The Steussy Ranch

Yes, I know the last week has been quiet on the blog. In fact, I was sitting down this morning to handle a couple of videos that I’ve been meaning to upload for a couple of weeks.

Now, anyone who has edited video knows how much room they take on a hard drive. Well, I maxed out this morning after completing a 45 second final for YouTube for a classmate of Camilla’s. The rest of the day has been spent with the computer chugging through to compress older (over one year) graphics files to give me some breathing room. The computer started compressing at 10am this morning, and I’m still not done (it’s 10pm now).

I’ve given up and decided to throw money at the problem – but not too much. I just ordered my first ever 1.5 terabyte hard drive from Amazon – $129. Once installed, it will MORE THAN DOUBLE the storage space of my entire house and business, combined. I’ll probably have to run a second Linux server though, to host it effectively. (Rubs hands manically.)

Coming back into the house from retrieving mail at the street corner, I found this taped to our door. We’d been home all day, so no one even tried to knock on the door. It’s a scam, written as a fake legal notice, using public information about our home loan to scare us / entice us into contacting American National Loan Audit. The “tape-it-on-the-door” system is pretty innovative for a scam. It gets your attention quickly, it looks like similar taped notices on foreclosed houses that we see around the neighborhood and, when they get caught, they will avoid any charges of mail fraud.

While I would dearly love to re-arrange my mortgage in the ways that they suggest that they can do, their delivery method alone tells me that they are not to be trusted.

Temecula is certainly one of the focal points on the mortgage crisis, so we receive junk mail like this every day. I should probably post more of them. This one, though, is so brazen it deserves to be the first one.

Hello world

Today is a day for multiple anniversaries. Starting with the most important, in 2001, Gabi and I got married. No, this is not the Malibu wedding in November that some of you may remember. We got married soon after the engagement in order to jump-start Gabi’s citizenship paperwork. It was a Wednesday in Norwalk where a justice of the peace gave us our vows, cried and took a (now long lost) photo of the two of us. The picture below is from our honeymoon trip to San Francisco and the Napa wine country.

On February 7, 2005 we closed the purchase of our house in Temecula. Amazingly, we have no good photos of the front of the house since the one that Gabi took when she discovered the place with our realtor.

Wow. 4 and 8 years later. Child number 4 on the way. Hard to imagine …

Gabi is expecting. She’s pregnant with a girl, who is due to arrive August 6. We’re 14 weeks along now, the tests are all good and everything is fine.

Steelers won! Great game. It’s a Temecula football season for the family pool …

Best of luck next year to everyone – we’ll be there too.

This is the Farewell note from Chris’ classroom assistant, posted at his class blog (that I host). The original is here. She has some very nice things to say about my brother.

Dear Class,

Since there wasn’t time for me to say my good-byes at the end of class, I decided to say a few things here. First of all, I want to thank all of you for being so respectful and spportive of me. Any time I was up in front of you, I was always given attention and support and I greatly appreciate that. I know that the quality of my teaching is not at the same level as Mr. Steussy’s, but you still cooperated and listened to me. I hope that in your minds, I did a somewhat sufficient job of filling his shoes in leading the class for a time.

You are all so smart, driven, and well-rounded. It was a challenge to teach you in that I had to always be thinking about what you would be thinking of, and since you are so deeply analytical I had to be even moreso. You’re at a great level to begin college at, and I know that wherever you go you will do well.

I sincerely hope that you realize how lucky you are to have Mr. Steussy as a history teacher. When I was in high school, my history teachers’ interpretations of “teaching” were to give us a textbook and have us read it then take a multiple choice test designed by the textbook writers that virtually everyone cheated on, and/or spending entire class periods going off on tangents about their lives and other relatively useless information that in no way prepared us for our AP exams. In observing and teaching this class, I have learned more than all of my high school history classes combined. This is a real history class, so know how lucky you are that you’re actually learning these things and thinking about them on a deeper level.

If you have the opportunity to study history in college, I strongly encourage you to do so. Whether it’s for a major, minor, general education requirement, or just for fun, you should take one class or more. History at the college level is so fascinating and it really gives you a strong sense of whatever the focus of the class is. I decided to major in history after taking an Asian American history class as a GE requirement while hating my biology major in my first quarter of college at UCSD–so you never know if you’ll find something you love where you didn’t even think to look (my true love in history came to be colonial-Civil War/Reconstruction US history). Study what you love in college and not what you think will get you money later in life. If you hate it, you’ll be beyond miserable. If you love it, your love for the subject can take you through the hardest of courseloads.

I’ll wrap this up by saying that I wish you the best in everything–college, life, love, etc. Good luck in college admissions, and just remember that where you go isn’t as important as what you make of it. It’s cliche but it’s true. If you’re considering UCSD and have any questions, I’ll be glad to answer them for you. Feel free to contact me if you need help with anything, and perhaps I’ll see you around San Diego some time. Good luck in your final semester of high school. Finish out strong and don’t get senioritis too badly! I’ll miss you all, thank you for everything!

Sincerely,

Marsha Clever

I’ve been using 21 inch graphics rated monitors for eleven years now. The first one that I bought (to support graphic development of computer game manuals) was in January 1998 for just under $1000. Weighing in at 60 lbs., it shown with truly lovely colors. I replaced it three years ago with a more advanced model that I bought for $10 at a garage sale here in Temecula – also 60 pounds with a lovely picture. The original owner was a gamer who had migrated to LCD flat panel monitors; the garage sale was held by his recently divorced wife.

And so it goes … (apologies to Kurt Vonnegut, RIP).

I made my first experimental foray into flat panel monitors when we were in Budapest last year. The inexpensive ASUS monitor was a complete failure. Despite numerous attempts to calibrate the color, even on the best settings, it was woefully inadequate for graphic development or even editing photos for this blog. Fortunately, my MacBook Pro has a truly awesome LED screen, so I could use that in a pinch.

My $10 monitor here at home started showing end-of-life signs. In the last week it was unable to hold a calibration, so it was time to replace it. Clearly, I needed to go in the direction of history and convert to flat panel monitors, but not make the same mistake as I did with the ASUS in Budapest.

Quick research showed that there are actually four technologies to flat panel monitors. Most common, inexpensive panels use a Twisted Nematic (TN) display. While the TN monitors are inexpensive and have fast pixel response times, most of them suffer from 6 bit color displays (rather than 8). This was probably the biggest problem with my ASUS monitor.

The problem with the other technologies is their pixel response time, which is so slow as to cause ghosting in games or movies. I decided to get the HP w2408h monitor. Sharp colors, good refresh time; not good for multiple people viewing (since colors, brightness and contrast change when not looking straight on), but that shouldn’t be a big problem here.

Click on the image above to see the full spread of the monitor. It’s huge compared to what I was used to. And the colors are simply amazing.