The Random Thoughts Review

For a complete collection of pictures, visit http://pics.omnux.com/Missouri-MannheimSteamroller2006Tour

Last year (2005), just a couple of days before Christmas, some college friends and myself went to a Trans Siberian Orchestra concert in St. Louis. This year, we decided to go to see Mannheim Steamroller (hereafter known as MS). The MS concert was December 3, 2006 at 7pm in the evening. Brian got the tickets back in early October when they first went on sale to the general public. They ended up being about $56 apiece with all the cuts that the ticket places get.
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In case you were wondering whether or not the situation at work is serious…. Ya, it is.

Today we got letters of non-reappointment that we had to acknowledge receipt of. Basically, they say that we are out of a job as of July 31st, 2007. Fun stuff.

So, ya.. a lot is riding upon us getting a grant from NIH. I feel that the group does good work. Hopefully others will agree.

“non”reappointment letter follows:

Each year, I try to make it until about Halloween before I turn on the furnace. This year, we had one of the coldest Octobers on record. As luck would have it, I still managed to make it past Halloween before using the furnace.

Around October 20th, I got really sick. And it got pretty cold outside. I wanted to have it nice and cozy warm inside, so I decided to turn on the furnace. I set the thermostat to “heat” and turned it up so that the furnace would kick on. The draft inducer motor kicked on and I went about my business. A few minutes later I noticed that the main blower still hadn’t kicked on. Further testing revealed that the draft inducer was kicking on, but I wasn’t hearing the “sparking” noise that the pilot ignition normally makes, the pilot wasn’t getting lit, and I wasn’t getting any heat. The furnace is down in my crawl space, and I wasn’t in the mood to crawl around under the house at the time, so I got out my little portable Titan heater and used it to get me through the sick spell.
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I’m having problems with roots in my main sewer line. I’m planning to rent an auger to chop them up sometime later this week. This isn’t the first time I’ve had problems. A few years back they caused me some grief as well. Some people were asking about that, so I decided to put this writeup on the blog so that others can read and be amused by it. I certainly wasn’t amused at the time, so hopefully it can give others some joy. This occurred in May of 2002. I was working on some other projects at the time as well, so bear with me. The amusing stuff will happen if you keep reading.

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Hey hey.. Well.. It’s been an interesting weekend.. Mostly negative, but a positive thrown in here and there just for grins..

All my stuff got delivered last wednesday night for the privacy fence that I’m putting around the backyard. I now have a garage full of lumber, etc. I’m estimating about 3 tons or so of stuff. I
could be off by a little bit, though. I’ve got over a ton of concrete and rock, though, so I don’t think I’m off by much.
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If you’ve been following my journey for the past year or so, you know that I’ve been looking for a truck camper for quite a while. (See this, this, this, this, and this)

I’ve posted about the various truck campers that I’ve seen on eBay, but they just never worked out to my satisfaction. Usually, they were too expensive. Truck campers that fit a small truck are rare. In the past year, I’d estimate that 10-15 have shown up on eBay. There are a LOT of truck campers that fit full size pickups, but ones that will fit a small truck are rare.

A couple of weeks ago, a popup truck camper showed up on eBay. The basic description was:

This is a decent older camper of unknown manufacture. It is a commercially made camper with a seal from a RV camper’s association seal. My guess is it was made in the 80s or early 90s. The camper has a fridge, 3 burner cook top, furnace, power converter, small water tank and sink with hand pump. I bought this camper about four years ago intending on using it in my retirement but my plans have changed. The camper has been in a boat storage facility and I have never used it. I did hook it up to an electrical outlet and the lights and fridge worked. The gas tank is the old type and needs replacing. I have never used the gas appliances or water pump. The previous owner told me the fridge (3-way) was new the year I bought it.

The upper bed is about the size of a single and not large enough for two full size adults (unless you like to cuddle.) The lower bench slides out to make a bed. There is a table that is stored under the upper bed.

A few of the screens have small to moderate size holes in them. The clear plastic windows are fine (some slight clouding) as are all the vinyl sides and zippers. No smoke or pet smells.

The bottom section of the camper is 38 inches wide and 86 inches long. The overall width is 78 inches. The distance from the bottom of the camper to the bottom of the cab overhang is 42 inches. Weight unknown. The previous owner carried this on a Dodge Dakota without and suspension modification. I moved it on my wife’s Ford Ranger and although it set level, it was apparent when driving some additional support in the rear springs would be necessary on a long trip.

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On Saturday, September 30, 2006, I ran in my second race. I had run in a race on July 4th, and I found out about this race, and decided to go for it.

C-U On The Trails was billed as a fun race/walk on Robeson Meadows trails to familiarize people with the Champaign Urbana trails system. It was a 5k run/walk to start at 9am with refreshments and drinks provided.
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Just wanted to write a quick post on what I’ve been attempting to accomplish recently.

We’ve been working on a big proposal at work recently. We’ve been working toward the proposal for a year and a half now or so.. Work activities have been aimed at positioning ourselves in a good spot for writing the proposal and stuff like that.

Proposal deadline was the end of September, and it was decreed back in the spring that we should plan on being around the office for most of July, and all of august and September. So, vacations had to be done before that. And, that’s about how it worked out. Starting in July, meetings really started to pick up. Daily meetings, for 2 or 3 hours, for a good part of July. Writing started in early August, and sometime in August was probably the last time that I actually had a 24 hour period where I wasn’t at work.

Work kept intensifying. From august until now, there have been about 550 emails sent back and forth regarding the proposal, and about 250 of them were in the last week alone.

So, anyway, the days at work got longer and longer. Non-work activities started to suffer. A draft version of the proposal was due last Monday, and the preceding weekend took a fair amount of time. This past week, however, was day after day of nothing but work (it seemed). For most of September I have been trying to exercise before going into work of a morning, because the evenings have all been spent at work. This past week was rough, though. As I started leaving work later and later each evening, it really started getting hard to be up at 6:30 to exercise so that I could be back into work at a good time. Wednesday night I think I came home about 11, and, between Thursday morning and yesterday, Monday, I managed to get 14 hours of sleep. Thursday night I actually made it home at 11:30, but got some disturbing mail that kept me awake until about 1am or so. Managed to get up at 6:30 on Friday. Friday night I was at work until 1am. Saturday morning I got up around 6:30-6:45 squeezed in some exercise, went to work, and left from work around 4am on Sunday. Woke up about 7:30 and got into work at about 9:45 Sunday morning, and didn’t leave until 5pm MONDAY. I did leave the building once, at 6am Monday, so that I could move my truck from one parking spot to another. It was kind of cool at that time.

The proposal was effectively done at 8am on Monday. But, I didn’t want to go to bed then. I wanted to get back into a normal wake/sleep pattern as quickly as I could, so I figured I would stay awake as long as I could and then fall asleep, and hopefully be back to normal by Tuesday. As the afternoon rolled on, I started getting tired. I was, I think, rather coherent for most of the day. It really shocked me. I ended up being awake for 34 hours before falling asleep, and, other than having tired eyes, I really think I did OK. Anyway, I left work about 5pm, and promptly crashed my truck into the first car I met. Just kidding! No, actually, I made it home fine and figured that I would start the process of falling asleep. So, I laid down on the couch and started watching some TV. About 10 minutes later I was nodding off, so I went and laid down in bed. I decided to send some email, and went back to bed and promptly feel asleep. This was a little before 6pm. And, I slept until 6:30am. Close to 13 hours of sleep. I woke up feeling quite refreshed.. The most awake I’ve felt upon hopping out of bed in quite a while.

Anyway, this has been an interesting experience. I’ll end this session by saying that my brother bought me one of those Successory desk pieces a few years ago while I was in grad school. It reads:

EFFORT

Some people dream of worthy accomplishments, while others stay awake and do them.

We are printing a large (multi-hundred megabytes) pdf file, and large embedded PDFs are causing problems. A guy wrote up this documentation on making them smaller. (Thanks Barry!) It looked like something that others might find useful. So, the writeup… This assumes that you are shooting for a max PDF size of 5 megs.

How to make your figure smaller:

–Very Short Answer: Use the PDF Optimizer function, in the Advanced menu of Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional. Many files shrink a lot, with no change to the output image, when using the “First Try” settings I describe below. (These settings don’t alter the image quality at all, they just discard hidden junk.) If this does not work, you’ll have to think about downsampling, dpi and image compression, also described below.

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