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Friday, July 18, 2003
Becky headed to Greensboro today to help Grandma Charlotte with her yard sale for Saturday. They organized all the items for the sale and priced everything with labels. The yard sale starts at 6:00am Saturday morning and my guess is that people will start arriving about an hour earlier than that.

Susan and Zachary visited again on Thursday night. They brought us another box of peaches from the North Carolina State Farmers Market in Raleigh. They also brought a nice present and card wishing me good luck as I search for my next programming assignment. That was nice, thanks!  Zachary spent some time on the laptop surfing the web trying to find updated drivers for his Philips CDRW 400 series USB CD burner. It was starting to act up and he searched for new Windows XP drivers to see if that might solve the problem. He found drivers, but none that were newer than what he already had.

My brother Trent called and asked if I wanted to head out to Falls Lake for a night fishing trip. I agreed and we arrived at the lake about 8:30pm. The weather was tempermental for the first few hours and we ended up anchoring under an overpass bridge for about 30 minutes during a wind/rain storm. After that, the weather cleared and it turned into a very nice night for fishing. We stayed out until around 3:00am. Now, I don't get skunked that often but tonite just did not seem to be my night to catch fish. This was not the case for Trent though . He caught quite a few and missed a few more. The biggest was a nice largemouth at about 3lbs along with 3 others ranging from .5lbs to 1.5lbs. He released all the fish. While we were anchored under the bridge during the rain, we watched some other fisherman pull in several crappie while fishing with lights. While we waited, I tossed in a line and did manage to hook what a appeared to be a catfish but lost him near the boat.

For bait we used a variety of plastics including Centipede Worms, Lizards, and Shad imitations rigged either Carolina or Texas style. Trent also had some luck fishing a Rattletrap lure. I had mixed up and brought along a batch of homemade fish attractant that I had learned about a few years ago from my good fishing buddy Bill King. It consists of a mixture of Mineral Oil, Anise Seed Oil, Garlic, and Salt. I had tried it several times in the past with good results but tonite it didnt seem to make that much difference to the fish.

Click on any of the picture thumbnails to see a larger view.

Trent - Largemouth Trent - Largemouth Trent - Largemouth Trent - Largemouth - 3lbs Trent - Largemouth - 3lbs

Thursday, July 10, 2003
Finally took up an offer to go fishing with my brother Trent at Falls Lake in his boat. We set out in the afternoon and with the exception of a 20 minute down pour of rain, we had great weather and caught a few fish. We put in at the Upper Barton Creek Access Area around 4:30 in the afternoon and left the lake near dark around 8:45pm. Trent caught the first fish (a largemouth) about .5 lbs within the first hour and I caught a small crappie and a small largemouth about 30 minutes before we finished the trip.

Trent has a 1987 Wellcraft "180 Classic" and trailer and he pulls the boat behind a Ford F150 pickup. We had a great time and planned some additional trips (possibly night fishing) for later on in the summer. We took a few pictures and you can see them below.

Other info: Anne arrived today from Birmingham, Ala. for a visit. Anne was Becky's college roomate at Auburn University. They try to get together for a girls week or weekend at least once a year. She made the trip by herself this time and is staying until Sunday.

Also in the news our young friend Zachary called the other night and was curious if he could recover deleted pictures from his secure digital memory card from his digital camera. It looks as if he has figured out how to do this with some free software downloaded from the web! As soon as I find out the name of the software he used I will post info about it here for others. Good job Zachary!

Trent Trent Trent Guffster

Wednesday, July 9, 2003
Nothing much new to write today so I will post some pics of a fishing trip that Becky and I made to Fort Fisher several weeks ago. It was a very bright sunny hot day and we caught flounder (just shy of keeper size), bluefish, and croakers. Lots of croakers. We saw several different coastal birds including our favorite - the Oyster Catcher. We also saw a small alligator in the road at the entrance to the park. We brought home enough croakers to cook for dinner one night. The trip was great fun. We will definitely head back again in August for larger flounder since the drive is only a couple of hours from Raleigh.

Fort Fisher Alligator Alligator Oyster Catcher

Friday, July 4, 2003
Happy birthday Grandma Charlotte!

Happy 4th of July!

Its been a while since the last update. I have been busy working on several projects and have pretty much neglected the Blog.

Finally got around to backing up my network machines at home. With the help of the new 52x Memorex CD burner, Ghost, and a couple of SCSI tape backup drives I had laying around we got it mostly accomplished.

Still writing lots of code mostly in VB6 and PHP. I have several projects I am polishing up now to one day post online for FREE with source included. More later, I have to go put the dogs up since they go literally crazy barking when the 4th of July fireworks start booming. And they are booming right now. Cya.

Thursday, April 10, 2003
Happy birthday Becky! She's counting backwards in years now. Went out for a great dinner and a movie. It was her choice so you can bet it was a girly movie... What a Girl Wants

Good pic found by MLJ. Once a fisherman, always a fisherman...

Priceless!

Wednesday, April 9, 2003
More rain...

Tuesday, April 8, 2003
Rain, rain, rain...

Friday, April 4, 2003
You would think that all I do these days is plant trees and watch birds... Not so, but I did spot a White Throated Sparrow perched in a holly tree this afternoon. Picture is below.

White Throated Sparrow

Thursday, April 3, 2003
Saw the Pileated Woodpecker in the back yard again today but could not get a picture. Re-planted a few more small trees. Pics later.

Wednesday, April 2, 2003
Another picture of the Chipping Sparrow - this time in the front yard on the feeder. You can also see the magnolia / rhododendrun type tree that I re-planted yesterday. I have still not been able to identify exactly what it is. So far it seems healthy after re-planting...

Looks like some big drum and bluefish have started to show up on Ocracoke Island. I have the fever, now I just need to find the time. See 2 fishing reports from Tradewinds Tackle below:

March 30, 2003 Tradewinds Report
March 29, 2003 Tradewinds Report


Chipping Sparrow Unidentified Tree Unidentified Tree Leaves

Tuesday, April 1, 2003
Bill and Sue left today to head back home to Springville, Al. We very much enjoyed their visit.

Today was another Tree and Shrub day for me. I ventured out to the back of our property and dug up more small trees and shrubs to re-plant in the front yard and in the back yard within view out of our kitchen window. Becky and I re-planted a small dogwood, a poplar, some sort of magnolia type tree, and a few shrubs that I have not yet identified.

I found a couple of good tree sites on the web. The first is by Backyard Gardner and is entitled Why we Plant Trees. The second site is a great site for identifying trees entitled What Tree Is It? Tomorrow, I'll post some pics of the trees and shrubs we re-planted today.

We headed out to Wendy's for a burger and fries for dinner and stopped by Border's and Barnes and Noble to look for the The National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Trees: Eastern Region . Neither of them had the book so instead we bought a book on photography from the bargain table for about $5 - Practical Photography by John Freeman ISBN 1-84309-037-6.

Monday, March 31, 2003
Bill (my father-in-law) and I (and the dogs) fixed the dog fence today. Some of the fence posts were originally made out of landscaping timbers instead of pressure treated 4x4's. So we replaced 4 of the rotten timbers with 4x4's and fixed the gate so it closes more easily. I also hauled off one of our wooden dog houses to the dump. My brother and dad both have extra dog houses that they no longer need so I will plan to stop by and pick them up soon. Montana and Liebchen (australian shepherd, and golden retriever) both roam free in the yard most of the time but I occasionally put them in the fence when we are expecting visitors.

We watched the birds (Chickadee, Titmouse, Goldfinch, Nuthatch, Junco, Wren) and squirrels eat from the feeders on the back deck. We spotted a Chipping Sparrow perched on the deck rail. Its always tough to identify the sparrows since they all seem to resemble each other. I took a picture of it as well as a Goldfinch with a slight patch of yellow.

Chipping Sparrow Goldfinch Squirrel at Feeder

Sunday, March 30, 2003
Wet and yucky outside today so we mostly stayed inside and watched the coverage of the war on CNN and FoxNews. The cable guy arrived around 9:00am or so and I pointed out where the damaged cable was. We fixed it in the rain and everything was back up and running in about 20 minutes.

Harold and Anna left today to head back to Pennsylvania. We noticed on the weather channel that their part of the country was getting a good bit of snow and hoped that they didnt have to drive in it. They are from Ephrata, Pennsylvania. It was hard to imagine snow when it was nearly 81 degrees here yesterday...

Tracy headed back to Duke after visiting for the weekend.

Saturday, March 29, 2003
Bill, Harold, Anna and I went to lunch at Barry's Cafe in Cary. The guys had flounder sandwiches and Anna had a tuna salad sandwich. Dessert was Macadamia Nut cookies and Chocolate Chip cookies. We then stopped by Fish Pro's in Raleigh to take a look at the freshwater aquarium fish and to have a sample of my tank water tested. The water passed the Ammonia and PH tests but failed the Nitrite (NO2) test. I used part of my $40 Christmas gift certificate to buy a reliable and accurate NO2 home test kit for future tests instead of buying some fish to take home. It looks like I will need to vacuum all the gravel in the tank and do a 25% - 30% water change in the tank and test it again.

Becky and her mom Sue headed out to do some shopping and came home with a few items. Emily and Rochelle left for their trip home.

Harold, Bill, and I made a post out of one of the cedar trees that came down during the storm to put up a bluebird house. We cut the post with the chain saw and mounted the bluebird house about 5.5 feet high. Harold and Anna had brought us 2 birdhouses (1 Bluebird and 1 Wren house). We mounted the post near the end of the fence in our front yard in one of the few wide open spaces we have. It looks great and the cedar post should last nearly forever. Hopefully it will be a good location for a bluebird to nest. We should know soon.

Syracuse beat Auburn today by 1 point to knock the Tigers out of the NCAA race. :(

Bluebird House w/Cedar Post

Friday, March 28, 2003
Re-planted 3 more dogwood trees today in the front. One was about 8 feet tall with several branches and lots of new growth. Unfortunately, I hit our buried cable with the shovel while digging the hole for the dogwood so now our TV is fuzzy and the internet connection is toast. I called Time Warner and they will be sending out a repair guy on Sunday morning. :(

Dial up bites.... I hooked up the laptop modem and used my Bellsouth dial-up account for internet access today. It wasnt terrible but it wasnt great either. At least I could check email and get connected to the rest of the world. Connection speeds were around 42k at best.

Emily and Rochelle arrived for a short visit. They were on the way back from a trip to New York City and Washington DC and stopped by for the night. Rochelle was visiting George Washington University where she will be attending school soon. We hooked up her laptop to the Sony 36" TV and watched as they showed us the pictures from their trip.

Thursday, March 27, 2003
I dug up some small dogwood trees today and re-planted them in the front yard right behind the new grass that I planted this spring. I tried a different type of grass this year (red fescue) since my front yard is mostly in the shade and previous attempts at growing grass there had failed miserably.

Wednesday, March 26, 2003
Bill and I spent most of the first half of the day cutting up more trees that fell during the storms. We got most of the huge oak tree cut and all the large pine and cedars cut up that the oak tree took down when it fell. I hauled off most of it to a big brush pile way in the back woods of our property. Bill showed me how to sharpen a chain saw blade with a round file. It takes a while but works well. We also had to repair the chainsaw. The pull cord broke off, so we opened it up and fixed it. I also took the opportunity to give it a good cleaning since the filter was pretty clogged up from much use.

Harold and Anna arrived today from Pennsylvania. They are visiting for a few days. Bill and Harold were in the service together and they all come here for a visit once a year in the spring. Harold and Anna brought us some great pretzels, chips, and chocolate made in Pennsylvania. They also brought us a homemade christmas stocking and some dish cloths that Anna had knitted, and 2 homemade bird houses that Harold made! Anna made ham balls for dinner. Its a Pennsylvania thing... :)

Tuesday, March 25, 2003
Starting cutting up the huge oak tree that fell in the back yard during a tornado warning last year. It will be sometime before it is finished. My father-in-law Bill helped... He cut with the chainsaw and I hauled off what I could. Its tough work but you can already tell a big difference. Becky planted some flowers today in planters on the back deck.

Monday, March 24, 2003
Bill and Sue arrived for their visit.

Sunday, March 23, 2003
Not too much to report today... Finished pressure washing the deck. It looks great.

Auburn beat Wake Forest and is now in the "Sweet 16" of the 2003 NCAA Tournament. Go Tigers! Click on the picture to view the details of the game at Sports Illustrated CNN.

Monte Killingworth

Saturday, March 22, 2003
I spent most of the day today working in the yard, and cleaning the porch and driveway while Becky cleaned in the house. Becky's parents Bill and Sue are coming for a visit in a few days. Their friends Harold and Anna are also stopping by for a few days later in the week. The pressure washer has been outstanding... I pressure washed the front deck stairs, the walkway, the lower brick on the foundation of the house, the garage doors, and the decorative brick along the edges of the driveway. Wow! Also used it to clean the front porch rockers and the bird baths.

The power went off again last night. The clocks were flashing when I got up. I headed out early to get the car inspected since it was overdue. I failed the the inspection because of all things... "wiper blades". I didnt want to dish out the $15 for el cheapo wiper blades from them since I had a brand new "Bosch" pair at home in the garage. I made them show me why the wiper blades weren't sufficient. It was ridiculous. So, I drove home, installed the new blades and drove back to get my inspection sticker. Just ridiculous... I stopped by Ace Hardware on the way home and picked up a new sprinkler. It will come in handy for the newly planted grass in the front yard. I also made a trip to the local nursery to grab some bales of wheat straw for the new grass. The dogs insisted on going with me.... so they did. They both got their share of head pats and belly rubs by everyone we encountered until we arrived back home.

This must be a dog weekend. The picture below was sent in by 'Mom'. The caption read "There are times you may wish you had purchased that 'Extended Warranty'". Pretty funny. Thanks Mom... Click the picture for a larger view.

Did you get the Extended Warranty?

Friday, March 21, 2003
Haney gets a new addition to the family. Her name is Pebbles, 6 wk old yorkie-poo. Click the picture for a larger view.

Pebbles

Thursday, March 20, 2003
Trying to figure out what type of fish to add to the aquarium at home. We lost all of our previous fish during the ice storm we had here in late Fall of last year. Thinking about getting some more African Cichlids but I'm going to let Becky decide this time. I like the Julidochromis Marlieri and I've seen a few for sale at Fish Pro's in Raleigh on Hillsborough Street. These particular fish are from Lake Tanganyika which is an over 10 million year old rift-valley lake in East-Africa and is the second deepest freshwater lake in the world.

Take a look at some of the great fish pics at the Exotic Tropicals' Cichlid Photo Gallery. More information on Cichlids can be found at http://www.cichlids.com.

Got some pictures back on CD. You can view them below... Select from the drop down list. Click on the thumbnail picture below it to see a more detailed view of the picture.



Wednesday, March 19, 2003
Installed the Win32 version of the Apache HTTP Server on the network today for testing purposes. Installation was a breeze. Decided to go with the 2.0.44 version of Apache but might uninstall it and go with the 1.3.27 version which seems to better support PHP. The Apache docs state that PHP is only 'experimentally' supported under the 2.x version of Apache.

Today I updated my version of the 'Norton Antivirus Auto - .dat - File - Updater' app. It is written in VB6 and gets kicked off at night using the excellent WinCron task scheduler by Steve J. Gray. Previously my app was making a typical FTP connection to ftp.symantec.com and GETting the latest symcdefsi32.exe file from the public/english_us_canada/antivirus_definitions/norton_antivirus/static directory and then closing the connection. At times the FTP algorithm required 3 or 4 tries and would occasionally still came up empty. Made some changes to the code to connect and download the file using the Windows URLDownloadToFile API function in urlmon.dll instead. The urlmon.dll is installed with MSIE. So far this has really cleaned up the code, required no special entries through the firewall, and provided a much higher success ratio of getting the file every time.

Here is a very simple example of the process that downloads the latest symcdefsi32.exe to a network share... There is no Error Handling in this simple example and the FileExists() function is a custom function in a supporting .DLL which is much more robust than Dir$.
   ' Put this in a .bas module
   ' -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
    Public Declare Function URLDownloadToFile Lib "urlmon" Alias _
                             "URLDownloadToFileA" (ByVal pCaller As Long, _
                             ByVal szURL As String, _
                             ByVal szFileName As String, _
                             ByVal dwReserved As Long, _
                             ByVal lpfnCB As Long) _
                             As Long
   ' -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
   
   ' Put this in a .bas module or Form Event code
   ' -------------------------------------------------------------------------------

    Dim strLocalFile as String
    Dim strRemoteFile As String	
    Dim lRetVal as Long
	
    strLocalFile = "\\Server\ShareName\Sarci32.exe"
    strRemoteFile = _
      "ftp://ftp.symantec.com/public/english_us_canada/antivirus_definitions/" & _
      "norton_antivirus/static/symcdefsi32.exe"

    Screen.MousePointer = vbHourglass
	
    If FileExists(strLocalFile) Then Kill strLocalFile
	
    lRetVal = URLDownloadToFile(0, strRemoteFile, strLocalFile, 0, 0)
	
    Screen.MousePointer = vbDefault
    
    If FileExists(strLocalFile) Then
        MsgBox "File Downloaded Successfully!", vbInformation+vbOkOnly, App.Title
        ' Code would go here to Shell and Run Sarci32.exe in quiet mode...
    Else
        MsgBox "File was NOT Downloaded...", vbExclamation+vbOkOnly, App.Title
        ' Code would go here to handle a download error, possibly query the lRetVal
        ' value for more detailed error information, and/or for retry attempts.
    End If
   ' -------------------------------------------------------------------------------
We heard from Tracy today that she was accepted to the summer program at UCLA. Wow, that is really great news! She hasn't decided to accept yet since she is waiting to hear back from some other offers too, but she was pretty excited. We also heard from Emily (our other niece) and she is stopping by for a visit on the way back from her trip to Washington D.C. and New York City. It will be great to see her since we don't get to see her nearly enough.

Its been kinda hard not to sit in front of the TV tonite with the current situation going on in Iraq and the Middle East.

Tuesday, March 18, 2003
Testing out the Blog Admin page. The javascript code seems to be secure enough for now. Might get MLJ and Duanester to hack on it a bit and see how easy it can be broken...

Cleaned the lower part of the back deck with the new pressure washer today. It looks good but the deck wood looks like it will only hold up to 1 or 2 more cleanings before it will need to be replaced...

Looks like the great and free (licensed under the GNU General Public License - GPL) MySQL 4.x Open Source Database has come out of testing and is ready for production use. Download Version 4.0.12 here.

Monday, March 17, 2003
Fixed the leaky exhaust system in the Saab. Bought a new Troy-Bilt pressure washer to clean the deck, driveway, and brick on the house. I guess tomorrow we will start the cleaning process if the weather holds.

Worked on the Blog Admin page today. Trying to figure out how to have a fairly secure page on the website (hosted by www.freeservers.com) by only using javascript. Looks like we found some ideas and will try them out tomorrow.

Sunday, March 16, 2003
Watched the Duke - N.C. State ACC championship game on TV. Was hoping for a State win since my Brother 'Trent' and my Dad 'Bob' both went to school there and are big State fans. Tracy (our niece) is a Duke student and I'm sure she is glad they got the win.. Found out that Auburn will make it to the NCAA tourney this year - I guess I had not been paying too much attention to them this year. War Eagle!

Tonite we had tickets to the BILLY JOEL and ELTON JOHN FACE TO FACE TOUR 2003 concert at the RBC Center in Raleigh. The Show was great! Met up with Trent and his wife Laura and some of their friends before the concert for a cook-out and get-together. Never saw either of them at the concert though - they must have given up their seats for better ones.. We were 3 rows from the very top of the arena. I was glad I brought the binoculars...

Fishing season is approaching... I need to check out the calendar and come up with some dates to save for The Outer Banks.

Elton John Website
Billy Joel Website

Saturday, March 15, 2003
[testing some more...]

Tracy, Stacie, and Titus visited the 'Guffey Inn' for the weekend. Titus gave me the idea for the Blog Page. You can see his online journal here. Hmmm, looks kinda familiar huh :) Titus seems to have a good eye for detail on his page. Titus had his digital camera with him on this trip and took a few pics of the 'Guffey Inn' while he was here. You can see them at his site too.

Had lunch with Kenny at the Bear Rock Cafe at Crossroads Plaza in Cary. I had a Rueben. We caught up on stuff and then went over to REI to check out the gear. Kenny and I worked together at my last programming assignment at Labcorp. He still works there.

Worked some on the website. Still trying to find a nice format for Guffster's Blog that I like. This current one is the first run and will eventually change to a darker background with lighter text in a few days.. Having trouble getting the HTML to render the same under IE and Mozilla. Seems Mozilla is more picky about style sheets. I am running the latest 1.3 version of the Mozilla Browser (Win32) which can be found here.

Becky and Stacie stayed up until they finished the impossible puzzle they were working on in the kitchen. I'll post a pic tomorrow.

Friday, March 14, 2003
[testing ...]

Updating the webpage. Fixing broken links on Fishing Reports page...
Updated layout and added some new fishing pictures to Surf Fishing pictures page...

Testing image thumbnail below

Circle Hook Circle Hook
 
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