There are no pics this week.
Danita had some stress at work this week. Margo was out with her mother’s funeral. She was covering for some of Margo’s time-sensitive work. In addition, her desktop and laptop computers both stopped working. Se took up an old laptop to use for a while, and it does a lot of things, but Microsoft Office programs don’t work on it. The IT department told her that the desktop has a bad disk, and Dell will replace it. But they didn’t put the computer back together. Danita was on the phone, talking with somebody from Dell who was half way around the world, and had a terrible accent, over a bad phone connection, and couldn’t make any progress at all. She finally hung up in total frustration.
Our neighborhood IT committee decided to recommend a WordPress web site. I’m busy working away. The board meets the last week of July. We’re putting a proposal together for their review. If they approve the proposal, I want to put up a test site before Danita and I leave for Alaska, which is followed by my bike & hike in NY. Our existing site has lots of content. I’m working hard getting all that stuff organized and formatted so I can build the test site quickly.
Here’s an example of a problem. The condos each have an organizational document. This is about 10 pages of dense text, complete with county stamps, folio numbers, lawyer signatures, etc. These documents all need to be put on the web site. That’s not too much of a problem, except that they were printed out and put in a scanner (to capture all the stamps and signatures). The files are huge. Modern practice is to keep posted files under 2 MBytes. One of the files was 100 MBytes. The free compression tools couldn’t make the file small enough to fit. The gold standard for PDF file compression is Adobe Acrobat, which is a ridiculously expensive program. I found out I could use it on a trial basis for 30 days, free. No credit card required. I’m sure I’ll get a ton of Email from Adobe later. But for now, it did what we need it to do. One condo printed the documents on colored paper. I couldn’t get them below 3 MB. The rest all are under 2 MB.
Here’s another hair puller. A lot of the board minutes were put on our old web site in Word format. They need to be converted to Adobe PDF format. That’s very easy to do. Of course, we have 6 boards with monthly minutes for the last 4 years. So there’s plenty of files to fix up. But the process is easy enough. Unfortunately, I couldn’t open one of the files. Word said the file was corrupt. I finally found somebody with an old version of Word that would open the file. They reformatted it and sent it to me, so I can include it in the new web site. Of course, this kind of thing is never supposed to happen. I’m just lucky, I guess.
And on it goes. In the mean time, before I take my NY bike & hike, I want to be able to ride 60 miles in hilly country. Then do it again the next day. So far, my body has had a succinct reply to that idea — “you’re nuts”. I decided that I tried to train too much too quickly. Now I’m focusing on doing 60 mile rides in not-very-hilly country, with occasional shorter hilly rides. I’m hoping that I can get that down, then start working on the longer hilly rides. I have four training weeks left. (I won’t be training while Kathryn is visiting, because I would rather spend time with her than argue with my body about riding the bike.) One good thing, all this hard work should give me wonderful blood chemistry. That’s important, because my next blood work is Friday. I don’t know how I got my doctor’s appointment just before our cruise, with all it’s sitting around and eating rich foods. But I’m glad I did. I figure I’ll have 6 months to wring all those fats and sugars out of my body before my next doctor appointment.
We have no SOCA parties this week. (That will also help my blood test results.) But we have a beef roast next Saturday, followed by an ice cream social on Sunday. Yummy. And great timing, just one day after my blood work. Too bad Kathryn didn’t come a little earlier.
I hope this finds everybody doing well.