David Ernst Chats with the World

Ok, it’s really cold.  I wanted to express my respect and good wishes to everyone who braved the cold on their bicycles today… most particularly, my Brazilian wife!  Very impressive!

The walk from my bedroom to my office was far less harrowing.  I did have to walk to the mailbox to send in my estimated tax payments though – Due today, don’t forget all you self-employed people out there!

So, a week ago, we welcomed my new “co-workers” to our home.  The drywall replacement that we’d been planning on since shortly after the water issue (you want to say “flood”, but that might not be technically accurate) of June 2008 has officially begun, and the contractors are quite happy to be working inside somewhere.  It seems to be going very well, faster than we expected so far.  Hopefully that will continue to be the case.

Anyway, in the meantime, we moved both of our offices into the guest room.  This has actually worked remarkably well… if I had my filing cabinets and some more civilized wiring (note the 50-foot ethernet cable unapologetically lying in the middle of the hallway) I could probably just keep it this way indefinitely.  But, of course, I don’t have to, in another week or two, I should be able to return to my office, which should be looking better than it has since I started working there.  We’ll see…

My family latched on to these battery testers a few years ago, clever little things that gauge the size of your battery and use that to figure out how much power to expect from them, so that they can compare that to how much power they are putting out, thus giving you a reading on how much “juice” is left in them.  Lots of batteries seem to have the same kind of thing built into them these days.  Whatever.

I’ve been noticing something recently: lots of products use multiple batteries (2, 4, whatever).  When the device starts to complain about its batteries being low, I take them out and test them.  Often – usually, I’d say – I find that only one of them is actually low.  Take out four batteries, three of them test perfectly fine, and the fourth is totally dead.  I have to suspect that this isn’t just because the one battery is failing, I think it’s something to do with the physics of batteries.  But, I don’t know what.  And, I could just be wrong.  But, anyone else experience this?

Whatever the case, you might think about checking all of your batteries instead of just throwing them all away when the device they are in says they are low.  Curious to hear if others experience this as well.

Forgive me, reader, for I have sinned. It’s been one year and 23
days since my last post.

And my excuse? Well, I’ve been busy….

But really, it’s not exactly the “busy-ness” that wears on me. It’s
the feeling that there are things I SHOULD be doing that I’m not.
that’s something I realized recently as I was bemoaning the fact that
I didn’t have time to do more of the things that I want to do,
including writing in this blog. It’s not that I didn’t have time, per
se, it’s that I had open commitments that made me say “look, if you
have time to blog, you have time to do this other thing, which you
must admit is more of a priority than blogging”. Which, honestly, I
still do, but at least I’ve reached a point where something
substantial is happening with all of the remaining open commitments,
so I’m feeling a bit better, and being that I reached the one year
mark, I figured it was time to do something here too.. and I want to..

Now, I am someone who could probably dive into my memory and write
pretty extensive posts about most everything worth writing about from
this past year, pretty much as if it had just happened. I’d lose a
few details, but, basically, it could be there. However, I don’t want
to spend that much time writing, and I’m sure you don’t want to spend
that much time reading, so… we won’t do that. Rather, I’ll try to
be brief as I present this Year In Review…
(more…)