Turn, Turn, Turn

One thing is constant in life and that is change. That scares a lot of people but it is like death and taxes in that it is unavoidable. To me, it keeps life interesting or at least not boring.

Yesterday, the La Crosse Ward saw a change in leadership. Bishop Steven Sorensen was released after four years and having to manage the incredibly difficult task of merging two units. That is an unusual place to be put in, to say the least. Hopefully life will be a little easier for Bishop Sorensen and his wife – they have earned it.

Matt Baker was called to be the new bishop and he will do a good job. I had the pleasure of working alongside him in the La Crosse 2nd Branch presidency and he is a standup guy. Things will be different as they always are with a bishopric changeover, so it will be interesting to see the changes. My prayers and best wishes go to Bishop Baker and his wife.

Meanwhile, we continue to get thunderstorms tromping through on a nearly daily basis. This morning had another one I was vaguely aware of; too much weekend wore me out and not even an earthquake could have gotten me up. A little change in the weather pattern would be nice.

I’m planning to get a Blu-ray drive before the year ends. Not having a lot of money and the unexpected expense of a new backup drive has derailed discretionary spending for the month. Reviewing TRON: Legacy made me really want the extra resolution since some of the screen captures would make great desktop wallpaper. Alas, it wasn’t meant to be. With Blu-ray’s getting much cheaper and dual packs with DVD more common, it is a step I need to take.

This week is the anniversary of the opening stages of the Battle of Britain, so I think I’ll watch the film of the same name again and review it. While I love the series Fractale, I’m getting burned out reviewing science fiction and fantasy. Time to dig out some old favorites for a change of pace.

Fly Like an Eagle

In the night sky of 1957’s Autumn, people could see the glowing dot of man’s first artificial satellite, Sputnik 1. It was a colossal embarrassment for the U.S. government and a great achievement for the Soviet Union. But America rallied and made it all the way to the Moon the year I was born.

So earlier today, the last space shuttle launch happened and the last mission for the program got underway.  I have mixed feelings about the whole thing. On one hand, the United States has abandoned manned space missions and likely will never return to government ones in my lifetime. On the other hand, one of the biggest wastes of time, energy, and money by our government is finally coming to an end. This is not a knock on the astronauts, but on the NASA bureaucrats who designed the program and ran it.

The space shuttle never lived up to a fraction of what it promised to do. Regular spaceflight is still an elusive goal as is doing it cheaply. Two spectacular and preventable accidents killed fourteen astronauts along the way. Did we get the big space stations and labs in the sky we should have had by now? I’m sorry to say the International Space Station is nothing to be excited about. About the only real gain out of all this was the Hubble being refurbished and its achievements in astronomy.

For those of us who grew up in the 1970’s or before, there was promise of great things just around the corner in space exploration. Large space stations, moon colonization, manned missions to Mars, and further exploration into the unknown. None of those things have happened and it is decades later with every attempt to do so shot down before it goes anywhere.  As an American, I find it tragic that we will now have to hitch rides with the Russians to even get to the I.S.S.!

Maybe the mistake was relying on the federal government to do something so important. Maybe the comfortable laziness spawned by too much material wealth stripped us of any daring. That promised future which gleamed so brightly in the night sky looks lost right now.

Our only hope is now with private firms going into space.

Don’t Bring Me Down

It looks like rain again. The sky is overcast and the weather service predictions changed from a clear weak to chances of thunderstorms every day. What is this, Seattle?

Yesterday, I went outside to tag damaged and “junk” trees with spray paint for the eventual purpose of having them cut down by a neighbor. To my dismay, I found the mini wind break of asian elms is in dire shape but not due to the wind damage. The large one on the South end contracted wet wood years ago and I’ve been lobbying to get it cut down. Sadly, it is too late and every tree in the line is now showing symptoms – including a very large cotton wood.

The entire line of trees has to be cut down before the disease spreads to the oak, maples, and willow. Sigh.

Originally, the line of trees planted by my late mother was supposed to be kept at shrub height and be decorative. But it was too much for me to maintain and I let it go. Personally, I thought it turned out better looking that way and it served as a nice windbreak. In the end, the little trees took the brunt of the wind damage last Friday along with the back yard maple that always gets damaged. So they did their duty, but I’m not happy losing them.

At least my external back up hard drive has already been replaced. I ordered it on Tuesday and received it yesterday to my shock. Buy.com came through and I didn’t even pay for shipping. All I can figure is that the warehouse must be in Minnesota for the drive to make it that quickly.

So now equipped with a Maxell 1 TB drive, I was able to image the boot drive – a big improvement over simply backing up critical personal files. It also has a rocker switch for turning on and off, not a pushbutton like the Western Digital. That drive would turn itself on every time the power went out and came back on, which is what I suspect killed it.

Oh good, the sun is peeking out. It would be nice to get the garden and yard dried out but I’m not holding my breath. Speaking of the garden, I had to do a second round of planting peas since only a few plants came up. It will be interesting to see if we produce much given the weather.

More tired than usual today, but got some needed things done the last couple of days including a Home Teaching visit, grocery shopping, and cleaning and maintenance work on the Mini-14. it shouldn’t have the misfeeds and odd lock opens now.

The sun is hiding again, time to wrap this up and get to work on the long delayed TRON: Legacy review.

Testing Is a Good Thing

Nope, I’m not writing about the scandal of Atlanta teachers cheating on test scores to make themselves and their classes look better. What I’m writing about is about personal testing of one’s limits. All too often we skate by through life without seeing where we are and what we can really achieve.

That’s actually quite a broad topic, so for the sake of brevity it will be narrowed down to one example. A personal one at that.

In a recent post, I mentioned how my times in Yahoo crossword puzzles had been doubled while I had the respiratory infection. While the puzzles are being used to sharpen my rusty word skills, they serve another purpose as well. That is to see how well my brain is functioning that day. Cognition is something heavily affected by CFS and while I can usually tell how well I’m doing there, it isn’t always the case. So a more objective test on a daily basis is helpful to see how I’m doing and assist me when I’m waffling about how alert I’m being.

Previously, I’d been using a game called Audiosurf on the Steam game service to judge how well my physical reflexes (and to a lesser degree, alertness) were doing on a given day. Having fallen out of that habit, today is the first day of reinstituting that test alongside the crossword puzzles. It is a fun game, especially since I only play on Mono Pro setting to avoid real aggravation. Since it also uses music from the player’s personal collection to generate the “roads”, the soundtrack is always good.

Testing my capabilities each day helps me assess and allocate my energy for the day. Energy management is a must with CFS. Overextending causes lengthy setbacks which require far too much down time to recover from. While unavoidable in general, limiting the severity increases what you can do in the long term.

Today was a fairly good day on both tests with the mind sharp enough and the reflexes at my normal level. Those mistakes were rust from not playing in a long time, I tell you!

The Sounds of Silence

“He’s dead, Jim.”

That was what flashed through my mind around 9 PM last night as it became clear that my external backup hard drive hadn’t just failed, but had done so in spectacular fashion. Despite an array of utilities I have, the thing won’t cough up any data whatsoever. Not even a low level format is possible.

I’ve had drives fail over the years in every possible way except bursting into flames or exploding. But none so completely. It looks like the power outages on Friday night killed it, since I suffered a BIOS corruption on our media center PC too. That was easily fixed.

So the hard drive I rely on to protect my most important data has shuffled off the mortal coil. Oh the irony. At the moment, I can’t afford a new one so I’ll have to buy a refurbished one at this rate. Of course, it was well out of warranty. Irritating.

Oh and for the record, it was a Western Digital 500 MB MyBook. WD drives and I have had an excessive failure rate compared to other brands. Perhaps I should find another brand.

Happy Independence Day!

It is a good thing to remember how this country was founded and the immense sacrifices made by our founding fathers. Many who signed the Declaration of Independence ended up losing everything during the Revolutionary War and I wonder how many today would take that kind of risk. Sadly, this is not a time of optimism or hope in the United States with the future looking quite bleak. But at least for a day, we should set aside our differences and despair to celebrate the grand experiment that began in the late 1700’s.

On a more local note, I was glad to see a lot of people turn out for the annual La Crosse Ward “picnic”/cherry pit spitting contest. No, I didn’t compete because I was out of spit, as usual. Elder Tataipu won convincingly with a 42 foot spit, easily outdistancing everyone else. Score one for the full time missionary from Hawaii!

I’m wobbly from the weekend, it has been an endurance run. Saturday night I ended up in charge of the fireworks again and that was exhausting, though fun. We probably spooked every critter in the Yucatan valley with our light and sound show. There are leftovers, so we’ll be well prepared for next year.

A Mighty Wind

With the 100 degree weather yesterday came a break from the misery late in the evening. The only problem is the break also broke trees. The National Weather Service summary has a list of all the damage reported from the high winds that swept through. The animations show a faint bow echo ahead of the rain and that’s where the worst of the winds were for us. When it hit, I thought the air conditioner was going to be shoved into my room it was shaking so much. In fact, it has never shaken during any storm. Power was out for several hours starting at 10:30 PM. With the heat and humidity in the house it made for uncomfortable sleeping.

Things were far worse in other places in Minnesota and Wisconsin, so I can’t complain. Not exactly a good start to the Independence Day celebrations.

Photos of our rather unimpressive damage:

Scattered branches and twigs litter nearly all of the West  and front yards.

How these branches missed the antenna, I don’t know. Not that it made much difference when the power went out.

The maple tree out back has taken a beating this year. The big limb drooping is damage from the earlier storm that spawned a tornado in La Crosse.

Biggest damage was to this Asian Elm which was slated for being cut down anyway. While a lovely tree, it has wet wood, a bacterial infection that can spread to other trees. That dark stain on the right side is from water continuously being pushed out through its vascular system.

Amazingly, most of the branches in the East yard came from trees in the West yard. The cottenwood and oak trees were the main victims.