Andrew performed in his first violin concert the other night. Dad was very proud.



Even better - good form on bowing and left wrist for this camera shot! And Andrew followed dad's advice - at least start and finish at the same time as everyone else.

I'll post a few more pictures in the picture section when I get a chance. I've got a few weeks worth of pictures to post.

Tags: Andrew

So no offense to Christmas Tree 2007, but this tree isn't the overwhelming success of last year's tree.

We purchased the tree on December 9th - it is a nice Douglas Fir that has pretty full, even coverage, and a good shape for a Christmas Tree.



You'll notice though it's a little sparse on ornaments. And that the bottom half of the tree is even more sparse than the rest. First, this year we have a mobile and curious Declan to test the ornaments within his reach. This has relegated anything breakable to branches above his reach. And most of our ornaments are of the breakable variety...

Second, most likely because of the drought in our region this year, the branches on this tree aren't quite as stiff as the branches were on last year's tree. Our ornaments also tend to be heavier (though not heavy). This has required some creative placement and use of Christmas tree lights to support branches to support the ornaments.

The additional side effect of the drought is that this tree is shedding needles at a far faster rate than last year's tree. Last year's tree dropped needles sparingly. This one is dropping it by the handful (even though it's still drinking a good amount of water) daily.

But it's still a nice tree. And it's real and not fake. As much as I dislike vacuuming up needles daily, I dislike fake trees more (childhood trauma of memories of an overused artificial tree....)

Merry Christmas!

(If you're offended by the Christmas greeting, then Happy Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, or as one friend says, "Kwanukkahmas". Or can we just agree on Happy New Year then?)

I just went online and purchased a couple of items from Amazon.com - a piece of electronics equipment and a train DVD for Andrew.

Ordinary transaction, until I got to the "Thanks for your order" page. The recommendations they gave on that page really gave me cause for pause for just a minute. Based on a train DVD order and a gift for someone else, I get:

* DNS & BIND Cookbook (it's a reference book about configuring name servers so when you tell your web browser to go to www.stickman.org it knows how to find it).
* Just Your Type (apparently about creating a [implied romantic] relationship using personality types)
* Wedding Crashers (the DVD starring Owen Wilson)

If it were baseball, they'd be doing okay. The first one would apply (except I already have that book). The other two....what???????

Maybe they're using pigeons randomly pecking at keyboards to generate answers....

Many folks have wondered when I would cave in and get an iPhone. Oddly, some people *assumed* I got one on day 1. So let's get something straight - I'm not *that* crazy.

That said, the appeal of a handheld device that I could use to browse the web and check email over WiFi at home and when out really got me. Add the fact that I heard that as a *phone*, the iPhone was excellent finally convinced me to shell out more dollars than I should have for the iPhone, protective shield for the screen, and a holster case.

I have not been disappointed with the phone (two exceptions which I'll discuss later).

First, the phone does just look cool. You think it's big, and maybe compared to my Nokia 6126, it is. But not offensively so. The screen is the most readable thing I've used in a long time. Intuitive interface. And the thing has, to me, the best sound quality for phone calls over any phone I've owned in the last 4 years at least. It also holds calls my 6126 used to have problems with, and I thought the 6126 did a great job. I live in a notoriously bad signal area (because all cellular towers tend to point away from my house). This phone makes cell usage usable in the house.

It paired up easily with my Nokia BH-900 headset. Works great. No complaints there. I was somewhat relieved about that - I like my BH-900 very much and I really didn't have the money for a new Jawbone headset (even though I hear those are great too).

As an iPod, I like it very much. I never thought I'd find a use for the YouTube program, but it has come in handy. And of course, because it's an Apple product, it syncs perfectly with my Mac. Movies are also a bit nicer to watch on this device than on my previous iPod. You just have to remember, though, that this is also your phone so if you kill the battery watching a movie, your cell phone is off too.

Battery life is pretty good - 3 days easily without charging unless I'm heavily into email or movie watching....

There are two irritants. The first is ringtones and Apple's somewhat heavy-handed tactics to drum up business from the iTunes Music Store. I have a series of old MIDI ringtones (converted to MP3) that I am just used to. And want to continue using. And find it just very difficult to do so. If Apple offered these goofy ringtones that I like on iTMS, well, I'd probably buy them. But they don't and they go out of their way to keep me from using them. Fortunately, there's iToner which has allowed me to install a bunch of my old MIDI ringtones.

The second is a little more esoteric. iPhone mail refuses to display email messages which were forwarded as an attachment. If someone takes a client like Thunderbird, selects a message and forwards that message as an attachment, the message shows up on the iPhone as an icon named "mime-attachment". The issue is that iPhone mail appears to not understand message/rfc822 message types. This is exceedingly frustrating for me and I have filed a bug with Apple.

I am hopeful that Apple will open up the iPhone to developers. This may sound silly, but it would be nice to get a game of solitaire on this thing....

People have also complained about being limited to using EDGE only instead of WCDMA or "3G". For me, this isn't so much an issue - when I'm surfing or reading email, it's usually from on a WiFi network. If I'm truly out and about, I'm usually only checking mail or trying to do a few specific things (like check flight arrivals) which really aren't bandwidth intensive. I also do wish Apple would get a Flash viewer on the iPhone as well - if only so some websites don't come up completely blank (that said, that's poor coding to me anyways, but...)

8 out of 10. This is the only first generation Apple product that I can say that so far I've been this happy with.

Tags: Technology

The last couple of weeks at home have marked the return of something we've been lacking for a while in Maryland - rain. It's great that we are finally getting some. We sure do need it.

Unfortunately, this has triggered an issue in our 2006 Ford Freestyle - rain leaking into the passenger compartment. We've had this intermittent problem of water mysteriously showing up on the front dashboard of the car occasionally, but in this case, we soaked a good chunk of the rear cargo area, with the water coming out where the seat belts for the 3rd row come out of the headliner in the ceiling on the driver side.

This was frustrating beyond average since the theme of this particular car has been "water leaks". Previously, we had water soaking the floor of the second row seats on the passenger side due to a badly aligned gasket in the firewall that allowed water from the A/C unit to leak in (taking it in for a water leak in the middle of the summer with no rain was fun). Then another plug worked its way loose and we leaked again several months later into the same spot.

I took it in last week, where our local Ford dealer performed a TSB (Technical Service Bulletin) for the water leak which sounded like what we had been describing. Seems like there are some problems with the way the drain hoses for the sunroof were positioned. Anyway, fix performed, got the car back and things seemed good. Until earlier this week when it rained again. Good news - it didn't leak out the driver side. Bad news - it leaked out the passenger side.

Grrrr.....

Called the dealer again. Referenced the first call and they promptly (without any arm twisting) set me up with a loaner car and an appointment the next day. Returned fixed and tested - we'll see what happens.

It's odd how cards seem to develop themes for annoyances. My wife once had a car that seemed to be some sort of stealth car - because people kept rear ending it for some reason. Another car had a habit of hitting odd objects (like parking lot posts, dogs in the road, etc.). My wife's current car has had the record for "things that should never break, but have" like 12V outlets falling to the floor, CD player that refuses to play track 1, etc. It really does make you wonder that as cars become more complicated, they seem to be getting a lot harder to build correctly.

So in my previous entry, I talked about a reported 1954 article from Popular Mechanics about the future of the home computer.

Turns out, as pointed out by my friend Fourth Breakfast, I was duped. It's a fake picture. See the referenced note about this picture at http://www.snopes.com/inboxer/hoaxes/computer.asp

I don't tend to fall for these too often, but every once in a while, it happens. And here I was thinking that big wheel was to open the beer fridge...

Still, I don't want one of those consoles in my house for the same reasons I wrote before!

Tags: Technology

A friend of mine recently forwarded me the picture below (with caption). It's from a 1954 issue of Popular Mechanics.



If you can't read the caption, it says "Scientists from the RAND Corporation have created this model to illustrate how a "home computer" could look like in the year 2004. However the needed technology will not be economically feasible for the average home. Also the scientists readily admit that the computer will require not yet invented technology to actually work, but 30 years from now scientific progress is expected to solve those problems. With teletype interface and the Fortran (sic) language, the computer will be easy to use."

There are times I think my laptop is too big. Then I look at this and stop complaining. Think of how much *power* that thing would consume.

Then again, for those that have seen my basement, I already consume plenty of power as it is on computing devices...

Tags: Technology

Yesterday (Oct 26) was the official "release" day of Mac OS X 10.5 or "Leopard". Highly anticipated and awaited by the Apple faithful.

The "bleeding edge" folks were trading comments back and forth on several Mac mailing lists I'm on about when their copies would/did arrive. I found one particular comment amusing. One person reported that their package arrived in the late afternoon, and that the UPS driver said it took so long because the number of deliveries of this "iPod" (sic) nearly doubled her route and the routes of all drivers in San Francisco.

Makes me wonder what Harry Potter did to UPS....

Tags: Humor

Lots of folks have written about this week's fires. Like many others, I paid a lot of attention to them, but for me, a bit more maybe than most since I used to live in both Los Angeles and San Diego, and in particular, in neighborhoods in each city which were evacuated.

I found this picture to be pretty representative of the scale of the fires. Taken shamelessly from The Weather Channel website...



The Witch fire in San Diego resulted in an evacuation of my old neighborhood there. The Buckweed fire in Los Angeles resulted in an evacuation of my old neighborhood in Santa Clarita (aka Canyon Country).

I can't imagine what it must have been like in Southern California this last week. If you can see the smoke from space...

Don't faint - two postings from me in one day.

Apple yesterday started taking orders for Leopard - their newest version of MacOS X. They also announced that those who purchased systems on October 1st or later could obtain an upgrade for only $9.95.

Immediately, people who bought their new Macs right before October 1st started to whine.

I had for many years used a story that was taught to me as the "Fallacy of the Beard". Or, more simply, at what point does a beard become a beard? One hair? Two hairs? 100 hairs? The "just one more" argument. At some point, you just have to draw a line and declare the beard a beard.

I learned today that that story (or logic) is called a "sorites". I was pointed to a website http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/sorites-paradox/ which describes the term in more detail.

So to all your whiners out there -- tough. Read the URL. Apple drew the line. Get over it. Just like all of you who whined about the iPhone price cut.

And something new learned. And from now on, instead of explaining the story, I can just give them a URL!

Tags: Technology

I have recently discovered that there are a lot of very stupid email administrators in this world.

In the last two days, two of my domains have been pummeled by large numbers of emails to non-existent people - the apparent result of sites trying to bounce undeliverable messages back to forged email addresses.

What these sites are doing is accepting inbound emails without question, then running them through some sort of filtering device, usually something like a Barracuda Spam Firewall. The filtering device determines the email is either undeliverable or inappropriate. Fine. The problem is the stupid device then tries to *return* the email to a forged sender. Which is some random victim domain.

This is just an entirely stupid way of doing filtering. One should filter before accepting the mail. If you don't like what you're getting, reject the original SMTP transaction with a 500 series or 5.x.x (permanent) failure code. Once you accept it, it then becomes your problem. It shouldn't become mine. All you are doing by trying to bounce it back to forged email addresses is doubling the traffic generated by the spam.

I need to go find a technology-less deserted island and go hide...I can't stand the stupidity of some of the stuff I see on the internet these days. Doesn't anyone understand how this stuff works anymore?!?!?!

Tags: Technology

My friend Fourth Breakfast made a comment recently about never knowing I played the violin. I'm positive she forgot. I think we crossed that path once before when reviewing the odd similarities in our lives....but nonetheless, here's an answer for her and others who might (or might not) have been interested.



So the story about the violin. Recently, Andrew started playing violin at school. It's offered at our local elementary school starting in 3rd grade. First thing you need in order to play the violin is, well, a violin. A friend suggested I just get one off eBay. I disagreed with that. Having played violin myself for well over 15 years, you don't just buy a violin like an iPod. You have to audition it. They don't let you do that on eBay....

I happened upon a local violin store. Gailes Violin Shop in College Park which isn't too far from us. The moment I walked in I knew this was the right store. Violin shops, in my opinion, have a certain atmosphere, including smell. It smelled like a violin shop. Some nice mixture of rosin, wood, along with sounds of instruments being played in a wonderfully silent environment. I spent a fun hour trying out the quarter-sized violins before selecting one for Andrew.

The experience made me decide to dust my old violin off and get it back into playing shape.

I have faithfully carried my violin in its case around, by hand, for 18 years. It has always moved in the back seat or trunk of the car. So it actually was in pretty good shape. I needed a bow rehair, new strings, and a little adjustment to the bridge. Otherwise, the violin was amazingly just as I left it when I closed the case 18 years ago. Opening the case and getting the instrument tuned up was quite like rediscovering an old friend.

Getting the violin to the violin store was how I discovered it fit in the boot of the Mini, by the way. It happened to be the car with gas in it that day.

Andrew and I are now practicing together, with my hopes that not only will Andrew keep up with the violin, but that I'll get enough rust out of the fingers to actually join an ensemble or some other local group. I have discovered, though, that my double-jointed pinky fingers haven't gotten any better with age...

Tags: Andrew

Saw this today on an email list at work (and this does *not* apply to me):

Three things are certain:
death, taxes, and lost data.
Guess which has occurred?

Tags: Technology

Today is the 2nd birthday of my Mini Cooper (okay, it's not really the birthday, but more like the adoption day - I took delivery two years ago).

Since then, I've been amazed at what I found fits well into the tiny little boot (or trunk) of my Mini. See the picture below for a reference point (I took this picture two years ago).



The little boot actually carries quite a bit of stuff. I don't hesitate going to the grocery store with the car, nor have Costco or Home Depot runs been out of the question either (within reason of course - I'm not hauling home a 37" LCD television home in the car for sure...). But in the same way my Roland D-70 keyboard used to fit perfectly in the back seat of my 1988 Mustang LX 5.0 coupe, I have found a couple of surprisingly perfect fits in the boot of the Mini.

- My full size violin in its case snuggles in perfectly between the tire jack case and the opposite wall of the Mini in the left-right direction in the lowered section of the boot.
- Refrigerator 12-packs of CocaCola fit perfectly in that lowered section in the front-back direction. You can get about 5 in (I forget exactly how many) but it's a perfect fit whatever the count.
- Eddie Bauer overnight duffel. This might seem intuitive, but the one I have really is a perfect fit once inside. Sometimes, a little, um, "encouragement" is required to get it into the boot. But once there, it's a happy camper.

In a previous posting of a similar name, I talked about a company, LetsTalk.com and how a unique email address I had created for use with dealing with this company had been leaked somehow, and I was receiving many spam messages from them.

As a statistic, I recall that I counted an average of over 400 blocked spam delivery attempts to that email address alone per day over a 4 day period.

I contacted LetsTalk.com through their communications web page. And got nothing. So after a week, I contacted TRUSTe.org per LetsTalk.com's privacy statement and filed a complaint. Here's how things went:

TRUSTe made an initial return contact within 24 hours asking me if I had been infected by a virus/trojan/malicious website. I responded that since I use a Mac, there are no known malicious viruses circulating for it, that most Malware doesn't work on Macs, and I have standard NAT and firewall security. I will admit it's not bulletproof, but, my point to TRUSTe was if my system had been compromised, I should have leaked the hundred or so other unique email addresses as well, and all those were silent. TRUSTe agreed and forwarded my complaint to LetsTalk.com

TRUSTe enforces responses times and acts as a facilitator for the whole complaint process, and after about 10 days (and me sending in logs, spam samples caught in my spam filter, etc.) LetsTalk.com delivered a report where they showed that a third party they had hired to scrub their advertising email lists had leaked out all the email addresses to be scrubbed.

So, on one hand, it's bad that the info leaked. But on the other hand, they did find the source (or so I believe since the spamming has stopped), and they indicated it was email addresses only. No other information reportedly leaked.

LetsTalk.com was responsive, asked appropriate questions, and at all times seemed interested in resolving the complaint. Refreshing and appreciated. TRUSTe's system also appears to have worked well - less than 2 weeks to resolution once I contacted them.

Maybe there's hope yet for the internet...

Tags: Technology

It hasn't even been two weeks since you left us, but we're still thinking of you on your birthday. We miss you dad.

My friend Fourth Breakfast posted this link: http://youtube.com/watch?v=D9bMM3prOFo which is an, um, "interpretation" of Brokeback Mountain. Absolutely hilarious!

Tags: Humor

One of advantages to having your own domain *and* running your own mail server is that you can create as many email addresses as you want on your domain. So some time ago, tired of the spam thing, I started tracking "who does what" with my email addresses, by assigning each contact with a new company a unique email address.

There are few surprises. Shortly after linking my Safeway grocery card with my United Airlines Mileage Plus account, my United Airlines address started receiving emails from Safeway. I posted my address on my high school's alumni website and immediately began receiving emails telling me I had just inherited $2 million dollars. Harvesting bot. Things like this make sense.

Other things are surprising. Like receiving male enhancement spam at an address reserved for transactions with legit companies. Today's example is LetsTalk.com - a popular cellular phone service reseller. While their service when I placed my order with them was excellent, the fact that my LetsTalk specific email is now receiving massive amounts of spam doesn't reflect well on the company and raises concerns about their security practices. I've fired off a letter to the company and we'll see what we get back.

Other sites that I have, in the past, tracked to email address leaks are such popular sites like classmates.com (though I haven't received email to that address in a few years now) and one of my *former* banks. That latter event was quite interesting, especially since I proved to their security officer that the breach was coming from a compromised PC *inside* their corporate network. They lost my business not so much because one of their PCs became infected, but because their security officer was so cavalier in handling the manner (oh, your email is not private information, I can find it anywhere on the web).

The bottom line - as has often been pointed out, your information is not as secure as it seems.

Tags: Technology

We decided to head out for ice cream last night as a family and finally decided to test a theory that we've had for a while.

Question: Does a forward facing car seat fit in the Mini Cooper?

Answer: Yes

So the next question: Does Declan like driving around with the top down on the Mini Cooper?

Answer: Yes

How do we know? Aside from the wide grin on Declan's face for the entire ride last night, when we went to take the Freestyle to go shopping this morning, Declan kept tugging at the door handle of the Mini and looked confused when we put him in the Freestyle.

Tags: Declan

Last Thursday, Andrew and I had a chance to visit and ride on the Western Maryland Scenic Railroad originating in Cumberland, MD. It was a great chance to spend time together and to for me to get out of the office for a day.

The excursion starts as a 1 hour train ride from Cumberland, MD to Frostburg, MD on tracks from the original Western Maryland and C&P railroads. On our trip, we were pulled by a Western Maryland diesel locomotive, but other trains are pulled by steam engines. Below is a particularly scenic shot taken in Frostburg.



More pictures can be found at http://www.stickman.org/Pictures/Pictures-2007/WMR/

After the 1 hour train ride, the train engine is turned around on a turn table (you get to watch!) and you are then given an hour and a half to eat lunch and explore Frostburg. One of the neat attractions in Frostburg was the Thrasher Carriage Museum which houses various restored horse-drawn carriages and sleighs. There's also plenty of scenery to enjoy in the surrounding area and town. You then go back to Cumberland on the same train you came in.

It was a 2.5 hour drive from our house to Cumberland, but I think we'll be going back. In the fall, I think the scenery should be spectacular and the people all around were friendly and made the trip thoroughly enjoyable.

Tags: Andrew

My friend Fourth Breakfast has tagged me for one of these little blog tag games. Like my friend, I'm going to limit my responses in a few cases otherwise, we're going to be here all year....

Jobs I've held:
I was a Ride Operator at Six Flags Magic Mountain in high school and part of college. I ran roller coasters. When I worked there, I was known as the only operator to ever hit Emergency Stop on Freefall 3 times, and not be terminated or reprimanded for any of the occurrences.



I've also been an engineer for McDonnell Douglas, Megatek, and Sun Microsystems (current).
I've been systems administrator for the University of Michigan and the University of California, San Diego.

Places I've lived:
Schenectady, New York
Canyon Country, California
Ann Arbor, Michigan
San Diego, California
Hershey, Pennsylvania (actually, Palmyra, but close enough)

Movies I can watch over and over:
The Hunt for Red October

My guilty pleasures:
Playing blackjack in Las Vegas

Shows I enjoy:
House
The Weather Channel

Places I've been on vacation:
Too numerous to list, so I'll say Lake George, New York.

Favorite foods:
Anything Italian, but Veal Parmigiana is my benchmark food.
Just about anything else my wife makes is next.

Websites I visit daily:
http://www.stickman.org/ (of course)

Body parts I've injured:
Knees. Both of them. Not requiring surgery, but I know when the weather is changing....

Awards I've won:
I choose to list "Perfect Attendance" in 3rd grade.

Nicknames I've been called:
Stickman. Or course. The origin goes back to my Magic Mountain days...


Now that I've played, we'll see if Mr. Chuckles is game...

Tags: Blog Tag

The silence in the last week is because we've embarked on a new project at home - painting. Our house is 2 years old now, and we've decided we're tired of white everywhere. So we're repainting. We started with Andrew's room, and after one week of work, here's the result:



Now if you wonder why it takes a week to paint a room, this is an evening/spare time project, and, I had to do the ceiling. I usually go out of my way to avoid painting ceilings. There was no alternative in this case because during the drywall repair for the typical settling nail pops and such, we discovered that the touch up paint was still very noticeable. Repainting the ceiling was the only way to fix that...

The colors are Hawthorne Yellow and Linen White (from Benjamin Moore). Great paint, by the way. Very happy with the stuff and the local dealer.

Now, we're on to the dining room...

Tags: Home Improvement

I decided to upgrade the system I use for primarily work at home to something newer. 3.5 years is an eternity in PC technology, so I saw what seemed like a nice cheap system with which to upgrade. This was a Dell Dimension C521 w/ a dual core AMD64 Athlon processor (the 4400 series so 2.3 GHz), 2GB of RAM, 320GB of hard drive, and an nVIDIA built-in graphics controller. For $560 (before tax) it seemed like a nice system which would be a nice boost in performance for not much money. Given that I would then use my old system to replace Andrew's 7 year-old $399 Dell Special, it seemed even better (Andrew's system is so old, it won't even run Windows XP).

Unfortunately, one of the conclusions I've arrived at is that I hate Windows Vista. First, there's that ever irritating Windows issue of needing to get a new driver. Everything needs a new driver. And not every thing has a Vista driver. Arrgggh.

Next, realize that I work for Sun. One of my goals is to run Solaris on this thing. Multi-OS booting on a PC used to be pretty straightforward under Windows XP. Unfortunately, this is not the case with Windows Vista, which seems to insist on being in charge of things. It's not straightforward at all.

To get Vista to dual-boot with Solaris, fortunately, someone wrote some very nice (if somewhat complicated) instructions on how to accomplish this. With these instructions as a guide, I'm making progress. Now just need to get audio working, and the network working....

Keep your eyes on the Blog for more updates.

Tags: Technology

One of my relatives docrpm posted this interesting entry on his blog about something he saw at his local Safeway.

As I posted in my comment to him, this seems to be a great example of the problems you encounter when you try to legislate common sense. It's too bad that more and more, we are forced to do so.

With the garden in full production mode, the family has been hard pressed to come up with new ways to consume all the produce. We stumbled upon a recipe (on the back of a box of pasta) that seemed perfect for our garden's abundance of zucchini, tomatoes, and basil.

Penne w/ Zucchini Sauce and Sausage

1 lb. Italian Sausage (crumbled)
1/3 cup extra virgin olive oil
2 medium zucchini, chopped (2 cups)
1 cup chopped plum tomatoes (approx 4)
10 fresh basil leaves, torn
2 garlic cloves, minced
1 t. salt
1/8 l. ground black pepper
1 lb. Penne pasta
1/4 cup freshly grated parmesan cheese
1 T. chopped parsley

Boil pasta according to package. Drain.
Cook the sausage in a large skillet over medium-high heat until done. Remote from skillet and set aside
Heat oil in a skillet. Saute zucchini, tomato, basil, garlic, and seasonings 6-8 minutes or until vegetables are tender, stirring occasionally.
Add sausage to vegetables. Stir. Add sausage and vegetables to hot pasta. Toss. Sprinkle cheese and parsley.

Notes - basil needs to be fresh. The quality of the sausage obviously makes a difference. Don't overcook the pasta. We also find the dish tasty the next day as a cold leftover.

Tags: Gardening

Growing up, one of my favorite games was Trouble. I first got the game when I was about 6 years old.

This weekend, we picked up the latest "travel" version of Trouble. I thought it would be interesting to compare it to my original game. Which I still have and which still works great.



Obviously, the newer one is on the left, old one in the center. Box describes Trouble as a "Frustrating Chase Game" made of "sturdy plastic". Yup. I actually do keep things forever. I've also somehow managed to keep the original game with all its original pieces, and with the Pop-o-Matic still functioning (even though you can see oxidation from the metal inside the dome).

I would never have thought over 30 years ago that my sons would be playing with the same actual game today.

A couple of interesting websites with videos I've found today.

The first one begs the question "Does it spill your drink when you get a Blue Screen of Death"? Click here for the first video.

The second one gives me a chance to answer a question I've been asked a bunch lately - did I get an iPhone. The answer is no. But if I did, I certainly wouldn't treat it as seen in this video. Click here for the second video. Warning - not for iPhone owners that are faint of heart.

Tags: Technology

So it's early July and the garden has just been working overtime.



Zandra's happy as she loves tomatoes. We've already picked a few and according to her, they are yummy. Along with the cukes and zucchini. Just picked some peppers last night. Hoping this keeps up for the summer -- still a long way to go.

More garden pictures here.

Tags: Gardening

Coming back from visiting the family on Tuesday, we were seated in front of a family (mom, dad, and 3 year old girl) where after getting on the plane, the girl was screaming rather hysterically. All the parents on the plane felt bad for the family as mom and dad were working very patiently and diligently to try to calm the frightened girl down.

Then Mr. Jerk sitting a row or so behind them shouted, "Get her off the damn plane. I paid good money for this seat and I can't take this anymore. Get her off the plane now."

I think most of the plane was in shock at Mr. Jerk.

All the parents in the front part of the plane then sprung into action to try to help calm the girl down, which she eventually did after about 10 more minutes. Too bad none of us had brought anything to take care of Mr. Jerk.

Talking with the parents later (who were very appreciative of all the support and even let Andrew watch a movie with their daughter on their computer), it turns out the little girl's last flight had been quite traumatic. Their plane had been clipped by another plane on the runway with their plane getting the other plane's winglet stuck in their tail cone. So even to an adult, yes, I'd be traumatized too. Much less a 3 year old girl.

So to Mr. Jerk out there - get off *my* airplane next time.

Tags: Travel

For Father's Day, Zandra and I went out on a "date night" for the first time in quite a while. It was intended to be a dinner and movie night, but we chose to go see Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End - meaning we missed dinner because the movie was so long (the official running time is 2:45, but if you do the commercials at the beginning, it's longer).

That said, we weren't disappointed. The script was very well done, and so complex that I can't imagine the screen writers keeping the plots, sub plots, and sub sub plots straight. I was thoroughly baffled about 2 hours into the movie. I'll have to look at things again when it comes out on DVD. And because we got there late, we had to sit closer to the front than we would have liked. Resulting I think in us missing some of the widescreen action (this is one DVD you will want to get in widescreen version). We had a great time and I won't say too much more since I don't like spoiling the plot for those few people who haven't seen it.

But two comments do come to mind: 1 day every 10 years just seems sad. And stay for the ending after the trailer.

Seen on a church announcement board near our house marking the last day of school last Friday:

Students: YIPPEE!
Teachers: WHEW!
Parents: HELP!

Tags: Humor

Arrrgggh...

In our neighborhood, having a sprinkler system is (at least to me) a requirement to keeping your lawn in a condition that won't draw the ire of the Home Owners Association. So it's fine that people have them to water the lawn.

What drove me nuts this morning was someone's sprinkler that was watering a full 90 degrees too far - thus doing an extremely good job of watering the street.

And me as I drove by with the top down on the Mini.

Not only does sprinkling the street waste water, but it presents a hazard (slippery pavement). And annoys me. Time to say something to the HOA.

Tags: Gardening

Happy Birthday Andrew!



What's not shown is the "Busted Balloon Incident". Zandra bought Andrew this huge mylar balloon which also played "Happy Birthday" when you thumped it. It lasted all of 60 seconds in our house as Andrew, totally by accident, walked under the ceiling fan with his new balloon. Ooops.

We did buy him another one today and it's now safely tied up in his bedroom. Away from the ceiling fan.

Tags: Andrew

So tonight, a thread on an email alias at work had me do a speed test on my cable modem. I used the speed test at Speakeasy Networks (my former ISP whom I had to give up because I moved to an area they didn't service). I was a bit surprised. 14729kbps down and 1562kbps up. Wow. Almost 15Mbps/1.5Mbps. This is about twice what I was getting a month ago.

My suspicion is that since Verizon is on the verge of digging up our neighborhood for FIOS, this is Comcast's answer - boost their speed.

While I love the speed, we'll see if the infrastructure stays any more stable. That's been my biggest gripe with Comcast. The intermittent service interruptions....

Tags: Technology

The blog should now be fixed.

Maybe it's because I'm not plugged into the right developer network, but it turns out the problem was an incompatibility "feature" with the new web publishing software I use - RapidWeaver.

The issue was the theme (or the magic that formats the web page so nicely). The new version of the software required some modifications to the theme. Without them, the really odd side effect was that my archive files (the links that allow you to see my previous postings by month) didn't get named correctly. And my blog entries had this text at the top of the posting. Updating a file called Theme.plist in the custom theme seems to have resolved the issue.

So much for transparent upgrades.

Version 3.6.1 of RapidWeaver does seem to be a nice improvement. It appears to be faster and the blog feature is a lot more flexible than in previous versions. I especially like the ability in the RSS Feed to always publish the last 4 or 5 entries. I was annoyed at the beginning of each month when all previous entries got reset. There are some bugs in the new version, but things otherwise seem happy. Hopefully it stays this way.

Tags: Technology

The blog section of my website is not happy. I appear to have either a self-inflicted wound caused by upgrading to a new version of my web publishing software, or I've stumbled on to a bug. So please, no emails. I know about it...I'll post when it's fixed!

Tags: Technology

So every year since getting married, I've tried to have a garden. This year is no different - we have 4 varieties of tomatoes, 2 varieties of peppers, zucchini, cucumbers, and some various herbs.

Moving to Maryland, it was apparent last year that the soil in our particular area isn't very, um, fruitful (vegetableful?) and last year's tomato crop yielded, maybe about 10 tomatoes.

So this year, I made a number of changes - I moved the tomato garden to the side of the house with more sun, worked a *lot* harder to condition the soil, and mixed in some additional fertilizer to get the plants started.

Something worked. The plants this year are great and I've already got more tomatoes growing on the plants than I harvested all last year.

Pictures as I get a chance.

Tags: Gardening

I'm on a trip today and did my customary stop at McDonalds for breakfast. They're in the middle of a massive Shrek the Third promotion.

I didn't really pay much attention to it until I went to go put my straw in my orange juice.

It was Ogre Green.

I guess if it weren't orange juice, the straw wouldn't have looked so bad. But with orange juice, well, it looked like Phyllis Diller with a bad hair day. Nasty.

I decided to forgo the straw this morning....

Ever since purchasing my Mini Cooper S Convertible about 18 months ago, I've often felt a little guilty over spending so much money on a fun car that I never drive much of anywhere. In 18 months, prior to this week, I hadn't even broken 8000 miles on the car.

This week, I got to do some work related business up in New Jersey. The weather forecast looked nice, so I took the Mini up on the trip. Getting home that night after spending about 7 hours on the road total, I was happily reassured that the car really does do long trips well. I arrived home with no back aches (a testament to the well designed seats) and a grin on my face (mostly because I drove with the top down most of the way). Music blaring from the stereo fed by the iPod, and a nice breeze blowing through the car - a great drive indeed. It helped to take the edge off all the other events of this week.

31.7 mpg for the entire trip didn't hurt either. And to use a quote from another co-worker of mine who has a BMW, "I didn't drive it to maximize fuel economy either."

I attended the memorial service today for one of my mother's cousins. At the sign in table, the family had made little cards from my second uncle's drawings, and had a quote on the back of each (what he used to call SWOTD (Special Wisdom of the Day)).

This is what was printed on the back of mine. I found it quite profound, especially given my second uncle was quite the musician.

"after silence, that which comes nearest to expressing the inexpressible is music" - Aldous Huxley

The memorial service itself was quite beautiful, and also a bit sad. It's always touching to see how much a person is loved and how different people from different stages of ones life reflect on the same person. All very heartfelt and all very sincere. It was also a beautiful day with a cool breeze and light scattered clouds.

Poor Declan. This last week has been a tough one for him as he was suffering from the Hand, Foot, and Mouth disease thing.

This is one of those cases where you can't do much to speed the illness on its way. All you can do is feed Tylenol and Motrin and keep the pain under control. And try to convince the little one to keep drinking.

It hurts to watch - probably as much as it hurts the child to deal with the sores that often accompany this virus.

Hopefully, now that he's gotten it he won't get it again.

Yesterday, Verizon's contractor went down my street marking cable locations and hanging fliers on the door to indicate that they were about to pull the remaining infrastructure required to get Verizon's new FIOS service. I can't wait. It will finally be a decent alternative to the cable company and my cable modem.

http://www.verizon.com/fios in order to read more about it.

It's not so much the additional speed I'll be happy about (though it certainly doesn't hurt). I'm hoping that Verizon engineered FIOS like they have all their other telecommunications services - with over engineered infrastructure that will hopefully be more robust than that of Comcast. For all the good things about Comcast's service, I'm now tired of the 1-2 hour outages I experience every few weeks or so as the service mysteriously goes down in the middle of the day. These events have become frequent enough that I've gotten a DSL line as a backup to the cable modem. So I can keep working through these outages.

Check back here as I provide updates. As much as being first usually means being on the bleeding edge, I'll probably be first (yet again) to get some sort of new internet technology to my house. (I was first in my neighborhood in California for ISDN. I was first in my neighborhood in Pennsylvania for DSL. Why not be first in the neighborhood for FIOS?)

So this blog entry probably isn't news to some. In fact, to most outside the US most likely.

I recently went down to Costco to buy a new cordless phone set for the house. I settled on a nice unit by Panasonic KX-TG1034 -- one base with cordless handsets and 3 additional handsets. I was intrigued because of the advertised battery life (approaching 17 hours of talk time).

This phone came with something called DECT 6.0 which claimed to be the latest in privacy and interference prevention technology. Hmmm. That's a challenge in our house with two wireless networks, baby monitors, and a bazillion other electronic devices to contend with.

I got the box home, set it up, and have been really impressed with the performance of these phones. But reading the technical specs was the kicker.

This thing is nothing more than a short range cell phone.

DECT (Digital Enhanced Cordless Telecommunications) 6.0 runs in the 1920-1930MHz spectrum (close to US cell phones) and utilizes TDMA (Time Division Multiple Access) which is the same technology used by GSM cell phone to multiplex calls. This is great! Technology that we know works pretty well in cell phones, and operating on a frequency that nothing else is (supposed to be) using. My 2.4GHz wireless networks are safe and so are the 900MHz baby monitors.

And even with a full day of con-calls, I've yet to even get the battery to drop one status bar. So far so good.

Highly recommend the phone.

So it has been, what, 8 weeks since Daylight Savings Time started? And 5 weeks when Daylight Savings Time would have started had Congress not chosen to mess with an already working system? So why is there *any* excuse for people not to have figured out what time it is yet? Nonetheless, I daily get at least one email from someone whose computer clock is off by an hour. What - you don't really care what time it is? How many appointments have you missed? Dates, meetings, school buses, ???? Come on people! Get with the program! Fix the time on your computers already!

So I'm trying to figure out why my mulch calculations are off this year....

Saturday, I had 60 cubic feet (a little more than 2 cubic yards) of mulch delivered to my house so I could tidy up the flower beds, around the trees, and create a new flower bed in the back yard. I calculated 60 cubic feet based on the fact that last year, I used 45 cubic feet and it was just right, but that this year, I had one less tree to mulch around (the county took the tree out - BGE installed the street light too close to the tree and the tree got to leave [no pun intended]), which should have meant 3 cubic feet less, and the area of the new flower bed was about the size of the side flower bed, which takes generally about 12 cubic feet. Net gain of 9 cubic feet, so adding 15 cubic feet should have been plenty, right? Wrong. I'm going to be short at least 12 cubic feet.

Another cubic yard over last year...

My math has got to be faulty somewhere. Probably the same reason the yard isn't greening up - I probably have a fertilizer miscalculation....

http://abcnews.go.com/US/VATech/story?id=3059025&page=1&CMP=OTC-RSSFeeds0312

I totally sympathize with the students and families here. Tragedy to be sure, but I'd surely believe there's a lot of insensitivity (even though probably unintentional) here.

As far as horrific stories go in this tragedy:

http://www.time.com/time/nation/article/0,8599,1611998,00.html?xid=site-cnn-partner

Speechless.

Apple some weeks back released 10.4.9 of OS X and with it, iSync version 2.4.

At the time, I failed to notice that the Nokia 6131, which is the Euro/Asia version of the Nokia 6126 that I have, gained support in the new iSync.

http://www.macosxhints.com/article.php?story=20060915154526806 pointed this out to me today, and I removed my old hacks and implemented this one. What an improvement. Mainly, my addresses are now synced into the address field as they should, and not into the notes field! Woo Hoo! Tiny little things that really make your day.

So last month, I wrote about Andrew winning First Place for his school science project. Some have asked about the background of the project.

First, here's a picture.



The marketing name was "Making Fluffy Buns Bigger". The engineering name of the project is really more like "The Effect of Baking Soda on Biscuits". Andrew got the idea (with a little help from mom and dad) from an episode of Pinky Dinky Doo. This show happens to be a favorite of both Andrew and Declan. There's an episode where main character Pinky gets help from her family who inadvertently add too much baking soda to a batch of "Fluffy Buns" and makes the batch rise so big, it blows the roof off the house. Andrew's science experiment tried to demonstrate the premise behind that show (no, we didn't blow the roof off the house).

Andrew did do quite a bit of the work himself. He helped mix the biscuits, he typed in all the text into the computer, chose the colors, and helped paste the slides up on the display board. Of course mom and dad helped a lot with the actual baking, formatting the slides, and buying the materials.

Interestingly enough, at the Science Fair, it was kind of obvious where and how much parents had helped their kids. Some projects really were clearly "okay, mom and dad came up with the idea and told the child what to say". Others you could tell had a lot more creative thought from the kids.

The "marketing name" really did help - Zandra and I didn't know but part of the scoring was actually based on the title. From one of the judges, "oh, that was a great title. Everyone went around saying, 'Everyone needs more fluffy buns.'" Apparently, the phrase kind of struck a chord among the judges. Advantage Andrew.

The only disappointment is that only projects from the 3rd grade or higher get to go on to the County Science Fair. The pressure is on for Andrew (and parents) to think of another creative topic for next year. Maybe we need to watch more Pinky Dinky Doo....

There's been not a lot of blogging going on by me in the last couple of weeks. First reason is this really inexplicable (so far) stomach ailment I've had. The result is essentially bad cases of gas, but the gas causes an excrutiating amount of pain sometimes - making it difficult to want to do anything other than curl up in a ball. So far, all tests negative but things have been getting better over the last few days.

We've also been on the road - we spent part of the Easter holiday with relatives in California. Issues beyond our control resulted in me having to fly back out yesterday to go get Declan our youngest and bring him back today. Nothing like one lap around the country in 24 hours with the second half being with Declan. Fortunately, it seems like guys hefting lots of luggage and infant children get a lot of sympathy from folks. Never had so many people offer to help me with bags, etc.

Some have asked about the Fluffy Buns from Andrew's Science Fair project. That should be the next blog entry.

Late breaking news! Andrew won First Place for the 2nd Grade at his school's Science Fair today! Yippeee! The winning experiment was, "Making Fluffy Buns Bigger".

Pictures and more commentary on the event later, but this is just cool! Now, if the teachers only knew the yelling, crying, meltdowns, and anguish that we put into that presentation last night....

One of the things I was taught about public speaking is to make sure you know how long you have to speak, and try not to run over. (Having an interesting topic, mannerisms, reading your audience are also important, but not for this blog entry.) It's no different when it comes to pastors speaking in church on Sundays. In fact, church pastors often get unfairly teased about "speaking too long" on Sundays, so they're usually extra sensitive about the time.

When my church recently moved into its new building (Riva Trace Baptist Church), we moved into a sanctuary much larger than the original. We took the old clock we previously had in the sound booth that the pastor used to keep track of time with us. But it didn't work in the new sanctuary. (I *think* this was the clock we had in the old church, but regardless, this clock wasn't working out...)



The clock I referred to is the clock labeled "First (Original) Clock" in the picture above. Pastor Dennis couldn't see the clock with the new lighting and because the clock sits partially in the shadows made it even harder to read. This picture was taken with my Treo camera from about where Pastor Dennis would be standing while preaching.

So the church got a second clock with red LEDs lighting up the time. Great idea. Except the clock wasn't much bigger than the original, and with the small lettering, wasn't really visible either (this clock is labeled "Second Clock" in the picture above).

So this week, the church apparently consulted with NASA to acquire a smaller version of the NASA Shuttle Countdown Clock. This clock is labeled "New Clock" in the picture above. Now *this* is a clock you can see!

Will it help Pastor Dennis finish on time? Only time will tell (no pun intended)....

My friend Tom and I both got our Treo 650s around the same time a few months back. We've had a lot of fun sharing our experiences in getting different software, etc., installed on them.

I was wondering this morning if our Treos weren't somehow linked together though. Last night, I dropped my Treo on the floor at church. It fell far enough that it bounced twice and knocked the SD memory card out of it. It stayed running though and didn't seem to have suffered any ill effects.

At about the same time, Tom's Treo mysteriously died while doing nothing. No power. No lights. No response to the charger. Nothing. Dead.

It has to make you wonder - did it die on behalf of my Treo? Hmmm?

Like many parents with kids, Zandra and I often help our son with his homework. This week, though, I am curious to find out what Andrew's teacher must have thought about us after his Wednesday spelling homework....His assignment was:

"Write sentences for each of your spelling words and use an abbreviation in the sentence. For example, 'The dog was barking on Elm St.'"

The sentences I helped Andrew with were like, "The peat moss weighed 40 lbs." and "Mr. Smith asked us whether or not we ate lunch."

The sentences Zandra helped Andrew with were like, "There is a shortage of R.N.s in hopsitals, " "The S.P.C.A. encourages you to keep your pet on a leash," and "There is a P.D.R.* on the shelves."

Hmmmm...not sure about some of those.

*P.D.R. stands for Physician's Deskside Reference

Found this little item on a mailing list at work. Hilarious.

http://www.applegazette.com/macrumors.php

Looks like the following:



The actual website has an auto-generator to create a rumor for you.

So let me make my point-of-view clear:

I am tired of all the news coverage of Anna Nicole Smith.
I am tired of all the news coverage of Britney Spears.
I am tired of all the news coverage of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan, and so on.

I therefore applaud the following Associated Press posting that showed up on CNN today:

http://www.cnn.com/2007/SHOWBIZ/TV/03/02/ignoring.parishilton.ap/index.html?eref=rss_topstories

The AP had a "black out" of Paris Hilton stories for over a week. Someone *finally* understands that she isn't real news.

If only they could make that blackout permanent. And if only someone could trigger a virtual power failure about Anna Nicole Smith. It's pathetic we waste so much time, money, and resource on the funeral coverage of someone who was so promiscuous, that no less than 4 people claim to be the father of her child.

MINI has made a bit of a comeback since being purchased by BMW. It's a car that is cute, fun, and gets relatively good gas mileage. When I bought my 2006 Mini Cooper S a little over a year ago, there was no dealer inventory where I was. You built your car, they ordered it, and you waited until it showed up.

MINI has also been known for its rather humorous (in my opinion) advertising. To introduce the new 2007 MINI Cooper, they've taken advertising one step further. Hammer and Coop. This is a humorous spin on Starsky and Hutch, Magnum PI, and Knight Rider (at the least) -- a short series of what can best be described as long commercials -- all done with that same bizarre MINI humor.

I found it humorous. If not a little male-centric. http://www.hammerandcoop.com -- I give it 4.5/5.0 stars of approval. It doesn't get a perfect score because, well, it *is* marketing....

I guess I find this little story mildly humorous, but probably more reassuring.

The current quarterly promotion gimmick with Discover Card is currently a 5% cashback bonus for things related to travel. Hotels, car rentals, etc. So the gimmick is working in that I've recently been putting all my hotel, car rental, etc. charges on my Discover Card. And this month, I've been doing a lot of travel as it turns out.

So I returned home Saturday evening to find a message on the answering machine from Discover Card's Security and Fraud division. Seems like they were concerned with the sudden increase in travel related charges on my card. Hmmm....mebbe because of their promotion?

The amusing moment in the charge review was the question, "And you have a charge here from Southwest Airlines for...." "$5.00" I answered. "Right" the lady replied. "How do you only get a $5 from Southwest Airlines?" A couple of witty responses danced through my head, but I decided to be nice and say "Security Fee on a Frequent Flier ticket".

But in all seriousness, it's nice to know that someone's computer algorithm for detecting these types of things actually worked correctly.

I haven't had a chance to write anything new lately - not because I haven't had things to say, but because I've been traveling around the country and sleep comes before blogging.

Hopefully we'll get back to regular blogging soon.

Just in case the link I referred to in my previous Super Bowl posting gets deleted, I wanted to include the punchline from the article:

"No one is allowed to broadcast the game on a screen bigger than 55 inches outside your house or with a large group. The NFL basically wants you at home watching the game with family. The NFL claims large gatherings skew the Nielsen number which are the numbers used to sell commercials."

or from the NFL itself (quoted from the Indianapolis Star)

NFL spokesman Greg Aiello said the league's longstanding policy is to ban "mass out-of-home viewing" of the Super Bowl. A major exception to the rule is made, however, for sports bars and other businesses that show televised sports as a part of their everyday operations.

"We have contracts with our (TV) networks to provide free over-the-air television for people at home," Aiello said. "The network economics are based on television ratings and at-home viewing. Out-of-home viewing is not measured by Nielsen."

This is clearly all about the almighty dollar.

I think next year I'm going to plan an "NFL Super Football Game to the Letter of the Law" party....

Quicken for Mac is such a sad state of affairs. No competition. No incentive to get better.

The Mac version lags far behind the Windows version. And Intuit has no motivation to fix this situation.

It's frustrating. They've got us by the neck.

Today, I fired up Quicken 2004 to be greeted with a message that support for Quicken 2004 would be discontinued on April 30. With that, my ability to download transactions, update security prices, stuff that I do quite a bit, was going to go away. Essentially, Intuit was saying, "We haven't gotten money from you in a while - pay up." The equivalent to electronic blackmail....

It's totally reasonable for companies to obsolete support for software. Most obsolete software after 5 years or so, and usually by then, there's enough new features to warrant an upgrade. Not so with Quicken. Oh sure, some things have gotten nicer, and they've fixed a few of my complaints. But it wasn't enough to make me pay $70 to upgrade. Well, they finally forced me into it, and I'm not happy. Even with the $20 discount, it's still extortion. There aren't enough "new features" to warrant an upgrade. I call this a $50 mandatory software maintenance fee.

And, to show how much Intuit doesn't care - they couldn't even be bothered to make Quicken 2007 a Universal app to natively support the new Intel-based Macs. Everyone else has or has it on their roadmap. Intuit doesn't. Quicken users don't have any other options.

For once, I wish Microsoft would step in here and write some software. Microsoft Money for Mac. MMMmmmmmm....

This seems to be truly unfair.

NFL puts kibosh on church Super Bowl party

If you read this and other articles related to this story, it appears this is all about ratings and money. You can't have a party if you have a new 60" TV it seems.

Send your comments on this to:

National Football League
280 Park Avenue
New York, NY 10017

I think I'm going to watch a movie this Sunday. The Chargers are out anyways, so who cares?

A resounding endorsement for Dad's spaghetti from its new biggest fan....



More pictures recently posted on the website.

So we've all known about computer viruses for years now. Did you know that computers get aphasia as well?

Apparently it's true. Got this note today about a problem with the telephone tree system at work. "The phone issue of overlapping recordings has been fixed. IT restarted a vocabulary process on the IVR that was not functioning correctly."

What's next? Stroke? High Cholesterol? ED?

You have to love computers....

I set out on a seemingly simple task this last weekend to add a remote keypad to our garage door opener. We'd not gotten them installed when we bought our house, and it seemed like a much better solution than having to walk around with a spare remote control unit all the time. The installation seemed to be fairly simple and I knew programming wasn't more than a 2 minute operation.

Yes, I was right, installation was a snap. What I didn't anticipate was how many iterations it would take me to get the right keypad unit. In short, the color of the programming (or "learn") button on your garage door opener apparently matters. At least for our opener (made by Chamberlain who also, by the way, makes the ones for Sears)

There is a widely available, popular, remote keypad unit that claims to work on all openers made since 1987. "Perfect!" I thought. Picked one up at Home Depot while on a light bulb/air filter/sanded caulk/etc run on Friday (remember, I'm into optimization so I hate going to Home Depot for just one thing).

Ahem, no. When I got home, I read the fine print which said it didn't support those with the billions of rolling garage door codes. Rats. Rolling garage door codes became popular I think in the late 1990s when it was discovered it was almost trivially easy to sit in a neighborhood with a radio receiver and listen for the remote codes of garage door openers and then to reprogram any generic opener to mimic that code. Specifically, it only referred to openers with red and yellow "learn" buttons. And our opener has a purple button meaning "315MHz, 10-billion rolling codes opener". Which, by the way, is the latest and greatest for Chamberlain.

To top that all off, looking on their website, it seemed like only Chamberlain sold those, and then through mail order. I was frustrated.

Anyways, fortunately, had to pass by Home Depot on the way back from lunch on Saturday. So I returned the unit I had purchased the day before.

Later that afternoon, I stopped into Sears. Had to pick up a new water filter for the fridge. Walking to the refrigerator section, I happened to walk through the hardware section and remembered that Sears' units were made by Chamberlain. Hey, maybe they had the right unit.

Sure enough, there's a shelf of remote keypads. I looked at the openers, and found an open package which said, "Supports 315MHz openers with 10-billion rolling codes and purple learn buttons." Hey, that sounds like mine. Perfect! Except this package is open - let me grab the next one on the shelf because I don't like open packages. Paid the clerk for the keypad and the filter and went on my way. Got home and went right to work programming the thing up.

Except it didn't work. Could not for the life of me figure out why. Spent 30 minutes pushing buttons, following and re-reading programming instructions, and then it hit me. The instructions referred to an orange "learn" button. Walk back into the house, punch up Sears on the web, and discover that when I had picked up the next one off the shelf, I had picked up the "390MHz, 10-billion rolling codes opener" keypad by mistake. ARRRRGGGGHHHH!!

So Sunday after lunch, made one more trip back to Sears. Found the package I had been looking at the day before. Confirmed 3 times it read "315MHz, 10-billion rolling codes opener", noted the part number, and started looking for another unopened one. To find that that was apparently the last one in the store. At that point, I decided I'd had enough, checked the package for all the parts (yup, had keypad, battery, instructions, and 2 mounting screws) and got an exchange for the part. Drove home, did the by now well-known programming dance, and voila. It worked. Mounted it up on the framing outside. It's now installed and happy. And it did take only 5 minutes to program and install.

Too bad it only took me 3 tries to get the right opener.

Now to the rant - the guys who put the built-in garage door openers into my wife's Volvo and my Mini Cooper were able to design an "all-in-one" unit. Why can't they make one for your home? Even if doing so makes it cost a little more? I would have bought one! Hello! Marketing! Are you listening?

But, the moral of the story - when getting a garage door remote, make sure you know the color of your "learn" button and realize that all openers/keypads are not the same....the color of the button matters.

I made a new purchase this last week - a Brother MFC-9420CN multi-function color laser printer. I think this is Brother's flagship printing/multi-function device. If it isn't, I don't want to see the bigger model.



This unit came delivered via UPS Ground weighing in at 100 lbs. according to the shipping label. 31 pages per minute black, 8 pages per minute color. Enough to kill a lot of trees in a hurry. I've named the printer color-termite.

This is a size comparison to the laser printer it will soon replace - the HP LaserJet 4MPlus



The rationale behind this purchase is much like that of the hybrid car purchase. I was tired of spending $30/month on ink cartridges for my previous multi-function unit. Even when I was using it only minimally (like a cat, it constantly liked to clean itself). Savings on ink should pay for this printer in a few years. Also, my HP printer is 11 years old. It doesn't handle some more complicated documents, and recently, the bearings in the cooling fan started to make noise and I was getting accordion folded output. I am replacing both units with this new unit. I got $120 off the unit from costco.com this week. Free shipping as well (and that is a big deal when you're shipping 100 lbs....)

I already have color printing working from my Mac, Windows, and Sun Solaris. I'm very happy.

Trees of the World - Beware!

So of course I have to make a comment about today's "Big Announcement". I will admit the iPhone sure looks cool. I hope Steve Jobs has enough influence to make sure that the phone doesn't end up bastardized by Cingular. Cingular seems to have a history of doing that to perfectly good phones.

If Cingular and Apple do screw it up, though, there's always the Microsoft alternative - the Zunephone....

I'm a huge fan of Apple products. However, I'm tired of all the hype we go through at this time of the year when the "Big Announcements" are made in Apple's product line.

There's so much guessing going on. iTV. iPhone. Apple buying Sun. I stopped reading the speculation weeks ago.

Apple will announce stuff tomorrow. It will be cool and interesting. I'll read about it after it happens. Doesn't anyone else have a life? Does hypothesizing about what is going to come about going to really change what gets announced? Save your brain cycles already....

I'm not sure what it is exactly with my work cell phone, but it seems like people are constantly dialing it looking for other people.

In some cases, it just seems like it's an honest mistake. Those don't bother me.

But there's the case of this one lady named Cheryl Davis who keeps giving out my cell phone number to her doctors and dentist who call me to remind me of her appointments. I know where they are now (the wonders of caller ID). I know when she's scheduled to get her teeth cleaned. Hey, maybe next time her doctor's office calls I should ask them for a rectal exam on her behalf.... I won't be using any of these offices any time soon. Wish I could figure out how to block these people from calling my cell phone.

Then there's the collection agencies. Particularly annoying are the ones which only leave a message which tells you to call back a number. This seems to be the favorite (annoying) trick of this Argyle Solutions (or something like that) company (if you ever get a call from 800-527-4955, it's this clueless company). I am convinced they call every number in the country randomly looking for people. And even if you ask them to take you out of their database, sometimes they'll call back a few more times for good measure to really make sure it's the wrong number.

If you think I should change my number, well, my wife's cell phone is no better in terms of misrouted calls and I always fear I'll get the number of some former drug dealer and start getting calls at 2am in the morning asking for a hit. At least these people call during the day when I'm awake.

There's a term in the computer industry called "Clean IPs", or numeric IP addresses that have never been listed in a spam database or otherwise been linked to abuse. It's hard to get one of those it seems and you want one of those if you ever want to run a legitimate mail server. Likewise, it now seems to be difficult to get a "Clean Phone Number" that hasn't been previously abused by someone else. We need a service that does a background check on phone numbers so when you're assigned a phone number, you can check its history and the previous owner so you know if you're going to be in trouble or not....

At various points of the day on Tuesday, I took to channel surfing the various coverages of President Gerald Ford's State Funeral in Washington, DC. At some point, the difference between the coverage on CNN and C-SPAN suddenly struck me. For those of you outside the US, C-SPAN is a channel which pretty much focuses on displaying coverage of the US Congress and other government related events. CNN is CNN.

The commentary on CNN almost never stopped. It was like the constant color commentary you get watching a sporting event. Half the time, I wished they would be quiet. You couldn't hear yourself think and some of the drivel was meaningless. I can see President Carter is talking to Secretary of State Rice. I don't care what you think they are talking about. And even if I did, was that really relevant to the event at hand?

Whereas with C-SPAN, there was no commentary, save for the occasional closed-caption item that went by indicating that music was playing (I usually watch TV with closed-captioning turned on since I suffer from a mild hearing loss). Allowed for total reflection and appreciation for the solemnity of the event.

More is not always better.

So as I noted in my previous blog entry, our Christmas holiday vacation got fairly involved with the sharing of illness and other physical misfortune. Here's the final tally:

James: 1 injured left wrist (note to the person at BWI who stopped short in front of our luggage cart - next time I'm running you over....), 1 repeat sinus infection (still on going) 1 bout of 36 hour GI bug (affecting both directions).

Andrew: Sniffling and hacking cough, 1 bout of 12 hour GI bug (affecting forward direction)

Declan: Sniffing and hacking cough, 1 bout of 12 hour GI bug (affecting forward direction), 1 bout of 24 hour GI bug (affecting rear direction and still ongoing), gagging from sinus ailment also resulting in gastrointestinal upset.

Zandra: 1 short bout of GI bug, 1 incoming sore throat, and having to put up with 3 sick members of household for entire vacation.

Collateral Damage: 1 interior of Volvo S40 (Zandra's car), at least 12 loads of laundry (we think probably more), up to 4 baths per day for Declan, 3 pillows, general misery for all.

Welcome to 2007. We all need a vacation...