Pretty soon it will be back to sea again for another two months. Where does time go? Here we are in June and half the year is over. When the wife and son take off for Samoa later this month, we are on the downhill trek to completing this year and welcome in another. Of course 2011 is not the year I am looking forward to unless there are some drastic changes in the move to Newport. I watched the videos on the Oregon news websites of local Newport and Oregon politicians patting themselves on the back. I will visit the archives five years down the road and see how much of the grandstanding became fact.
All I could do is shake my head in disgust and join the growing chorus of anger over bureaucratic abuse of taxpayer money. If the press were like they were during the Watergate era, this would make a good story for an investigative journalism. But the mainstream press, as in this case the Seattle Times, P-I and local radio and television stations, did nothing but parrot what was fed them by public affairs officers. If Oregon were to give an MVP trophy, it should be awarded to the mainstream Seattle press for lethargic reporting over this issue.
Spare time is spent reading books, watching movies and listening to music. I just finished reading "Wonderful Tonight" by Pattie Boyd, former wife of George Harrison and Eric Clapton. I thought it was a bizarre triangle when I heard of the divorce between her and Harrison in 1970's just about the time George went on his only tour of the US in 1974. It consisted of the usual insights on lives of rock n' rollers of drugs, alcohol, infidelities and reasons for divorce. In other words, there was no smoking gun or anything revealing. Time to return those to the library. Now I am reading "A Short History of the United States." A book the wife picked up at a local independent bookshop, Edmonds Bookshop, to help her with studies on her citizenship. And that bookshop will get more business from me towards the end of the month to buy books for the upcoming cruise starting on June 26.
Since my conversion to Mac I have only two words to describe it, "love it!" I still have to learn to do some things but the design of the iMac, speed and the concept of plug it in and it works thrills me. I went to Mac to get away from Windows and be more active in blogging, graphics, photos and movies. The final straw for me was when XP started to shut off my laptop after upgrading it to SP3. I had to upgrade because Microsoft was no longer supporting XP SP2 after July. The symptoms started long before I upgraded and thought the shut down was hardware related. I could run it on batteries but it would not stay charged. Whenever I plugged it in to AC it would shut down after posting to Windows. As I said, it got worse as I went to SP3 but since Windows is vulnerable to attacks the laptop may have fallen victim to malware. Hardware is a Sony Viao so it is impossible to open it up and check the power connections underneath. In addition being a Windows Network administrator on the ship convinced me to migrate. The usual Windows idiosyncrasies of crashed programs or an endless display of "End Now" pop-ups after programs lock and time consumed for the operating system to reset itself. I do have an Office Suite for Mac as I am used to using Microsoft Office Suite. But leave it to Microsoft, as the Entourage cannot send e-mail via my NOAA account. I still have many Windows files I need to transfer to the Mac and re-establish contact with e-mail friends. This reminds me of the time I migrated from a Kaypro II CP/M machine to my first XT with MS-DOS 5.0. It was a Packard Bell (remember that name?) machine and the graphics for its time was "impressive."
Another three day weekend and plan to enjoy it. Take care and goodnight from the Emerald City.
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