I was blessed with a few hours of free time on a Sunday with great weather. Zachary has a babysitter and Madeline and Sarah went to Hattie's baby shower. So what have I been doing.

First I decided that it would be a good idea to upgrade the firmware on the Blu-ray player. My Blu-ray player is the Sony BDPS300 and last night Sarah and I tried to watch "21" only to find that the player hung while trying to load the disc. So I looked on the Sony web site and saw it would be a saga to install the player. But I followed the directions on the Sony support web site and after 30 minutes I managed to get the player to play the disc.

Since Sarah bought an ipod we need to get it to play the music from our defunct music library. So after fighting with the thing yesterday morning and getting music, but what was determined to be bad music, onto it I am in the process of having it grab the music from our old archive on the terabyte drive. It tries to do some indexing of cover art or something so that is taking forever.

I felt the hot tub needed some maintenance so I put all three sets of chemicals into it. I shocked it, I chlorinated it, and I put in the stuff that gets rid of oils like my excessive leave in conditioner.

I decided to load and organize my photos into the Flickr library online. I even looked at the stats and could correlate people looking at my images with times/dates that I post that I have updated images through the blog. This was the graph it gave.

I have been struggling to grow grass in the areas where the patio construction affected the most. What happened was that the rocks and rock-dirt was in the front lawn while the patio was being dug-up and installed. Upon seeding it not a lot of grass has grown. Due to a complex chain of events beginning with my ineptitude at closing pipes for the winter I have yet to be able to water the area effectively. I did close the pipes for the winter but closed both the inside and outside locking water in that burst the pipe leading to the front yard. It was fixed but then the faucet thing stripped and broke. Then I bought the wrong one from Somerville Lumber. Then I bought another one from Home Depot which is much closer. Now I can't find my tools with the wrench. So anyways I had tried Miracle Grow liquid fertilizer but not much of it transferred from the bottle to the ground. So I poked a hole in the bottles of the concentrated stuff with a screw driver and squirted, it came out like lighter fluid, the fertilizer onto the patches that have refused to grow grass.

I thought I mighht work out on the elliptical runner now in the basement but I never got around to it.

Posted by Dan Housman at 12:44 PM | Permalink

Since the weather has been watery this summer we have been noticing that mosquitos are breeding making our outdoor living room with the hot tub tricky to live in at night. I had my dad bring the Mosquito Magnet Defender from Marshfield but as usual it didn't work and instead just runs for a few minutes then blinks with a red light. The Mosquito Magnet will live in my memory forever as the most useful product that was also incredibly unreliable. So operant conditioning has me trying to figure out any way to make that bug killer work.

But among my searches on line I did manage to find a piece of research, probably marketing material in a manufactured study comparing mosquito traps. While this may be an unbalanced research piece I applaud the efforts of people working to shine a light on the critical differences in this area so important to people looking to enjoy their backyards in the evening. I would rather see hundreds of graphs like this than the typical consumer drivel comparisons I normally see of computers, phones, and cameras that are all basically the same product and easy to evaluate by using them.

Posted by Dan Housman at 09:24 PM | Permalink

The kids are growing up fast. Zachary is already doing a commando crawl around rooms. He is trying to start pushing himself to a full crawling position and I'm sure he will be there shortly. He likes to babble. When we went to the beach a week back I tried to dip him into the cold water and he was not a fan of the experience. When I returned to the group including Sarah he then decided to say "Yab, Yahb, Bab, bahb" which roughly translates to - "Did you see what this crazy guy was trying to do to me?" I've been trying to work with Madeline on moving forwards with swimming. She loves to dive around the hot tub onto me and yells "Hee Haw" as she dives. We managed to graduate from the 3 inch deep water at Crystal Lake to the waist high water but she is hesitant to go under the water fully. We have water games we play. Shark involves humming the song from Jaws and clapping my hands around her or "eating" a meal of sand placed into one of my hands through my arm-mouth. Uppie-Down involves hurling her into the air to land back in the water. We also are now often playing a game where she calls me a "bum" and I tickle her until she tells me I am not a bum. Fun stuff.

Posted by Dan Housman at 05:03 AM | Permalink

I've been driving back and forth to the Philidelphia area recently. As I drive I listen to the radio and think. It is interesting to go down the coast and hear various things tune in and out. At some points I'll hear some preaching seminar on a Christian talk station that can often have statements that resonate with me as I go "You don't buy things for your children to make them happy... you take an interest in them and spend time with them." In the last drive down I was watching the gas prices fluctuate from state to state. New Jersey seems to have the cheapest gas. Everyone on the radio seems to be talking about oil. The Democracy Now folks were talking about how in Burma there is a law suit where a big oil company has been trying to bury the law suit around dumping large pits of toxic waste in the Amazon for years. The economists on some other station are convinced that oil availability and energy structure is critical to the overall stability of the econony. Some folks are trying to find their nearest ethanol 85 filling station and chatting at great lengths about the need to allow ethanol from sugar cane to be imported into the country without tarriffs to allow for generating ample supply of ethanol to help convert people to buy vehicles that will use it as a supply. When looking at the issues around while driving it is clear that the need for energy is already a huge challenge in the 21st century.

Meanwhile other folks are worried about how many slots former Chinese nationals are taking-up on the US ping-pong team.

I was also thinking about the idea that man created god(s) in man's own image and not the other way around. It could make an interesting idea in a sci-fi. I'm sure it already has been that a software application like Google eventually evolves into an AI with a god-like status to replace current religions with a new religion around the god. Maybe it has already happened. The turning point is when the search tool/network AI deity has been created with enough man-like features but not so many man-like flaws to become considered as a moral authority. So people could relate to it like those old programs that would fake a human response but it would give sage advice, monitor what you are doing, and be a superior being worthy of human worship.

Posted by Dan Housman at 04:40 AM | Permalink