Bill Roper's Journal

I'm trying to hack through too many things at work simultaneously, which is keeping things entertaining there. But I'm making progress.

The house is much cleaner now that the cleaning lady has been here for the first time in over a month. :)

Julie had tumbling class tonight over at the Community Center, so I went along with Katie, intending to let her tether to my phone to play Ingress for the first time. Sadly, something was really messed up with her location and she eventually handed me the tablet in frustration. I will need to figure out what's going wrong with this soon.

Ah, well...

After having handed Katie my phone to war drive with it in Ingress yesterday on the way to and from Wrigley Field, I figured it was time to tether her tablet to my phone and head over to the nearby park to give her a more formal introduction to the game. But when we got back from lunch, the neighbor girls who had been out of town for the last week arrived and that plan went kerflooie. So I talked to Gretchen and she said it would be fine if I headed over by myself.

I'd started running the mission there, but had farbled things slightly so that I would have to walk the entire park again in order to catch the missing stations. I figured this would be a good opportunity to knock out the various Enlightened portals in the area, save for the really big ones at the north end. So I took the walk, finished the mission, recharged things, hacked portals, and knocked out a bunch of froggie portals along the way.

As I was knocking out the last of the lower portals, I noticed that someone else was also busy dropping resonators. So I pinged him and thanked him for the help. It turned out that he is a substantially more experienced player, so he offered to meet up with me and hand me some potentially useful items. This meant walking back toward the south end of the park again, but -- what the heck! -- I need the exercise.

We had a nice chat and he showed me some "trophies" from when some massive control fields had been generated in the past. (He's been playing for several years now.)

And then it was time to head back toward home.

By the time I finished, I'd picked up around 50,000 AP, so only another 100,000 to go to make level 6.

And I walked about 5 km, which is not too shabby! :)

I finally finished the ISFiC Press financials some time after 2 AM last night and forwarded them on to Tom so that he can file our taxes. And there was much rejoicing.

Earlier in the day, I engaged in some general frustration relief before dinner and went over to the nearby park and started beating up enemy portals in Ingress. I walked about four kilometers and did a good bit of damage. And I made it up to level 5. :)

Meanwhile, back on the home renovation front, we had the lighting in the kitchen redone, removing the fluorescent ceiling fixture that daisy_knotwise had long referred to as a display case for dead bugs and replacing it with an island light with four pendants and four LED cans on the side of the kitchen nearest the stove. I put four 60W equivalent Cree soft white bulbs into the island light and declared victory.

Except that the LED cans also had Cree bulbs in them, but they were very nice LED inserts from their TW series, which have a CRI of 93 instead of 80. 100 is sunlight equivalent for color reproduction. 80 is decent, but pretty yellow.

I went poking around on the Home Depot website and discovered that they were clearing out six-packs of the 60W TW series bulbs for $42.22, which is more expensive than your standard LED bulb, but a darned good price for the TW series. So I ordered a six-pack.

The next day, I found a message in my spam bucket that Home Depot had canceled the order with no explanation. So I called them up and got someone who had no idea what was going on. He said that the bulbs were no longer in stock, they couldn't deliver them, and that he was really sorry and couldn't explain why my order had been canceled with no explanation. In fact, you couldn't even get to the canceled order from the website -- the link would fail.

While I was on the phone with him, I pulled out my cellphone and ordered another six-pack of bulbs from the website, this time asking for the bulbs to be shipped to store instead of shipped to home.

And I got a shipping notice earlier this week. So I ordered two more six-packs of TW bulbs.

I picked up the first of the orders today at the local service desk. (Which was being slow beyond all belief.) Yes, that's six Cree TW bulbs, curiously enough in individual packaging in a tray that would normally have held many more bulbs. Ok. They were still the right bulbs.

So I took them home and installed them in the island light.

The light in the kitchen is very good now.

I think I'll put some of the next set of bulbs in the studio...