Update!

It's been a long time since I last posted anything on my blog, in fact a bit too long and as I've been postulating posting something for my readers I've been wondering exactly where to start as so much has happened in the last few months. For starters Winter, although not officially over is finally displaying some signs of its own demise and slowly surrendering to longer days, slightly better temperatures, a warmer sun higher in the sky and the inevitable melting of snow. Recently my wife and daughter were able to trek out to a pine tree in our yard that has a little shoot sticking out its side that my daughter affectionately baptized "baby tree" when she was just 10 months old. The fact that they were able to reach that tree is a good sign of the better weather to come. I must say that I can't wait to see and feel the warmth of the sun on my face and to feel warmer breezes on my oldish bones, it's been a long Winter fraught with all sorts of challenges both emotional, psychological and physical. I'm currently just getting over a case of Sinusitis which seems to have become somewhat of a traditional Spring occurence. Work is now settling into more of a routine, but is far from being the stable ground that I've been seeking, but hopefully that will come in due time.

On other fronts, I had mentioned in this blog several times my indecisiveness about buying a MAC, well it's done. I purchased a MAC Mini some 4 weeks ago or so and I couldn't be happier. This little unit runs like a dream and although it's a tad on the slow side when running several software titles at once, it's still a nice stable machine that will allow me to get back into many of my projects that I've been meaning to tackle and on which I will be writing more in the future. Now that I have the MAC I've concentrated on ripping my whole music collection to MP3 just to have it easily accessible. I'm up to 1,100 song titles so far at 7 GB and I'm only about 1/2 way through my CD's. I purchased a nice little Palm Tungsten on which I can load MP3 and listen to them, so armed with that and a 4 GB SD card installed I should have enough room to carry most if not all my Jazz collection with me anywhere I go. My next few projects on the computer will be writing another parody newsletter that I have dubbed Compendium Absurdium which will hopefully makes its paper debut sometime in late April depending on my time and inspiration. Of course I still have the electric car conversion, as the weather starts to warm up, the level of snow goes down and the price of fuel goes up, my thoughts inevitable turn back to the my EV. So what's on the agenda with the Festy? Well the first thing is to continue on the interior, rebuilding some of the rusted out flooring and re-inforcing the area that will house the battery boxes. Then will come the motor to transmission mount, this will be a tricky bit of metal working business and even as I type this I'm not sure exactly what kind of mounting system I will use. Since I have a neat little CAD program for the MAC I will try my hand at drawing up plans for making a mounting plate and even some kind of connecting arrangement to mate the motor to the transmission. Other projects? Well there is a whack load of renovations to be done to the house including the basement, front and back doors, changing out the bathtub and finally changing the kitchen counter and sink. If I plan things well I should be able to get most of these things done by the end of the Summer. The basement will have to wait a little while longer, but I don't want to drag it out too long as it is my office and is rather unpleasant at the moment. I will end this here as I'm falling asleep and the batteries in my cordless bluetooth mouse are slowly dying leaving me without a means to navigate in my computer. I will write again soon more in depth about my MAC and what I've discovered so far.