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...