Author: bob

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Photo Blort!

Friends,

Here’s the reason why I ventured outside on Tuesday morning…

Steamy!

The snow caught in the tree bark was catching the sun and was turning to steam. Click on the picture to see a larger version.

Of course, there was a little danger involved…

Icicle danger!

Not the ice daggers above, but the icy walkway below. Here’s a shot from immediately after I checked whatever hip padding I may or may not have…

Wuh?

Thank goodness my cellphone cushioned my fall. [btw, the replacement refurb is much better than the old one] Also by the way, I now wear stretchy tire chains on my shoes whenever I venture downstairs. They’re brilliant and you should try them. Highly (and also muchly) recommended.

And lastly, this is the project I’ve been working on lately. Yes dear friends, it’s a door. Some people had said during the last Christmas season that gift cards are lousy gifts. I beg to differ. Home Depot gift cards are always welcome around here…

Compartmentalize me.

Yeah, the stain isn’t quite right but wait for the tannins from the wood to work and start turning the wood yellow with age. Give it half a year. Heck, I’ve got the time.

Your pal,

bob

UPDATE: Howdy socalmountains.com forum folks. Please drop a line in the comments to let everyone know who you are. Thanks for stopping by!

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From Our Secret Alpine Laboratory…

Friends,

You know how when water gets really cold it enters a solid state? And how it becomes very slippery after that state change? It’s going to be very exciting to go down the driveway…

What goes up...

…like a chute for flying across the street into my neighbor’s living room.

Another fine picture

This might have to be a Christmas card. Thoughts?

– bob

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Freakish Geek Nonsense Alert! – Webclip Icons

Friends,

Now that you have an iPhone or iPod Touch, you must know that you can save bookmarks to favorite websites on your home screen (or another of nine screens, but that’s for another day). I’ve added new webclip icons to the famous bobtherieau.com site for your amusement. Just cruise to the page on your iPhone and hit the plus sign at the bottom of the screen. You’ll be asked what to do, so just click “Add to Home Page.” Glossy finish, rounded corners, it looks swell.

And for the rest of you, KCRW is giving away an iPod Touch every hour or so during their pledge drive this week. Donate to the station and get a chance to win! You know you love them. Give them money.

– bob

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Weather Alert!

From the paper of record:

The weather is so unpredictable.

“It is clam adn cloudy this morning. Today is predicted to be cloudy with highs in the low 40s. Tonight is predicted to be cloudy with a slight chance of showers and lows in the low 30s.”

It’s getting so you can hardly keep track of the weather around here, you know?

Your pal,

bob

UPDATE: You knew it had to happen. Based on a suggestion from K8 and a concept stolen borrowed from The Beachwood Reporter, we’re inaugurating The Idyllwild Weather Clam. It’ll be easier to update once I figure out some tricky code, but it’s straight text courtesy of Mr. and Mrs. Internet at the moment. Enjoy!

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A Little Late For Work

Friends,

I’d love to be a weatherman, as would you. While you’re working on your mission-critical widgets, wouldn’t you love to be wrong all the time and keep your job? Blatantly wrong. All of the weather widgets I check, from Yahoo! to The Weather Channel to Accuweather (tee hee) missed the snow this morning. Each one of them.

There was snow, ice, fog, and some windy wind thrown in for maximum fun this morning. In the Midwest and East, they see that and scoff. In Southern California, we flip our cars over with something that must amount to glee. I saw one this morning that I reported to the rescue personnel in person since the mobile phones weren’t working. I woke the firemen up, and friends, please feel free to throw away your Hot Firefighter Every Month calendars. There’s not a lot of glamour in half-asleep firemen pulling up their pants asking you if you know whether the driver is dead at 6:30 in the morning.

You’d have thought that the word would’ve got out by this afternoon, but nobody told the Volvo driver at the Keen Camp Summit. He seemed okay and was clambering out of a window with his briefcase when I drove by. A dozen spectators and helpful citizens were on his side of the road. Two underdressed and shivering families from the valley were conducting snowball fights on the other side. I dunno, a little callous?

By the way, Accuweather now says it’ll snow tomorrow. Good catch!

– bob

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U.S. of China – Puttin’ On The Feedbag

Friends,

Now that you’re restricted from reading this lovely mess by say, Websense, fire up your feedreaders and point them here: http://feeds.feedburner.com/ajauntylittleblog. Let’s see if Mao’s Little Helper has stopped that.

Mouse to Cat—check.

– bob

UPDATE: (sounds like you’re striking back against the “crushing of dissent.” are you actually dissenting? -ed The truth is like a bouquet of flowers that smell bad! What’s the worry?)

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Monster Jamb

Friends,

My nephew and his staff invited me to America’s Finest Okay Joyless Awful Substandard** City to be his guest at a brazen display of carefully choreographed vehicular nuttiness. I’m referring, of course, to monster trucks.

We've arrived.

The circuit that the unnaturally huge truck owners belong to is well defined. The trucks themselves are brands since you can’t mention the series without Grave Digger popping up. If you haven’t perused the Hot Wheels aisle at Target in a while, you’ve surely missed the madness. Bad night for the guy running—at Qualcomm Stadium at Jack Murphy Field (barf) on the eve of the AFC Championship game in Foxboro—the truck called The Patriot.

When being a patriot is a bad thing.

You’ve never heard such booing. Even after the perky announcer guy implored the crowd to give the guy a break. “He’s from Santa Cruz…” Boo! “He’s a California boy…” Boo! “C’mon people…” Boo!

Chargers fans, it seems, are not the most discriminating bunch.

It turns out that the intermediary bits, the semi-final race heats, are deadly dull for even the six-year old demographic:

When do they jump again?

Things started picking up later during the “freestyle” event. Ninety seconds to crush as many cars and jump as high as possible for each truck.

Okay, this is more like it.

But after we’d seen a contender set his truck on fire, it was time to go. Good thing, too. It was after ten, my host was sleepy, and we’d seen all we needed to see. Rollovers, crashes, fire, jumps, we’d taken in that, hot dogs, and all the exhaust fumes we could stand.

Good times.

– bob

P.S. Remember Jose Jimenez, the comedy persona of Bill Dana, who was popular in clubs and on teevee in the 60s? I guess you’d have to be over 40 to recall this stuff, but who in the Chargers P.R. office has this much of a tin ear?

Don't touch that! It's J.B!

Here’s a piece of his TV Engineer bit to help explain what’s going on here. Even he gave up the bit for its perceived racism. Three decades ago.

** SUNDAY UPDATE: Las Chargitas lost to the Patriots this afternoon. Apparently the booing didn’t work.

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United States of China

Friends,

This site is now blocked by Websense at San Diego’s Omnipresent Charitable Organization. Actually, all sites hosted on the blogspot.com domain have been silenced. Other “social networking and personal journaling” sites have been disappeared as well. TypePad sites are among them, but there are a couple that missed the axe for now. I won’t name them and give the thugs ideas, though.

It’s disconcerting of course, but I worry about the greater message. Alternative and private opinion isn’t welcome at a place that some might consider progressive, and that’s a choice made by some anonymous individual. Was it us? Was it a Websense update that just automatically installed (which is likely since it happened on the 15th)? Was it an executive decision made to enforce parity with our ban on Facebook and MySpace? And this—will it make the place happier and more productive?

I’m not happy, if that’s any indication.

By the way, you can send this URL to yourself and give it a try: http://tinyurl.com/39fjs9 It’s a TinyURL for the giant link to this site through the YouHide proxy server. Here’s another one: http://tinyurl.com/26vbdk from SurfUnblocked. The nice thing about this one is that the advertising banner doesn’t seem to be that overwhelming. Proxy servers. Geez, it’s come to this.

Your pal,

bob

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Genius! – Microsoft Edition

Friends,

If there was ever an example to prove that I don’t know what I’m doing down at the Festival of Dirt, this is it. It’s complicated, so bear with me here…

There’s a fairly problematic machine in the mix down there. My predecessors had tried all sorts of idiotic tricks to make various flaky software packages work. Undocumented. Unauthorized. Non-standard reaching for marginal functionality. Workarounds are the norm for anyone who uses that machine, but the bill finally came due today. I had even implemented some of those insane fixes. Internet Explorer 7 stopped working, so I installed Firefox and let it go. The big problem is that some of our internal software now requires IE. Time to finally make it work.

  • Having uninstalled balky IE, I now needed to reinstall.
  • Use Firefox to download a new version of IE and run the installer.
  • Reboot.
  • IE 7 won’t run.
  • Check the DLLs. They’re set to load the Dependency Checker instead of registering themselves. Fix that. Still won’t run.
  • Reboot.
  • IE 7 still won’t run. Use Firefox again to download IE 6. Run installer. Error message says “setup has detected a newer version and will quit.”
  • Uninstall IE 7 and restart.
  • Run IE 6 installer again. “Processes requiring a restart have not completed. Installer will quit.”
  • Reboot.
  • Run IE 6 installer again, and again error message says “setup has detected a newer version and will quit.” Wha?
  • Check Start menu and notice that IE 7 is listed as the default web browser. What are the odds? Click on IE 7 and it runs. It runs!

In a nutshell, I uninstalled a piece of software, which then appeared and ran properly. What? Are you kidding me?

Absurd Microsoft shenanigans? Alright super genius Windows dudes, what happened here? Cripes!

– bob

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Storm Of The Century Of The Moment! – Media Watch

Friends,

Yeah, it’s been raining and stuff. Big Pacific storm. Whatever. The Idyllwild Town Crier website has a breaking news alert describing our dire situation. Better copy it here before the editors over there take it down…

Breaking News
Saturday, 6:46 a.m.

Anything that can leak, will leak.

Any mud that can slide, will slide.

Any flood that can flood, will flood.

At 6:46 a.m. Saturday in Idyllwild it is pouring rain, and it has been raining all night. If this isn’t the storm of the century it is at least the storm of the year.

It is pouring rain so hard that it sounds like two storms. One storm is pummeling the land in a steady downpour, while the other storm dumps heavier batches just to break up the monotony.

It is like listening to methamphetamine-crazed drummers wailing on snare drums, bongos, tom-toms, and garbage can lids all at the same time, with feeling.

In a nutshell, here’s the National Weather Service forecast for the Riverside County moutains:

Flash flood watch through Saturday afternoon.
Heavy snow warning above 6,000 feet through Sunday evening.
Wind advisory through Sunday night.
Dense fog advisory until 2 p.m. today.

For more information, click below:

National Weather Service report
Riverside County Mountains
http://weather.noaa.gov/cgi-bin/iwszone?Sites=:caz056

Cal Trans Road Conditions
http://www.dot.ca.gov/cgi-bin/roads.cgi

Uh oh. A meth reference? Drummers? Somebody let the interns update the corporate site. BTW, “any flood that can flood, will flood?” What’s going on there? The Rule of Threes really didn’t play out so well, did it?

Oh dear.

– bob

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404 – Friday Not Found

Friends,

Remember how my siblings had been so generous over the Christmas holiday with their maladies? Well, I’ve got it too. Thanks!

I took a nap when I got home yesterday and woke up this morning at 4:04. The most graphic detail about this flavor of fluey fun is that when I did wake up, I couldn’t actually see the clock at first since my head was stuck to the pillow. Yeah, that kind of stuck.

bluh.

– bob

P.S. Oh yeah, Obama and Huckabee won in Iowa last night. Do we care? Let’s ask President Gephardt!

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happy new year.

Friends,

We made it. If 2006 was a truly stinkeroo year for reasons that might be best left to a splash into the archives, doesn’t it seem that 2007 was merely a “transition” year? Some of us transitioned more than the others though. I gained an impossibly adorable niece, ended an abhorrent and downright smelly habit, didn’t get a new job, and managed to annoy my vivacious writing partner enough to make her move to another state (not even a neighboring state. what the hell did you do, champ? -ed)

Oh!Yeah, that little Inez is awfully cute. This is from Christmas, where her handlers were sick. My nephew and his driver were also unwell. Now I hear that Dad has graciously accepted their gift of goo. Generous!

What about that smelly habit? Yeah, I’ve decided to quit smoking after a two and a half decade career supporting America’s proud family tobacco farmers. They’ll be sad even after hearing the real reason why I made the decision. It wasn’t because of the hectoring (although there was plenty of that). It wasn’t even because I’m a cheapskate and holy crap, have you priced a pack lately? No, it’s actually an anti-government move (yeah, huge. our institutions should start crumbling any minute. – ed. The scoundrels in office haven’t learned that they can’t count on cigarette taxes as a reliable source of income for their pet projects. Surely they’ll try to score political points by claiming that their taxation has achieved their aims of forcing more people to quit. “It’s a win for public health!” they’ll gloat. I’ll believe that on a cold day in a Kaiser waiting room, thankyouverymuch. So no more cigarette tax revenue from me.

To answer your questions ahead of time, I’ve tried to quit before and was unsuccessful. I’m angrier about it now though. Oh, yeah. I’ve got a hell of a headache.

As far as the job search goes, as little said about it as possible is better. How depressing is it? I made similar money (maybe more when adjusted for inflation) two and a half decades ago. Hey! Isn’t that when…

Once the nicotine withdrawals subside, I think I’ll be better able to get down the business of business. Stuff’s going on here at Jaunty Central too that’ll be unveiled very soon. Too soon for some!

I hope you’re enjoying your new year so far. We’re gonna have a bunch of fun, okay?

Your pal,

– bob

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Try To Find The Worrisome Bits Hidden Here

Mes Amis,

French President Nicolas Sarkozy is on holiday in Egypt with his new girlfriend, former supermodel Marienne Neverheardofher after a very public (and very quick) divorce. While he’s been away from the Continent, this sort of thing has been going on…

Our allies in the War On Orange Juice™. (you didn’t mention this, but rudy’s polling well in florida. coincidence? -ed Not really.)

– bob