JUL-A-2
RE-ENTRY
BETWEEN TRIPS TO THE FAR SIDE OF THE WORLD,
USING THE
JET-SET TIME CLOCK TO ACCOMPLISH A FEW LONG RUNS
WITH JOE, A
CLEARING OF THE BACKLOG OF DETAILS,
DISSERTATION
PETITION, AND THE 4TH OF JULY HOLIDAYING
July 4, 2002
This note is typed on the office desktop computer, since the laptop is getting debugged of its “Autoformat” accidentally installed by Michael Eiffling in Manali when he appended the patient data on the long range referral to Alden Harken in University of Colorado. It is also disabled, since, once again, it is acting strangely with a line of keys out of action, which prevented me from filling in any of the blanks in the chapters I had left unfinished in Spiti because of lack of power to recharge the batteries, or this mystical lesion which shows up only when I need the machine and have the time to produce stuff from it—as occurred in my “weather wait” for over 24 hours in Lukla Nepal, when I even had intermittent electricity, but the same line of keys went out. That Line includes the keys I can exercise here for you: *, 8, I, i, K, k, <, , Now, if you can figure how to write an intelligible paragraph without the capital “I” or a “,” you see how this would be even further compounded by a bunch of autoformatted hieroglyphs, such as paragraph marks, space bar dots between each word and every hard return or tab key use. So, the laptop is getting its rehab in its very own “Detox Center.”
That same status is the case for the
two Nikon Tele-Touch cameras (NTT) both of which are in George Mora Nikon
camera service. Even as I am rehabbing
those two cameras, I have been looking at others to replace them, making the
bold step into the world of upscale digital photography. I went to Best Buy to
look at the ones they had on display there, and saw that the cameras are ranked
on the basis of how fine their “pointillism” is—that is, 1.2 Megapixels is on
the cheap end, and up through two, three and four, with top end cameras now
packing 5 or 6 megapixels for higher resolution and lots of options, which
includes video digital streaming and audio, all depending on the size of the
memory chip in the camera—some of them even recording to a CD. So, this would mean that the vital link in
the upscaling could be the computer and video monitor you are going to have to
hook it up to, some of them with software so that you do not even need a
computer in between.
As I was running early on Sunday
morning with Joe only a few hours after I had returned to IAD, taken the
Washington Flyer to West Falls Church, Metro to GW, where I picked up the
parked Bronco, and we used my early rising from jet lag to put on a few miles
several times this week. He mentioned
that there would be a Business Section series of articles on Digital cameras,
since he gets the news by a JAWS internet; (Job Applications With Speech.) I looked the paper over, and went to see
those on display at Best Buys, and heard there about www.cnet.com. The internet review of the cameras available
recommended a model that was not in the two stores I looked through—the Canon
S-40, which had a small size with high resolution and a price about three
hundred dollars under the top end heavier and bulkier cameras like the Cannon
G-2 and Nikon CoolPix. So, I will still
have to “go to school” on these rapidly evolving technodevices, but it will be
nice to never run out of film (although I will still have to worry about
running out of battery, and less likely to run out of memory on the bigger
chips) and to get essentially “instant photography” with pictures I can delete,
edit, and store for various uses. You
are already getting some of my pictures by Internet, but it takes a full week
for that to happen. I have storage of a
number of these pictures on CD’s which would mean I would need to make a CD
burner available to add to the collection of computer clutter to create albums,
and eventually, I would have to run this through a program such as Power Point
or other display capability, to show them on the computer screen, or a TV
monitor, and –just maybe—fewer prints in albums, which have now proliferated to
the point of cluttering up a good part of the future library displacing some of
the book space which is also getting to be premium in the limited library in
the remodeling project.
On the subject of “going back to
school”, I succeeded in getting the petition into the Graduate School Dean on
the subject of a tight time frame for my new thesis committee, with a thesis
proposal written and defended by September, and then five chapters of a thesis
generated in ten months to be defended in October of 2003. This is somewhat mechanical, but it allows a
timetable so that I will be done with
this process, which has been marking time too long. So, we will each see what the Grad School Dean says about this
timetable with a departmental approval of this process.
One bit of happy news: the Boston
marathon for April 21, 2003 will feature 20,000 runners with expansion of the
group in the 45+ age group by making the qualifications for running just a bit
easier for the senior citizens in the groups they have added to the 80+
categories. It turns out that the
qualifying time for a male in the 60+ category is a sub-four hour marathon. The time that this has to be accomplished is
in an officially Champion Chip timed race from September 28, 2001 forward. What this means, is that I am already
qualified! I had run the MITP with Joe
in November, within the time period, and have the certificate, as well as it
being Champion Chip timed so the certificate is not even necessary, having come
in at 3:56! So, I do not have to pay
the Jimmy Fund extortion through the AMAA lottery, and can enter the race as an
open qualifier, while attending the AMAA without needing their race entry.