BeachClub - February 2005
Introduction:

This month at the 'Beach Club' ...

anyway - Picture of the Month - (more ceramics later in the third half of the web-page...)...
two ceramic fish by Ms. May
May 'created' these 'two-fishes' (as Mr. Bill calls them (actualy boyfriend (left) and girlfriend (right)) during a recent art-show at the local (Port Salerno) "Fish House Art Center" - literally an old fish-processing house / site on the shore of our local "Manatee Pocket".  And, NOW, the lady that owns it has opened quite a nice gallery displaying art from both around the local area as well as around the country.


May Wong at the north-end of Buntzen Lake
Then - another picture of someone beautiful - taken as we went for a long (LONG) walk around Buntzen Lake, near May's parent's house in Port Moody, BC, CANADA, - near Vancouver.


this here thang


and - something else VERY interesting that we found on our walk (around Buntzen Lake (2 1/2 hours)
 - these things were 'all over the place', but do you know what they are?

OUR - trip to Vancouver was VERY NICE;  we engaged in all the "usual winter trip to Vancouver" activities

ALEX & JACOB  May & Jacob at the computer
Mr. Alex & Mr. Jacob (With knitted cap by Ms. Lily;   then a picture of Ms. May and Mr. Jacob at the computer (please note Ms. May is the beautiful one with the glasses!)




(way-top-left - Ms. Amy (Yee's Mom), Mr. Jacob & Ms. Yee blowing
out the candles on Mr. Jacob's one-year-old birthday-cake



Ms. May at the top of "Screaming Eagle quad-chair" lift at 'Grouse Mountain'.

Mr. Bill bought new boots & bindings (Salomon brand) excellent stuff, now to have WARM AND DRY FEET after a day of snowboarding - it was REALLY GOOD...

Nick & Bill on the lift
Mr. Nick - our grapic-arts / Apple Macintosh / mountain biking friend from Hong Kong joined us again...

We also discovered a new sport - something that we can't do in Florida - it's called "Rock Boarding" - and it is what snowboarding turns into when there's not enough snow and the rocks stick-through the snow, - the bottoms of our snowboards are not likely to recover soon, I forsee a number of hours in the shop working on both the edges of the boards as well as the bottom surface, then I'll probably have to re-wax them, also... ...


Ms. May in Vancouver airport
AND _ another picture of Ms. May sitting / awaiting (almost falling asleep (it's LATE (after 10pm; Mr. Bill was already falling asleep!)) our flight back to Stuart, Florida - where it is WARM and we are not wearing ALL THESE CLOTHES... - we are in shorts, now!


Mr. Bill's Knoppix Experience (the positive side of a very negative Windows Hard Disk Crash):

as a last-note to our "Vancouver Trip" - there was a major computer-hard-drive-failure: - UGH UGH UGH...

Unfortunately, Mr. Bill's Toshiba Windows XP Laptop blue-screened a couple of times while in Vancouver, the bottom line being that we've lost 90% of the digital-pictures we had of everything we did there... 

I've collected a few back from here and there - so those you see are probably 'recovered' though there are definately 'some missing'.   This is yet another lesson for back-ups and having multiple copies of EVERYTHING, on multiple computers - ESPECIALLY while travelling!!! - ???

However, like a lot of other things in life - this 'failure' of my WindowsXP hard-drive has had some positive effects...

Knoppix-screen-small  <= click for larger screen-shot-image

I've booted "Knoppix" (for those of you that do not know what this is - it is a bootable-CD-ROM with a Linux (SuSE (a German Linux variant))  - that is when you boot and run this Operating System (Linux 'replaces' your WindowsXP or your Apple Mac OS "X" (which is also a Linux variant)) with a CD-ROM that you put in and turn the computer on, it uses NO hard disk (Unless you configure it to) and it NEEDs no hard disk to run...

web-link is:  http://www.knoppix.net  <= here is where you can find-out more  and links to where you can buy the Knoppix CD-ROM (bootable). - YES - you can definately download from the Internet - but it's several HUNDRED Megabytes of data (so even with a high-speed link it would take 'a while') - and burn your own CD-ROM, it is, though more 'practical' to pay the $4.95 for the (original) CD-ROM and the other $4.95 for shipping - it's NOT
going to break your bank!)

 and (presently)  I do not have ANY HARD DRIVE in my Toshiba Laptop

and Linux (Knoppix) is running quite well

- IF YOU REALLY NEED / WANT to save something - YOU CAN save it on a "USB-disk" which now come in sizes from 16 megabytes all the way up to 1 gigabyte... - so it's VERY POSSIBLE to have an OS run with NO hard drive (read this as an OS that will NEVER have a virus on the OS because the OS has NO writeable storage (except your USB disk and you can be VERY CAREFUL what you put on that!)

ALSO: _ if you want to 'save config' information for your Knoppix - you can put all that on a floppy in less than 100 K bytes (less than 10% of the space on a floppy) then 'lock' the floppy disk - so it will never get corrupt!

Learning MORE about Knoppix has been a very enjoyable, educational and enlightening experience!

NOW I will carry my Knoppix CD-ROM, config-floppy and USB-disk with me EVERYWHERE, so that I can always RECOVER!


And - as promised, here's some more of Ms. May's ceramic-arts-things...

May's B-bowl - small     May's blu&red plate - small

(and Do NOT forget the Fishes at the top of the page!)...

more pictures here...

IF you like Ms. May's ceramic-art you can write her to tell her how much you like it!
Christmas, 2004: - whoops - we almost forgot...

there were some pluses and minuses and other such things this year, no 'real surprises' but it was good to get-together and see the family again...

One thing that 'was' a surprise (at least for "gadget freak" Mr. Bill) was his sister gave him an iPod.   Before now he hadn't really thought of himself as a 'music-guy' but WOW this thing is really slick - it can not only 'do music' but it stores files (after all it IS a 20 gig hard drive in there!), and so it can store whatever you want off your computer (you plug-it-in to firewire or USB cable(s) (both included) and it 'mounts' on your desktop - very similarly to when you plug-in a USB-disk)...

AND - if you have Palm-Pilot 'style' device and you save contacts (addresses) into ...vcf you can drop that file in the iPod's pre-made "Contacts" folder or if you have a Calendaring program and export those events into ...vcal you can drop that file into the "Calendars" iPod pre-made folder,  OR if you have anything in raw ASCII text files you can drop those into the pre-made "Notes" folder... (I happen to store my .tcshrc file on my iPod (my sister says that makes me a 'geek'))

FURTHERMORE: there is / are several pieces of software on the internet that help you write 'iPod Books' - a particularly quirky formatted - up-to-4,000 byte file (you can have, I think,
up to 100 of these files)  in your pre-made "Notes" folder and read those on-line...

there's a BUNCH MORE features that this thing has - both documented and easy to access as well as some un-documented ones that there is 'third-party-software' to support...

I hadn't much else to do after my Toshiba-WindowsXP bluescreened me so I spent a couple of hours in one of our mall-visits and found a book (O'Reilly is the publisher, wouldn't you know it), it's called iPod  & iTunes hacks  Tips & TOlls for Ripping, Mixing and Burning   written by: Hadley Stern,  ISBN: 36920 00778 - US $24.95 - a little pricey.  Some of the stuff about how to run Linux on your iPod needs some updated web-site-links, but other than that a book just chock full of things to do with the iPod!

All in all another TERRIFIC product from Apple, and I have had a lot of fun and REALLY enjoy both the music and the 'fiddling'!!!

see my 'Links' section at the end of the web-page for more access to more iPod things...


(water-(for house and yard)) Well re-worked in January, of 2005:

We had one of the two wells near the house 're-juvenated' - these guys came out with a HUGE truck that, of course, dripped grease and oil all over our (previously) clean drive-way, but that's a whole 'nother-story.

well guy with truck pulling old-well-out      well-screenwell-point-tip

Anyway, they pulled the old well / (with no point on it) out of the ground.  Then, they put a 5-foot long section of stainless screen (actually  two types of stainless screen) on the bottom of a 21 foot long section of 2" galvanized pipe,  with this 'fancy-tip' / 'point' on the end, drove that back down the hole that the other one came out of - hooked it all up and boy do we have WATER NOW!!!!

Very satisfying that the pump suction-side is now only about 12" of mercury (this is how we measure vacuum in the USA) instead of the 27" of mercury vacuum that the old well was doing.

BUT, then, now, I have to re-adjust all the yard-sprinklers  /  irrigation heads since we have so much more water volume and pressure, now, but like everything else in life, there's a trade-off...


on-to-other-things...

Just before we left, Mr. Bill was 'struggling' with some welding and air-compressor problems and while at the welding shop, the welding-guy introduced me to someone who sold me a used air-tank for $50, which isn't / wasn't bad, considering the cost of a new one in this size-range is about $350-$500 (plus shipping (which would be about $100)...

airtank small  <= click for larger image

So - I brought this one home, and discovered that someone had broken-off the drain-pipe in the fitting, but with a little labour, the gas-welding torch and so-on, I was able to repair that and now have a fairly serviceable 80 gallon air-tank (with two safety valves and such).  I still need to re-position it in the shade and finish piping up the system and putting further  (water) drains in the piping system and such but we're making significant progress with all this, some day soon my shop will be REALLY SERVICEABLE!


Trees-gardens-and recovery from the hurricanes...

We had a couple of "sand pines" that we thought we could 'recover' after the hurricane.  But our 'county forester' (a State employee that had come to Bill's awareness through his training with the state forestry people) came to visit & review our two 'marginal' trees yesterday - just coincidentally, after we returned from the airport / Vancouver trip.  Ms. May met with him and he assured her these trees were a 'loss' / 'dead'...  So - I guess there's more work in store, chopping them up (again, thank goodness for the invention of the chain-saw!) -
Ms. May decided Mr. Bill was eating too many (expensive, Claussen pickles) so we whipped-out our 'refrigerator' pickles recipe, and made some of our own - pickle chips (on the left) and pickle spears (on the right) we're still 12 hours away from testing them, - they're supposed to sit in the fridge for 24 hours before you eat them, - we may not be able to wait...



(this is actually an 8 March picture - so if we do a "March 2005" web-page - you may find the same picture there, too?)
Here's a 'section' of the web-site that I've never done before, this is a "(mostly) useful Web-Links" section. It will be, as you might guess, 'mostly' a collection to computer-related and / or technology / tool related sites, but you might benefit from just a 'brief run-through' of them, see what you think!

IF any of these links you try don't work - please let me know.   E-mail to Bill

And - our 'last-gasp' - something to end-on... We've finally come to an agreement on what to do with some of our excess funds from recent investment successes, so we decided the southwest coast of Florida (Sanibel Island) was a good place to invest.   If you're interested in sharing in our one-bedroom, sea-view, high-rise, condo, please let us know.  View here.
last updated:  Tuesday morning,  08 March 2005  @ 08:20 edt-usa