Al Gritzmacher's Blogosphere

Did you feel it? Did you get just a little bit more done today? A few minutes ago, at 6:59:60 pm local time, an extra second was added to the calendar. That’s right, after second #59, there was #60, then #00. It was done then because it was midnight in Universal Coordinated Time, UTC. It’s called a Leap Second.

So why add a second? Who’s going to even notice? Probably not you or I, but people in science doing precise measurement, especially of celestial objects, needed it. Do you need to reset your clock? Not unless you’re really obsessed with accuracy. Continue Reading…

I often listen to music on my computer. No, not often, nearly constantly. I have a large collection of MP3s and usually have a semi-random selection of songs in the playlist in Winamp. I let them shuffle at random and I have a plugin that removes the song once it plays, so nothing plays twice.

My first thought would be that it would play songs that don’t go together very well, clashing styles and tempos, but most of the time, it doesn’t.

First of all, it’s mostly all music I like in the first place. So just the fact that it exists means I probably like the song. But my tastes vary widely and according to mood, so that covers a lot of ground. And there are a lot of reasons I might ‘like’ a song or artist. Just because I ‘like’ surf music, doesn’t mean I always want to listen to it. Continue Reading…

Sale of sales, bargain of bargains, Toyotathon of Toyotathons… what idiots do they think we are, writing commercials that idiotic?

I think I’ll run right in and ask for a Cadillac of Cadillacs…

A week ago, we were having a perfect, snowy December. There had been snow on the ground almost continuously since before Thanksgiving, but no major storm to speak of. The ski areas were having the best start in years.

But that all changed after Christmas. We’ve had rain and almost all the snow has melted here. There’s still enough down south in the ski areas, but they’ve got to be concerned.

Click any photo for a larger image.

Today, high winds came in this morning and it’s more like March coming in like a Lion, than December. Gusts more than 50 mph woke us this morning along with the sound of sirens as the local Fire Department kept busy answering calls. Continue Reading…

After just having bought an Acer Aspire One netbook as well as a D-Link router, out comes a combo deal on Christmas Eve.

Of course, it’s the version of the Aspire One with the 16GB solid state drive, not the 160GB hard drive mine has. They managed to squeeze WinXP on it anyway, instead of the smaller Linux also offered. I don’t mind Linux, but the stripped down version that they put on the AAO seems weak. I hear they run really sweet with Ubuntu, though. Mine does off of a USB thumb drive, no less. Continue Reading…

I love my new cell phone. It’s finally a fairly modern phone. I mentioned it here recently, the LG VX-9100 aka. ENV2.

But I have one problem with it. I keep dialing random numbers with it when it is in my pocket. Sometimes, it even treats them as a redial or gets into the directory. That’s the worst, because it calls real numbers and real people!

If I’ve called you and you heard nothing but background, or worse, heard whatever I was doing at the time, please accept my apologies for anything I said! One friend called me back to let me know it was happening and we laughed about it, because her son did the same thing all the time. Continue Reading…

We’re back from another trip to Pittsburgh. This was the first follow-up visit after Al’s transplant. He had labwork and a clinic visit yesterday and a bronchoscopy today.

We left Thursday morning about 7am and arrived in time for his appointments in the afternoon, then stayed one more night at the Neville Family House. The bronch was the only thing to do today and was an outpatient proceedure, so we were free to leave by about 5pm.

It was done under mild sedation, so there was some observation time before we could leave. The photos here are Al having his first food after being NPO since last night. He really felt okay and was glad to get the sandwich. They wanted to get a lot of fluids into him, so he had some cranberry juice and a can of Pepsi.

We noticed they have a new can design that we haven’t seen at home yet.

Al has been cleared to drive, but with the sedation still wearing off, I drove home tonight. He’s free to drive himself around all he wants to now, and enjoy that until they tell him he can go back to work!