After spending Independence Day at home with friends from out-of-town (your typical cookout, pool party, then picnic and fireworks shindig), we flew up to Cleveland for a long weekend with more family and friends.
Continue reading ‘Baseball, barbecues, and a boat in Cleveland’ »
On an entirely normal, beautiful fall day, a small town is suddenly and inexplicably sealed off from the rest of the world by an invisible force field. Planes crash into it and rain down flaming wreckage. A gardener’s hand is severed as the dome descends. Cars explode on impact. Families are separated and panic mounts. No one can fathom what the barrier is, where it came from, and when—or if—it will go away. Now a few intrepid citizens, led by an Iraq vet turned short-order cook, face down a ruthless politician dead set on seizing the reins of power under the dome. But their main adversary is the dome itself. Because time isn’t just running short. It’s running out.
On our flight up to Cleveland today I finally finished “Under the Dome” by Stephen King.
“Under the Dome” takes place in the small town Chester’s Mill where, suddenly and inexplicably, an impenetrable force field has cut off the town from the outside world: no power (except for propane-powered generators), no burbling river, no winds or breezes, no rain, no fresh air. It’s a chilly late autumn in Maine, but under the dome, it’s unseasonably warm and getting warmer.
Like many other of King’s books, the cast of characters is vast and there’s a lot of stuff all going on at once, described from multiple viewpoints, much like “The Stand.” This was initially hard to keep track of, but once you get sucked into the world of Chester’s Mill, everything flows together nicely. The novel also has the “benefit” of being confined to one place (under the dome) and thus the locations aren’t as spread out as they were in “The Stand.”
The themes of the story range from small town politics, religion, environmental issues, and emergency management to “Breaking Bad”-like drug lords and meth labs. And, of course, there’s the Dome. Where did it come from? Why does it only surround Chester’s Mill? Will the U.S. military be able to break through and free the trapped citizens of the Mill before it’s too late?
At over 1,000 pages, “Under the Dome” wasn’t a quick read for me (I started it back in April after I finished “11/23/63“), but it was definitely a page-turner.
For Father’s Day I received the GoalZero Guide 10 Plus Adventure solar charging kit. I had first heard of this product back in February on an episode of Tekzilla and thought it might be a good addition to our hurricane supplies. I added it to my Amazon Wishlist and then forgot about it until I opened my gift on Sunday.
The kit consists of the Nomad 7 solar panels that provide 7 watts of power, the Guide 10 Plus battery pack powered by four 2300mAh NiMH AA batteries, and various cables.
The beauty of the kit is the wide variety of charging and power options you can get out of these simple components. For example, I could charge my iPhone by connecting it directly to the solar panels via USB or to the battery pack (also over USB). The batteries in the Guide 10 can be charged over USB or the solar panels and removed to be used in anything that takes AA cells like a radio, camera, or flashlight. The battery pack also has a built-in LED flashlight which can come in handy. Finally, the kit includes a 12V cigarette lighter adapter for use with car accessories, but with the limited wattage output of the solar cells you’re not going power anything big like a power inverter (although I did give it a try).
To charge larger devices like a laptop or iPad GoalZero has other solar array options but the one I got is perfect for our hurricane kit to charge our cell phones or smaller devices in an emergency.
Other than our usual Memorial Day weekend preparations for the upcoming hurricane season we had no plans or obligations so we decided to go to Busch Gardens for the day. Even with Tropical Storm Beryl approaching north Florida, we had gorgeous weather for our outing.
We had purchased vouchers for our Fun Cards (pay for one day, come back all year) online the night before, hoping to avoid any long holiday weekend lines at the ticket windows. An early start got us to the park before the parking lot even opened so we got a great parking spot (once it opened) and were on the tram and across the street at the entrance with plenty of time to spare. We redeemed our vouchers at the automatic machines to get our Fun Cards and still had a few minutes to wait before the official park opening.
Continue reading ‘Kicking off the summer at Busch Gardens’ »
[ I apologize for using the term “rabbit hole” three posts in a row! -windracer ]
Apparently I have a thing for doing homebrew stuff in April: almost exactly two years after softmodding my Wii so I could load my games from a USB hard drive instead of discs, I found myself wondering if I could do the same for Virtual Console and WiiWare content. Well, of course you can! The path can be confusing and frustrating, but the destination … well, it’s a cool destination.
Continue reading ‘Virtual Console and WiiWare games through a USB loader’ »
This week the latest LTS version of Ubuntu, 12.04 Precise Pangolin, was released. I waited a little bit for the initial download rush to die down (ok, only one day this time) and then took the plunge and upgraded.
As with my prior upgrades, the ‘do release-upgrade’ process itself was painless but I had a few post-installation issues:
Coming this October: Quantal Quetzal!
Jake Epping is a thirty-five-year-old high school English teacher in Lisbon Falls, Maine. His friend Al, who runs the local diner, divulges a secret: his storeroom is a portal to 1958. He enlists Jake on an insane—and insanely possible—mission to try to prevent the Kennedy assassination. So begins Jake’s new life as George Amberson and his new world of Elvis and JFK, of big American cars and sock hops, of a troubled loner named Lee Harvey Oswald and a beautiful high school librarian named Sadie Dunhill, who becomes the love of Jake’s life—a life that transgresses all the normal rules of time.
Today I finished Stephen King’s “11/22/63.” I’m always a sucker for a good time travel story and while this one doesn’t break any new ground in the genre I enjoyed it.
Jake Epping is shown the “rabbit hole” by his friend Al, the owner of a local diner that connects to September 1958 through the storeroom. Al has been using the rabbit hole for years to buy supplies for the diner at 1958 prices, keeping his own costs down. Every trip into the past is a “reset” … it’s always the same day when you arrive, and when you get back to the present only two minutes has passed.
The film adaptation of Suzanne Collins’ “The Hunger Games” has now spent three consecutive weeks at #1 and this past Easter weekend I finally took my daughter to see it. She had wanted to see it immediately on opening weekend (like a lot of her friends did), but the PG-13 rating concerned me and I wanted to read a few reviews first and see how the graphic violence was being portrayed before exposing her to it. As I told her, reading the book is one thing, seeing those things “for real” on the big screen is another. As it turned out, though, my fears were mostly unfounded and she really enjoyed the movie.
Continue reading ‘The odds are apparently in favor of “The Hunger Games”’ »
It’s hard to believe, but our fourth annual Spring Training trip is over. Time to head back east …
It’s our last full day in Arizona … one more game, and hopefully we’ll get to see one Indians victory while we’re out here.