Last modified: Dec 13, 2008: 4:46 pm Central Time

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Passing of Ruth Boyd

December 15, 2008

Ruth Elizabeth Boyd, 94, of 200 Leeder Hill Dr., passed away Dec. 15, 2008 after a brief illness. She was born in Windsor Locks, CT Dec. 14, 1914 oldest daughter of Wilfred and Helen Burt Beech, graduated from Bloomfield HS, NJ in 1932 and attended Bloomfield College.

She worked for the Prudential Insurance Co. as an office supervisor until her marriage to the late Francis Orsemus Boyd on Sept. 21, 1940. She enjoyed being a den mother for the Boy Scouts, organizing the Sunnybrook Art Group of Boonton and working as a home health aid in Morris County. She and her family lived in New Jersey until moving to Hamden in 1997.

Mrs. Boyd is survived by three sons, Jeffrey H. Boyd of Bethany, CT, John B. Boyd of Slovenia, Europe, Wayne E. Boyd of Amarillo, TX and a sister, Marjorie Little of Henderson, NC. She is also survived by 10 grandchildren, Felicity Boyd-Enders, Matthew Boyd, Nicole Boyd, Stephen Murphy, Claudia Baskovec, Christopher Boyd, Andrea and Christopher Hopkins, Leanna Scott and Jacob Bluhm and 6 great grandchildren, Zala, Ashlee, Alyson, Chloe, Sara and Levi.

A service of remembrance will be Saturday, December 20 at 2:30 PM in the 6th Floor Common Room, Whitney Center, 200 Leeder Hill Dr. Hamden, CT. Memorial contributions in Ruth's memory can be made to The Art Committee, c/o Karen Anderson, Whitney Center, 200 Leeder Hill Dr., Hamden, CT 06517. Arrangements in care of BEECHER & BENNETT, 2300 WHITNEY AVE., HAMDEN.

Linux Revisted

September 12, 2008:

In the end, since I'm on vacation and still don't need to go back to work, I just reformatted my hard drive and have gone with LinuxMint. Now we have three pure Linux Machines in this house, one dual boot and one XP laptop.

No one likes the way Microsoft took Windows Vista in this house, and so when I showed my wife one of the later free distributions of the GNU/Linux operating system called LinuxMint, even she was impressed and installed it on her computer, too.

September 10, 2008:

Everyone is happy with LinuxMint except me. I've had to reinstall it about 6 times so far on my desktop. I'm not sure why such a hard time with it. The main issue I have been having is getting it to dual boot WinXP and Linux.

September 9, 2008:

My wife hates Windows Vista. When she bought her new laptop it came with Vista on it, but she found she could not play Runescape on the machine under Vista, so she took it to a friend of ours from work who removed Vista and put XP on it, and that's how it stays.

But the other day, all of us installed Linux Mint on our computers and got rid of Windows altogether (except my wife's laptop, still running XP). And everyone seems to love it. Now we've got five computers, four running Linux, one running XP.

In our house we don't depend on Microsoft to choose for us what our operating system is going to look like. We have a free OS.

If you want to try Linux Mint, click here.

Big Man Screaming Lady

Terrorizing Poor Lady - Photoshop Magic! This photo taken on the Sonoma Traintown Railroad in Sonoma County, California, during a 2005 motorcycle trip. The screaming lady was added later.

We're Wayne and Shelly (aka Jeanne) and although we now live between Amarillo and Canyon, in the Texas panhandle, neither of us are originally from Texas. She's from the St. Louis area and I was born in New Jersey and my Mom and brother live in Connecticut.

I love people, photography, motorcycles, flying private planes, traveling, computer programming, writing books, hiking in the Palo Duro Canyon, Hare Krishnas, Democrats, Star Wars, vegetarians, Forest Gump, astronomy, and correctional officers, CSI and Law and Order.

Shelly, Leanna and I just got back from an overnight whirlwind trip to Dallas Texas, where we visited the Dallas World Aquarium. Here are the photos!

Well, it's 2008 and I'm still kicking.For that matter so is Shelly and Leanna. This year will mark the birth of Leanna's baby girl, due June 17. I'm off work for 9 days, the second of three 9 day vacations that I'm taking to burn time at work from the end of December to the beginning of March.

Last November we returned from a trip to Connecticut. My mother gave me her car, and Shelly and I flew up there and drove it back to Texas.

And here's another one of our 700 famous quotes:

Never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never--in nothing, great or small, large or petty--never give in except to convictions of honor and good sense.
-Winston Churchill

Latest Trip to Connecticut

October 17, 2008

Shelly and I just got back from a great big trip to Hamden, Connecticut, to visit and assist my mother. She is getting on in years now (she'll be 94 next month) and has had to move into a single room in a high-quality nursing home.

We did our best to try to make her feel comfortable and at home in her new place, and we have now returned back to Amarillo.

Road Accident

August 16, 2008:

In an attempt to take my motorcycle for a yearly state inspection on a cloudy day in Amarillo, Texas, I headed out with my son-in-law Donnie in hot pursuit in a chase vehicle to bring me home. We planned to leave the bike in the shop for a couple of days for an oil change and new tires.

On the way, it started raining very hard, and apparently had been raining very hard for sometime. The roads were flooded out. I had to drive the motorcycle through deep puddle after puddle, each deeper than the one before.

At one intersection I was unable to turn because the road was completely flooded out with 2 feet of water. So I had to continue straight on a dirt road. In the rain and flood waters, that dirt road became slick and slippery.

And that's when the motorcycle slipped out from under me and skid to a stop, with me skidding on the road behind it.

I scratched my wrist and feel soar, but am otherwise alright. The motorcycle, however, sustained a broken mirror and some other damage.

Motorcycle Trip

Shelly and I took a motorcycle trip this August 2008 from Amarillo, Texas to Pikes Peak in Colorado, and back down through Red River, New Mexico on the way home. Here are some pictures of our trip:

Amarillo Review

I'm still working on the PHP code off and on for AmarilloReview.Com, but mostly I'm just working my job as a correctional officer doing a lot of overtime.

Amarillo is a great town in the panhandle of Texas, but it's not without problems either. The town wants to "grow up" but still has a lot of prejudices and lacks a real world-class service attitude toward customers in stores and restaurants.

For that reason, Shelly wanted to star

Shelly, Leanna and I just got back from an overnight whirlwind trip to Dallas Texas, where we visited the Dallas World Aquarium. Here are the photos!

Last November we returned from a trip to Connecticut. My mother gave me her car, and Shelly and I flew up there and drove it back to Texas.

It is a website called, appropriately enough, AmarilloReview.Com.

The site is presently still in development, using PHP and MySQL as the engine behind the website visitor interface, all of it being coded by me in my spare time.

We hope that it will eventually evolve into a very interesting website. In the meantime, why not visit the site and register as a new user?

Latest on the Site

I've redesigned the look and feel of my home page and am experimenting with cascading style sheets (CSS) in order to eventually give the entire site a uniformity and ease of updating. Hope you like it. Had some time on my hand, since I'm at home, sick with bronchitis at the moment. In fact, both of us are not feeling too hot. Leanna, my step-daughter, on the other hand, is doing great.