Category: Activities

Long kayak trip

I went kayaking this afternoon. It was quite a long trip because I had nobody with me to make sure I didn’t do something stupid. The Google Maps Pedometer (sometimes you have to fiddle with it to get it to show my course line) shows I went 5.7 miles.

It wasn’t the most exciting trip I’ve ever taken, but the creek was sure different after the Katrina-spawned rain we got a few days ago. Not a lot higher, but way, way faster. Going up stream, there were places where I was paddling as hard as I could and barely making any progress at all. Lots of people on the river today because of the great weather and the Labour Day holiday. When I got into the bit upstream of Browncroft Boulevard, the bit I’ve never been to before, there were a lot of people in the park, most of them throwing sticks and balls into the river for their dogs to retrieve. Luckily none of them mistook me for a stick. One person did annoy me by throwing the ball right to the opposite side of the creek just as I got there, meaning that both I and the dog had to take evasive action to avoid hitting each other.
On the way back, I stopped to take some pictures of a couple of swans that were preening and feeding. One of them did a big display, unfortunately I paniced a bit because I thought he was going to come after me, and didn’t get the picture.
 
Later on, I met another couple of swans, one of whom had a neck tag. Man, those things must suck to carry around.

By all means, Paul, fsck with the hard drives

This morning, as Vicki was about to leave for work, she dumped her laptop on me, saying it wasn’t booting. It was stuck on a blue boot screen, with nothing much happening. So I did a three finger salute and forced a reboot, and it went to the OpenDarwin login prompt. I put in her userid and password, and it said “Invalid login” and started doing a normal graphical boot. Then it popped up a warning about something wrong with the Tablet driver (which is odd, because we don’t have a Tablet). I acknowledged the warning, and it booted some more, and then it went back to the OpenDarwin login prompt. After a few attempts at different userids and passwords, I remembered how to boot these guys into single user mode (splat+s).

In single user mode, it gave me an error with replaying the journal. So I did an “fsck -fy”, and after it said it finished fixing everything, it sort of hung again. So I did another boot into single user mode and another “fsck -fy” and it didn’t find anything wrong, so I booted it normally and it came up fine.

So I pulled out the external firewire drive and copied her entire /Users/vjrnts directory over to it. Good thing it’s still under AppleCare.

Not a bad day, overall

Half of our group was off playing golf on company time, so the rest of us figured we deserved a break too and went to Hooters for lunch. Last time I was at one of them was coming back from Oshkosh 2003 when I got weathered in at Muskegeon. Nothing’s changed, except the age dispartity between me and the hot young waitresses is now a few years greater.

I managed to get to UPS to pick up our new iPod Shuffle, but of course being Apple they had to do something wrong and they left out the cable to connect it to our stereo. At least I’ll have something to listen to at work until my new photo iPod comes.

Also, I finally got the FedEx shipping information so I could ship my broken iPod back, so I got to the FedEx Kinkos store and got that shipped off.

And then when I got home with the Shuffle, I find two packages, one my hotly anticipated copy of Bone Wars, the Game of Ruthless Palentology from Zygote Games, and the other my slightly but lightly used new camera, a Nikon Coolpix 8800. Unfortunately it was already nearly dark by the time I got it unpacked and the battery charged, so I didn’t get any pictures to show off yet. But it’s a very nice camera.

More kayaking pictures

Here are some pictures from last weekend’s kayaking.

kayaking/DSCN2129Vicki gets sideways.
kayaking/DSCN2131Traffic jam!
kayaking/DSCN2133

Nothing too artistic or cool, but I like them. It was a beatiful day, but unfortunately the river was quite low because of the lack of rain, and the weir was 95% blocked by a gigantic tree – I probably could have pulled myself through the gap, but I didn’t have any confidence in Vicki’s ability to do the same so we turned back instead.

iPod Number 6 Progress

I spend a lot of time with an Apple support today. He wanted me to go through all the steps with the iPod Updater and iTunes that I’d already been through last night. All the time I kept whining about how many times I’ve gotten dud iPods in the past, and what an inconvenience it was. Finally, after exhausting all the other options, he said “I’m going to transfer you to another iPod specialist”. Oh, great, I thought, another hour going through all the same stuff. Instead I was on hold for 20 minutes or more, and the new guy finally came on he asked me for the dispatch numbers for all my previous iPod repairs. (Once again Apple proves itself incapable of looking up the information in their own damn database – idiots.) Anyway, he tells me that they’re going to give me a new Photo iPod! Score one for the power of positive whining. So I said “well, as long as you’re going to give me a new one, can I pay the difference in price and get a 60 gig one?” And he said “Sure”. And so evidently I’m goin got get a brand new top of the line 60 gig iPod.

Woo hoo!