Monday, November 14, 2011 Lethbridge

5:10 am

The temperature is 0 C, with a high predicted of +4 C. From the Environment Canada website: Today Mainly cloudy. 30 percent chance of flurries early this morning. Wind becoming west 30 km/h then increasing to 50 gusting to 70 late this morning. High plus 4. Tonight Clearing this evening. Wind west 40 km/h gusting to 60. Low minus 5. Normals Max: 4°C Min: -8°C.

5:15 am Morning Musings

Not a good beginning to the day. I have gained a couple of pounds over the weekend. A combination of no coulee walks coupled with some excellent food (not in moderation) has set me back a little. Not serious, but annoying.

I then set up this page for the morning and immediately lost about 2 hours work on yesterday's web page. I had set up a new set of notes for "Infinite Jest" late last night and then did a too quick delete this morning and poof. Darn. Other words come to mind but restraint is in order.

However the coffee tastes great.

I have Four main activities that I would like to attend to today:

• Model Trains: Set up a new set of reports using Ship It. I have made changes to the train timetables to reflect the changes I made while setting up the operating steps for engineers. I hope to have a successful hour or so with the Ship It program and then begin realistic running operations again.
  
  
• Coulee walk. I am going to add some home-based exercise to my routine.
  
  
• Geocaching: One more search and find. There was a Brass Cap cache released recently. This might make for a good activity as I am still new to this type of cache. I understand the search part but have yet to complete the logging of such an activity on the geocaching.com website.
  
  
• Literature: Redo the table that I began last night.

7:00 am Technology

I like to keep track of the time I must spend keeping the technology working.

I ran into difficulties when I tried printing from my Mac to the Canon MX870 inkjet printer. The screen simply gave a display saying "communication error". However I had just printed a few pages to that same printer from my PC laptop. Thus I was pretty sure that the printer was working fine.

I typed "Canon MX870" into google and soon had a link to the latest driver. I downloaded and installed that and then when I tried printing again it worked fine. Good. But I had to know that the problem might involve a driver and I had to know how to find it.

The PC tries to carry out a complete scan of the hard drive once a week. This takes a few hours. I have it running now. Fortunately it is possible to pause the scan at any time to do other work and it will then pick up where it left off after I finish doing whatever needed to be done.

7:15 am Model Trains

I have rerun the Ship It program and produced reports for a new set of car starting locations and switching operations for the first day. I have also printed a set of engineer's activities for the first 4 hours of operation (which involves trains 601, 200 and 700).

The next step is to make sure that all cars are placed in the proper locations on the layout.

[Addendum 8:50 am] The cars have all been placed in their proper locations.

11:00 am Geocaching

This morning was a special search. I finally decided to familiarize myself with the Brass Cap caches. There was a new site placed a short time ago in Lethbridge and I found it this morning. There is a special sequence of activities for logging the find and more importantly, there are special websites that give the locations of other brass caps within the province. I think I now have this under control. This will increase the number of potential sites within a short drive of home.

• GC43F3 - Brass Cap Cache - Lethbridge 7th Ave

This was another day that had not had a find until now. Today was my 5th addition to this list for November. I now have 19 days in November with at least one find (and 11 without a find).

Here is a listing of all the loggable brass caps in Alberta:

• http://members.shaw.ca/pdops/Cache/_2NameIndex.htm

1:15 PM Literature

Now to rebuild the table that I erased early this morning, before the coffee kicked in.

 

 

 

 

 

Year	Time	Section	Pages	People	Description
<2002
2002
2003	Apr 1	3	27-31	Hal, James Incandenza	Hal, age 10, in a meeting arranged by his father, with a child psychologist. Hal quotes from the OED and says that he often gets beat up when he does that with his friends. Hal's father is an avant-garde film maker who founded the Enfield Tennis Academy. Hal finally realizes that the psychologist is actually his father, wearing a disguise.
		5b	37-38	Wardine, Clenette	Two poor black girls living in a violent family situation, Reginald, Roy Tony
		5c	38-39	Bruce Green, Mildred Bonk	Two high school tough kids.
2004		8a	63-65	James Incandenza	Ph. D. in optical physics. research funded by the military. Commits suicide at age 54.
2005
2006
2007
2008		7b	55-60	Don Gately	A 27-year old burglar and oral narcotics addict who kills a man (unintentionally) while engaged in a robbery.
		8d	67-68	Hal?	recalls his first use of drugs when he was almost 16
2009		2	17-27		A detailed description of Hal (?) waiting for a woman to deliver some marijuana. He is clearly an addict in need of a fix. He had been in treatment 2 years earlier. This is a superb section describing the situation through the eyes/mind of an addict.
	Apr 1	5a	33-37	medical attache	The attache arrives home and begins watching an Entertainment cassette that has arrived in the mail from Arizona.
		9a	68-78	Kate Gompert	is on suicide watch in a psych ward, her 4th hospitalization in 3 years
	Apr 2	9b	78-79	medical attache	his wife arrives home and finds him dead, in front of the tv screen, which she then looks at.
		9d	87	medical attache	a number of other people have entered the room and are all in a trance watching the Entertainment cassette
		9c	79-85	Gerhardt Schtitt, Mario	Schtitt, almost 70, is head coach at ETA. He and Mario (age 18) get along well.
	Apr 30	10a	87-95	Marathe, Steeply	Marathe uses a wheelchair. He is an informer about the activities of a Quebec-based radical group because of his need for money to help finance his wife's illness. Steeply is an Unspecified Services field operative. He wants information about the Entertainment cassette that the medical attache and a few others (about 20!) have been watching. The cassette was delivered through a series of channels known to be used by this Quebec radical group.
	May 9	4	32-33	Hal, Mario	Hal and Mario are brothers who share a room in the tennis academy dorm
		6a	39-42	Hal, Mario	They chat before going to sleep. Their mom (Avril) became Headmistress of the ETA after their dad (James) died.
	Oct	6b	42-49	Orin	Now a placekicker for the Phoenix Cardinals. Generally seems depressed with no real purpose in life.
		7a	49-54	Hal	Hal, age 17, regularly hides in the academy's Pump Room to get high on dope. He is an addict.
	Nov 1	8b	65-66	Orin	is in a cardinal costume in a pre-game show. He hates it.
		8c	66-67	Pemulis	is leading a big buddy get together of younger tennis players at ETA
	Nov 3	7c	60-61	Jim Troeltsch	age 17, gets suddenly ill before practice drills.
		10b	95-97	Disney Leith	teaches high-optics courses at ETA. A number of the boys are quizzing one another on entertainment technologies
		7d	61-63	Hal?	thinks to himself about nightmares and dreams
		9d	85-87	Tiny Ewell	an elf-size man who is on his way to a detox center
2010		1	3-17	Hal	Hal, age 18, in his last year of high school, is being interviewed for admission to a university in Arizona. He is a top-ranked junior tennis player. He also has a photographic memory for the meaning of words. His understanding of the interview process is very perceptive although his attention to detail is bizarre. At the end he has some form of seizure and babbles incoherently. He has been in residence at the Enfield Tennis Academy since he was 7.The interview is to clarify the discrepancy between his standardized test scores which are subnormal and his desire to go to university. But Hal's perception of the interview indicate that he is abnormally intelligent. He not only remembers detail, he understands what he has read whether in language, philosophy, or mathematics. But he seems to be socially backward. "Yet he has some trouble with excitability in conversation." He had a previous episode a year earlier when he was restrained and taken to Emergency in a straight jacket. "I'm not just a boy who plays tennis. I have an intricate history. Experiences and feelings. I'm complex. ... I'm not a machine. I feel and I believe. I have opinions. Some of them are interesting." The section ends with, "So yo then man what's your story?"