It's Been A While

So it's been a while since I have posted to my blog, but it seems that I should be posting more, given the current state of affairs, and I will attempt to do just that.

Sailing With Eye Candy

Was invited out to be bowman on the Farr 395 Eye Candy for the Protection Island Race.  Boy, did I make too many mistakes - asymmetrical kites are still too new to me.  I got the tack line lead the wrong way putting the sheets "outside" way too many time (three or four times, I think).  Once I launched the chute with the tack and clew reversed.  I'm not going to take the credit for that one, I think it was packed in the bag backwards.

Anyways, it was a long race with just about ever different sailing condition you can name.  We had a pretty good ride, got knocked down pretty good a couple of times, but keep moving and actually got home quite early.  We corrected out over the bigger boats  and finished eighth.

Picture to come ...

Big Trees, Big Fun

So the wife and I spent the weekend of the 16 - 17 of March on the coast, looking for big trees. My wife was inspired by Forest Giants of the Pacific Coast by Robert Van Pelt which covers Sequoias, Redwoods, Western Red Cedars, Doug Firs, Sitka Spruce, Western Hemlocks, and quite a few others.

We managed to bag quite a few of them on the Olympic Park.  We saw the Quinault Lake Cedar, the Nolan Creek Cedar, and the kalaloch Cedar.  We walked through the Grove of Giants along the south shore of Quinault Lake to see massive Doug Firs, Hemlocks and Spruces.  We looked at the Quinault Lake spruce and the Preston Macy tree.  We looked for, but could not find the Barnes Creek Survivor Grand Fir (so we'll have to go back for that one).

And to top it all off, we spent the night in a bluff cabin at Kalaloch Lodge, on the bluff, but back in the trees.

Nice!

I'll add pictures as I get them tweaked and converted to jpegs.

Nice Ride!

Went out on  John's boat for a race on March 30th. That boat is a nice ride. It's a 1D35.

We won the race.

Spring Is In The Night Crtters

When I first moved out to the "country", thirty some years ago, I was astonished at the amount of noise made by frogs.  It was so loud, I couldn't sleep.  Now, I get worried when I don't hear the frogs.   They've become my very own "canary in a coal mine" to let me know that my little corner of paradise still has a healthy ecology.

And so it's nice to hear them. 

Sorry about the rather poor production values, I just heard them while I was upstairs staring at the computer, trying to write some code, and ran out and recorded them with my phone.  (I'll blog about the code pretty soon, I've finished the non-GUI version and have the GUI version almost done.)

In fact, I'd have to say that's one of the aspects about living where we do that I have come to thoroughly enjoy, we see lots of critters.

Here's the deer coming through the yard last summer.

And I've got a picture of a black bear racing through the yard too (he was NOT going to stand still for a photo).

There's been a family of owls which have also taken up residence somewhere on our property this last year, they make the most crazy sounds at night sometimes (I tell my wife that's  when they're getting it on).  I'll try to get recordings of them too.

Oh, to be young and horny, like a toad...

About That New Keyboard

So I've been using this new keyboard for a while now and thought it was time to do a more through review (which I had promised on an earlier blog post).

It's a Rosewill RK-9100BR, translated that s a mechanical, illuminated keyboard using Cheery MX Brown switches.  These are the silent version of the Blue switches so these have tactile feedback but no clicky sound.  I should note that the keyboard is not silent, and that a rubber dome type keyboard is probably more quiet .

Plus the keys are individually illuminated by an LED - a blue LED in this particular model.  There are three illumination modes (which keys are lite) and four levels of brightness for each mode - almost everyone complains that all levels except for the minimal level are too bright.  I do have mine set for the minimal level so I suppose I fall in to that camp.

Plus it has a small set, only eight, media keys available for a bit of control over things happening on your "desktop".  I am using Linux (as readers of this blog know) and was pleased to find that all of the media keys work right out of the box without any fussing around on my part in key definitions.  That's always nice.  I don't use many of them, but volume control is always useful.

I bought mine at Newegg for $119 which is quit a bit of moola for a keyboard (and that was on sale for ten bucks), but I suspect that with a little care and cleaning, this could be the last keyboard I will need for a long, long time.  I had my last keyboard for over ten years (a Logitech Access keyboard), and will take better care of this one since I happen to like it a bit more too.

I went back to Newegg to make the link to the keyboard (I suppose I could link to the Rosewill website too) and noticed, as for the last month, that the keyboard remains sold out.  I can understand why, when I went looking for a new keyboard (mostly prompted by seeing how useful my wife's Macbook Pro illuminated keyboard was for typing in darker rooms) it was the keyboard which best fit my requirements:

Black - all my other PC stuff seems to have migrated to black
Mechanical key switches - Cherry Brown being the preferred choice
Illuminated - LED was best and I don't need funky multiple colors
Media keys - I wanted a minimal set of media keys mostly to change volume

Of all the keyboards I looked at this one best fit the above list.  There are a couple of items from other keyboards which would be good such as the Linux key caps to replace the windows keys on the Das Keyboard, N key rollover on a PS/2 with hardware interrupt would be nice, but this keyboard needed USB to get power for the LEDs (and this unit has 6 key rollover which really is good enough).

So no photos but there are better photos available at the Newegg website and here at the Rosewill web site.

The Black Dog In The Dark Night (Of My Soul)

Not a normal post for me, but...

I have always struggled with the Black Dog, and as my daughter pointed out to my wife, "He always does this during Christmas". 

Shit.  I hate doing this.  I hate was it does to my family, my co-workers, and everybody else stuck around me.

Times like these, I read the news and despair.  I've tried to live my life right, only to see that greed, corruption, and fraud prevail - honesty, diligence, and trust are for chumps.

 I know it's just me, but it seems like the world's going down the drain, my country's going down the drain, and we're all just along for the ride.  My wife tells me not to read the news when I get like this - she's probably right.

All one can do is grab your bootstraps, pull yourself up, and get on with it, but it is hard - the bloom came off of this rose a long time ago.

Man, I really am a downer. 

I'm sorry my daughter, my wife, you deserve better.