Blog of a bald geek.

I so miss pulling up to any servo, getting out, pressing the touch screen to set the pressure I want. Put the nozzle on and wait for the beeps. Done.

Hows it done here? Glad you asked……….

So you pull in to the servo just like back home.
Already, even at this stage, you know you are in a different country…. the price of gas (as its called over here) is weird.
I still dont get it…. They show it by the gallon (blog coming about USA and the metric system), but they include the fractions of a cent.
So you end up with goofy things like $3.12 9/12 and things like that. I totally have no idea how to read it.

Find a pump, open your fuel door and thats about when things start to really change.
Your now standing at the pump, one or three hoses just like usual, but every pump has a card reader.
I like this a lot. Its so nice to just be able to swipe your card and start filling up.
But, here also is a bit of a got ya. Some of the smaller brands don’t take the usual cards, and charge a surcharge to use anything but theirs.
Also, some don’t take credit, only debit cards….. so you soon learn how to pick your servo brands.

Ok, so swipe your card and enter your post code. Yeah, if its a credit card, you dont put your pin in, you put your zip code…….Security? Pff, this is America, we don’t need no credit card security……
Once you do that, you can pick your nozzle and thus your grade. It will either be one nozzle for all three, or one of three nozzles.
Some pumps, you just lift the nozzle and off you go, but there are still some that you have to lift the nozzle out and then lift a leaver under the now empty space where the nozzle was before the gas will flow. Bit odd, but you soon get used to it.
I have blogged in the past about how you may or may not get spammed while you are doing this. I still find it annoying. (I think the introvert in me just finds it hard to get ANY quiet time in this country, there is just constant stimulation and information being thrown at you, even when you dont want it or expect it!).

We are not done with the differences yet…. On the end of the nozzle there is black rubber cone. The fuel nozzle comes out of the middle of it such that when you put the nozzle in your car, the wide end of the cone goes around where the fuel cap screws into your car and the rubber cone forms a seal around your car and the fuel nozzle.
The idea here is that someone figured that all the fumes from all the cars filling up was causing a lot of pollution, so the cone capatures the fumes and does something with them…….
Sounds fine right… yeah, it is ok, right up until you ride a motor bike…… You cant put the nozzle into the bike tank and fill the tank all the way up. The pump will cut the fuel off when the bike tank is still only half or less full.
No problem right, just lift the nozzle out and squeeze the handle and keep filling right???? No, this is America….. there is some sort of sensor in the end of the cone and if it is not compressed you cant turn the fuel on… so, to fill a bike you have to grab the end of the cone and pull it back to the handle so you can then use the other hand to squeeze the trigger and get the gas to flow…. Some bike shops even sell these little plastic wedge thingos that you can clip onto the end of the cone to pull it back… I have never bothered, the whole two hand job has never bothered me that that much…….

So, you are done filling, put the nozzle back on the pump, screw in your cap and you are off. No need to go into the store to pay. You get the option of getting a docket there from the pump if you want.

So, that’s the drill. And, if it were not for the title of this blog, it would probably make a nice little blog….but lately, I am finding you need to press less buttons to get me wound up about pretty much anything and for the past week, my tire pressure button has been fully compressed!!!

Not being as fit as I once was, I prefer not to use the bike pump I have at home to put air in my car tires…. the last few times over the past few months I have put air in the Rangie tires, I have used the bike pump….. We are going to LA on Sunday for a shoot with Zim and I really want to put air in the tires…….Also, we had the Passat serviced and they said the tires were not waring even and asked if we wanted them rotated. Which I got them to do, but I also have noticed that the VW dealer ship ALWAYS drops the tire pressure when we put the car in for a service, it annoys the beep out of me and I have asked them three times not to do it, but the message never gets to the guy out back…… Anyway, point is, its been on my mind that I have 8 tires to put air in… thats a lot of air for this old guy!!!!

So, I can see you, deal blog reader, asking the simple question of ‘Why not just do it at the servo while you are there?’
Why not indeed…… Because this is America, thats why!!!!!!!!
So, for the pure sake of finishing the visit to the ‘gas station’, lets put some air in your tires. (Or, more accurately, lets TRY and put some air in your tires).

So, once you are done getting your gas, head on into the shop.
Why? Because you have two choices to get air in this country, you can go into the shop, or you can pay 25 cents (that’s a quarter coin to you buddy (yes, they have a single coin worth 25 cents here (they also still have 1 dollar notes and 1 cent coins, DON’T get me started on THAT one!!))).
Yes, that’s right, you have to pay for air.
Some times I am tempted to just pay for it rather than walk into the shop, but I don’t do coinage in this country (I said DON’T get me started on that one!!!!) and so never have a quarter on me.
“Whats wrong with going into the shop? People are not paying for gas, so the place would be empty, right?”
WRONG! Remember, this is America, if you get an American out of his car, he must (its the law) put something in his mouth…. so the shop is full of people in line, waiting to buy cigarettes, doughnuts, Twinkies, energy drinks, coffee, soda pops and otter pops (Don’t get me started about the last two!!!!) and so on…..
Generally, going into the shop, not so fun……
So, you can stand in line, or stand at the side and try and get the assistants attention. Once you have that, you tell them your pump number and you want some air.
Why the pump number? Well, the air is only free for customers, and if you move from your pump and go and park near the air before you go into the shop, I have had assistants argue with me that I am not a customer and I need to pay to get my air. True story.
At this point, they can either press a button or tell you a 4 digit code.
Yeah, you heard me. A lot of air stations have a telephone touch pad that you can enter numbers in. One time, just the one time, I saw on my docket the pin number for the air. This made so much sense that I nearly freaked. Sadly, that gas station is not in Temecula, so I cant go back….. (But,what if you want air and no docket? Got a quarter on ya?)
So, shop full of people, old bald guy that is mildly dyslectic, going deaf by the day and cant cope with accents very well and suddenly, at high speed, you get a 4 digit number spat at you….. hence I always have a pen in hand…..

Getting air is just soooo much fun…. keeping up are we???

So. Back to the car. Move said car from pump to air station.
I really dont have the writing skills to get the next bit in all its color, feel and smell, so you are just going to have to wait for the high def movie when it comes out on Blu-ray……
Seriously, it gets comical……. If the assistent pushed the button, then you are all good, if its a number pad version, you are so out of luck…. why? Because most of them look like they are smeared with vomit….. seriously, I have no idea what people do when they get air to make the machine so gross!
Anyway, put on your kitchen gloves and pound those numbers! and I do mean pound. They take some pressing, what with all the vomit and glue and crap all over them and all…..
Once you get all the numbers in there is no sound or light to tell you that you got the numbers right and that there is air ready to go.
If the assistant had to press the button in the shop, there is no way of knowing that you are good to go, you just have to try it…… And don’t forget, no matter if its button job or pin number, its on a timer, so don’t be mucking about, or you will be half way through your 4th tire and you will need to do it all again……..

Grab the end of the of the hose and give it a good yank. The spools here are wound by killer springs…..no way this sucker is going to be on the ground at the end of the 4th tire and you just let it go (like every one must)….no, its going to retract into that spool at speeds that would leave most sprinters gasping for breath!
So, got a good grip on your hose, head to your first tire, get the valve cap off and jam that hose on…. Now, with out fail, the end nozzle on the hose looks like it has beat with a maul hammer by an iron worker, so you have to wiggle it around a bit to get the now square air nozzle on your round valve stem. You try real hard not to imagine what the nozzle is doing to the nice thread on your valve stem if if your cap is actually going to screw back on after all this…….
So, one hand jamming the thing on, valve cap in your mouth, one foot keep you steady, other foot is pressing on the hose because it wants to get back into that spool with all its might, but dont press too hard, the hose is not super thick and you can really cut the air off if you are not super careful.

Now comes the fun part.

Some have a pop up air gauge, some don’t. All have a brass leaver that you have to squeeze to get the air to flow. Well, that’s the idea….. The leaver also looks like it has done 20 rounds with the ball peen hammer crew and its function has long be forgotten…. It leaks air. A lot of air……well, at least it would, if it were not covered in about an inch of electrical tape and at least three garden hose clamps….. It gets hot here in SoCal. Electrical tape goes all slimy in heat….. But its all gravy baby, as you have your kitchen gloves on and so the black sticky residue all over the the leaver bothers you not!
Go on, hit that leaver, start the rush of air into your tire… I DARE YOU!
Soon as you do, the battle of forces begin.
There is about 36 or so PSI in your tire and there is about 38 PSI coming out the end of the hose, the leaks around the garden hose clamps and melted electrical tape taken about 5-8 PSI from the precious total in the hose.
Its always a lot of fun to see if you can see your tire inflate. Or not.
Whats the pressure like after a moment or seven from the leaver action you have been doing? Let go of that leaver and see what the little pop up pressure gauge says.
I’m sure you are way ahead of me…… How can the thing pop up if its shaped like a banana? What do people do to these things? Do they come new from the factory like this???
So, wrench the nozzle off, put your tire pressure gauge on the stem. Try and not think about what the bludgeoned valve stem threads are doing to your nice digital tire pressure gauge.
Take a reading. With a LOT of luck, its slightly higher than when you started…..
Get the tire to the desired reading.
Keep moving, time is ticking.
Move to the back tire. Remember, that reel is pulling like nuts. There is no way you can keep that hose at ground level, so yeah, go on, let it rub all over the front of the car while you try and keep it under your foot to stop its escape. (Or, get your significant other out of the car to hold it down and off the car).
You get the idea. The other 3 go much the same…. Just remember, after you are done with the last one, when you let go of the hose to stand clear, and try and make sure that the path between you, the spool and the nozzle does not include you,  your car or any part of the paint work!

So. I am off home to get my monthly exercise and use the bike pump to put some air in my tires.

So, the time has come……..

http://inlandempire.craigslist.org/mcy/1887495877.html

No emails yet, but I hope that it goes very soon….. Its going to make it so much harder if it just drags on and on…. and I really don’t want to have to do the whole Ebay thing.

Mixed feelings, but most of all I just want it sold quick.

Yeah, um, ok, right, yeah, ahhh, blog…right, yep, got it…….

I am grateful that most of you know that I don’t not blog deliberately….. if you don’t hear from me for a spell its because I am busy in other areas.
The other day, I got 50 emails in one day, none of them were spam and none of them were just ‘FYI’s', they were all to me and all stuff that I had to work on.
I am still working on some of them. I hate taking more than a few days to get back to anyone, but sometimes, I just cant get through it all.

Ok, so, anyway, yes, work has been busy, really busy. Photos have been up and down. I was trying to calm them down for a bit because they were taking up some time. We found that if we leave the car out of the garage, we can peg a sheet on the garage door and get a little studio action happening pretty quick and easy…. Freddy bought a black king sized bed sheet from Wal Mart for 15 bucks (which is a little more my style than $150 for the exact same thing from the photography shop), one of the best things we did. I really like high key photos. (White subject on black background) Its been a real learning experience watching light and seeing how it looks to your eye and then how the same light looks on camera. I have a lot to learn. Point is, the garage being attached to the kitchen helps keep the photos local to the family and connected. That said, they still take some time to get…..
The past few days we have had Sean Porter staying with us. Yes, the very same Sean Porter Photography that is linked to the top of my photo album page. If you have not checked out his stuff, please do it. Got some talent the boy has. So we have been shooting every night with him, he knows flashes better than I do, so I have been trying to pick up some tips before he goes back to Australia.

Still no word on the house. The paper work is progressing. Thats about all we know. I asked a few of the people involved in the process what the go is, like, have we got the house or not…. All of them said that they cant say, there are so many steps in the process that no one person knows them all, so thus no one person can say, ‘yes, you have the house’. If we fail to clear one single step, then the whole thing fails. So, we are just taking it one signature at a time. I’m told that we should know one way or another some time this month. Watch this space, or not, however indifferent you feel.

So, here we are, 480 words into my blog and I have not even began to cover the intended topic…… next time….. perhaps……..

[Edit, this is not my topic, but goes with the last one I posted;
http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSTRE6743SG20100805
Nuff said...... ]

Some of you might know that I was not a fan of facebook.
I never said too much here because all my experience was by looking over the shoulder of Freddy and watching her struggle with it.
Yesterday at 7:06am, after a very interesting week,  I made my account and messed around a little.
Ended up talking with my buddy Doug over in Lancing MI to try and get me going. In the end we both gave up.
At 5:43pm yesterday, I deleted my account.

So. I was right. It is junk. One of the worst web sites I have ever tried to do battle with. Only Godaddy.com and the software of Weather-display is worse.
It really does have the feel that it was written by a few computer geeks that were half tanked late in the night.
There are menus all over the place, the feel of the navigation really is such that you can believe that the core code has never been touched and its just been built on, hack on gak.
The security settings are very confusing and having it wide open by default is just wrong (and very sad).
The basic lay out is just not logical or intuitive at all. Its like they are still stuck in the 90′s.

How did it become so popular? No idea. Clearly a lot people have more time and patience than I do. I suspect that they have the 80/20 rule in force. Of their 500 million users, only 20% of them are regulars.

Anyway, it matters not what I think, they are going just fine.
I am personally disappointed that some friends and family have stopped communicating along the usual channels since getting their facebook accounts. The pressure for me to ‘just sign up’ to be in the loop is not going to let up anytime soon I suspect.

So, the Ben Orchard that is on facebook? Its not me…. and its not going to be me anytime soon.

Had a moment of clarity on Friday afternoon…….. (Warning, geek content to follow).
It occurred to me while I was mumbling under my breath about my flakey web site that quite often the browser was throwing up the “cant find beno.id.au” thing way too fast……. It was like it could not even find me……

Ahhhh, perhaps its not. So, I hit up my DNS server host……… Afraid.
This guy has been great. I have been using him for about 6-8 years now.
Its been free for me all this time, and I honestly never really think about it all that much. My Linksys router has had its OS replaced with a Linux version (Tomato), and it supports Afraid for dynamid DHCP, which Time Warner use.
So I never have to worry about my IP address changing and I never have to worry about my domain name resolving to said IP address.

That is, until the last week and a bit.
When I went to the news section of Afraid, I found what I was looking for.
In case you are reading this long after the event, here is a cut and past of the news from Friday;

So, we found the mystery to my woes. I really am annoyed with myself, I really should have figured this, or at least included it in my tests a lot quicker than I did. I really am getting rusty over here (thats more than enough out of you Gary, I hope you split your drink from laughing!)

So, the bottom line it, I cant complain as I am getting it for free. The obvious thing is to see if paying for it would protect me from this sort of thing in the future or not. A few days of hit and miss every 6 years, is it really worth it? Is this sort of attack on his servers going to be come more common? Some of these questions I am not sure I am ever going to get answers to.
Bottom line. Least it was not something at my end. I have to be honest, I really was getting tempted to point the finger at Windows 7. It was the one thing I changed, and I am having hit and miss issues with my photo album, one moment it will change a photo, next it wont. I really cant get to the bottom of THAT one so I thought it might be a small indicator of bigger things.

Anyway, bottom bottom line, I am still going to take the site down for about 1/2 hour tonight to remove a hard drive from the current server PC.
That drive will then go into Terrys computer and will be formatted and have Linux installed. I will move the web site over to that PC (ie, my original one). Once the site is up and running I will swap the IP addresses and we will be back running on Linux. That will only take about 1 minute for that one.
I am hopeful that this will be it for another 6-8 years. Both Freddy and I are getting sick of all this shuffling and not having things working. Once this (last) shuffle is done, we are hopeful that 98% of things will be back up and running and the last 2% (I suspect that it will be the sharing of drives and data between windows and linux again) that is left hanging, I will just battle through it.

If you have been trying to hit my site of late (whadayamean you havent?!), you probably have noticed that it has been a bit hit and miss.
I am really not sure why. I have tested pretty much everything and just can not find anything wrong…… Not helpful or fun.
It seems to have been doing it for at least a week now.

This flakyness along with my continued frustration of getting more than 60% of anything working has lead me to consider yet another computer move…. Well, not so much computer as change the core OS.
I really did try and get along with Windows 7. I really wanted it to work. Really I did.
In a moment of clarity however, it came to me that all the Windows/Linux hassles came from me wanting to use ONE program. Lightroom.
When I was not doing any post processing of my photos and thus was running everything in Linux, all was good.
Then, I got into Lightroom and was running it in a virtual computer on my Linux computer. Because I could only use half of one of my eight CPU cores, it ran like a dog. That’s when I first changed to Windows. Sure, Lightroom ran well, real well, but the rest of my sanity went out the window.
So, as you may recall, I then switched to two computers. Linux for my web server/blog/photo gallery and Windows for Lightroom.
That’s when I had a lot of hassles sharing data between the two systems.
On top of that, I found that Windows does not do something’s very elegantly, like capture remote URLS, batch jobs or use component video capture cards.
Robert spent some time helping me try and get things going, but in the end, I came to see that I just was not using the right tool for the core job.

So, since you all decided for me that giving up was not an option, I have decided to go back to using Linux as my main operating system running the web site etc and do one of two things for Lightroom;
1. Try a new Virtual PC software that will use more cores of my CPU so the performance is better.
2. Give up on Lightroom and use GIMP for my post processing. (Last option, and not thrilled with the thought of this one).
3. Get and use a second computer for Windows and Lightroom, just turning it on when I need it. (And using Gary’s help to get the sharing between the two systems so I don’t have to use a USB stick to transfer the photo files as I was for a while).

So, at some stage soon, my web site will go down for an hour or so while I reformat the hard drive and load Linux and copy the web site etc over….. Oh, wait, given that its currently up and down like a hospital elevator, you probably wont notice any difference at all…. mmm, never mind.

P.S. Since I never did any post processing before I met Zim, I am blaming him for all my computer woes. You should blame him too. :-)

If you have been reading my micro blog on the right (I am really not sure why I bother on that one… I don’t think any one reads it…..) you would know that yesterday we had the biggest shake here in Temecula for some time.
Yesterday it was reported as a 5.9, then about 1/2 an hour latter 5.6 and then this morning I see that is has been officially rated at 5.4.

Even the locals are talking about it.
I was working back (as usual) when it hit. At first a gentle roll. A few of us felt it and said the usual ‘here we go’, and I sat back to enjoy it, but then it got a stronger roll to it and we all raised our voices, then all of a sudden it got real jerky and really started to actually shake.
It was the first time I have ever really felt it shake. Its hard to describe, if you have been on a boat, you know the feel of a rolling quake, but when it really shakes its a whole different thing.
The building started to bang and make some real noise. By this time all the office workers are on their feet and looking around and generally getting pretty excited.
Nothing fell off my desk or anything, and I have heard no reports of damage anywhere. Its pretty sparsely populated out there.
Thankfully it all settled down pretty quick, I would say the whole event lasted about 30 seconds.
I whipped out the cell phone to get some video right at the end and got nothing other than a bunch of us being all excited, I will spare you from that video…… So here is the shake map from the USGS web site;

Earthquake shake map

You can see that it was both very close to Temecula and also how good at dirt is from filtering us from all the action. By the time it got to us it really had lost a lot of its sting.

I’m losing track how many now I have felt, I know I was here for a long time and wanting to feel one and now I have had my fill and could be happy not going through another….. Thing is, I dont think that is much of a plan. The interesting thing about yesterday was that it was a really minor fault line and has not been active for years and years. No one was watching it or expecting any from it. The question is did the Easter Sunday one down the way set this one up or not?

Anyway, it seems to be a way of life here and makes me think about stock piling food and water for what it would be worth……