Note: There are no pictures this week.

Happy Easter everybody. I hope yours is a good one. Ours will be a little different. Danita and I are going to Ed & Lynne’s as usual. But Ed raised turkeys, so we’re having turkey for Easter dinner. I think this is the first year that ham hasn’t been available. Given the weather forecast for today, I suspect we’ll be hiding plastic easter eggs inside this year.

I went back to work at CASA this week. When we started the computer upgrade project, we agreed we would use Windows 8 Pro and Windows 7 Pro. The reason for the “Pro” versions is that it allows them to encrypt sensitive files, and allows them to back up personal computers. It turns out the office manager is passive aggressive  and refused to order the software licenses. Two weeks ago, I ran out of useful work I could do. I don’t really need this job, and it’s against my ethics to make them pay $15 per hour for me to do nothing. I decided to stop going to work. This forced the issue. The licenses were ordered. They came in Tuesday. I went back to work Thursday. This didn’t change the passive aggressive nature of the office manager. Instead of giving me access to the downloads, she burned them onto disk “for” me. She burned Windows 7 instead of Windows 7 SP 1. I spent 4 hours downloading the service pack over their very slow data link. When she burned Windows 8 Pro, she copied the ISO file onto the disk instead of using the ISO file to create the CD-image. She clearly knew this was not the way to go, because she created the CD-image for everything else. Fortunately, I found a way to work around this. Two of the computers need a memory upgrade, which she didn’t order because she was “confused”, even though I sent her a web link. Finally, after forcing me to work every Thursday and Friday, she decided she couldn’t come to work Thursday or Friday, so we couldn’t “clarify” the computer memory upgrade.It’s frustrating to have a small project turned into a major production like this, but it’s nice that the work is optional. I’ll go in next week and maybe one day the week after. If the memory isn’t in by then, I’ll run out of work again and stop going in.

I have two projects in the works for Habitat. Both will take weeks to get going, as meetings must be held and after that hardware ordered.

In the meantime, the weather is getting nicer. I’m spending a little more time on the bike. One of the women who works for Danita has a husband who got very excited about my bike trip to Maine. Don and I were talking about bike trips and started talking about riding the Blue Ridge Parkway. This morphed into a 2-man ride up the Blue Ridge from Asheville, VA back to home. We’re planning to do the ride in mid-July. It should take about 2 weeks to ride the 500 miles. The mountains take a toll. We’re not planning on riding as many miles a day as I did riding to Maine. We won’t be doing any camping. Don isn’t at all interested in camping, and I’m not interested in carrying the weight of camping gear in the mountains. Except for Roanoke, we won’t be able to ride into a nearby town to get a hotel. It’s not that big a deal to ride an extra couple of miles. It’s no problem if those miles go down the side of the mountain. But going back up the mountain the next morning before even starting the daily ride is an overwhelming thought. Fortunately, there are enough hotels, B & Bs, and less expensive resorts right off the parkway to make the trip possible. Because some of the places are popular in the summer time, I’m going over to Don’s house tomorrow. We’ll make our reservations for each night of the trip. Except for the last two days, we should only ride 4 or 5 hours a day. That will give us some flexibility to ride around rain squalls. It should be a challenging adventure. After we finish the reservations, we’ll do a bike ride.

I got the results of an MRI of my brain this week. I was surprised to learn that I had a stroke. It’s an old stroke. I had an MRI about 17 years ago, and it wasn’t there then. It most likely happened during my surgery. But it might have happened while I was on Plavix. Or it might have happened some other time. I guess it’s true what people have been saying about me. I have a hole in my head (a missing tooth), and I’m brain-dead (stroke damage). It’s at least nice to know there’s something more than just bone between my ears.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Note: There are no pictures this week.

TV is light entertainment. Great TV provides light entertainment very well. The really great TV shows never last very long. An example was “The Flash”. It was one of the best shows ever. Visually, it had an intriguing juxtaposition of the latest in technology superimposed over an Art Deco background. It was a perfect genre piece (male hero, not always sure of himself; female scientist, good looking and brainy; really bad villains; a few hero side-kicks and hangers-on). The show was pure shtick, and they played it straight. There was a nice sense of self-depreciation and humor (like when the Flash did his mother’s dishes really fast so he could leave his mother’s house in good graces and go save the world). As good as it was, it didn’t last long.

Neither did Vegas. This show was really great TV. It had an authentic feel of post-war 50’s Vegas. It had bad bad guys and good good guys. Visually, they got every detail right — from the cars, to the desk lamps, to the fire extinguishers, and everything in between. When they made allusions to historical events, they got them right. Sadly, it looks like Vegas is cancelled. Bummer.

Fortunately, there are a couple of decent TV shows still on:

• Blue Bloods: Totally predictable schmaltz, done right.
• Good Wife: Whatever happens, you won’t see it coming and it will be slightly outrageous.
• The Mentalist: a nice off-beat take on cop shows. We haven’t seen any of these episoeds this year. 10 PM is too late for us.

Danita and I had a nice week eating out. We ate every breakfast out until Wednesday, when Danita had to go back to work. We ate every dinner out, including a SOCA party coming up tonight. Yesterday being our anniversary, we went a little upscale to the Candle Light Inn. We did their early dinner special. I had potato-leak soup, truffled meatloaf, and chocolate-peanut butter mouse for desert. It doesn’t get much better than that. The nicest thing about going to restaurants (besides Danita not having to cook and me not having to do dishes) is  that we can disagree on what we like to eat, and both eat something we like a lot.

I’ve gotten a couple of rides in, but not many. It’s been cool and rainy. They are forecasting snow for this evening. I’ve been looking at the possibility of riding the Blue Ridge Highway from Asheville, NC to home. That’s about 500 miles of very tough mountain riding. It turns out the riding is the easy part. Getting myself to Asheville, and finding places to stay that don’t cost $300/night with a 2-night minimum are not as easy. Also, I would have to reserve all the rooms ahead of time. Whatever schedule I decide on, it would be rain or shine riding. I’m not sold on this yet, but I haven’t given up either.

I spent most of today on computer stuff for CASA. They have laptops with detailed information about juveniles. Maryland has really tough juvenile privacy laws. Their laptop data needs to be encrypted. But they don’t have any significant IT support. I wanted to use Microsoft’s Encrypted File System, with everybody sharing one key. This way everybody in CASA could automatically share the encrypted files, but if they lost a laptop, the bad guys wouldn’t be able to get to the sensitive information. I spent hours searching and finding that this wasn’t possible. Microsoft designed the system so everybody has their own individual key, and that’s that. I finally got disgusted reading and just make it work, exactly like I wanted it to. That felt satisfying.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Note: there are no pictures this week.

Last week and this week are all about vacations. Last week we firmed up our plans for Alaska. We’ll be flying to Anchorage Sunday, September 1. We’ll get into Anchorage late and stay overnight. Monday we’ll drive to the Independence Gold Mine, then continue on to Talkeetna, near Denali State Park (the southern part of the park). We’ll spend the better part of a week staying at the Talkeetna Roadhouse Hostel (includes the FREE Talkeetna cultural package!) We’ll spend time soaking up the Talkeetna atmosphere, hiking, and hanging out around Denali Park. We even have a day set aside for the obligatory bus ride in Denali National Park. Saturday, we’ll drive back to Anchorage. We’ll spend a couple of days in Anchorage, staying at the Camai B & B. Then we’ll grab an overnight flight home Sunday evening, Sept 8. All the reservations are completed. We’ve started the outfitting stage by going to REI and getting Danita a good pair of boots. (I already have a good pair of boots.)

We’re doing Denali “on the cheap” by staying 3 hours south of the national park, using modest accommodations  and skipping the expensive “adventures” (such as dog sled ride and airplane fly-over in the fog). Of course, “cheap” is relative. Alaska is expensive. We understand it will be an experience we will never forget. Roughly translated, that means we’ll probably spend a week slogging around in rain and mud, then come back and brag about the wildlife and scenery. “Modest” accommodations is also relative. Like most hostels, the Talkeetna Roadhouse has gone upscale. We will be taking advantage of one of their private rooms, complete with a queen size bed and a sink!

This week is spring break for UMBC. Danita is off Monday – Wednesday. We decided to tale a mini-vacation this week, right here in beautiful suburban Columbia. Between SOCA parties, restaurant coupons,  and our upcoming anniversary, we have an entire week of dinner out planned — except Thursday. I’m confident we’ll find a way to eat dinner out Thursday also. If you have any good coupons for the Baltimore area, please rush them to us! We even have a few breakfast restaurant meals planned.

We started the week out with a bang-up breakfast at Mimi’s. We got a buy-one-get-one-free coupon for our anniversary, plus a second coupon good for two of their huge muffins, absolutely free. That alone covers breakfast for today and tomorrow. Sunday is the toughest day for breakfast coupons. It’s pretty easy to find breakfast coupons for week days. We already have a buy-one-get-one-free at Bob Evans. This afternoon, we are looking forward to hearing Saint-Saëns’ Thundering “Organ Symphony”. The concert is virtually sold out, as it should be. This is an astounding piece of music, and it’s one of those pieces for which a radio broadcast or CD simply can’t come close to duplicating the experience of a live performance. The Baltimore Symphony Hall was built to accommodate a first-class pipe organ. Unfortunately, they never got the funds for said organ. But the reviews indicate that the electronic organ they are bringing in for this concert is an incredible piece of engineering. They might not launch a tsunami, but I expect we’ll be feeling the floor vibrate.

Bike rides are proceeding at a stuttering pace. The weather is better this time of year, but it’s not good enough to be able to take long rides. I got a moderate ride in last week. For me, that’s a 20-mile ride to lunch, then a 20-mile ride home. The ride was quite unusual. Normally, when I ride, I don’t see any emergency vehicles. On this ride, I saw 8. the first 5 were all at different times, were all going to different locations, and all had their emergency sirens on. The next 2 had emergency flashers on. The last one was just tooling down the road. I got a second unusual ride in Friday. I went to my bike shop on a rainy Monday morning to get some things I needed for the upcoming season. They didn’t have the gloves I wanted in stock. They ordered them for me, with the delivery expected for Friday. Come Friday it was down right nice out — 55 degrees and sunny. Of course it wasn’t possible for me to drive to the bike store in weather like that. But I had never ridden my bike to the bike store. I knew I would have to cross 3 Interstates, a major highway, Amtrack tracks, and the Baltimore Light Rail. This would make finding a good bike route a formidable exercise. So I went to Google maps, clicked the “Bike” button, and asked for a route. The route looked pretty good without changes, so I plugged it into my bike GPS and took off. The ride turned out to be all back streets and paved trails. I crossed the Amtrack tracks near BWI airport using one of the paved trails. The trail took me to a building. I entered the building and walked my bike across the tracks on a pedestrian / passenger bridge, then took an elevator down on the other side of the tracks. My hat’s off to Google Maps!

Life is more fun when it includes new toys. We have a cordless phone with three handsets. (Yes, we still have old fashioned telephone jacks in our house. In my defense, they are part of our FIOS service, so they aren’t totally old-fashioned.) The main unit plugs into a phone jack in the living room. This drives all three cordless handsets — one in the living room, one upstairs, and one downstairs.We got these phones way back when we lived in Kingsville. They’ve served us well,  but last week they started dying. The upstairs handset started going wonky, overcharging the battery. Then the display stopped working. We could dial a number, but it was impossible to see the number we punched as we entered it. I went on-line and found that the phone is so old they don’t sell handsets for it any more. It was definitely time for a new toy! The new phones were quite easy to set up, they work great, and they have a cool new feature. In the past, if I wanted to talk with Danita, and I was upstairs and Danita was in the basement, I could use my handset to page Danita in the basement. We almost never used the feature, because the handsets were numbered, and we had to know which number handset we wanted to page. With the new phones, we can give the handsets names. I don’t know how this started, but we started calling the basement the “Garden Level”. (The house is too up-scale to have something so common as a basement. Besides, the basement is finished as nicely as the rest of the house, and is a walk-out with a huge door and window. So it doesn’t at all feel like a basement.) Shortly after that, the upstairs became the “Sky View Level”. I named the handsets “Garden”, “Main Level”, and “Sky View”; making the paging feature useful.

Well, that’s a lot of news for one week. I have to hurry up and finish this so I can get back to mini-vacationing. I hope this finds everybody doing well.

Alaska Itinerary (click for larger view)

You may remember Danita and I were planning the ultimate Alaska vacation. We had quite a few difficulties coming up with our itinerary, but we finally did it. We would take the Alaska Ferries from port to port, seeing everything we wanted to see — all the interesting port towns plus Denali Park. The trip would be longer than we wanted (3 weeks instead of 2), but we would have the opportunity to see it all. The only problem is, it’s an impossible trip. We would end up toting suitcases through towns, looking for a way to keep all our stuff together while we await check-in time, or sometimes waiting for our transport to the next city. We took a close look, and we found the problem was the Alaska Ferry system. Not only would we be in a different hotel almost every night, but the ferries mostly traveled during the day. We would spend most of our time looking at water. The coup de grace was the end of the trip — 4 days on a decidedly non-luxuriant ship with almost nothing to do. We gave up.

Alaska Super Cruise

Casting about for alternatives, I accidentally found a dream cruise. It visits just about every port town we are interested in visiting. It was practically perfect. The cruise ship travels at night, giving us the entire day in town. We get to leave our suitcases on board. The only thing we take into town is our credit cards. The only problem was there is no opportunity to visit Denali. We decided to go with the cruise, with the idea that we can always come back to see Denali. That’s when Danita noticed that these cruises are available in 2014. That leaves us with no plan for vacation in 2013.

We are trying to decide what to do. We could do Denali “on the cheap” this year — a 1-week quickie to visit the interior of Alaska. Or we could do something else — for example, go to London. There are several things we won’t do. We won’t go to Mexico. (It’s too dangerous for Gringos these days.) We won’t go to Italy or Greece. (The economic downturn has hit these countries hard, casting a pall on tourism.) Whatever we do, we have to decide pretty soon.

Other than that, my biggest problem is our deck. The squirrels finally ate all our bird food. I decided it’s close enough to spring time. They are responsible for feeding themselves. As soon as I clean the bird droppings, that should be taken care of that for the year. The other issue with the deck is caused by my own error. We were supposed to get snow last week — 4 to 12 inches of it. As it happened, the temperature was a couple of degrees warmer than expected. That was enough to give us an inch of slush, followed by rain. I decided to push the slush off the deck. It was like pushing the world’s largest slushie off the deck. The error was I used a shovel to do it. That was a bad idea because it scraped the stain. I wasn’t planning to repaint the deck until next year.

Other than the deck, I’m having a better time these days. The clubhouse projects are completed. All my work at Habitat is suspended waiting for some kind of a decision meeting. I made some significant progress at CASA. The weather turned beautiful the last few days and I’ve been on the road. It feels good.

Poor Danita isn’t having quite as good a time of it all. UMBC is interviewing for a new VP of Research. This person will be her new boss, so she has a significant input to the selection. Unfortunately, the interviews are in the late afternoon, precluding her attending exercise classes. She’s experiencing a lot of pressure at work. She’s understandably stressed about helping her Dad sort through all of Leona’s stuff. And, of course, we’re trying to figure out what to do about our vacation.

I’m confident we’ll get through it all. I hope this finds you doing well.

Gamera and Hall

This week the Gamera Human Powered Helicopter team flew. They got a beautiful room in the Baltimore Civic Center Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. I was there most of the day Wednesday and Thursday afternoon. With a working control system and a major improvement to the propeller mounting, they had high hopes of earning the Sikorsky prize, or at least of setting a new world record.

Propeller Gimbal

One of their challenges has been oscillation in the propellers. One side of the propeller would go up, and the other side down. Then the one side would go down and the other up. Last Monday, somebody on the team had the idea of mounting the propeller on a hinge or gimbal. With the gimbal, if the two blades aren’t perfectly balanced, the propeller simply spins as a slight angle. In just one week, they came up with a practical way to gimbal the propeller, fabricated one hinge and tested with one wing, and then fabricated three more hinges and re-built all four propeller mounts. These guys work hard!

Skinny Pilot

The team was quite pleased with the new gimbals. Not only did they eliminate the propeller oscillation, but it let them save weight. Because the side-forces were reduced, they could use thinner aluminum in the propeller mount. Weight is the thing they are always fighting. The control system added weight. The bicycle generator added weight. Support strings for the arm trusses added weight. They require their pilots to be strong and skinny. This picture of one of the pilots shows how skinny the pilots are. This pilot weighs 118 pounds with his cycling shoes on. The flights Tuesday and Wednesday were going OK but not great. Wednesday evening, the team decided to remove all non-essential weight. They ended up taking a little too much off. One of the arm trusses broke. They literally worked all night repairing it. They got about two hours of sleep early Thursday morning, sleeping on the floor of the flight room.

The Gamera air frame held up better than ever, thanks in large part to the propeller gimbals. They only had one minor incident Wednesday when a pulley broke loose, and another one Thursday when the chain for the hand crank slipped off. The flight controls worked very well. I have a video of a spectacular controlled flight with the helicopter moving left, right, forward, and backward. It might be the first ever controlled flight of a human powered helicopter. Unfortunately, there were no new world records. They already had the record for sustained flight (65 seconds) and altitude (a little over 9 feet). This time their longest flight was about 58 seconds. Their maximum altitude was 5 or 6 feet. You can see videos of Gamera flying at http://www.agrc.umd.edu/gamera/ .

My other projects progressed this week. I finished the clubhouse network. Of course, there’s always something to clean up, but the project is done. The other clubhouse project is new credentials for the front gate. We’ve made good progress on that. Donna stuffed 350 envelopes and recorded the new numbers. I merged this information into the resident database, changed all the reports and screens for the new credentials, and delivered the new residential database. Monday we’ll see if we can merge the list into the database used by the front gate system.

I actually issued a laptop to one person at CASA. The delay isn’t me this time. These people want to do things soon, but not today. I work there Thursday and Friday mornings. Most employees are there Thursday, so I can interact with the staff. Only a few employees are there Friday, so I can work on computers without bothering anybody. This Friday was an amazingly interesting day. I arrived first. One of the volunteer supervisors arrived about half an hour later. Because of our neighborhood, the front door is always locked. Because of our budget, the door bell doesn’t work. The supervisor sits in the back of the office and can’t hear people knocking on the door. She asked me to let Rebecca, a prospective volunteer, in when she arrived, which I did. It wasn’t long before Sue, another volunteer, arrived to go to court with the supervisor. The supervisor hadn’t told me about Sue because she did not expect Sue to arrive. We finally decided Sue could wait in the office. Then Cathy, a third volunteer, arrived and asked for the “Johnson” envelope which should be sitting on the desk. There was plenty of junk on the desk, but no Johnson envelope. I called the executive director on her cell phone, and she said “Oh, F***”. We finally found the Johnson envelope. Two other supervisors finally arrived. One of the supervisors called the court about the mystery court hearing for Sue’s case. She learned that they weren’t letting anybody into the court. It seems a deputy had accidentally discharged his weapon and shot himself. Another one of the supervisors works in my area. Before the day was out, she was talking about the steel plate and screws in her ankle. She was taking her shoe off so I could clearly see where the plate and screws were. All in all, it was one of the more unusual days I’ve ever had at work.

I met my neurologist. I like his approach. He recommends tests. No surprise there. When I had my heart stints, they gave me cardboard stint wallet cards with illegible scribbling on them. After a month or so in my wallet, they looked really crappy. I sat them aside in case I needed them. They didn’t survive the move to Columbia. Now I need an MRI and they won’t give it to me without more information about my stints. I had my heart work done at St. Joseph’s hospital. At the time, it had the reputation of the area’s premier heart hospital. But about a year ago, one of the cardiologists was charged with doing unnecessary procedures. This escalated into a really big deal. The hospital was on the front page of the newspaper a lot. They had so few patients they ended up shutting down half of the facility. At the last minute, a chain of hospitals bought them out and they barely stayed in business. It’s a good thing they are in business, because they are the ones that had that oh-so-necessary information about my stints. I guess I’ll ask for a copy of the report they sent my MRI lab.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.