Saturday random 20

1. Kitaro - Beat
2. Miles Davis - Portia
3. Alan Jackson - Wanted (what the...?! oh yeah...)
4. Husker Du - I Apologize
5. The Who - New Song
6. Jim Croce - These Dreams
7. Devo - (I Can't Get No) Satisfaction
8. Duke Ellington - Sophisticated Lady
9. Hawkwind - Waiting for Tomorrow
10. Johnny Cash - Orange Blossom Special
11. Pink Floyd - Sheep
12. America - Sister Golden Hair (always reminds me of someone I used to know--hey Brer, remember Vicki?)
13. Monk's Choir of the Benedictine Abbey of St. Martin, Beuron - Third Christmas Mass
14. Little Texas - You and Me Forever (same compilation as Alan Jackson above)
15. Yes - It Can Happen
16. Ticon - On the Rocks
17. Suzanne Vega - Knight Moves
18. Henry Purcell - Prelude to Dido and Aeneas
19. The Jaye Consort - The Song of the Ass
20. Andres Segovia - Sarabande (by Handel)

Spent a good deal of time today getting the old Win98 machine back on the internet, but only temporarily so my daughter could do some church-related online activity. Discovered that the CD drive in that computer won't read CD-RWs that I wrote with this machine, but it will read regular CD-Rs. Yeesh, what a pain. Downloaded some freeware antivirus that still works on Win98 from Sourceforge. That machine isn't critical, and I can always use the "restore" disc that came with it to start it all over again, which I actually did just recently because it was still totally bogged down from when I used to use it as my main machine a few years ago. But, I thought it was a good exercise for the kids to learn the importance of keeping your computer protected. Ripped one more record and edited a couple others that I had previously ripped but not broken down into individual tracks yet. I was reminded yet again of the error of trying to do too many things at once--I got a skip on one track because the computer got too overworked and there was a lag in the recording, so I had to do that track over again. Heh, one of the other records had a real skip but I was able to clean it up better and remove the skip that was caused by a stubborn speck of dust.

And of course I downloaded all my regular weekly security updates and ran my weekly scans. I read recently about the Conficker worm that's supposed to hit April 1. Make sure you're anti-virus is up to date before then.

The playlist above may look strange, but that's how I like to listen to music. I see nothing at all odd about Johnny Cash and Pink Floyd playing back to back. I remember back around 1980 or so, maybe a little earlier, one of our local AM stations (KONO) ran a program where they asked for listeners to send in their three favorite songs, in order of preference. Song #1 got 3 points, song #2 got 2 points, song #3 got 1 point. They tallied everything up and played The Top 860 Songs of All Time (because they're on 860 AM). I don't remember what the #1 song turned out to be, but I do remember that somewhere near the top they played "El Paso City" by Marty Robbins and "Stairway to Heaven" by Led Zeppelin back to back. I thought that was the coolest thing I'd ever heard on the radio.

Freeze warning tonight! But April is coming and it will get hot soon. I figured out how to pack an extra 24 ounces of liquid plus two sandwiches into my ice chest for work. Now I can carry:

One, 24-ounce bottle filled with water and frozen.
One, 20-ounce bottle filled with water and frozen.
Two, 20-ounce bottles filled with refrigerated water.
Two, 12-ounce bottles filled with refrigerated "gatorade."
Plus two sandwiches and maybe a couple of granola or candy bars or a banana. I also like to carry Little Debbie brownies because they pack an enormous amount of carbohydrates and they taste good. I don't like bananas, I really only tolerate them, but I eat them when I'm working because they are so rich in potassium and carbohydrates. The frozen bottles help keep everything cool, and by the time I'm out of the other liquids they've thawed enough that I can get more water from them if I need to. If it's really hot, like torrid, I'll even carry one of the 12-ounce bottles in a fanny pack. But usually I just carry a Camel-Bak and some Sqwinchers in my pocket.

So when it gets really hot, I'll also be carrying a two-liter Camel-Bak of water to keep me going until I get back to my truck where my main liquid stash is. I'll also have several extra packets of Sqwinchers in the truck so I can mix more "gatorade" if I want to. Sqwinchers are small packets of concentrated syrup that you mix with water--if you're on foot somewhere you can just pull one out of your pocket, tear off the top, fill it with water from any available hydrant, and have a 6-ounce shot of "gatorade." (I use the quotes and lower case because it isn't made by Gatorade). That's something they supply us with at work.