Uncle Dave's Blog

LOL

As many of you know, the Radio City Apartments (which is actually a hotel) still uses keys for the rooms, one for the deadbolt and one for the other lock! The deadbolt in my room is installed backwards, so when you turn it to lock, you turn it away from the jamb!! Took me a while to get into my room on Saturday!!!

The other weird thing is the high-rise office building across the street from my room! It NEVER turns the lights off!! Even when no one is working in there!! And the effect it has is that when I look  out my window from my bed, I have no way of knowing if the sun has come up yet! Very creepy. I mooned them this morning.

Today, October 5th, was a good day.

First some sad news – my sister called to advise that one of the fish died. She wanted to know what to do with it…I told her to chuck it into the orchard! LOL

On to the day! No Billy shows tonight.  🙁

Started the day off with breakfast…..guess where!!!! Yup! Juniors! Sking, ERinVA and I had a nice breakfast there. I had the usual. JJF joined us at the end and we all walked down to the Circle Line boat tours, where Sking left us as he had already done it. JJF, ERinVA and I did the half circle tour of lower Manhattan! Excellent!! I took 455 pictures and would have gotten more if my battery had not died! Which really sucks because I have three extra batteries and did not bring any with me on the boat! Very fun tour; got nice shots of Statue of Liberty!
Continue reading “Uncle Dave’s Second Annual Birthday Billython – Part Four”

Ahh, October 4th is nearly at an end, and I must say it turned out to be a wonderful day.

I should mention that, except for some rain when we landed, it has been lovely here. Today was short sleeved shirt weather.

Morning began with meeting Pugsnort for breakfast at my favorite place, Junior’s. Challah (pronounced “hallah” with a phlegmy first H) french toast – just awesome! Then she and I walked around a bit including a visit to The American Girl Place, scoping out for later shopping. Turns out that, in addition to clowns and mannequins, she is also creeped out by dolls!! To my delight! This place is three floors worth of dolls, or maybe just two, and we toured them all.  She was especially creeped out by the doll hair salon, where they had little salon chairs for the dolls to sit in while they had their hair done! What was even creepier is that it is easier to get up to the upper levels than it is to get down.
Continue reading “Uncle Dave’s Second Annual Birthday Billython – Part Three”

Okay! It is the morning of October 4th and I am in New York, abd except for stressing over the lunch plans,pretty happy.

Yesterday was one hell of a day! Had to get up very early for my flight from SFO to New York, and the stress began right away when I was behind some idiot in the security line that did not know how to quickly fill the bins with his stuff and move along! And then on the other end he was putting his shoes back on right at the bin conveyor rather than gathering his shit and moving to one of the chairs to do all this. To make matters worse,  I nearly ran into this same fellow again when he STOPPED at the exit of a moving sidewalk!!! What a moron!!
Continue reading “Uncle Dave’s Second Annual Birthday Billython – Part Two”

Preview:

My original birthday plans were to go down to Disneyland for a few days, always a fun trip. But when it was announced that Kiril Kulish, one of the Tony-winning stars of Billy Elliot, was giving his last performance on October 3rd, and that Haydn Gwynne, the Tony-nominated actress who plays Mrs. Wilkinson, was giving her last performance on October 4th, I started crunching the numbers and realized it wouldn’t cost much more to go toNew York than it would to go to Disneyland. That is a bald-faced lie, of course, but I am sticking to it.

BONUS: Looks like I will also get to see the debut of Alex Ko as Billy on October 6th or, my birthday, October 7th!!!
Continue reading “Uncle Dave’s Second Annual Birthday Billython – Part One”

Damnit! It is 91 degrees out on the patio! That is just so wrong for September, even in California! We need cold and rain and wind, or at least some autumn weather!

Damnit!

Looking forward to New York City in a week or so!

I do not often get excited about something like this, but I gotta tell you, the new version of Picassa is great and it’s People Find feature is amazing.

Basically, People Find uses face recognition technology to find faces in pictures. It isn’t perfect, but pretty good. Then it lets you name those people and then it goes and hunts down every picture you have with that person in it. And it is pretty darned accurate. What an easy way to organize pictures of people.

Probably the biggest problem is that if you have four kids under the age of 6, and three of them are blond girls, and all four are related, it sometimes can not distinguish the baby pictures real well. But those things are easy to fix, as is adding people that People Find doesn’t recognize.

LOL – it even found the person in a picture hanging on the wall behind the people I was taking a picture of!!!

Except for the fact that it does not have an image resizing feature, I really love Picassa!

This morning, as my thoughts turned to my upcoming trip to New York City, I came upon a brilliant idea!

You see, I have a 4GB memory card in my camera. This card will hold about 1100 pictures at the very best settings possible. (I think if I lowered my standards down to 640 x 480 it will hold about 4000 or something.) And I have had the same card in my camera since my trip to London LAST October.

Now, last night a friend of mine posted that he lost years worth of images because his hard drive crashed. But he also mentioned that they were mostly ones that no one wanted to see anymore. His most recent ones were still on his memory card.

Light bulb!!!

Why not just take my almost full memory card and plop it into my safe, and put a new one in my camera. They are only about $15 bucks or less for a 4GB card, which is worth it to me for the safety.

No, I could not find on the net any info on how long the data will remain on the flash card in the safe, but I backup all my pictures to DVD anyway, so I am about as safe as a guy can get.

So I am off to New York soon, and with luck the new card will get me through that trip, plus Thanksgiving, Christmas and then my London trip in May!

So a couple of years ago I signed up at my doctor’s office to be more connected online. This is usually really cool – I can send my doctor messages, get RX refilled, check on my appointments, etc.

However, there is one part that sucks, especially if your health kind of sucks like mine: 24 hour lab results!! That’s right! Within 24 hours of going to the lab to have blood drawn and a nice cup of pee, the results of said contributions are posted online for me to peruse in the comfort of my own home. Yup, my good cholesterol blows – it always has and always will!! Yup, my fasting glucose level is high, but this time it is higher than usual, which pisses me off because I skipped having a cookie the night before and it still sucked!! And my HGBA1C – fuggedaboutit!! Highest of the last 8 tests. Yeah, I can look back and chart out all of my tests for about the last 8 years!

So the areas that I sucked in last time are the ones I suck in now. So why the hell should I go to the doctor next week to have him tell me that, and the ovious – that I am overweight??? Damnit!

Someday I am going to read about my own impending doom on my doctor’s website, so when I go to see him he will say, “How you doing?” and I can say, “Well, according to the online lab results, this will be our last visit in this world.” And then he will say, “Yes, but isn’t technology wonderful?”

Coming soon – October 3rd – 8th, New York City!!!!