Sunday Meanderings for the Terminally Insane

It must be Sunday - it seems that every Sunday the blogger interface drops the top menu bar and reverts to a font calculated to make me blinder than I already am. But I am fooling the gremlins of software! I can type blind just as badly as the next person.

Today was one of those days that the thermometer says one thing, but the body says another. The thermometer said 40, but the wind chill said 10. Needless to say, walking into the breeze during the stroll Molly, L, and I took in the park early in the afternoon was a biting experience. According to the friendly (but seldom correct) weather people, the next week is supposed to be cool to cold out here on the plains. In a rarity, it is supposed to be cooler out here that in the foothills and Denver. Sometimes we get all the luck. Still no snow or other moisture out here either.

After our walk, I played car repairman on L's vehicle. Her windshield washer had stopped spraying. Given that she is up in the mountains with all the snow up there, it is important that the washer work. Colorado uses magnesium chloride in place of salt as a deicer on the roads, which is ecologically friendly, but leaves a slush that is about like light crude oil in color and viscosity. Thus, whenever a truck runs by, you need to have working washers or be prepared to drive blind. Back to the topic at hand, taking the molding plastic off and un-kinking the hose fixed it all. Evidently it got kinked when they removed and replaced it to put in the new windshield this summer and it had finally closed off under the heat-cold cycle of winter. Routed it through the groves in the molding as designed and all should now work fine. I will undoubtedly hear about it if it doesn't.

Other than that, I have been battling a sinus headache all day. That alone makes me think that the aforementioned weather people might have it right. Big changes in air pressure and I can almost guarantee my sinuses are going to hurt. There must be somewhere where the air pressure is constant year round.

(I must have gotten to them with all my typos - the blogger interface just popped back to normal and the font is big enough for me to actually see. Just goes to show that even software programs can only take so much!)

I got a chance to test some of my home-brew software in the thrown together PVR today. You remember it was my current obsession as discussed here . So I used it to record the play-off games today with my automatic ad removal engine in running in real time. It only crashed and burned a couple of times, so it is getting closer to being usable. Still needs a lot of code cleaning and optimizing since it can pull a machine with dual 3GHz processors right down to it's knees, utilizing both CPU cores to 100% for periods. (Are you bored enough with this techno babble yet?) Here's a picture of the system in operation as I compose this post with the game playback marked in red.

L got headed off back to the mountains earlier in the evening, so Molly is lying in her bed moping. Molly will mope for about 16 hours, then return to her normal bouncy self. The only hope of early recovery is the sighting of a squirrel in the yard. It's amazing how dogs are observant enough to sense when one they love is getting ready to leave. Within an hour or so of L's planned departure, Molly starts laying on the floor at L's feet and watching L with sadness in her eyes. Then she gravitates to the garage door and watches as the people go back and forth. Then, when L leaves, she immediately heads to her bed and lays there, looking like the world has come to an end. So I leave you with this picture of Molly moping in her laundry room bed.