Saturday, May 7, 2011 Lethbridge

6:35 am Morning Musings

The temperature is +3 C, with a high predicted of +15 C.

From the Environment Canada website:

Today Cloudy with 60 percent chance of showers. Risk of a thunderstorm this afternoon. Wind west 30 km/h. High 15. UV index 3 or moderate. Tonight Cloudy periods with 60 percent chance of showers this evening then clear. Risk of a thunderstorm this evening. Wind west 30 km/h. Low plus 4. Normals Max: 17°C Min: 3°C

Yesterday was about geocaching. Today's first priority will be about model trains. I need to verify that my upgraded throttle and base station work. I also need to verify that Ship It! software is working using the Parallels interface.

2:00 PM Model Trains

The throttle and base station appear to be working fine. I powered up the system and the locos ran under control of the throttle. Excellent. I still need to do some reading about the MRC computer module, but that can wait for awhile.

Now comes the bad news. The Ship It files that I thought were okay when the techie got the Parallels system working on my machine are in fact not okay. The file I accessed when I was working with the techie were just one of my early preliminary files. All of my actual working files are simply missing.

5:00 PM Technology

I have finally decided that my idea of using Parallels to run the few PC-only software packages is no longer a viable alternative. I would be much simpler to simply buy a basic PC laptop and only install a few programs that are useful for my model train layout. I have already uninstalled Parallels from my Mac, thus freeing up a huge amount of space (almost 50 GB!) and as a result have moved the files for this website back onto the laptop (instead of having them stored on a peripheral hard drive).

The next step is to buy a PC laptop with Windows 7 as the operating system. Then I will need to buy a new copy of Ship It and install it on the PC. I will also install the MRC program on the PC laptop. There is also an open source program for programming DCC decoders that I would like to put on it.

Now that I have made this decision, I am already feeling relieved. I will now have 2 simple systems, one on a Mac and one on a PC. Many of the highly technical problems involving running both on the same computer are now gone. I may even install a few geocaching programs that are only available on a PC.

9:00 PM Literature

While reading "Irma Voth" I came across this sentence:

"I went far away in my head, back to Canada, to snow, to forts, to ammunition that could melt, ..." [p. 117]

This is turning into a fascinating read. Irma Voth is not having an easy life. Toews provides a particularly insightful view into the life of a young Mennonite woman who leaves her family. There is not the humor of her previous novels, but this is not a humorous situation. Bleak yes, humorous no.