Bill's Ramblings...

We land in Sydney Tuesday (March 6th) and after a layover of fewer than two hours, we fly to Cairns in Queensland (red line). We stay in Cairns until Saturday the 10th when we fly back to Sydney. We stay in Sydney until Tuesday morning, March 13th. At that time we board the Volendam, our Holland-America ship and home for the next two weeks. The yellow line shows our course to New Zealand and how we work our way up the east coast of New Zealand, ending on March 27th. One night in Auckland and on Wednesday, the 28th, we fly to Los Angeles and then onto Atlanta. We get in on the evening of the 28th, get our car, and drive a bit north of Atlanta where we will spend the night before we continue on to Lynchburg on Thursday, the 29th. Whew! I'm tired already, but very exciting as this will be our most adventurous trip to date!

Back driveway is GONE!! They finished tearing up the asphalt that was the back driveway in front of garage today and it looks quite different, to say the least! We still need to do some clean up although they got up most of the asphalt pieces, roots, and the likes. We also need about three loads of dirt to bring the level up to the curb by step-down to back yard and in front of garage. Once we have that and it has some time to settle, we will seed it and, hopefully, by late fall have a full stand of grass before winter sets in. Once we have the fill dirt, though, we will start planning how we will landscape this new yard area. We will move the garage doors back into the garage to make the front space of the garage like an outside eating area. Very exciting!

Whew! Finally I have a clean desk to work on! Thanks to our friend, Bob Milanovich, and his incredible array of wood-working tools, not to mention vast experience with using them, "we" built a custom shelf unit for my retirement "office." I say "we" in quotes because though I drew up the detailed plans for what I wanted so that my laptop would fit in a space under where the monitor sits and so that I would have spaces for other things I like to have on my desk, Bob, for the most part, manipulated the tools. He taught me a lot and I did do some of the cutting, but he handled the router and other more intricate cutting tools to turn my simple design into a true piece of furniture!

I had planned to paint the unit gray to match the walls in the room, but my wife and I like the look of the finished wood so much, I think I will just leave it natural. After countersinking the nails, filling holes with wood putty, and sanding it all off, I had to try it out! Of course, I will soon have to take it down and either paint it or shellac it to protect the wood. However, in the meantime I am enjoying the clean desk top and having a place to put my "stuff!"

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This_what_retirement_looks_lik.zip (5.19 MB)

So, this is what my first "work day" in retirement looked like today! Actually, this all began last Saturday morning when I was made aware that the retired extension manager for our area had written in the paper that now was the time to cut back azaleas to around 12" to improve their growth for next year. Image in upper left panel was the fruits of my labor (and my wife's) from Saturday and Monday. This morning I got smart and remembered I had electric clippers that made the initial "slice" through our incredibly large azalea bushes much easier. Where was my brain on Saturday?! Our curb is lined with cuttings in wait for the City of Lynchburg crew to do a pick up. The area between our house and our neighbors looks awfully bare but understandably so since this is the first time we have cut these bushes back in 7 or 5 years!! Yikes!

Second image shows the blossoming azaleas and Dogwood trees this past April. Can't wait to see what it looks like next April!

First the good news: the stove and hood I bought a week or so ago was delivered yesterday on time, in fact, early!! Now the bad news: it doesn't fit in the allotted space!! Bummer! Electrician came this morning and put a plug in for me (old stove was a "drop-in" and hard-wired) and was able to install the new stove exhaust hood so it does, in fact, exhaust to the outside (as old one did). 

I knew this was going to be a possible problem yesterday when the Sears guys brought the stove into the kitchen. The space is ALMOST 30" but some of the counter needs to be trimmed back a little. After removing the old unit, we had to cut the counter and the lip at the bottom, etc. and got it pretty close, but there is still a little more that can come off and, of course, my circular saw is at home in Lynchburg! So, that has to wait until I come back up to Charlottesville next Sunday. My only concern now is that the actual space between the cabinets is not going to be wide enough and I will have to remove the tray cabinet to the right. At least, I guess, I'm lucky that that is a possibility and I don't have to cut and reset shelves, etc.

Oh, the joys of an old house!

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Our daughter and her family gave me a 32GB Wi-Fi iPad for Christmas. So, I have now been living with it for over a month now and the verdict is that it is definitely one of the most awesome devices I have ever owned! All the hype when the iPads were introduced back in April....remember, the hype that all the naysayers poo-pooed, well, in my opinion, it was totally justified, the hype, that is, not the poo-pooing. And the comments that "you had to hold one in your hands and use it for a little while." Again, true! It is a difficult device to explain; it really is something you have to experience. The size - the screen is about 9.75" on the diagonal - seems just right. Viewing high quality images on it and even videos is a great experience. It is a wonderful game playing device - when I now use my iPod Touch, it just seems so tiny, still useful, still another awesome device, but, well, tiny. Using Safari or any of the several other web browsers available for the iPad is also a pleasure compared to using a browser on the iPod Touch. I generally avoided using a browser on my Touch, in fact, and that meant I was not really taking full advantage of the iPod Touch's capabilities. The iPad provides me with enough screen real estate so that I actually can enjoy the browsing experience.

The onboard keyboard is, quite surprisingly, very good and easy to use. Despite that and mainly because it does take up a lot of that available screen real estate, I have gotten a small wireless keyboard for my iPad. I opted for the standard wireless keyboard and not the one with the iPad dock because I wanted the flexibility of being able to use the iPad in both portrait AND landscape orientation and the dock keyboard restricts one to only portrait and, again, in my opinion, is a bit bulky. I want to be able to take the iPad on trips and leave my laptop - albeit a small 13" MacBook Pro, thus not one that is heavy or takes up much room - at home. The wireless keyboard (which I am using right now and which allows me to type very normally) makes it, therefore, more practical to actually do real and extensive writing using the iPad. Granted, it is almost as big as the iPad itself and that does add to the "stuff" I need to pack with it, but the two compatible devices complement each other nicely and I CAN use the iPad without the keyboard and, so, only carry one device around when I am not going to be doing that much writing. Bottom line, I feel the keyboard is a good investment for someone who does want to be able to write journal notes, blog posts, lengthy e-mails, and the like while on an extended trip. For my "stand," I purchased a small plastic business card holder from Office Depot for around $2.50!

My other purpose for the iPad while traveling is to serve as one back-up location for all the images I capture with my digital SLR. I shoot in RAW and the iPad will not only accept the RAW formatted image files, but also display them on its beautiful screen, so we can enjoy them before we even get home. To make this possible and since my dSLR camera uses CF ('compact flash') cards, I had to augment the Apple Camera Connection Kit's USB adapter with a powered USB hub so the iPad would recognize my card reader! With the introduction of the IOS upgrade to 4.2, Apple reduced the power output to the connection port and now non-powered card readers are not supported. I couldn't find a powered card reader, so opted for the powered USB hub (a 4-port model from Macally - purchased from Micro Center).

There are a number of photo editing apps available for the iPad. After reading about most of them, I decided to purchase Photogene ($3.99), which got consistently good reviews and has a fairly long track record since it has been available for iPhones and iPod Touches for a few years. It is amazingly full-featured! Another good program, I have found, is the free Photoshop Express app. I will still continue to rely on Aperture for my photo editing back on my laptop, but having these two excellent tools available right on the iPad means I can - if I want to do so - do some editing of selected images that I may want to post to a travel blog while underway.

Every day I seem to discover a new app or new use for my iPad! There are plenty of sites that specialize in telling you about these apps, but let me mention a few I never imagined existed. Air Display ($9.99 - I got it on sale for $0.99! - from Avatron Software) lets you use the iPad as external monitor for your laptop or desktop. Imagine!! Now, this is not a great solution for a permanent external monitor, but if one is on the road with both a laptop and iPad, it does mean that one can use the iPad to display, say, a web page, travel site, recipe while writing about it on the laptop. A practical use. Another app that surprised me is any one of the several good remote desktop controller apps that allow you to connect wirelessly to your desktop (or laptop) computer back in your office or home! Though there are many of these and LogMeIn Ignition ($29.99) gets great reviews, I chose Screens from Edovia, Inc. ($19.99) so that I could access my wife's iMac back home when I am at work 70 miles away and she is experiencing some difficulty printing or trying to accomplish some other task. It is truly a surreal experience to control a desktop computer using your finger on an iPad screen! Most of the available apps will let you control Mac and Windows computers and "Screens" is one of them.

One of the things I was looking forward to with the iPad was the ability to use it as an e-book reader. I have installed the most common e-reader apps, such as Apple's iBooks, Amazon's Kindle, Barnes & Nobles' Nook, Lexcycle's Stanza, and the Google Books app. These apps are all free. In addition, I have installed GoodReader because of the many positive reviews I have read or heard about its ability to open almost any file format, including audio and video! Of the apps intended for book reading, I think I like the Kindle app the most, though I have to admit to not yet having read a complete book on the iPad. We are going on a vacation trip soon and I will, hopefully, be able to give the iPad a good run for its e-book money. The little I have read, however, and though I have not used an actual Kindle e-book reader device myself, I think the form factor of the Kindle device is probably more conducive to pleasure reading on a device; closer to holding a large paperback book.

I still rely on my little iPod Touch, though. Don't get me wrong! It is small and that smallness is what makes it practical. I always have it with me and even though I have pretty much always had my iPad with me since I got it, that won't always be the case. (I don't think. I don't sleep with it, for example.) So, I will continue to count on my iPod Touch to access e-mail, refer to the calendar, and get contact information. It is my game playing "machine" when I am standing in line, waiting for something, or just plain killing time. The iPod Touch and my iPad are a team and I will count on each of them for different things.

I completed the "Sharing Your Digital Images" class for Albemarle County's (Virginia) "Open Doors" community education folks two weeks ago. Generally, I was happy with how we ended and I learned that I had planned to cover way too many things for the participants to do! Though I still think there is a place for some "between classes" online component, that definitely didn't fly with this group! I'm getting it that folks want to come to a class once a week, learn something they can use, and, hopefully, practice (in the case of the things I'm teaching) with what they have learned between classes, but they aren't really interested in doing specific homework or having to participate in online discussions. Some are. Some did get on the threaded discussion board and contribute. I also found - or, at least, have come to the conclusion - that they weren't too keen even about visiting the discussion forum for assignments, though they did, for the most part, do it.