BookJournal: No Uncertain Terms

Well I just about have this one finished up so I’ll write about it now. William Safire, in addition to having been for many years the conservative political columnist for the New York Times, is also the author of the “On Language” column that ran in that paper on Sundays for many years. In “On Language”, Mr. Safire explored the origin of words and phrases, discusses usage and spelling, and generally addressed any other language-related topic that piqued his interest. No Uncertain Terms is a recent (perhaps the latest… I’m not quite certain) collection of those “On Language” columns, one of at least a dozen. I know I own at least one more of the set: In Love With Norma Loquendi.

Being a lover of words and turns of phrase, Safire’s columns fascinate me. ALmost better than the columns, though, are the responses he chooses to print. Many of his readers choose to write in, enough that he has given the various groups titles. There’s the “Gotcha! Gang”, which nails him on factual errors. (I was actually a member of this gang once several years ago.) Then there’s the “Squad Squad”, nailing redundancy at every turn. Safire often corresponds with professors of English, editors of dictionaries, and historians, which means that the level of learnedness is very high. Still, the writing is snappy, so the book stays fun, and rarely gets dull.

I doubt I’ll find and add all of Safire’s collections to my personal library, but I’ll be on the lookout for another volume or two. They are fun reading, the topics won’t get old, and they improve my grammar and usage.

well, it's official

I got the letter from the FAA today that officially notifies me that I will be a DER candidate pursuant to my attendance at an orientation seminar in February. Woohoo! It took about 7 months to get from “here’s my application” to “you’re approved”, but at least we’re there now.

back into the swing of things

Today I’m back at work after 11 days of holiday. I was just about ready to come back… I can only spend so much time away from routines before it starts to drive me crazy.

So I’m sitting at work today, but with some Christmas gifts to entertain me; right now I’m listening to (and quite enjoying) Jamie Cullum’s new album Catching Tales. It’s a nice mix of jazz and pop, very listenable. I also have listened through Switchfoot’s new album Nothing Is Sound, though it was a bit of a pain getting it onto my iPod with the copy protection Sony put in place on the CD. (Quick solution: rip the files with CDex, then import them into iTunes.)

Finally, the last bit of fun for now: Becky IM’d me from home a little while ago to let me know that my copy of Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0/Premiere Elements 2.0 came from Amazon today. Oh, the fun I will have photo and video editing…

the obligatory new year's post

I’m already a day late on this - it’s January 2nd, not the first. I’ll probably come up a (metaphorical) dollar short, too… you won’t find any deep New Year’s resolutions here. Somehow I’ve never been much for New Year’s resolutions. Not that I’m against them - I just never put too much effort into them. This year is no different.

I could write a lot about the year gone by, but if you want to read about it I have blog archives that cover the year. :-) I could write about the year upcoming, but seeing as I lack the ability to see the future, my predictions will be at best haphazard in accuracy. Much will change; much will remain the same. I don’t want to sound too nonchalant about my life, but in a sense, I am; I am confident that the God who has directed and guided me through my first 28 years will continue to guide me through my 29th. He will continue to provide the conviction that drives change; blessedly, He is also the provider of the ability to make that change.

So welcome to the year of our Lord 2006. May He bless you richly this year as He continues His good work in you.

BookJournal: PowerSat

Powersat is one of the latest titles by long-time sci-fi author Ben Bova. Bova is a prolific author. His numerous tomes are full of futuristic technology, but the technology never takes the forefront; rather, it just provides the setting for classic themes of exploration, ambition, love, and revenge. Powersat is no exception.

Powersat is set in the near future, and features an inventor who is trying to set up a geosynchronous satellite that will collect solar energy and transmit it to Earth via “widely dispersed” microwaves. The worldwide oil syndicates, worried that the demand for oil might be decreased, sabotage his efforts, and the conflict ensues. The hero, trying to identify the villians and stop them; the villians, trying to continue to stay under the radar while continuing their sabotage.

There aren’t a lot of suprises in Powersat. The characters do about what you’d expect, and the hero is successful as you would expect. Mr. Bova is pushing his favorable views of space exploration and invention here, with a story that, if not superb, is certainly at least sufficient to carry the message. Still, it was a distracting, lightweight read, another enjoyable book from Ben Bova.

Upgrading the Tivo Hard Drive

OK, so when we bought our 40-hour Tivo, it was small-ish for storage space, but it worked. Now that we’ve got subscriptions going for kids programming like Sesame Street and Zooboomafoo, I’ve been wishing for some more storage space. Having been assured by Mark that the upgrade was fairly easy, I decided to take it on myself.

Step 1 was to get a larger hard drive. I didn’t want to spend a lot, but I wanted a lot of space. A Christmas gift card to Best Buy (thanks Ryan!) was a good starting point. Then I found a good deal on a Hitachi Deskstar 7K250 160 GB hard drive. It started at $119.99, but has $80 worth of mail-in rebates. So I picked it up today and got started.

There are good instructions out on the web for upgrading to a bigger Tivo hard drive. The most detailed and useful was www.newreleasesvideo.com/hinsdale-how-to/index9.html. It has very specific step-by-step instructions.

Step 2 was to crack open the Tivo and backup its hard drive onto the new hard drive. Most of the time here was spent just opening cases and swapping in and out hard drives. Per the instructions I had created a bootable CD running some specialized Linux, and that allowed me to do all of the fun backups and restores.

The whole copying process (including all of the programs I currently have recorded) took about 2 hours to complete.

Step 3: put everything back together and check out the system status page.  The results: 40 or so hours of recording space in “Best” mode, up to 183 hours in “Basic” mode.  I think I’ll stick in “High” mode, which’ll give me 83 hours of recording time.

Note: depending on the type of Tivo, you may not be able to use all the hard drive space; older Tivos software limits you to addressing about 137 GB. However, my Series 2 Tivo model TVD540040 is able to address larger amounts, so I was able to use all 160 GB. Woohoo!

I’ll echo Mark’s comments here on Tivo upgrades; I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was. If you’re comfortable swapping hard drives in and out and setting the master/slave jumpers, you can do this. No problemo.

Upgrade complete

I’ve just finished upgrading all of the thehubbs.net blogs to Wordpress 2.0. It all seemed to go smoothly. Now we just have to use it for a while to gain some familiarity. I will say that this WYSIWYG editing seems pretty slick so far.

Christmas time is here...

OK, so Christmas was actually two days ago. Now the family has all left for their respective homes and our house is quiet. It was a very nice Christmas. Laura is old enough this year to understand about opening presents and to really enjoy the toys she got. She could’ve just stopped with the first one… after 7 or 8 she was overwhelmed. We ended up leaving the last few of hers for her to open later.

I received many thoughtful gifts this year. In no particular order…

  • Jamie Cullum’s new CD, Chasing Tales
  • Duke Ellington’s 70th Birthday CD
  • A cool t-shirt from Target - a spoof of the famous “Dogs at Cards”, but with Snoopy and his pals playing poker. Actually, I got two of these.
  • Two Family Christian Stores gift cards - the first will buy me Derek Webb’s Mockingbird, dunno what I’ll get with the rest.
  • Lemstone bookstore gift certificate
  • Best Buy gift card
  • Burger King gift card…. mmmmmm…. Whoppers.
  • Some gift fundage from Becky’s folks… I’m using this to buy the Adobe Photoshop Elements/Premiere Elements bundle pack I’ve had my eye on for a while.
  • A bunch of misc sundries

I think that’s it. My apologies to anybody if I forgot their gift.

Now I have the rest of the week off from work, so I’ll have to find some projects to work on. Somehow I think I’d go crazy if I did nothing but sit and play on the computer all week. It wouldn’t score many points with Becky, either. :-) So, I’m off now. Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all!

Christmas shopping... check.

My today didn’t go as planned. But that’s OK - it’s turned out just fine anyhow. Becky showed up on IM at 7:30 this morning (waaaay early for her) and said she was feeling poorly. It ends up she’s got this one-day stomach bug that a bunch of folks around here have had; throwing up and the whole works. So I left work about 8 to come home and take care of Laura.

Laura and I played and stuff in the morning, then she took a nap. This afternoon, we went down to Coral Ridge Mall to get out of the house and so I could start finish my Christmas shopping. I managed to pick up stuff for everybody except Becky. Laura was very good, enjoyed walking at the mall, didn’t fuss much.

Now it’s evening, and instead of going to the coffeehouse as we had planned, we’re sitting here at home watching Northern Iowa play for the D I-AA football championship. Actually, to be fair, Becky told me to go ahead and go to the coffeehouse if I wanted to, but I decided I felt like staying home instead. And now, I think I’m the only one watching the football game… I’m pretty sure she’s fallen asleep here on the couch.

Such is the exciting Friday night of this old married guy…

Just for the record...

…the new snowblower kicks butt.

I probably looked like an idiot using a 5.5 hp 2-stage snowblower to remove an inch of light snow from my driveway yesterday, but it was great. :-)