Iced Tea Forever

What a mess. Somehow I was unfortunate enough to acquire a file that had been BinHexed into .hqx format. I didn’t know what to do. Information was hard to find and not very clear. Near as I was finally able to figure, .hqx is some ridiculous Mac binary-to-ASCII conversion format. Once I finally found something that would extract it, the result was some other ridiculous compressed file.

Finally at the end of the whole mess I ended up with a Mac file completely incompatible with my Windows machine! What a colossal waste of time.

So the minute you hear anybody talking about BinHex and .hqx, run the other way. Unless it’s me of course.

Went to the Potawatomi Zoo last Saturday. We were having a good time walking around looking at all the animals, and I was trying to work in saying “Potawatomi” as much as possible.

I looked ahead at the next animal and wondered, what in the world is that? Looks like some kind of fox or something. I went and looked at the sign and it said “Red Panda.”

What?! Wow, I thought, I was way off. I would have never guessed it to be a type of panda. Of all things. I watched it walk around a bit, climb around in a tree and whatnot, then I saw another sign. Suddenly I felt vindicated and became extremely excited!

It was a Fire Fox! An honest-to-goodness real Fire Fox, whose browser namesake is so highly popular and revered!

I was thrilled.

I had a hard time trying to get a decent pic of him, the little guy would hardly ever face me. But what a thrill, to see firsthand a creature of such importance.

I was perusing the program (link to pdf) to this week’s International Barbershop Competition, and what do you know. There on page 54 it says that during the Saturday evening program Bill Gaither will be presented with an honorary society membership. Interesting.

Saturday night is the Quartet contest finals, that’s a must-hear anyway, I’ll keep a watch out for Bill.

This week is the International Barbershop Quartet competition in Indianapolis (pronounced “Indiana-PO-liss”). I had been very optimistic that I would be able to attend this year, but things are not looking to be in favor of that. Bummer, huh.

Anyway, my old quartet buddy Gabe will be there. I used to sing with Gabe in Razorburn, I told you about that here and here. But his current quartet, Late Show, qualified for Internationals this year! That’s a big deal.

I’d love to go hear him in person, but next best to that will be catching them on the webcast. So don’t call or visit the ITF headquarters this Wednesday, July 5, around 2:45 in the afternoon. I’ll be busy.

Let it rip Gabe!

I drove 1,697 miles last weekend to Virginny. That’s a lot of driving, at least for me. And it became increasingly clear throughout that the car needs some attention now too. Balance, alignment, check the brakes, check the AC, and fix the blinkers. Stupid chevy. And some of those things have even just happened in very recent memory.

According to my feeble calculations, I did get 26.7 MPG though. That’s better than I was expecting, especially from a chevy!

I’m proud to say that my Dad raised me to be a Ford man. I’m not proud that most of my life I’ve driven chevys.