LarryC’s World

Update !!!

Larryc.net is back up!! less than 24 hours and the Email is working, and the url redirects to this web page. All is well.

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Many of you know that I also own the domain larryc.net. I actually acquired it first because larryc.com was not available. I have been using that domain for my email for almost 10 years now. Anyway, I am going to consolidate it with my current hosting provider. Now is a good time to do it, because my contract expires on larryc.net shortly. Also, my email volume is usually low over a weekend since most of my newsletters don’t publish then. Interestingly, my spam is higher on the weekend. Of course it won’t bother me if a bunch of spammers get bounce messages. I intend to submit the DNS change Friday night, and hopefully, we’ll be back up on Monday morning.

After the change, anyone who navigates to www.larryc.net will get to this web site, and email sent to me at larryc.net will get to my larryc.com provider. You never know what is going to happen on the Weird Wonderful Web… after all it took a week to move larryc.com when it should have only taken 24-48 hours. But this is even a more simple change, so I have hope.

I saw this article linked on Slash Dot… It appears that the days of calling on the phone to get the correct time are over. A T & T is ending the service. California and Nevada are the last holdouts, telephone time has already been discontinued in the other 48 states. But according to THIS LA Times Article AT&T is ending the service in California in September of this year.

When I was a kid growing up in Illinois, the ‘time service’ was subsidized by a local business. In Aurora, Illinois, when you called the time number, you had to listen to a 5 (or 10) second ad for the local business before you got the time. I think they used to give you the temperature also. When I got to Northern California, the time number was POP-CORN. In reality it was 767 + any 4 numbers, but everyone knew it as popcorn. I remember well calling that number every morning to set the time on our online computer systems. We were still doing that as late as the mid 90’s at the Stock Exchange, calling the PacBell time service to set the time on our trading system. It wasn’t until the late 90’s, 98 or 99, that we installed our own NTP server. NTP is network time protocol for you non-techies. It is a standard method of synching time on computers across a network. We actually installed an antennae on the roof of our building, so that we could pull the time signals direct from GPS satellite signals.

Of course today, everybody has a cell phone that displays the time. And, if you’re like me, you have a program on your computer that automatically synchs your time at start up with one of the many public NTP servers. The most common one is time.nist.gov which synchs to the National Institute of Standards atomic clock in Boulder, CO. Today we seem to take time much more seriously, and demand much more accuracy. No longer is it ‘half past ten’, or ‘quarter to nine’! No today it is 10:35:07.00. We have a fetish to measure time down to the hundredth of a second. When I was a kid, and left the house in the morning I was told “be home for supper”, whenever that was. Not now, everything is timed down to the minute, or second. Somehow this fetish with time hasn’t improved our lives any, just made them more complicated. It also hasn’t improved the ability of anyone to be ‘on-time’ either.

Time to wrap this up, I’m beginning to sound like an old grump. Oh wait, I am one!

Thought I would give you a picture of one of our fellow residents of the Dripping Springs Natural Area.This fellow was hanging around on the Filmore trail, and he didn’t seem to want to get out of our way. He is a Western Diamondback Rattlesnake. You can tell he is a Diamondback by the black and white rings on his tail. He was close to 4 feet long, and his markings are very distinct. Often, the Diamondbacks in our area will have more mottled colors, and the diamond pattern will not be so distinct. The resident “expert” on rattlesnakes tells me that they add a rattle every time they shed their skin, or molt. That can happen twice a year or sometimes only once a year. This guy has 12 pairs of rattles, so he is at least 6 years old and maybe as much as 8 or 9. He is also pretty fat, so the food must be plentiful this year.

I know the food is plentiful this year. The quail are working on their third brood this Spring/Summer. In addition, the rabbits, ground squirrels, mice and rats are plentiful this year. It’s probably because everything is so green due to the rain we have had.

Our ‘monsoon’ season started pretty early this year. July was wetter than average. Typically, we receive about 6 inches of rain per year. Most of it comes in thunderstorms in the late summer months, and early fall. During this time, weather patterns draw moist air from the Gulf of Mexico, across southern Texas and northern Mexico, into the Southwest. When this moist air meets the hot desert, thunderstorms result. Some of these can be quite intense, dropping an inch of rain or more in as little as 30 minutes. Since I have been here, September and October have been the months with the most rain. this year, however, we have had (officially) 5 inches in July alone. I say ‘officially’ because our storms tend to be small in area, often covering only a square mile or so. It is not unusual for us to watch intense thunderstorms down in the valley, over Las Cruces proper, while we stay dry. I have some interesting weather pictures I have taken in the last 2 weeks. I’ll get them online soon.

Rain, Rain, Rain… It has been grey, cloudy, and raining off and on all week. We haven’t had any “gully-washers” around our place, but they have had some in El Paso. Well, Friday and we are off to Dripping Springs. Maybe the rain will keep the visitors down this weekend! Last weekend, we were busy on Sunday, and some of the people just didn’t want to go home at 7:00 PM when we close. I didn’t finish closing up until 8:00 PM! Don’t people have to go to work on Monday? Oh right, not necessarily.

Well, I am still working on cataloging my photos. It is better to do it on my PC before I upload them. Maybe, I’ll have the albums online next week. But, I have been working 4 days, and sometimes I just don’t feel like working on the web site. But, I’ll get it done.

See you on Monday!!

Larry