This is a test post of my blog, to see whether the Email is fixed. You do not have to respond.

I am writing this on Saturday, 9/27. There are no pics.

We met with the financial planner Wednesday. My goodness it was an experience. We reviewed our investments, etc. Discussed our goals. The financial planner will put everything into his computer program and we will review his suggestions in a few weeks. I’m not sure why, but we got quite — I’m not sure what. It wasn’t excited. It wasn’t worked up. It was something between those two, I guess. We ended up having an unplanned dinner out. Then we got TV snacks and a bottle of red wine. We still had our planned dinner out Thursday. And we were close to going out again Friday. I think we’re getting back close to normal.

We had some nice but cool weather, followed by a day of cold rain. Today it was extremely nice — 80 and sunny. We went to another section of the Patuxent Wildlife Refuge and had a wonderful hike in a wooded area. This time, we had to sign a form in triplicate. One copy stayed in the office, one went on the dash board of our car, and one stayed with us. We were required to return our two copies when we got back. They were talking about unexploded ordinance from when the area was part of a military base. We decided to take their advice and stay on the trail. ;-) After our walk, we had lunch at a local restaurant. We’ll do our normal Church and Sunday breakfast out tomorrow.

We’ve been attending different churches. We haven’t really fitted into St. Louis. We visited a parish that uses one of the shared religious centers here in Columbia for a few weeks. Now we’re trying another parish near by.

While we were having that cool but nice weather, then the rainy cool and not so nice weather, I was being reminded of how cold I felt most of last winter. We heat our house to 68 in the winter. It’s from a combination of wanting to be green and being cheap. Every time I settled down to read, or play with the computer, or do some other sedentary activity, I got quite cold. I understand the importance of being active, but I don’t plan to be active all the time. I decided what I need is a heavy, warm sweater. The only thing I can find in the stores is fashionable light-weight sweaters, so I ordered one. It came in today. It looks like it’s going to be a big help. What I know for sure is that it is *very* warm if worn when it’s 80 degrees.

I continue to be surprised by the things I should know but don’t. I was reading Ken Follett’s middle book in his “Century” series. This book starts just as Hitler is taking power in Germany. I read about the Battle of Cable Street. This took place in London on October 4, 1936. Fascist “Black Shirts” wanted to have a march through London’s East Side. The East Side is where the poorer people lived, including most of the Jews. Many people in the Black Shirts were from the upper-class. People from the East Side plus several leftist organizations opposed the march by barricading Cable Street. The London Police tried to clear the street — including horse mounted police beating British citizens with sticks. I had never heard of this before. After I read Follett’s fictionalized account, I started searching the internet. It’s easy to find news videos of the riot and endless summaries and analysis. What surprised me most was the disagreement of precisely who participated, and what the after affects were. I would read an analysis that said “clearly, this was the result”. Then I would read “clearly, that was the result.” I was almost left wondering if people were talking about the same event.

I hope next week will be a little less exciting. And I hope this finds everybody doing well. And it would be nice if my server actually sends the Emails this week. I guess we’ll see soon enough.

I am writing this on Sunday, 9/21. There are no pics this week.

It feels like lots of things happen, but by the end of the week, I have a hard time remembering them all. And the happenings I remember don’t necessarily turn themselves into a good story.

I got my bike back late Tuesday. It was a good week weather-wise, so having the bike lent itself to many fine hours on the road. It’s nice to have convenient access to a bike shop that lets me skip most of the uncertainty of how to effect repairs, and the grime of all that oil and dirt, and the frustration of not knowing how to put things together mechanically.

Danita and I met with a financial planner who is available through UMBC and TIAA-CREF (they run her retirement savings plan). The adviser makes a lot of sense. We’ve scheduled a meeting with another person from their organization to review our investments and get recommendations of how we might change them to better match our retirement needs. I must admit I’m approaching this with some caution and a little skepticism. But the service has no up-front fees, so we would be foolish not to at least listen to what they have to say. Retirement planners talk about the next 30 years. Certainly there are people who live that long. Looking back to what things were like 30 years ago and seeing the differences between then and now, one can certainly find a lot to think about. We’ll see where this goes.

Here’s a computer tip I came across. Like everybody else, I read a lot of documents in Adobe Reader (.pdf) format. I always felt that Adobe Reader was a large program that offers few features. This has been more true with recent releases, which move more and more features out of the free program and into paid cloud services. I was reading a computer security blog and stumbled onto an excellent solution — Foxit Reader. Don’t worry about the strange name. Foxit has an incredibly large set of features in their free reader. Go to  http://www.foxitsoftware.com/Secure_PDF_Reader/.
Sad but true, one has to be very careful of searching for popular programs and clicking the link at the top of the search results. Many companies make a living by tricking users into downloading junk onto their computers. That’s why I included the link to this program in my blog.

I had a nice experience this week. Our neighborhood got a new security camera DVR. I wanted to set it up so that when community board members we called upon to review the security video, they could do it from their homes. That was easy enough, but the problem was that with our new system, allowing access to video over the internet also allowed access to administration over the internet. (Administration allows a person to delete video, turn recording off, and in general be a genuinely bad person.) The system is *supposed* to allow us to permit access to video from anywhere while limiting administration to only in the office, but I couldn’t make it work. I called the service person and learned that this was a known bug in the system. Then I was astonished to learn that most of his customers weren’t bothered by this. Their solution was to allow easy access to administration from anywhere. I guess if I wanted to lead a life of crime, I could have an easy time of it. I called the manufacturer and found that a firmware upgrade would solve the problem. I installed the firmware upgrade and found that I could block administration over the internet, but I couldn’t make it work in the office. That wasn’t a very acceptable answer. I tried several things, all of them unsuccessful. I gave up. Two days later, I knew why it wasn’t working. The idea just popped into my head, fully formed. I went into the office and my idea worked perfectly. It’s brain magic — I have no idea where my idea came from. When I was working as an engineer, I relied on brain magic to help me with all kinds of problems all the time. Now that I’m retired, I don’t have much need of brain magic. It was gratifying to find that my brain magic hasn’t disappeared (yet).

Ken Follett got a lot of publicity recently for completing his “Century” trilogy. I thought it would be interesting to read the first two books in the series while waiting for my turn to get his new book. I went to the Howard County Library web site and found that I wasn’t the only person in the county who had this idea. But I was astounded to find that if I was willing to read the second book first, I could start immediately. So I put in my request. The book is waiting for me to pick it up. Amazing!

We had some entertainment this week. We went to a neighborhood party Saturday. The music was too loud, so we left early. The BSO season has started. We attended our first concert of the year this afternoon. Because it was the first concert of the series, they started with a very nice symphonic transcription of the national anthem. We heard Beethoven’s violin concerto and Mahler’s 4th symphony. The Beethoven was quite good. I’m still working on my appreciation of Mahler, but the piece had a gong. How bad can it be when they play the gong? After the symphony, we went out to a restaurant that was OK, but we probably won’t bother going back.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

I am writing this on Monday, 9/15. There are no pics this week.

It was a quiet week. We had a neighborhood party Friday. I broke my glasses. My backup glasses don’t work as well. I received the part needed to fix my bicycle. I decided to take the part and my bike to the bike shop. I expect to get it back in working order in a day or so.

The week wasn’t entirely without interest. We booked our China vacation. We will be traveling April 23 – May 13, 2015. I tried to sign up on-line. I found I could sign myself up, and I could sign Danita up, but there was not an obvious way to sign us both up. It felt so wrong to be filling out information about roommate preferences to get the “double booking” price. I ended up calling them this morning. Sometimes it pays to use the phone. There is more flexibility in travel than the internet site indicated. Now we have to finalize flights, apply for our visas, etc. Trip details will be worked out over the next several weeks. Now that I’m paying more attention about news from China, I realized that China is blocking access to Google. I suppose that means that only Danita will have the ability to read her Email, should we be so fortunate as to have internet access. This might be quite an adventure.

I hope this finds everybody doing well.

I am writing this on Sunday, 9/7. There are no pics.

My bike book is done! It is available on all major E-book outlets, and is also available in paperback from Amazon and a few other outlets. Don’t worry about trying to find it. You will all be receiving a paperback copy when my order comes in. It’s my way of celebrating the completion of the project.

I had a nice experience with the book cover. They say you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, but that’s exactly what everybody does. I have no artistic talent. But it turns out there are a large number of people who make book covers available through the web. Most self-published books are E-books, and most E-books are junk fiction. By far the largest category is romance novels for the ladies, followed by fantasy for the teens, and then junk guy stories (Samurai / Private Detective / Soldier of Fortune stuff). All the artists have sample work on their sites, but it’s hard to judge how they would do on a bike book from the samples. I picked a lady who had reasonable prices and seemed to have a good attitude. It worked out very well. I ended up getting it for a 3-year old laptop with a broken cooling fan plus 47 cents, thanks to E-bay. I simply sold the computer, left the proceeds in my Pay Pal account, then used the Pay Pal account to pay the artist. Very slick.

Last week we finally got our typical summer weather — 90 degrees and 90% RH. Not only was it hot during the day, it didn’t cool down much at night. We ran the AC all week. But we had a nice cool front come through late yesterday. We enjoyed a dramatic thunderstorm from the shelter of our under-deck porch. It was the first really good thunderstorm we had since the deck was re-done, and we enjoyed watching the storm very much. (We had a heavy rain day, which I wrote about earlier, but there was no thunder or lightening.) Today the AC is off and the windows are open. The weather is so nice today, we went out to play a round of mini-golf at the Columbia Sports Center.

I was out on my bike Wednesday for a short ride when all of a sudden, I couldn’t change gears. I had noticed a part was a little loose. I couldn’t tighten it, but I figured it would hold out until winter. I was wrong. I’ve ordered a replacement part, but I’m not sure when it will be in. I have my old backup bike, but I haven’t taken very good care of it. The cables are corroded, and I don’t want to ride it too far from home, in case a critical cable breaks and I have to walk it home.

In addition to the bike, my method of making the rabbits go someplace else didn’t work. I’ve put 4 bags of gravel in the ground, sprayed copious quantities of rabbit repellent, and dumped over a can of “Critter Ridder” peppers on the ground. They just keep on digging more holes to get to their warren. We’re coming up on another breading season (they have 3 or 4 a year), so I want to do something pretty quickly. Ferrets can be quite effective, but I rejected that option because I have no use for the ferrets once the rabbits are gone. Also, the ferrets only get the rabbits out of the ground. You still have to get rid of them. Cats like to hunt rabbits, but our neighborhood would not appreciate the type of feral barn cats that like to hunt. It’s supposed to be easy and cheap to trap them, but we have plenty of rabbits all over Columbia. There’s no place to relocate them. So I decided to call professionals in and ask them for the “final solution”. We’ll see what they say.

My most recent project is a Raspberry Pi computer. This is a little (2.5″ x 3.5″) circuit board computer that costs about $35. (You can find pictures very easily of you search for “Raspberry Pi” on the web.) The computer is amazingly capable, and there’s a very large DIY (Do It Yourself) community doing all kinds of things with it. They have a way to play videos on it. You connect it to the Internet, then plug it into your TV. Voila, you can play videos from the World Wide Web. I worked on this for a surprisingly long time, but I finally got it working. I was surprised that it does an excellent job of playing web site videos such as You-Tube. Unfortunately, I also found that video content doesn’t include Amazon streaming movies or CBS.com streaming TV shows. At least, not legally. I wasn’t surprised at the limitation.

The other thing I want to try with my tiny computer board is wireless remote control. There are a wide range of home automation and home security products. I am interested in devices using the Z-Wave protocol. They have a plug-in board that lets the Raspberry Pi talk to Z-Wave devices. Because the devices are mostly available for people buying very expensive systems, it’s hard to find the simple (and inexpensive) kinds of devices I am interested in. But after spending an entire day, I found a reasonably priced device that lets me detect a push-button switch. The add-on board and the switch device should be in Tuesday. Then I’ll start playing around with Z-Wave stacks, javascript, python, and endless other strangely named geek stuff that I don’t already know how to do. It should keep me busy for a good long time.

That’s a lot of news for just one week. I hope this finds everybody doing well.