AC Capehart capehart

I know why we’re in Altoona. I even appreciate it. I like the new friends we’ve made. But I miss the comfort and convenience of old friends. Even some colleagues from Kesmai. There are enough stocky people with dark hair that every now and again I think I see Stuart Holme in the distance. I miss his uncomplicated appreciation of life. I miss my friend Nancy (not a Charlottesvillian) with whom I seem to often have an understanding that exists outside of spoken communication.

[rant] As you probably know, we bought a house recently. With that sort of thing comes taxes. For the actual sale itself, the state takes 2%. 1% is paid directly to the state by the borrower, the other 1% is paid by the borrower first to the seller who then pays it to the state. Then there are property taxes. Because I own property, the state lays claim to some of my money based again on either what I paid for that property, or (often worse) what it thinks I could get for it if I sold it.

Maybe not everybodyelse knows about this, but I sure felt out of the loop when I discovered it. I saw my first PhotoStamp today. The photo’s of my uncle’s first grandchild. It was on a card he sent my mom. MY MOM knew about photostamps before I did. Sometimes, I get the false impression that because things in Altoona seem to move slowly, that things outside of Altoona also move slowly.

I was “backing up” the hard drive on my XP machine because it looks like I’m going to have to re-install XP. “Backing up” is in quotes because I’m really just skimming over the drive looking for “irreplaceable” stuff. I don’t have proper backup and restore media or software. And a proper restore would restore my XP problem anyway. The XP problem is that I can no longer install anything. When I try, I get a message like “Setup failed to launch installation engine: The RPC server is unavailable.

One of the things that I’d meant to do with this blog is some technical-review sorts of things for my toys. I don’t tend to get a lot of tech toys. I don’t make enough money to get a lot of tech toys. But I do get some, and I’d like to talk about ’em so that you could have some idea if you would like to add them to your tech toy-chest.

I accidentally went to mass yesterday. I’m going to pause for a moment and let you re-read and marvel at that sentence; I accidentally went to mass yesterday. (Sidenote: Carolyn says that since I didn’t stay for communion, I didn’t reallygo to mass. Read on for the details.) I was taking my dad on a tour of Altoona. We went to Lowes and Advance Auto, but also to the Wopsy Trail and the Horseshoe Curve.

I got this mail today. It cracked me up. I can see how it might work for a really big organization or ISP. But for a personally-owned/managed vanity domain? `Dear Accapehart Member,We have temporarily suspended your email account �ccapAhart@accapehart.

I’m having trouble sleeping, so I thought I would “pen” this entry which I’ve meant to do for a while now… So, the other day, Carolyn and I were walking to the mailbox a few blocks from our house. We go there because the pick up is early-ish (11:30 AM) and we seem to have good luck getting our DVDs back to Netflix pretty quickly when shipped from there. Now, Altoona’s not really a pedestrian-friendly city in general.

I’m trying the bk lifestyle today. It’s been pretty nice, but I’ve found it a bit distracting. The grandkids are next door. It was somebody’s birthday. There was lots of running around and swimming, etc. I guess I should explain what I mean by the bk lifestyle. My friend bkis doing editing work for the Ludwig von Mises Institute. He does this predominately on his powerbook. When he’s in Charlottesville, which he is this month, he spends most of his time doing his computing on his back deck.

OK, I’ve known CSS is cool and powerfull. And I’ve tried to start to make the shift (including for this blog itself). Some links have come across the Neon Guildfor which I was apprciative. (I’ve collected them in my wiki.) But I was blown away by the CSS Zen Garden. All of the CSS stuff that I’ve done has still required that the things I want designedto have special s or s or whatever.