The last entry indicated we were having trouble with our inter-web access from Guatemala. That problem wasn’t resolved until we got back to Santa Barbara, and then events just kept us from finishing the last entries about our trip. At some point, Harriet and I will make those final entries and complete our Guatemala trip report, but we’ve named the old homestead Casa Mañana for a good reason. We’ll get to it … tomorrow.

In the meantime, we’ve been busy with quite a few projects, activities, and trips, so I’ll be interspersing current events with ‘retrospectives’ on what’s been happening the last few months. We’re all friends (and family) here, so let’s keep it informal. I’ve got other blogs for the formal stuff.

Okay, that’s the ‘just get started again’ entry. Now on to the more interesting stuff.

Fair warning: I’ve been doing a lot of travel the last couple of months, and much of it is pretty nerd/geek centered. My favorite quote came from Debbie, who responded to my dilemma of trying to decide between a slide-rule collectors’ convention and WonderCon (a comic book convention) with “That’s the geekiest thing I’ve heard you say.”

“Cool,” I thought (at first).

So I tried another entry. That produced the same error message, but something was still posted. This process is a pain, but there was enough benefit that I thought I could work with it. Well, not so much. The entries weren’t formatted right, and when I tried to change them, the system crashed, and blah, blah, blah (insert technobabble). So, I deleted those entries and will shortly repost them in my usual (more time intensive) format.

I generally track over 150 blogs (not as intense as it sounds, and real blog-hounds track quite a bit more). A lot of the postings catch my interest, and I’d like to note those that fit my eclectic interests and dilettante lifestyle. I’ll still be making manual posts about those items and providing links to the information source. Those kinds posts serve as an annotated reference/bookmark tool which I can organize by tags.

A time zone converter can be found at:

The Time Zone Converter: http://www.timezoneconverter.com/cgi-bin/tzc.tzc
The World Clock: http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/

Singapore and Malaysia are 16 hours ahead of Pacific Time.
For currency exchange, we use Oanda to create a cheat sheet that we carry with us:

Oanda Cheat Sheet: http://oanda.com/convert/cheatsheet

The Singapore Dollar (S$) converts as

• S$1.00=US$0.64
• US$1.00=S$1.56

The Malaysian Ringgit (MYR) converts as

• US$1.00=MYR3.63
• MYR1.00=US$0.27

Finally, the power adapter site we use is:

Electricity Around The World: http://www.kropla.com/electric2.htm

Singapore and Malaysia are both 230V, 50 Hz and use the English power plug (rectangular blade)

Our next entry will be from the road!

Last night, at abut 3:00 am, Harriet was awaken by a loud “pop.” She got up to see if something had fallen downstairs, and when she turned on a light, it burned out with a loud “pop” of its own. She tried one other light, and it popped also. That woke me up, and we realized that something was wrong with the power. I have a voltmeter, and we were seeing 238 V on the outlets (they should be 110 to 120 V). So, I cut all the circuit breakers.

I called Edison, and they had a guy here about 4:30 am. Apparently, you can have a neutral line break in a way that the two phases in the power line can add across the outlets, turning your lines to 2x normal. After some tests, he suspected a tree had broken the line outside the house. A tree crew (contracted by Edison) arrived about 8:30 am and cut some branches away from a power pole, enough to allow access. The Edison crew arrived about 10:30 and began rewiring the section that had been damaged, and by about 12:30 pm we had the power restored.

Then began the inventory of things that have blown out. Oddly, the major appliances and the video electronics are all OK. It’s Harriet’s computer, my computer, the phone recording machine, and a lot of the smaller electronics that are burned out.

We’re in the process of trying to recover. Harriet’s business is completely tied up in that computer. So far, we’ve been able to move the hard drive into another, older machine she has for backup, and now she’s trying to get enough of it functioning so she can work. Steve and Krista have been real champions with helping her get a system working. We owe them, BIG.

I have an older machine that I’ve got running enough to access the internet, hence this update. I can get to my email through the browser, I’m just not able to access the stuff on my main computer. I ordered a new power supply on-line (yay!), so we’re making progress. We’ll see how far along we are before we leave on our trip NEXT MONDAY! Ouch.

The good news is that this didn’t happen while we were gone, and since it appears to have happened out of the residence (and maybe off of our property), Edison has some liability. We’ll be filing claims before we depart.

A couple of weeks ago, I was lucky enough to catch this hawk as it was hanging out at the cliffs in Santa Barbara. I was taking a walk at Shoreline Park with my camera, and I was able to get a few shots. The bird seemed happy to hang out until I tried to move into a better position. I think it got bored at that point and flew off.

Here’s a close up of the hawk. I was pretty pleased with the detail.

I really appreciate this bird’s patience since I’m

1. slow
2. not a very good photographer and
3. usually oblivious to these sorts of things

But, all in all, it came out rather nicely.

I’m no photographer, but I really didn’t need to be. The colors and textures just laid themselves out, begging to be recorded.

The irony is, we barely got a spritz from this storm. Just North of us, they received a good soaking, and I believe the storm hit south of us, also. For some reason it jumped by the Santa Barbara City area, lingering just long and low enough to give us some nice views.

And I just happened to have a camera in the car.

I’ve got several vague plans for this blog. First, this is the place where I plan on noting any items of interest that don’t fit in my other blogs: projects, personal observations, messages to family and friends, and anything else I can’t anticipate. I may even discover some topics that deserve their own, separate websites.

This is the blog of my wacky life, and may only end up being interesting to me. Maybe my family. Probably not Harriet.

Oh yeah, my picture here and on the About page came from the French Festical in Santa Barbara. This year I attended that festival with my youngest niece, Monica. I’ll add some other photos and notes from that visit in another post.