Chrismtas Day. That should be nice as we have had really warm weather for a long time.

Posted the previous entry from South Carolina using my dad's Webtv. Posting was no problem but viewing the updated page was a problem because the updates did not show up. I tried reloading the pages with Webtv but the new entries still failed to show up. Found a Webtv newsgroup that documented this as a problem with certain web pages not showing updates after editing.

Arrived at Tranquility Base. Parked motohome in front yard.

I had two machines in my office here at home. The one Barbara used to browse the web was an old 100 mhz Pentium. It only had 32 mb of memory and a 1gb hard drive. I got the idea that I would build a new machine and move my hard drives into it and then take my old 500 mhz Pentium III and give it to Barbara. That is what I did yesterday with the help of my son who is a certified computer something or other. I ended up with a 1.2 ghz machine running a Geforce2 graphics card. XP, the flight simulator, runs beautifully in it and the new card has antialiasing in it. This is new for me and gives a nice smooth look to XP. The frame rate does not seem to be much higher than before but I can increase visibility a lot. I was at the computer store and when I found out that memory was $23 for 256mb I bought enought to make this a 512mb machine.

The next interesting thing is that I when I gave my old 500 mhz machine to Barbara I put a 20 gb hard drive in it and installed Linux as the OS. I must say it is a sweet machine. It is extremely fast, faster than when running Windoze, and ultra stable. The windows interface is called KDE, http://www.kde.org/ and is very configurable. I am finding that except for running XP I tend to migrate to the Linux machine. I guess because it is requiring me to learn some new things and I like that.

The cool weather is here. Everyone has been outdoors enjoying it. My next door neighbor and his kids walked to the local convenience store to buy some lottery tickets. I rode my recumbent cycle over to pick up some tickets and met them there. It is supposed to get down into the upper 50's tonight which is very cool for us. After almost a year of hot and humid weather this is a welcome relief.

Had a neat experience that exemplfies why I find the internet and the web so interesting. I have been dabbling in PHP and MySQL lately. In case you don't know these are programming and database languages. Anyway, I was chatting with a friend who lives in New Zealand (that is neat enough in itself). The funny thing is that his name is Bob Brown too. Anyway, we had a great connection and there was virtually no time delay in our typing to each other. We were using the ICQ messenger to chat (typing to each other) in real time. Turns out NZ Bob is a PHP and MySQL guru. He gave me some great tips and pointers. Well, think about that. I am getting tutored by a guy who is 8,000 miles away almost as though he were next door. This ability to work as virtual teams regardless of the geographic distance between us is what facinates me.

Another project I have been working on is a new approach to scenery generation in the X-Plane flight simulator. I have been working with friends in Norway, Italy, and France on this project. While I have contributed little more than encouragement I have seen the team work and thought processes develop in spite of the distance and the language differences. In fact, I have become very good friends with these guys and yet I have never met them. I have had so many hours of discussions with them that I truly know that they are great guys and good friends. I hope some day to meet them all.

Hooray! It's Friday. Another week closer to retirement. It is supposed to be a nice cool weekend here. We have had lots of hot and rainy weather but now the first cold front of the year is passing through. We celebrate the first cold front down here like most people celebrate spring. It is the time when our most delightful weather occurs. It is the topic of conversation at work. Used to say around the water cooler but that does not apply any more as there is no water cooler.

DirecTiVo 2.0 Software
Don't mean to turn this into a Tivo only Blog but this was a good link to document. I will also save it somewhere else.

Checked the Tivo and it recorded all of our shows. We were late eating but since it was setup to record the Evening News with Tom Brokaw we had no problem. We just watched it when we felt like it. Now, Barbara is watching her soap opera, Days of Our Lives. The quality of the recording is perfect since it is a digital recording. I continue to be impressed. Also, after we watched the news the unit asked if we would like to delete that episode or keep it. I said delete and it took care of it. No rewinding or anything. This thing is great.

Just checking to see if I am getting through with this new
site

After having the DirecTivo for only a few hours I can say that it is an unqualified thumbs up product. I never imagined that TV watching and recording could become so easy. In just a few minutes last night I setup a schedule to record half a dozen shows. This morning I was able to watch the Letterman show from last night as if watching live TV. It was sooooo easy. I think we made a good choice here. The navigation menus are pretty intuitive after a short time of use.

So far I can only say that I am extremely impressed with the DirecTivo unit. The activation of the system went without a hitch. Installing in my entertainment center was the hardest part. Making adjustments to shelves etc. It is unbelievable to be watching live tv and pause it when you have to do something like answer the phone and then go back in and hit play and pick up right where you left off. It is also very, very, easy to record. You just look up a show by name and then hit record. The system takes care of times, channels, etc. This thing is looking every bit as good as people say it is. I like it a lot so far. It will take about 24 hours for the complete database to be downloaded to the system. Can't wait to learn more about the new system.