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.