You need a chuckle. If nothing else, I’ll clown for you so you can at least smile.
So I tried out the tablet life and it’s not alive for me. I can surf, but when there’s a minor issue with email not working, there’s nothing I can do to even guess what’s wrong. There are no tools for my networking skills to figure out why the connection didn’t work. I have reduced the fat-fingered issue, and can type a couple of paragraphs at a time without trouble. My style is unorthodox, pecking with the index finger of one hand while holding it with the other, but I can move along pretty well that way.
But there are simply no good editors. That is, nothing that combines the features I feel I have to have in order to do much. I’ll still be glad to have a real keyboard when it gets here because it makes searching for stuff a great deal easier. Still, the most useful thing about the tablet is the GPS. For a guy with major land navigation training, this is a wonderful tool. The next best thing about it is reading books and listening to my worship tunes. It’s just okay for surfing news sites and it’s tolerable for blog operations other than posting. However, without the diagnostic tools and feedback, I can’t trust the tablet much for email and so forth. Generic messages aren’t enough for a guy who knows how to fix this kind of stuff.
I haven’t lost the interest in putting files in the cloud. It’s the easiest way to stash the books in my preferred formats, because Smashwords does rotten PDFs and HTML files. My own are better, so I’ll be keeping them available in various places for my own purposes.
After a week of Win7 on the laptop, it slowed to a crawl. After yesterday’s “Patch Tuesday” update it didn’t even want to reboot. It was like those cartoons where someone piles a box-car load on some tiny donkey. This poor thing didn’t want to run that with that much crap. So I searched around and decided to give Debian Jessie 64-bit a try, that being the only thing I haven’t run on it yet among the options I can tolerate. At least it’s not crawling.
Meanwhile, the trail now runs all the way down on the south edge of the south woods, and up past various obstacles out onto the long sidewalk the developers built when they first began working the parcel. That sidewalk runs around the north side and back down to the starting point on the southeast corner. It runs alongside the divided boulevard wandering across the middle of the development parcel. The other half that I call the north woods already has some decent trails, but they need to be linked back to the main road. In all, once I finish, I’ll have roughly two miles of loops and laps running around out here. Given the pattern of development and current pace of lot sales, it will be a few more years before any of it disappears under housing foundations.
In the image here, I included enough to show where our mobile home park is on the east side. Some of the routes may be obvious in the image, but what you cannot see is how some parts are so very hilly.
Satellite view of the area where I’m cutting trails.
The thing that surprised me most as I kept at this project was that simple bypass limb-loppers are sufficient for 95% of the work because I’m basically weaving between trees, cutting only undergrowth and vines, and trimming back smaller limbs. I need to get a before-and-after pair to show that you can use such a tool and method to cut through almost anything out there.
I’m still praying I can blaze a trail into the US military community again. From my earliest memories I’ve always wanted to take the gospel message to them. My first shot was weak, but surprisingly effective nonetheless. The second time through the system I made a serious mark on people’s lives. I don’t think I’m finished with that, and the message has only gotten stronger. Pray with me about this.
