genius – Page 2 – A Jaunty Little Blog

April 9, 2019April 9, 2019

Old Friends: Bad News For The Toshiba

Friends,

It’s been real bad news for les ordinateurs anciens around here lately. For one, I purchased a replacement battery pack from a Florida Man and spliced it into the power system of one of the older machines here—a Toshiba T1000 laptop.

Why get this particular machine running again? The concept is brilliant: A PC-compatible laptop that boots almost instantly to MS-DOS 2.11 and runs for nearly six hours on a charge. The keyboard is a delight to type on, the non-backlit LCD screen crisp and reasonably responsive. It’s got a serial port, a parallel port, a 1.44 MB floppy drive and a 2400-baud modem. It’s still a great writing machine and deserves another shot.

After putting the machine back together, I left it on the charger and went to bed.

11:38 PM: “Honey, it smells like plastic burning in the kitchen.”

I shot up out of bed and padded into the kitchen to take in smells like blown 35-year old capacitors. After disconnecting the power adapter, but ever the optimist, I flicked the power switch to see if despite all of the smells, it would still turn on. No lights, no sounds, all the smells. Placing the machine on the granite countertop, I figure that at least I wouldn’t burn down the dining room table if it burst into flames.

1:35PM: Burning smell getting worse. Noticeable from the bedroom.

Laptop is still warm to the touch and rubber feet are stuck to the counter. Move the poor burnt laptop outside into the barbecue. If things go very badly, at least the flames will be contained. She asks me as I walk back in the kitchen, “Hi honey, what are you up to?” “Oh, nothing,” I lied.

I didn’t have time to take the thing apart this morning, so it had to wait until this afternoon. The damage was much worse than I imagined. Bad capacitors weren’t the problem. The real issue was a bad (or incorrectly wired) battery pack. I connected my red wires to the red wires in the battery pack, but the damage sure looks like a dead short that caused a little bit of fire inside the case…

So the motherboard is burnt. The add-on 2400-baud modem is burnt. The battery carrier and harness is burnt.

It’s beginning to look like the machine can’t be fixed!

Aw, c’mon. You know that’s not true.

Your pal,

– bob

May 20, 2016

An Ungodly Early Hour

Friends,

It’s been six weeks, so I suppose I should finally spill the beans: I decided to take a job off the hill and away from my lovely forest. The decision was easy to make since I was as broke as a joke, but it’s been a tough transition and doesn’t seem to be getting easier.

Waking up at 3:30 every morning is beating me up. I don’t know how people do it. The new coworkers in the new office in the new town at the new job are nice enough, but I’m so sleepy that I don’t feel I’m holding up my end of the bargain. Yeah, you read that right. Three-effing-thirty.

Thankfully, a sweet girl I know has been more than generous in playing along with this absurd schedule shift. She’s been a good sport, but she surely must be growing weary of my alarm going off in the middle of the night.

However, I have a plan…

Your best pal,

– bob

February 1, 2016

We Get Letters!

Friends,

We get a lot of interesting email here at the Secret Alpine Laboratory, and frankly, a lot of the unsolicited email seems a bit off the mark. I’m sure you’ve seen all manner of come-ons from deposed African princes, for herbal remedies and gadgets claiming to cure all sorts of ailments. This note, however, seems to know all about me—based on exhaustive research!

Dear bob@bobtherieau.com,

I am pleased to inform you that based on your professional background, you have been selected to apply for inclusion into the Worldwide Association of Female Professionals. Our research department nominates a handful of potential candidates based on factors such as your current professional standing, recent accomplishments, honors/awards, published articles, as well as information present on authoritative media outlets, social networks, and professional directories. Based on this, I feel that you would make a fitting addition to our elite network of professional women…

What a lovely honor!

Your pal,

– bob

May 21, 2015

Tramway!

Friends,

How do you build a tram system up a steep slope before we invented anti-gravity boots and rock-climbing robots? Helicopters! These “mechanical dragonflies” hauled stuff up the hill to build towers and string cables so that a bunch of guys in the 1960s didn’t have to. This video is 25 minutes of your life that you may, as I do, find fascinating.

Also, the opening set-up shots are worth the time just to see the hotels and businesses that no longer exist—like Bob Hope.

Come for the nostalgia, stay for the crass jokes!

Your pal,

– bob

May 20, 2015

Oh, The Technical Issues You’ll Have!

Friends,

I’ve been working on cleaning up some of the issues around here, but it’s a bit of a slog to go back through ten years of posts to find what’s broken. Here are only a few of the fun things that have gone wrong at your favorite Jaunty Little Blog:

When I moved to the new hosting platform, some of the images didn’t make it over. There are broken links everywhere and I’m going through the archives to return the missing files. It’s a bit of a mess.
Changing to the new template has damaged some of the closing tags for links in the posts. This means that links are just spilling across entire articles instead of ending where the link is supposed to end. I’m not entirely sure why this happened, but I’m going through each post and editing tags. So far, I’ve made it back to 2012.

I’m sure there’s a lot more to do, but I appreciate your patience while I continue to work on restoring some order.

Your pal,

– bob

UPDATE: I’m having a harder time finding old pictures than I thought. It turns out that my naming convention wasn’t as air-tight as I thought. I hope the Wayback Machine can help.

December 10, 2014

Kate.

Friends,

I listen to a lot of podcasts, which is like radio without the antennas or the static. This week’s Roderick On The Line episode discusses minimalism, go-bags, jeans, trendy boots and ends with a reflection on Kates versus Kats versus Kathryns that I’ve snipped for your listening pleasure.

Of course, you should probably listen to the whole thing if you’re not afraid of a couple four-letter words.

Your pal,

– bob

August 20, 2013

Vengeance Of The Dandies

Friends,

Sometimes people can come as close to missing the forest for the trees as one possibly might without being mauled by a bear. We have new neighbors up here in Fern Valley Corners, a grand new addition to the lodging inventory of available beds in town, and I attended their open house last weekend.

Nice folks, and justifiably proud of their vision and the craftsmanship they’ve put in to realize that dream. Last weekend also featured a concert that was attended by the monied class to benefit a local private high school. Once the concert was over, the wine and cheese crew headed over to the open house for free wine and no cheese.

I just walked around the corner and up the grand driveway to the grand entry, but noted that nobody was looking at the building. All cameras were trained on deer grazing on manzanita berries just past the parking circle. A magnificent bit of nature nearly close enough to touch. Breathtaking.

But one polo shirted, tennis shorted, sexagenarian in the group decided that this reasonably rare collision between the wild and the wide-eyed was boring. He walked up to the deer, then turned on his heels to check out the blue Jaguar.

Jaded? Maybe a little!

Your pal,

– bob

August 6, 2013

Wait! Come back!

A lovely centered picture of a girly dog spying something very interesting and smelly.

Friends,

I’ve hit my head very hard this evening on the kitchen cabinetry and I’ve surely earned a concussion for the effort. There’s every reason to believe that I’ll be fine, but I’m a little worried that the dizziness and confusion I’m experiencing at the moment signal something much more than a little bump on the noggin.

But that’s boring, so let’s get on with a little housekeeping!

Since I last uploaded something here over a month ago, we’ve had two fire scares. One that prompted the mobilization of over three thousand men and women to beat down the furious blaze that eventually consumed over 27,000 acres, and a smaller one today that was put out fairly quickly through our own corps and the quick attention of neighbors in Fern Valley. In the words of internationally noted photographer Jenny Kirchner on Facebook, “Yard abatement is important.” Indeed it is.

I don’t really have a headache exactly. Truth is, my head feels mostly okay. There’s going to be a bump for sure, but the biggest worry is that I don’t really have a good idea where I am right now. Well, never mind that. On with it…

During the Mountain Fire, I evacuated myself, papers, photographs, and Mme. Puppy Dog to the desert. From our emergency evacuation center in Cathedral City (whose city council has never met a boondoggle it wouldn’t agree to fund in full), we could watch the flames charging along the ridge towards the Palm Springs Aerial Tramway’s Mountain Station. Horrifying. I took pictures, but they’re kind of terrible camera phone shots not worth posting. This one is nicer.

Let’s see, what else happened? I got a new boss at the Far Eastern Outpost of a charity from out west somewhere in a city with a mayor. You know, that mayor. Mayor Headlock, they’re calling him. “Mayor Fingers” is creepier, so I’ll stick with that, since all signs point to him being really creepy.

Sorry, a little confused at the moment. I should get back on topic. Crickets are interesting, aren’t they? 78 degrees in the house, shouldn’t be sweating. Sweating might be bad.

I started installing a new french door on the weekend before guests were to arrive a couple weekends ago. Here’s a tip, all of the locksets you can buy at the hardware store have a defined offset. The offset is the distance between the edge of the door and the center of the lock and most are between 2 3/8 and 2 5/8-inches. You can get shorter deadbolts if you trim down the side of your door to be a lot narrower, but they’re blindingly expensive. You are hereby warned.

Very sleepy all of the sudden. Goodnight everyone.

Your pal,

– bob

May 1, 2013

Super. Market.

Friends,

I went to a supermarket yesterday to stock up on a couple things, like a loaf of bread and a package of giant tortillas. I also picked up a package of seasoned soy stuff to toss into a burrito and a box of unsweetened almond milk, which is nice in a bowl of cereal, but not much else that I’m aware of.

The light was on above an empty checkstand, but an impossibly thin girl in her 20s with a blotchy grayish-greenish-brownish complexion wearing a sweater (108° outside, btw) shuffled into position to run the register. Then, in an apparent rush to get through her lines, she spoke:

hello how are you doing today thank you for shopping at [market] did you find everything you were looking for?

“Um, sure. I think I found everything okay. How are you today?”

i’m fine thanks for asking.

She then started noticing, about halfway through scanning my items, exactly what she was scanning…

oh you don’t eat meat? seriously? i like meat. i like it a lot. like steaks. like a rib eye steak. they’re really good.

“No,” I replied. “I don’t eat meat.”

not at all? because meat’s really good. i like it.

“Nope. Not at all. Well anyway, I hope you have a good day.”

do you have a [market] club card?

We all play our parts.

– bob

November 26, 2012

Seven Seconds of Fame

Friends,

I was challenged at a meeting a couple weeks ago by the idea that I didn’t have a lot of experience with the media. Still don’t, but I took on the spokesman duties for a little event put on by the Far Eastern outpost of San Diego’s Omnipresent Charitable Organization. Didn’t get a mention in the lower third in the video package above, but neither did the county supervisor who wrote a big check, so I’m not too disturbed by the snub.

With this appearance, I’ve been in a few minutes of teevee interviews and seven seconds or so of airtime. Total. Ever. Okay, there was that time sitting in the audience at Bozo’s Circus in the old KMIR studios…

Your pal,

– bob

November 16, 2012

The Early Bird Special

A lovely centered picture of a sextagenarian at his job.

Friends,

This is the time of year when our monied elders come out from their summer hiding places in Idaho and Canada and migrate to the Coachella Valley. Actually, the annual migration may serve to empower some who never left the desert. People in the service sector aren’t happy, like the checkers at the upscale supermarket I stopped at yesterday…

A woman who looked like Iggy Pop if he’d stopped working out decided that she’d let everybody in the checkout line wait while she took off to pick out flowers. Her food purchase was pending in the register, so everyone in the queue surely wouldn’t mind waiting out her pokey and painfully deliberative decision-making process. Once she picked her poinsettia, Princess Jerky Treat shoved me aside to figure out how to work the payment terminal.

The checkout clerks looked at me and offered a wan smile and a little shrug that told me all I needed to know—”Sorry about that, but we’ve got to deal with these fragile monsters for the next four months.”

Rich, entitled, poor spacial awareness. I feel for the service industry. They’re gonna hear “be a dear” and will have to comp a lot of soup and breadsticks through March.

Keep a kind thought in your hearts for the poor kids down there who can’t get a job writing reverse mortgages, won’t you?

Your pal,

– bob

November 5, 2012

The Jeep Election

Friends,

This may be the second election in United States history decided by Jeeps. Let that sink in for a second.

If America’s foremost mink hubcap salesman hadn’t flubbed a news story about Jeep expanding back into China rather than saying at a rally in OHIO that Jeep was moving production to China, the state of the race would be very different. Partisans can talk about all of the other ways external forces have sabotaged his campaign, but this was an unforced error. In fact, it was the result of a lack of basic reading comprehension.

Shouldn’t that disqualify you from the presidency all by itself?

I’ll be up all night tomorrow hoping to find out…

Your best pal in the whole wide world,

– bob

September 24, 2012

I’ve Got A Headache

A lovely centered picture of a rollercoaster.

Friends,

I really will get back to the science and the future and whatnot, but please allow a moment for this public service announcement:

When you go to Knott’s Berry Farm to have a lot of fun with people whose company you enjoy and you’d like to not be a wet blanket, I strongly recommend that you not ride the Boomerang. It will beat your brains out. First, I’m too tall and didn’t fit in the seat. Second, because I didn’t fit, I had to sit up too high which moved my head above the cushions on the restraint hoop. Third, riders pull 5.2 g^* going forward AND in reverse. Fourth, I have an ungainly and too large head with not enough strength in my neck to keep this melon from bouncing around at 5.2 g. Fifth, this really isn’t anybody’s fault but my own.

Also, I had something to write here, but I can remember what it might’ve been.

Your pal,

– bob

^* The unit of measure for g-force is styled with a lowercase g. Uppercase G is for the gravitational constant. You’re welcome!