What Happened This Summer 2007



A fire on Thursday June 28- Apparently started by someone with a machine that made sparks.(But see below) Dottie Huntley, who lost a shed, had many
of her trees cleared off, but the grass that grew in their place burned right up to her house.


No trees, but the grass burns                                                                             Pine needles burning      

They left the trees lying on the ground, so they burned also. She also had many  standing green trees remaining right around her house which is also bad, and did no pine needle removal that I could see. Even raking a clear area 30 feet around the shed might have saved it. Conclusion: the pine needles and grass caused the trees to burn. I was surprised to see 'green' pine trees burn almost immediately,

                                                 




 The forest is as dry as it's been since I arrived 24 years ago.  My neighbor's goldfish pond dried up for the 1st time.The drought may last another 15 years, (There was a 60 year one in the 1100's in Arizona)  I don't understand why the
government doesn't build an incinerator out in the flatlands and let us dump our fuel there for free, this fire must have cost $50K- $100K, why
not spend it on prevention?

July 15, this poster appears on the bulletin boards-


BOO!  The bottom part said she was seen on the back of a motorcycle with a man with
a gray pony tail, and drives a gray/white pickup from the 70's.  My neighbor saw this guy just before the fire started.

Prescott had a  Rodeo Parade 2 days later.  I don't have any cowboy decor, no hat, no boots. I had the whole outfit
at age 5, chaps, 'Fanner 50's' (twin cap revolvers). Sit on a cowboy hat once, it's history, and cowboy boots deform my feet.

 
 The Queen                                                           Oh, to be a kid, they get 10x the enjoyment from a parade as I do.


This USED to be full of goldfish, never dried up in the 24 years I've been here. Hasn't rained since April 21.

   
Update: rained July 18. Claude's pond is pretty low.                                           July 29,  full !

                                                   
Ike Morgan, son of Andy, my nephew, and Melissa.       EVERYBODY'S interested in real estate!      A rooster, just what we needed

   


                                                                               Brutus and Libby



Hummingbird moth, it has a long thin snout just like a hummer, and the wing action is identical.


Brother Tom,                                     his son Mike                       Mike's preposterous vehicle, gets 11 MPG, makes me wan to buy oil stocks                               

By the way, I figured out how to play .wmv (windows media video?) files in windows media player, it's just like using a video editing program,
you go right-click on the desktop/properties, 'advanced' (note: there's a troubleshooting choice next to advanced, DON'T click on it), then
after you click on 'Advanced' there's ANOTHER 'troubleshooting' (big vocabulary at Microsoft), then set your hardware acceleration to 1
notch right of NONE (usually you'll want it on FULL). Then wmv's will play. Don't forget to put it back on 'FULL' when you're done with the video, the computer will lock up otherwise. Note I'm using Media Player 9, the latest one that will work on
Windows 2000, which Msoft is trying to kill off, mainly because you can put it on multiple computers.  Media Player hogs the whole
screen unless you 'switch to skin mode' an icon at the bottom right. Also, if you STOP, it rewinds to the beginning so you have to
write down/remember the elapsed time if you want to find out where you stopped.   There's also a video type called .flv, (flash video), which doesn't work in real time since I connect at 2.2 kilobytes per second, but if you go to
www.martijndevisser.com
you can get a free player for flv files, the 'Riva' player doesn't work.  You don't have to mess with 'Properties' to play them either. There's a
bunch of them at http://www.advancedartist.com/video, Coreldraw tutorials.

There are also .avi movies which refuse to play until you download 20MB from www.divx.com, then you have to do the hardware acceleration thing as above. I use the Divx Player now.

Saving Flash movies
It's actually pretty easy in Internet Explorer 6, 1st load the flash movie, then find out where your temporary internet files are. On my
machine they're at C:\documents and settings\terry\local settings\temporary internet files\Content.IE5, and under that will be a bunch of gibbersh directories like \8ERG24. Look for files with an .swf extension,
then right-click 'copy' and then paste into another directory. Note the Macromedia Flash Player 6 won't play them properly on my
machine, I use the SWF Opener 1.3 at BrowserTools.net ,it's free.  It also has a SWF cache viewer, which goes right to your IE and Firefox cache (cache is where commonly loaded internet stuff gets saved) and you can view them with that also.

Why is Gateway a $1.80 stock?  My friend Mark gave me a Gateway computer, an E-4100, he took out the hard drive. I looked it up
on the internet, it's got a Pentium 4 running at 2.2 GHZ!. This is 60 percent faster than my fastest machine. I decided to give it to
Angela, who runs a Pentium 2 235MHZ, which blots out AM radio when it's on.   It took 3 hard drives before I found one that it would swallow,
so I put some OS and utilities on it. The thing only came with a CD-rom, 128MB memory, and Intel 16MB integrated graphics, not going to
run any games. The modem had to be upgraded to a Hang-up-the internet if you get a call modem, and a 1GB memory.  The case is half-height, which means I had to cut off part of the new modem silver part. There's also an AGP video slot, it's brown like AGP anyway, but
I can't imagine what kind of video card would fit in it. Now she can answer email at 10x the speed of her old machine.  In Gateway's favor, (this machine was $1000 in 2003), the sound and modem drivers were readily available. 1 thing I noticed, if you don't put a firewall (Outpost 1.0 is free) on your machine, you'll be attacked immediately. Usually there is 1 byte going out of your computer for every 10 you download,
w/o outpost there were 2 websites sending bytes, and the ration was 1 to 1, this will bring a dialup connection to a virtual stop.
Angela also wanted her Outlook Express sent mail and address book, the address book I got by /export/adress book, but the sent mail I
had to START/Search for file or folders  *.dbx then I just copied them to a flash drive.

You're probably NOT dying to know how to send faxes with an MCI (which is really Verizion) calling card and an HP
officejet 300, but just in case:
1. The phone you dial the toll free number must be equal to (I put it on a splitter with the fax)  or  before the fax, if you
try to use the fax phone jack it won't work.

2. Dial the toll-free number, put in your pin, when it says  'to make a call press 1' do this on the phone. Now dial the fax number on your fax machine and press start. Note: you only get 1 page per call!  Also, I kept getting 'your pin is in use' unless
I waited 5 minutes or more to call back.



Copyright Terry Morgan 2007
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