January 4th, 2008
Wow, I unloaded 6 towers at the house the day before yesterday, then another one yesterday. that makes a total of 8 on the bench. Kind of a personal (professional) record. The coolest thing is, I really love this stuff! Making older hardware work. Getting the best performance out of the hardware. Setting up windows so it is easy and productive. Getting the most information out of each and every window and application. For some unknown reason, default settings in windows xp are not that way. So I go into every installation and tweak settings. I once wrote down all the things I did to a new install and it took up a page and a half! The response I’ve gotten for this has been clearly positive. Everyone seems to appreciate the steps I take to make things go more smoothly when on the job or at home. Lately, I have been putting Ubuntu Linux on older hardware. That’s pretty fun too! It runs great on older hardware, stuff that windows struggles with. Not like linux installs of old, this version actually sees all the hardware and installs it almost automatically! Comes with some great free applications too.
Getting ready to go to San Diego for a crane job. This is the last time we will move this tower crane on this jobsite. There has been a crane there for about 9 years, hopping it from one building to the next about every six months. This is the last building. In about another six months, we will take it down and truck it away. Not a bad rental contract. Wonder how many cranes they could have bought outright for that money. Good thing it isn’t my job to decide those things for them. I might have gone a different way. Of course the first crane on the job was burned down a long time ago by a bunch of eco-terrorists so that may throw the money out of whack a little bit.
Still twittering and there are some good pictures of heights on my flickr page. There are a couple of Hannah Pictures up there too, aint she cute?
merlin |
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December 29th, 2007
Well, I am writing in Windows Live Writer. I am giving it a solid trial to see what it looks and acts like. I have to say, the Word style highlighting of misspelled words is a cool thing. Something Wordpress doesn’t do. Spell checking is something wonderful if you are used to it and then suddenly it’s gone. Also, the fact that adding links to posts is really easy, as easy as Wordpress itself.
All in all, I have to give it a thumbs up. So far. I’ll keep you posted. (no pun intended)
merlin |
Blog |
December 23rd, 2007
I was just out in the backyard putting together a HUGE swingset for Hannah. She is gonna love this thing! It got dark on me so I didnt finish it. Glad I started a day early. I posted a few pictures up on my flickr acct. Go check them out. There are a bunch of phone pictures I shot while up on various cranes and hoists I’ve worked on this past year. They are tagged “Up There” Easy to find.
I have been twittering too, thats a site that I go to to answer the question “what am I doing right now?” You can follow me and many people way more interesting than me. I recommend Andy Ihnatko, Cali Lewis and the incomparable Veronica Belmont. There are lots of cool tech people there I enjoy following. I am also on Pownce, Facebook and Technorati. All in the interest of networking for my business.
Happy Holidays everybody! Thanks for being there, without you, I would be even more boring. He he
merlin |
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December 13th, 2007
All I can say is this: I have a ton of podcasts and rarely enough time to listen to them all. So this last week has been good. A week ago, Wednesday, I left my home in Mesa, AZ and drove to Salt Lake City, Utah for three days of work. Due to the weather, I only got one day in. Loaded seven trucks with parts of a crane. Then a fifty mile jaunt down the road to do some work on another piece of equipment. Then the drive south to avoid the snow that was threatening. Got home Friday evening. Apparently, driving in the rain is foreign to desert dwellers, because it took me an extra two hours to go about ten miles. Altogether, a half day trip took all day. So, get home friday night, ate dinner with the family during which a computer was delivered to the house. The next day I got the computer fixed (asked the customer to bring me the part and installed it while she waited. Thanks Patty!) Then jumped on a plane bound for Reno, Nevada. Rental car, hotel, dinner and bed. Got up early Sunday, did the job, flew back to Phoenix so I could tear my patient, kind, loving girlfriends computer apart. (Who knows, she may read this) Got it close about 11:00 p.m. Monday night then went to bed for the drive back to Salt Lake the next morning. Drove up, hotel, dinner, early to bed and overslept by almost three hours! Got to work just as the trucks were arriving so no real lost time. did the two day job in one (long) day. Up today at the crack of night; 4:00 a.m. and drove all day to arrive home this afternoon. Thats about 4400 miles in less than ten days. 2800 of it driving. I still didn’t catch up on all the podcasts. Maybe I ought to rethink the amount I download…
Thanks for being part of my journey. You can follow me on Twitter if you are a real glutton for boring punishment.
Merlin
merlin |
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December 9th, 2007
Elf Yourself! This is Chris, me, Hannah and Kelli. Pretty good laugh.
merlin |
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