This is me in Idaho just over 15 years ago. Back then, one took a mini-holiday five times a year. From here on in, I’d like to travel again. My last job didn’t allow for any extended amounts of time off at a stretch. Two weeks vacation a year is just not enough to really go do anything, and it is often weird to watch people who work all year try to party it up for such a short time. I knew people who would fly to Hawaii because the booze was cheaper there.
Resolution number one, I step up the search for a chick singer, guys are too much hassle. The Reb set the pace so I know it can be done. With eight guitar chords, twenty-five of my tunes are chick songs ready to go. As a backup, I’ll train another guitarist. Resolution two, back to work, I will consider [one of] several different part time positions to start unless I really score something big. Resolution three, when finances permit, I need a degree in that weird TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages). That’s all my resolutions, I calculate if you need more than three, you’ve been carrying them forward.[Author's note 2021: I was ultimately unsuccessful finding a chick vocalist guitar player, but I had fun looking. It's never easy finding compatible musicians and once again the usual problem was these people don't want to stop until they have a ten-piece orchestra backing them up. Well, nothing less than five-piece. Yet none of them have a clue as to where such a band would find regular gigs.]
Also, I accept several sources of advice who state I should increase [write more] info about what I do at the sacrifice of what happens around me. But not much, just a tad. This is a log, not your sister’s diary. I spend the same amount of time on each entry. The length varies by the amount I have to think, meaning the content is already there. So no speculating about what I don’t write.
The largest impact on 2007 was, by far, the bicycle. The recorded mileage this morning was 2,810 miles, or from here to the California border. At an average of 7.1 miles per hour, the equivalent of almost 10 work-weeks. How is your exercise program coming along? Well, except for Mitch, who goes cross-country on a monster trike.
[Author’s note: the true average is closer to 8.1 mph, as I’ve stopped disconnecting the odometer when I walk the bike, but even 7.1 is a high sustained speed for such long distances. Don’t think so? Try it.]
Much later, I spoke too soon about the computer. Every one of the 17 surplus hard drives around here balks at the install. In the process, I took apart a few of them, in particular looking to see what was underneath all those “Void if Removed” stickers. If you peek inside these hard drives, you can see they are deliberately built with unused extra disk hubs. When I dissected a crashed 200 GB drive with one disk it contained spacers and head spindles for five more.
The significance is many people wrongly believe that advances in disk technology are what propels increased drive capacity. Wrong, for here is a drive that could easily be made into a 1,200 GB (1.2 Terabyte) drive by adding more existing parts. They don’t want to sell you a 1,200 GB drive until they’ve sold you a 500 GB and 750 GB along the way. Back in my day, this was called a “rip-off”.
Here is a great picture of the house I’ve lived longest at in my life – four years. Yes, they are both color photos taken around the same time of day. Winter and summer. Don’t be dismayed by the snow, I specially took this picture to show the extremes. That amount of winter only occurs once every five years out on the west coast, and never stays around very long. A week at most. If you look closely, you can see the underground driveway just below the balcony at lower center. The original house was just the wing to the right.
