TomS Words of Wisdom

Industry Expo Center, City of Industry, CA -- Every thing is settling in for this year's AVA/USEF National Vaulting Championships. Today the main vaulting competition rings and the two warm up rings were in place by mid day in the Expo Center's Grand arena. Following the required vet checks the competitors began practicing on their horses. Many of the vaulters showed significant improvements during the afternoon practice sessions as they and their horses became accustomed to the surroundings. Several of the team freestyle routines look like they will be very impressive this year.
Setup was also completed of the "white arena" [barrel area] in the west end of the Expo Center's Grand arena. At a few minutes past two in the afternoon the Para-Nationals competition began in the "white arena". Performing in this pre-nationals event were vaulters from Valley View, Flying Stars, Elkhorn Equestrian, Half Moon Bay, Oak Hills, Starlite, Flying Stars, Flying B clubs. Many of these vaulters performed for the crowd of about 60 spectators despite significant disabilities.
As the afternoon advanced, the overhead misters and an afternoon breeze brought temperatures in the stands down to comfortable temperatures. The moderating temperatures in the Los Angles area should only make things better as the weekend's events unfold.
It looks like every thing is ready for the AVA & USEF recognized events to kick off tomorrow morning.
Watch these pages for more reports and in the near future VaultingCast.com interviews with competitors, coaches, trainers and [hopefully] a judge or two.

I've made some significant progress toward setting up a Distributed Family / Home Backup Network. Over the past few weeks I've been squeezing in some time hacking on my Linux server. I successfully got the Server version of Ubuntu Linux installed on my <$100 used IBM Personal Computer 300GL, aptly named LampCat. LampCat is a 400MHz PII with 376 MB RAM, an 8GB internal hard drive and a 100GB external USB 2.0 hard disk. Using just SSH connections I installed and configured Apache and a few other apps. I've also been backing-up the home directory off my AMD64 desktop machine, LinCat64, (running the AMD64 version of Ubuntu Linux) to LampCat using rsync.

The big acomplishment came this past weekend when I finially configured the various NAT routers in our house to allow access to LampCat from the outside Internet. For some reasion my SpeedStream 2604 won't forward port 80 properly, but forwards HTTP fine on another arbitrary port. I also was able do a rsync back-up after to opening the SSH port and using the fully qualified domain name.

On LampCat I still need to configure some file permissions so the backup process can be done as some user other then root and configure secure access to the backed-up filed via the HTTP server. I might also install wordpress.

I entered my first horse show in at least twenty five years this past Sunday. [I may have been in one near my grandparents farm when I was a kid.] The show at Farrel McWhirter Park in Redmond was just a local schooling show, so it wasn't too serious an affair, and thus I didn't spend as much time practicing as I might have.

It took us about forty minutes to ride down to the park with a couple of other horses from our barn. Cali and I entered two classes, finishing fourth in the English, Walk-Trot Equitation class and third in the Open Halter class. Our friends from Mecca finished their entries before the lunch break so after the show Cali and I rode back up the hill to Mecca by ourselves.

This and more photos are on my Flickr account.

I was skeptical when I read the subject. But it's a good one.

Carol Sayles <teacher_carol@ya...> wrote:

This came from Dave Pritcherd of Iowa State Days.

I LOL so thought you might too.

 

SOME CHRISTIAN HUMOR

 

 Jesus and Satan were having an on-going argument about who was better on the computer.  They had been going at it for days, and frankly God was tired of hearing all the bickering.

 

 Finally fed up, God said, "THAT'S IT! I have had enough.  I am going to set up a test that will run for two hours, and from those results, I will judge who does the better job."

 

 So Satan and Jesus sat down at the keyboards and typed away.

 

 They moused.

 

 They faxed.

 

 They e-mailed.

 

 They e-mailed with attachments.

 

  They downloaded.

 

 They did spreadsheets.

 

 They wrote reports.

 

 They created labels and cards.

 

 They created charts and graphs.

 

 They did some genealogy reports

 

 They did every job known to man.

 

 Jesus worked with heavenly efficiency and Satan was faster than hell.

 

 Then, ten minutes before their time was up, lightning suddenly flashed across the sky, thunder rolled, rain poured, and, of course, the power went off.

 

Satan stared at his blank screen and screamed every curse word known in the underworld.

 

Jesus just sighed.

 

Finally the electricity came back on, and each of them restarted their computers.  Satan started searching frantically, screaming:

 

 "It's gone! It's all GONE!

 

 "I lost everything when the power went out!"

 

 Meanwhile, Jesus quietly started printing out all of his files from the past two hours of work.

 

 Satan observed this and became irate.

 

 "Wait!" he screamed.

 

 "That's not fair! He cheated!

 

How come he has all his work and I don't have any?"

 

 God just shrugged and said, JESUS SAVES.

 

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