[Wednesday’s run: 3 miles; Thursday: 3 ; Saturday : 6.2]
I recently bought an adjustable bench power supply from a guy online. I think he is in Arizona. That arrived in a somewhat tortured box. The supply looked OK at first but then I noticed the banana-plug outputs weren’t solidly attached. Turns out those were the outermost protuberances on the front panel and probably somewhere on it’s trip it got dropped on it’s face which broke one of two internal plastic posts holding it all together.
So this week I took it apart and did some gluing and reinforcing. Now it is all back together and solid. [The supply is basically one big heavy transformer, a control board and the faceplate with meters and knobs.]
Another online acquisition is a 27″ LG monitor without stand or power supply. It was free. That is a better monitor than what I’ve been using. I tried it out with jury-rigged power and it seems to work fine. So I’ve ordered a power brick. And I went to Menards and picked up some TV swing mounts and other parts. I now have two monitors in my cubical mounted on the cubical walls instead of on stands. I lack height adjustment unless I take it all apart and move it up to different slots in the cubical pillars. But I didn’t have height adjustment at all with the stands. Otherwise I can move them left/right, in/out. And I have more space on the desktop for papers and junk.
Yesterday we ran a new route (I had done it once by myself).
I’ve been following the news to some degree. One of the features of my childhood was seeing protests on television. I’ve noticed that protesters always look better on TV. They look heroic as they battle the faceless, overwhelming line of police. Of course that is pretty much a direct inversion of what must be happening in real life most of the time. The protesters in any newsworthy protest would outnumber the police.
I don’t like protests. I don’t mind marching protests so much, they have their say and there is an end to it. The shouting trench-warfare type just seem to me to be mostly a production for the TV cameras.
And when I saw the pictures of graffitti on national park facilities in D.C. it really set off an anger and sadness in my mind. And a contrast to those quaint Tea Party picnics that were so recently derided as dangerous gatherings, the ones where the protesters would pick up trash and tidy up after the event.
And there is the descent into looting and burning and the related injuries and deaths. I don’t think the professional protester types intend for looting and burning, at least I hope they don’t. But there always seems to be a ready crowd for such things.
I’ve discovered that I really don’t like chaos. I don’t know if that is because of birth order or genetics or early childhood exposure to the evening news teargas stories.