Uninspired and offering advice

I'm feeling singularly uninspired this morning.
This is Day Five of my Shingles treatment. The blotches are about the same, but the nerves in my right arm are tingly and on edge - sorta like when your arm falls asleep, but constantly and accompanied by joint pain in the fingers of my right hand. And my right armpit feels like it's on fire.
There is a vaccine for Shingles that will either prevent or reduce the severity of the condition.
Maria says she recommended it to me several months ago, but I don't recall the discussion. It's a moot point now.
But if you've ever had chickenpox and have not yet had Shingles, I suggest you look into it because about half of the folks who have had chickenpox can expect this nasty little experience by the time they reach 70.

Shingles report

My Shingles outbreak seems to have stabilized.
It's not especially painful, but there are unpleasant tingling sensations associated with it, particularly throughout my right arm and on the top of my head.
I've been taking the medication regularly and haven't had to resort to the pain pills. By all accounts, this seems to be a relatively mild case.
Mostly, I've been following the medical advice and avoiding stress and getting plenty of rest.
In that connection, I'm suppressing an urge to get out on the riding mower and cut the grass this morning. A cold front came through last night and the temperature is a pleasant 68 - going to a high of just 88 this afternoon. Then it's back to the 90s tomorrow.

Yuppie compass or useful tool?

Arkansas was terra incognita for Maria and for me when she moved down here to start her new job last September.
I suggested we get her a GPS unit to help her find her way around, but she declined in favor of maps and a compass.
While many of my BMW-riding friends adopted GPS years ago, I've been a holdout, waiting for the technology to mature and for prices to drop. Earlier GPS units had less memory capacity and a greater dependence upon a computer link to choose and download map data for just the part of the country where the user planned to go.
Now, even the cheaper units come loaded with mapping and point of interest data for the 48 contiguous states.
Still, I held out.
Then we drove to Mountain View, Ark., a few weekends ago in a convoy with Maria's daughter and the daughter's boyfriend. While most of northeast Arkansas is flat with a fairly predictable road grid - the sole exception being Crowley's Ridge - western and northwest Arkansas is mountainous with an amazing hodge-podge of state and federal highways involved in any long drive.
We got along fine with our map on that trip, but it occurred to me it would be a whole lot easier and more fun to have a GPS voice give me a heads-up in advance of every route change. And, I must admit, I used computer mapping software to work out the most direct route.
Circuit City is blowing out a lot of stuff and they had the Garmin 200W on sale at a reasonable price over the weekend.
Besides, we both figured I needed a little retail therapy for my shingles discomfort.
So a day later, I can say I'm impressed. Yes, there are places that don't show up in the Points of Interest lists that I think should be there and no, it's nowhere near as flexible and sophisticated as the new Dash Express that I blogged about a week or two ago. It doesn't know about our little county sideroad. It was very short on documentation - just a fast and dirty Quick Start guide and so far, I've found nothing more detailed on the Garmin website. I did, however, download and install the latest 4 GB update and it seems a bit smarter than it was straight out of the box.
This thing will doubtless prove useful as we explore our new home state and we hope it will save us a few gas dollars by always showing us the shortest route. That is, if I don't burn up gas just driving around and playing with it.

The Elephant Man

I'm sitting in the mall, waiting for a store to open, and feeling like everyone is staring at my deformity - my angry neck blotches from Shingles.
So far, this is apparently a mild outbreak involving the right side of my neck from shoulder to behind the ear, with a small spot under my beard on my right cheek and a couple of blotches on my chest.
Not much discomfort - it looks way worse than it feels. Hence the Elephant Man feeling.

The Gratitude Campaign

Longtime friend Joe Repp emailed a link to this site today and it seems like a good idea to me.
The point of the Gratitude Campaign is using a reasonably universally understandable American Sign Language gesture to say "thank you" to military, police and fire personnel for their service.
Here's the explanation of the gesture:
This sign originated in France in the late 1700s, and was published in “Theorie des Signes”, a dictionary of signs by the Abbe Sicard. The sign was brought to the United States in 1816 by the Rev. Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, founder of Gallaudet University, who later modified it to start at the chin rather than at the heart. That sign is now the standard sign for “thank you” in American Sign Language. The original sign, starting at the heart, is less commonly known today and might now be considered “slang.”
You can see a short video about it here.
I think the old "thumbs up" works just as well - maybe better - but that's just a matter of personal preference.
And it's not about politics, it's about service.

Shit! Shingles!

A doctor took one look at the angry-looking rash on my neck behind and below my right ear this morning and pronounced that I have the dreaded shingles.
Herpes zoster is the medical name and it's apparently the legacy of childhood chickenpox. The virus has been lurking in my nervous system for more than half a century, waiting for the right stressful conditions to erupt.
I started noticing a prickly sensation on my neck a couple of days ago and waited for it to go away. It was decidedly worse this morning, with nasty little blisters that looked like poison ivy poisoning and big red blotches.
Maria insisted that I see a doctor and the shingles diagnosis was the result.
I'm now taking Propoxyphene-N 100W thrice daily with a supply of Famciclovir 500 mg in case I get too uncomfortable.
So far, it looks worse than it feels and if this is as bad as it gets, I'll count myself lucky in light of the shingles horror stories I've heard.

Leaving Memphis

The Pyramid again.

Memphis

Crossing the Mississippi with the Memphis Pyramid in view. There's talk of tearing it down. I think it's kinda cool, but then I don't have to pay the upkeep either.

Gas

$3.65 per gallon

I must be off

I'm off to Memphis this morning to the nearest Best Buy (100 miles distant).
I dropped our Sony VAIO laptop last week and now it won't boot Windows or recognize the USB mouse.
Fortunately, we have about a week left on our 3-year extended warranty/service contract - one of the few times I've ever opted for an extended warranty.

A message from SQ1

Hey, I was a bona fide Ovaltine-drinking Secret Squadron member with decoder badge, manual and membership card.

May I scrawl on your arm, mister?

I'm pretty sure this classified ad in one of Portland, Oregon's alternative newspapers is a joke.
At least I hope it's a joke.

Lighting

Sooner or later, this kind of thing happens to all of us in the newspaper business.
This time it happened to Rod Rose. I'll go easy on Rod because he's a longtime friend, a good solid journalist and the guy who introduced me to my wife.
Writers at bigger papers used to have the luxury of being able to blame bad headlines on the copy desk. Now, with the advent of computer pagination, the blame falls upon whoever built the page. Unless things have changed at The Reporter, that probably means Rod built the page and dropped the crucial "n."
So it goes. Chances are, most of the readers glanced at the headline and - given the context of the word in a weather story - their brains turned "Lighting" into "Lightning."

What about Bill?

As the talking heads on TV were analyzing and overthinking the presumed nomination of Barack Obama and the presumed demise of Hillary Clinton's presidential aspirations last night, I found myself thinking that this election year probably still has lots of surprises in store.
For the second time this spring, I heard the name of Sen. Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) casually mentioned as a vice-presidential candidate. You may recall that I raised that possibility here months ago.
And I thought it was brilliant of Hillary to let slip the idea that she might accept the #2 spot on the Democrat ticket while, at the same time, declining to concede.
As some of the folks on FOX News pointed out, her hint at being Obama's VP sucked a lot of the wind out of the sails on Obama's victory.
But the tantalizing thing about these scenarios is Bill Clinton.
I suggested earlier that Bill probably isn't eager to be relegated to the status of the husband of a president. But at the same time, it would be even more ignominious to be the husband of a vice president. Neither is a lofty legacy for a former president of the United States.
But then Jimmy Carter has turned into a treasonous moonbat, setting a new benchmark for presidential legacies.
And then there's the question of why on God's green earth would Barack Obama want a former president as the spouse of his VP? That would make for some awkward and weird scenes at state dinners and other such affairs.
And finally, I think Hillary is considering taking this all the way to the convention and making a fight out of it. The Clinton ego is pretty big, you know.

Sounds great

My quest for a good motorcycle sound management system began when I started touring.
Back in the early 1980s, I stuck a couple of earbud earphones under my fullface Bell helmet so I could use my Sony Walkman as I rode my first BMW – a ’71 R50/5 – to Michigan.
It was more of a distraction than entertainment, because the earbuds wouldn’t stay put and I had to crank the volume up too much to get over the sound of the wind noise.
When I made my first ride to the West Coast in 1986, companions Tim and Linda Balough introduced me to foam earplugs. During a break somewhere west of Kansas City on our first full day on the road, I reached into my jacket pocket and fished out the plugs Tim had given me earlier. Twenty miles later, I was a believer. I could hear everything I needed to hear, but just at a reduced, less alarming volume.
The stress of wind noise muted, I quickly discovered I could ride more miles a day and not feel as fried when I reached my destination.
Over the years, I experimented with a variety of earplugs. I found the EAR brand a bit too large for my ear canals and in later years favored the Hearos brand because their smooth finish made for easy insertion.
After swimming at the thermal pool at Glenwood Springs, Colo., I discovered earplugs go in easier and seal better if they or your ear canals are wet, so I got into the habit of giving myself a stereophonic wet Willie every time I put in my plugs.
But I still longed for music to fill those long stretches of superslab I traverse every summer in the West.
I bought a set of Bass Monster helmet speakers from Collett Industries Ltd. in Canada and installed them in my helmet. Added to the wind noise, the Bass Monsters were just too much for my un-plugged ears. But I also found that my Walkman’s output couldn’t drive the speakers hard enough to be heard clearly over earplugs. I’d ride down the interstate trying to hear music that, given the muting of earplugs, was slightly more perceptible than a thought.
Then, I discovered the Boostaroo – a $20 stereo amplifier about the size and shape of a Bic lighter – that kicked the Walkman’s output up to a usable level and also had multiple input jacks, letting me add my radar detector to the mix.
At last, I had a system that seemed to work.
The problem, however, was that I’d just changed the mix – the ratio of wind noise to music – and I was still bombarding my eardrums with too much sound. Our ears, after all, are designed to spend most of their time picking up subtle stuff like the gurgling of a stream or the rustle of leaves in a forest. I’d already noticed a touch of tinnitis – chronic high-pitched ringing of the ears – and worried I might end up with serious hearing loss if I didn’t find a better solution.
A few years ago, I noticed Bob Weis, an Orlando, Fla., audiologist at one of the BMW MOA national rallies. Bob makes custom-fitted earplugs, using an injection molding process that produces a plug that is a perfect fit for each customer’s outer ear and ear canal structure. But what really caught my eye was the option of installing stereo speakers in the custom plugs.
After missing connections with Bob at a couple of rallies, I finally caught up with him at the BMW RA rally in the summer of 2003 at Red River, N.M. For $20, he made me a temporary pair of color-coded (red for right, blue for left) plugs with the understanding that I could send them back to him after using them for a month or so and he would cast permanent medical grade silicone plugs, with or without the stereo speakers.
Later that day, I discovered Marilyn Navia, an audiologist from Miami, who was doing the custom formed stereo plugs – called in-ear monitors – on site.
With another three weeks on the road in front of me, I was eager to get the finished product, so I plunked down $170 worth of VISA plastic and Marilyn shot my ears full of colored silicone. I picked up the finished product later that day, along with a storage case called a Hearing Aid Saver – a cylindrical plastic case about 3” tall and 2” wide with silica gel in the bottom to protect the monitors from moisture damage.
Tim Balough had just had MotoLites installed on his F650, so we went for a ride to try out our new purchases. We did a 90-mile loop east and south to Taos and back and I was immediately amazed and impressed.
Without music, these are the best earplugs I’ve ever used. The noise attenuation is somewhere in the 25 decibel range – not quite as much as the -30 db Hearos, but still quite effective because of the perfect fit.
When I plugged in to my Sony Walkman MiniDisc player/recorder, I was all smiles. On the way across Kansas a few days earlier, I’d been struggling to hear clearly over the wind noise and Hearos with the volume cranked all the way up and Boostaroo-ized. Now, I was actually turning the volume down. Way down, like below half-volume, and still hearing the music perfectly. It is, without question, the best sound I’d ever heard on a motorcycle.
(The MiniDisc player/recorder has since given way to an XM satellite radio receiver and an iPod.)
I can't help comparing this minimalist arrangement with the full zoot stereo system on big touring bikes, notably the BMW K1200LT with its 6-CD player/changer hogging luggage space in the right saddlebag. I have to think I’m getting better sound and better hearing protection without the added bulk and weight of hauling the equivalent of a home stereo system around on my motorcycle. And, it’s an investment – under $500 total - that stays with me if and when the bike is sold or retired.
I gave the system a good workout the next couple of days, riding from Red River down through Albuquerque and across western New Mexico and Arizona to Kingman the first day and then across the California desert and Central Valley to Gilroy the next.
I found my breaks were shorter and less frequent and, quite unexpectedly, noticed my seat stayed much more comfortably much longer. Music as an anesthetic for the posterior? Maybe I could get a grant for some serious study of this phenomenon.

Eat in the hat

Here's a vintage postcard photo of the Brown Derby Cafe on Wilshire Blvd. near Rodeo Drive in Beverly Hills. It was 28 feet in diameter and 17½ feet high.
My first father-in-law, who served with distinction in the 144th Field Artillery Group of the U.S. Army, was an avid postcard collector. He bought picture postcards as souvenirs wherever he traveled in the 1940s. This one is circa 1940.
The sign on the roof says, "Eat in the hat."

Unbearable

I'm scanning vintage postcards and photo sets for Ebay today.
I have a bunch of them, including a set of views from 1940s Yellowstone National Park. Here's one of them - a shot of tourists feeding bears along the roadside.
We now know what irresponsible insanity this is, but as late as the 1960s people went to Yellowstone with the intention of feeding bears from their cars.
I think I mentioned earlier than when my parents took me to Yellowstone in the summer of 1956, we counted 29 bears along the roads during our two days in the park.
The National Park Service has pretty well stamped this practice out and the park's bears no longer see park traffic as a food source.

Free audiobooks & ebooks

I've been a fan of Manybooks.net for a long time and have read several of their free books on my Treo smartphones.
I was happy to discover the other day that they now have several titles available for free download in mp3 form, either as individual chapters or as all of the chapters in a single zip file.
Manybooks.net is the creating of Matthew McClintock for the benefit of the Internet community.
Here's how he explains it:

All of the eBooks from manybooks.net are free, however donations toward the maintenance of the site are welcome.

Many of the etexts are from the November, 2003 Project Gutenberg DVD, which contains the entire Project Gutenberg archives except for the Human Genome Project and audio eBooks, due to size limitations, and the Project Gutenberg of Australia eBooks, due to copyright. As of July 2004 most current PG texts are available here, usually within the week of release. There are also public domain and creative commons works from other sources.

Zip archives are stored in the same directory structure as on the DVD, with Author, Title, and related information stored in a MySQL database. Pages are built with PHP and served using the Apache webserver. The server is a 1.66GHz Intel Core Duo Mac mini running Mac OS X 10.4.

eBooks are generated on demand using a variety of tools, and cached for future readers - which means that the first time anyone requests an eBook in a particular format it will take a bit longer to deliver, but the next time that eBook is requested it will be sent immediately.

That means Manybooks.net has nearly 21,000 titles - mostly in the public domain that can be downloaded in a variety of formats - pdf, ereader, Kindle, Ipod Notes, and on and on for visual reading and three varieties of audio: 64 bps mp3, 128 bps mp3 and ogg vorbis.
I just finished listening to the unabridged original version of H.G. Wells's "War of the Worlds," which is considerably more detailed than any of the theatrical adaptations I've seen.
I'm about to start on Mark Twain's "The Innocents Abroad."
Check Manybooks.net out. I think you'll find something worth reading/hearing.

Complications

The hood latch on my del Sol has been increasingly stiff over the last 4 years or so.
The most recent struggle began last Friday when I ran out of windshield washer fluid. I bought a gallon of solvent at an auto parts store and popped the hood to fill the reservoir.
I lifted the hood about 2 inches, found the hatch and pushed on it - hard. It wouldn't budge.
Over the last couple of days, I shot WD-40 into and around the latch mechanism in a vain attempt to free it.
So I called the local Honda dealer first thing this morning and made an 11 o'clock appointment for an oil change and lube,telling the service manager I couldn't open the hood. He seemed confident it was no problem.
I'd been sitting in the service department for 15 minutes when a woman from the service department scurried up and announced,"Sir, they cain't git your hood open to change your awl."
"Yeah, I told them I couldn't get it open."
Some confusion ensued and I ended the discussion with, "Hey, if it takes a new hood latch mechanism, do it."
So here I sit, awaiting further news from the mechanics.
+++++++++++++++++++++++
Later: They got the latch open, lubed it to a point where they are confident it will work right, did the awl change and lube, replaced the wiper blades and tracked down an awl leak that stems from a seeping awl pan gasket. Since they didn't have a replacement gasket in stock and since replacing it would mean dumping all of the new motor awl they just put into the engine, we decided I should phone them a few days in advance of my next awl change to order the gasket and do the whole thing in one shot.
Considering the time spent on the latch and diagnostics, I was pleasantly surprised that the bill was only $78 and change.
I thought I'd never find another Honda service department as friendly and honest as the one in Lafayette, Ind., but it looks like I have.

Monday crap

Most of my Ebay transactions go off without a hitch, but I'm dealing with a couple of major exceptions today.
I've been disposing of a set of dishes that Maria no longer wants and am happy to report that we've made more from them on Ebay than she paid for them and that almost all of them have gone through the mail stream without damage.
Except for the cup and saucer bought by Betty Mapes of Nebraska. She said they arrived broken. So I carefully packed a replacement set this morning and will mail them presently.
And then there's Maria's Nikon D100 SLR digital camera.
I sold it on April 25 to a guy in Colorado who was slow to respond to emails and welshed on the deal. He claimed he mailed a check, but it never arrived and I'm willing to bet that it was never sent.
So I voided the deal and re-listed it.
This time the buyer was a guy from India, living in Canada, who writes in very broken English. To his credit, he paid promptly by PayPal. But a few days ago he wrote to say the camera wasn't what he expected and he wants to return it for a refund.
I have been selling on Ebay for 10 years and have 568 comments in my profile - all positive - and I have always striven to make sure the customer is satisfied. So I agreed to let him return it with the stipulation that the camera, batteries, charger, and manual all arrive in the same condition in which I sent them.
And I will refund his money via PayPal.
I've been asked to shoot photos for the BMW MOA rally in Gillette, Wyo. next month and I was originally planning to take my D200, but now I think I'll spare the more expensive camera from the dust and vibration of a motorcycle trip and carry the rejected D100 instead.
For the record, the guy in Colorado has only 5 comments in his Ebay profile - the sign of an Ebay novice or a crook. From now on, I sell no big ticket items to bidders with less than 100 positive comments in their profile.
And I'm not crazy about the hassle of international transactions, either.
Now, I'm off to the postoffice and to take my Honda del Sol in for an oil change and lube and to get the hood latch repaired.
It's always something.