Last Week

This last week was busy! How busy can a retired person be, anyway? Well, pretty busy!

It started out with the Archaeology Cafe, a monthly informal meeting at Cafe Vicente, sponsored by the Center for Desert Archaeology. This month's talk was about Romans in Tucson, by Don Burgess. President of AAHS and ex-CEO of KUAT. Romans in Tucson was the biggest scam ever and a very interesting story. See http://thebrainpan.wordpress.com/2009/05/10/don-burgess-authorhistorian-romans-in-tucson-the-story-of-an-archaeological-hoax-lecture/ and http://www.cdarc.org/?page=shop/normal&category_id=938f37c197c9dbb42c49eb93bd1275a9&ps_session=1723cb6ab432f050d81fb586d224889c

Then Wednesday was the usual Tucson Computer Society SIG, Windows 7 and Hardware. I presented an external battery by Dexim that can charge a Blackberry, iPod or iPhone, and Tweakers, a set of very small speakers that can improve the sound of your Blackberry, laptop or anything else that has a 3.5 mm sound output socket.

Then came the Tucson Computer Society Board meeting. I'm Treasurer. See http://www.aztcs.org/.

Next the AAHS (Arizona Archaeology and Historical Society - you can see why we use AAHS!) Board meeting. I'm Ass't Treasurer. See http://www.statemuseum.arizona.edu/aahs/index.shtml

Continuing, next was a lecture and reception for the Cassasola Photo Archives at the AZ State Museum (I volunteer there - mucho). See http://www.statemuseum.arizona.edu/exhibits/index.shtml.

The photo on left is one of Cassasola's photos. On the right is the Mexican Consul in Tucson, who was at the lecture and whose office sponsored the exhibition. The photos document Mexico City 1900-1940.

Next was the Mannheim Steamroller concert Sunday in Centennial Hall. If you've never heard MS, and there are few that haven't listened to their music at Christmastime, you might want to get their 25th anniversary CD. It was a marvelous concert! I never realized how many instruments are involved; most of the people play 4 or 5 instruments!Centennial Hall was full, but I understand that the evening performance was not completely sold out.

And then, to top off the list, Tucson Botanical Gardens had their annual Luminaria Nights. They decorate the Garden, of course, but the interesting part is the five performance sites around the Garden. These are amateurs, but are all accomplished performers. One of these in the past was the Tuba group, playing Christmas carols, but not this year (sob!).

So, you can see it was a busy week!

TBG and El Tour

The Tucson Botanical Gardens hosted several Mata Ortiz potters last weekend. Mata Ortiz potters live in Paquime, Mexico and make some of the most beautiful decorated pottery ever. The technique was developed by Juan Quesada some 40 years ago. As it gained popularity, Juan taught others in Paquime to make the same type of pottery. Today, the pots get prices that are much higher, but still reasonable compared to the Pueblo potters.

The photo above shows Manolo, a potter, setting his fire around his pot, which is inside the upside down bowl under the sticks. He's adding cow chips around the outside, which when lit, will increase the temperature of the fire to around 1500 degrees. The photo below shows him lighting the fire. As I watched him, it reminded me of Boy Scouts, but when I saw him dousing the sticks and chips with lighter fluid, the Boy Scout image disappeared!

Below shows the fire in full flame. Manolo kept propping up the sticks and chips that fell down, so as to keep the fire going as long as possible. The firing process took about 30 or 40 minutes. When the fuel finally all burned up, it was necessary to let the pot cool down. That took another 30 minutes or so.

This is the pot he fired. It looks kind of ugly right now, with the ashes on it, but it will turn a reddish color when cool. It was a plain gray before the firing. This was an oxidizing fire (oxygen allowed in to the pot area), which turns their clay red after firing. A reducing fire  (oxygen not allowed in the pot area( will turn the clay black The figure on the top of the pot is a lizard, actually an iguana.

Note the very detailed drawing on the pot. It's drawn with a hair, a yucca string or other things. It's amazing how detailed the painting can be with such crude tools.

Weekend before last was our annual El Tour de Tucson, a bicycle race. There are four different lengths, the longest 109 miles, then 66, etc. The course is the same for all four, just with different start points. The 109 mile track goes more or less around Tucson. We are a very hilly area, because of all the washes and rivers, so the race involves lots of going up and going down hills. There were about 8,000 entrants! Bicycle racing is big in Tucson. We see racers out practicing every day. They ride on city streets, go up and down Mt. Lemmon (9,000 ft), out to the Desert Museum and more. Too much for me, but it sure makes interesting watching.

What's Up?

How time flies! I see my last post was at the beginning of October, almost a month and a half ago. And not a lot has happened since then, to be honest!

One of the imponderables - my knee seems to be getting better. It's still "bone on bone," of course - that's not going to change - but I don't have the pain I had a month ago.

I had cut racquetball to two times a week, but now I'm back to three. It doesn't hurt as before. I don't know why, but it's a nice change!

Today, I got rid of a lot of paper in file cabinets. I save all those things that are sensitive, like bank statements, stock account statements and so on. As a pack rat, I also save a lot of other stuff that isn't sensitive, but which might need to be looked at later. Later never seems to come!

So when I saw a notice in the paper yesterday that a Credit Union was having a free shredding today, I gathered up all the old stuff and took it to them. It was only a shopping bag full, but it opened up enough space in the drawers that I can now save some more stuff for months!

I wish I could say that we're having a banner year for rain. 'Tain't so! We're down about two inches from last year and three or so from normal. That may not sound like much, but when normal for the year is 11 inches, the shortfall is significant. We had clouds the last three days, but no rain down here on land. Mt. Lemmon had some, though.

'S'all for now.

Windows 7 Launch Party

The Tucson Computer Society held a Launch Party on October 22, the introduction date of the new operating system. Microsoft provided a Party box with decorations, freebies and two copies of Windows 7 Ultimate (32-bit and 64-bit). You can see the decorations in one of the pictures here and the screen shows the desktop of Windows 7.
We had about 40 members attending, so it was a big crowd. The conference center at Sertino's Cafe was the site for the celebration.
We provided cake (see the beautiful cake below), ice cream and soda for everyone.
The features we showed included Help and How-To, Search, Taskbar-Pin Programs, Preview of Open Programs, Snap, Shake and Peek, Custom Desktop, Web Slices and Accelerators.
We also had a discussion of the upgrading process from Vista

(uneventful) and XP (specialized action required).

To top off the night, we had a raffle of the Microsoft freebies, plus many of the free items I have picked up at computer shows. There was a prize for every attendee!
The Launch Party was a lot of fun!

Update

I see it's been a while since my last post. I intend to remedy that. Writing a blog is as easy as writing a letter and I can add pictures. Although I could attach picture to a letter, each reader has to download not only the letter, but also the pictures, taking time and bandwidth.

My most recent adventure was San Diego, land of water and cool. The ocean is right next door, of course, but you can smell the salt air and if you're anywhere nearby, the businesses cater in some way to the Navy and watercraft. the cool part comes from the dramatically lower temperatures, at least lower than in Tucson, about 20 degrees. That's enough to be really noticeable!

My purpose was to attend CTIA at the convention center. This show is all about communications, cell phones, service providers and those associated with these businesses. As usual, my press pass gets me in free and gives me entree to special press events.

One press event, Showstoppers, was something of a disappointment. This is usually an exciting and big event for both press and the vendors, but this time there were few vendors and they weren't all that interesting. The food, though, was very good. Showstoppers is usually an evening event, but this one was at lunch, so the drinks were non-alcoholic.

The Virgin Mobile picture was taken at Showstoppers.

Another event for press was put on by HTC, a cell phone provider. Their Hero phone was interesting and I'm hoping to get one for review before long. I'm interested in trying out one or two of the touch-screen phones, like the iPhone. There a quite a number of them now. The Apple product has triggered many competitors.

And a third event was Mobile Focus, the most exciting and interesting. This was an evening event and had a theme of the 20's. There were two women dressed as flappers, the hall was decorated with prohibition posters and things. The drinks were pure 21st century, though!

There were many vendors, all of which were very cooperative. That means that they were willing to provide units of their product to review. While most products were related to communications and services, there were a couple of outliers - HP and Kingston. I got a lot of leads on stuff to review.

The drive from Tucson to SD goes over the desert in AZ to Yuma, the Colorado river, then the sand dunes (big!) in CA, then more desert, then the mountains east of SD, which rise from 1,000 to 4,000 feet, then down again to sea level at SD.

SD is as much a maze of freeways as is Los Angeles. Everyone is in a hurry, of course! And here I am, trying to figure out which interstate to take. I relied heavily on my GPS device to direct me to my destination, a cheap motel.

The return trip is as exciting as the trip over, but both were uneventful, the best kind!

Knees and Rain

Well, I suppose 50 years of playing handball and racquetball should catch up with me one of these days, but it isn't easy to recognize that it's getting to me. I've been having some pain in my left leg the past few weeks, versus none at all prior to that. I saw my doctor, who ordered X-rays and diagnosed "moderate arthritis," and referred me to an orthopedic doctor.
That's not a new diagnosis; I got that some 10 years ago. I was convinced that something else was going on. The ortho guy said it's "bone on bone and there's nothing I can do, other than give a shot of cortisone."
So, I guess dealing with pain is the only answer. I want to keep playing as long as I can. I find that acetominophen seems to moderate the pain satisfactorily for now.
As I've told many people, I've been old and I've been young, and let me tell you that young is better.
On the weather front (no pun), our monsoon season is over, officially. This year the monsoon was a bust! Instead of the 6 or so inches we usually get in the July-September period, we got 2.5 inches, a substantial shortfall. In my weatherspotter report for September, there was no rain at all during the month!
We now must wait for the winter season for more rain. This is December-February.

The Beginning

Today is the beginning of this blog. I read about it in Smart Computing (October, 2009) and decided to try it!

Yesterday, I went to Ryan airport for an Expo there. Ryan Field is about 40 miles west of Tucson and has an interesting history.

During WW II, the need to train many more military pilots than was possible with the limited airports of California led to the use of Ryan Field for that purpose. The weather was excellent and was close to the west coast.

The airport is larger than many small regionals, with two parallel runways, many enclosed hangars and a very nice restaurant on the field.

The Expo featured six high-performance airplanes from five manufacturers: Cessna, Mooney, Cirrus, Diamond and Beechcraft. Each was priced over $500,000, so the visit was only for interest, not possible purchase.

Here's a picture of the five of us in front of a Mirage, priced at $650,000. Quite a handsome group, huh?

I was interested in seeing what a new Mooney looks like, since another guy and I owned one for 15 years or more. Here's what the model at Ryan looked like - not a lot different in exterior style from ours, but the interior is different, especially the panel.

It was a hot day, one of the last gasps of our hot, dry summer of 2009, but interesting for those of us who fly.