Close Meditations of a Visual Kind

Nothing of consequence. Truly, the Ramblings of a Mad Shutterbug...
( iShuffle In to Work )

( State of the Treo )

That is all. We now return you to your normal Friday.

Saturday. Feed run, as usual, and then while Herself worked at taking down a stretch of 19 year old fence with patches of holes I worked on fixing up a couple of the water points which were leaking. I don't mind the leaking in one sense. We put big buckets under the spigot to catch the leak. While the goats were wandering this gave them additional watering spots. When the Bros are making rounds with me, this gives them additional watering spots, which for a black (mostly black) dog in North Central Baja Jorja in the summer time is important.

There's more fence to replace, but this stretch is the worst. Was the worst. As mentioned it's 19 year old fencing and caused me to pause as we rolled up the remnant fence fabric... we put this fence in when we first got the goats. Lately they've been looking at it as more a suggestion they shouldn't wander out of their paddock. A suggestion they've mostly ignored. Now it's more than a suggestion.

Between water works and fencing, a bit of sun exposure. There've been other posts by friends and readers here about sun exposure and predominantly norther European/Anglo-Saxon/Celtic heritage. All of the above apply to your narrator. Thus my arms, portions of my legs, and my neck are somewhat redder today than they were last Friday. Yes, that makes me a red-neck. Got a problem with that? The gate is that way.

Sunday. Laundry run, being as we've still not gotten the washer fixed. This included, on yesterday's occasion, a stop at the local Ace Hardware for some more water works maintenance supplies, a stop at the local pharmacy for Herself's prescription, and two loads of wash. Wash only, brought it home to dry. Drove through some rain coming home, not much.

Also Sunday worked on the migration of data from the Palm Desktop universe to the Outlook Universe. I've decided to give the Palm Treo 750 a shot, even given that it requires using Outlook as a Personal Information Manager. I think this will avoid the problems of virus security by not using the Outlook e-mail management tool. My theory is, if I never use Outlook E-mail, then I can't open anything with a virus.

To be fair here, Palm is not being terribly helpful in the transfer either. The 'conduits' which should allow a Palm handheld to talk to Outlook during the hot-sync operation are not talking. Thus, no sync from the old Tungsten to Outlook. This required (because I am not going to purchase software for a one-time use to migrate data) doing things the 'hard' way, exporting data from the Palm Desktop as comma-delimited files and importing into Outlook.

Contacts (phone numbers, addresses, such) moved fairly easily. It required reviewing the entries to make sure all fields imported correctly (more or less, and acceptible), and then being able to eliminate some duplicates which the flat-file database system Palm uses necessitated, by making additional links as appropriate in Outlook.

Memo's also made the transition without too much trouble. The To-Do list, right up front in the Palm Support web information, won't make the transition. Copy and paste individually. Maybe. We'll see.

Calendar, on the other hand, is not playing friendly. The Palm software I have (updated on Friday via download) will only 'export' the Calendar data to an 'archive' file format, which Outlook won't read, nor will Paradox, nor probably Access. Outlook will accept a 'VCal' format for import; it's not a selection for export from the Palm Desktop. Today will see a bit of time researching this, particularly since Calendar is one of the major reasons I use a PDA/PIM.

During and after laundry (i.e. while at home drying) I also got a bit more writing done on a bit of story which much needs it. Not going to dwell much on this now, because I plan on posting the story to LJ when done. It's up to 7000 words plus some change right now, so it will probably be posted in serial format, one section a day. I'd hit a spot where the details just weren't coming along, though the outline stares at me indicated what it is that happens at that point. So I skipped along to the next section, got that written, and started on the wrap-up section. We'll see. I'd like to get this thing up here before the end of May.

Evening both days included hot-soak in the tub.

That's my exciting weekend. I need a weekend from my weekend.