All week long, as we have waited for the delivery of our washing machine, Sibylle and I have kidded about sitting down in the basement watching it run. You know, a pair of lawn chairs, a lamp, maybe a drink with an umbrella. Entertainment. Color television.
The delivery has been made, and the first load is now being washed as this is being typed. I’m sitting in the basement, half watching the new color tele… er, washer do it’s thing.
Really.
Follow this link to see an image that will help you determine if you are right-brained or left-brained.
I am right-brained, according to this test. After concentrating at a point just below the image for a few seconds I was able to switch to the “left” side.
I have a love-hate relationship with Zone Alarm. Operating a Windows XP machine without virus and adware/spyware protection is foolhardy at best, so I appreciate having it on my laptop as a software barrier. However, it often times gets in the way of normal operations making wish I could operate safely without it.
Recently, upon waking the ThinkPad from sleep or hibernation, I was unable to access the Internet. Email, IM, and Web browsing all refused to work. Eventually I discovered that if I stopped Zone Alarm and restarted it my connectivity would be restored.
Searching the Zone Alarm forums I discovered I wasn’t the only person with this issue. The fix (I hope) is fairly easy: add the IP addresses for your DHCP and DNS. In my case the DHCP source is my LinkSys router, and the only DNS entry I have is the DSL modem upstream from the router. Here are the steps I followed, for future reference:
Open a command prompt and type ipconfig /all. In the output of this command will be the DHCP server address, and any DNS IP addresses. Copy these.
Open Zone Alarm’s control center and go to the Firewall page. Once there open the Zones tab. At the bottom of that page click on the Add button. In the dialog that appears add the one of the IP addresses you copied in step 1.
Repeat for all the IP addresses you copied in step 1.
Apply your changes and, hopefully, in the future Zone Alarm won’t interfere with your connectivity upon waking the machine.
Many things go into the concept of home. Some are tangible, others are not. Sibylle and I have started, slowly, to make a home, together. Tonight we added something tangible to the list of home in the form of a new front-loading clothes washer.
Her townhouse in Manhattan, and the apartment I had, that we shared here in Kansas City, both had washers and dryers that belonged to the structure, and when we moved to our new townhouse we left them behind. For the past month or so we’ve been doing laundry in the Laundromat, which isn’t bad, but it isn’t great either.
The only advantage the Laundromat has is that it realizes a form of parallel processing. You can wash all five loads at the same time. Dry them simultaneously too. At home multiple loads are serialized through the single thread of one washer and one dryer. And since the washer usually takes about twice as long to rid the clothes of water as it took the washer to add, the process is throttled to the speed of your dryer.
Our search for a dryer continues, but we are both very pleased to have a washer scheduled for delivery this Friday.
Sibylle and I had a quiet weekend. Saturday was spent doing very little; we slept in late and then took a nap in the afternoon. The most ambitious thing we accomplished all day was making dinner and sitting down to watch The Full Monty while we ate.
Sunday was also laid back, although we did venture out to run some errands and to try a new Mongolian BBQ restaurant - HuHot Mongolian Grill. We both enjoyed the fare, and the chance to eat out. We did some window shopping afterwards and eventually bought groceries for the week before coming home.
After the hectic weeks of moving this summer, and then our trip to Germany, it was very nice to have an unstructured, unplanned, no-expectations weekend to just be.
Most modern browsers offer an auto-complete feature for the address bar; start typing an address and the browser offers one or more addresses that start with the same character or characters to save you from typing the entire URI. Over time your favorite sites gravitate towards the top of this auto-complete list, resulting in the ability to type just a single letter, in some cases, to get to a site. Here, then, are the top 26 sites in my version of the Internet, as determined by their first letter.
A a.wholelottanothing.org/ B bits.blogs.nytimes.com/ C cnn.com/ D daringfireball.net/ E ericalucci.com/ F flickr.com/ G google.com/ H hivelogic.com/ I idlewords.com/ J jasonsantamaria.com/ K kottke.org/ L lifehacker.com/ M mail.google.com/ N news.bbc.co.uk/ O officesnapshots.com/ P padawan.info/ Q quirksmode.org/ R randsinrepose.com/ S shawnblanc.net/ T twitter.com/ U http://www.useit.com/ V veerle.duoh.com/ W woot.com/ X x180.net/ Y yahoo.com/ Z zanshin.net/
While Sibylle and I were in Germany we made extensive use of an Internet Cafe in order to check email and upload pictures to Flickr. Every time we logged out of the machines we were both very careful to log out of any password protected sites or applications, and to close all application windows. Still, since we had no administrative rights on the machines and therefore couldn’t wipe out the cache or browsing history, I was a bit nervous about having entered my passwords on a strange machine.
This afternoon my Yahoo Messenger account suddenly disconnected giving me a “you logged in elsewhere” reason as the cause. Yikes!
I immediately logged back in to Yahoo Messenger on my computer, and messaged Sibylle at home to see if my other computer had woken up. If it had, then that would be the cause of the “logged in elsewhere” message. If it hadn’t then there was either a bug in Yahoo’s software (not impossible) or someone in Winnenden Germany was potentially masquerading as me.
Sibylle confirmed that my laptop at home was still slumbering away. Time to change the password.
What is interesting is that this password was one that Yahoo assigned me when I first start using IM about 100 years ago. For some reason clot451coat639 was easy to remember and type. I never saw a reason to change it until today. The only password I have that’s older would be the one for ICQ, which dates back to 1995 or so. Probably ought to change that one as well.
While we were in Germany, Sibylle and I made good use of a small Internet Cafe in Winnenden, the town next to the village where we were staying. The cafe had about a dozen mid-level desktop computers with 15 or 17 inch LCD monitors, and offered miltch kaffee, soft drinks, and beer.
The first time we sat down we discovered that the keyboards were quite a bit different than the English one we are used to in the States. I’m not sure I can remember all the differences, but here is a partial list:
Except for the viruses infestation on our camera’s memory cards, the Internet Cafe experience was a good one, made all the more interesting by the differences in something as common and ordinary as a keyboard.
My employer utilizes Microsoft Outlook for email and calendaring. The culture here uses the calendar to track outages. When you are going to be out of the office, whether for training, the dentist, or vacation, you are to send a meeting announcement to your team letting them know of your absence. It’s a good idea, provided everyone follows a couple of simple rules.
Make sure to leave your name out of the description of the event. This way it will appear to all who accept it that they are going to the dentist for root canal work.
Always mark the event as Busy, so that everyone has that time blocked out on their calendar too. After all, if you aren’t going to be here, no one should be getting any thing done? Right?
Send your event announcement to the widest possible audience. Use departmental mailing lists rather then just the names of people you work with on a daily basis.
Be sure to require everyone on your event. If you mark them as optional then they won’t have to send you a response.
Don’t proofread your event. Software is tested in production, so why shouldn’t everyone on the company-wide distribution list have to accept or decline multiple iterations of your outage as you correct the date, the time, the location, and the description six times.
Sibylle and I had a fantastic trip to the East Coast to see Ted, and a Genesis concert, and then to Germany to see her mom, and Stuttgart.
Flying Our flights were by and large good. We had a longish layover in Charlotte on our way to Hartford, but we were able to pass the time by browsing in some of the shops and by splitting a sandwich from Quiznos. Our overseas flight was only about two-thirds full, and we had a three-seat row to ourselves, which was very nice. Neither of us slept much or very well on the flight but we enjoyed sharing it with each other.
Amsterdam was chaotic and seemingly disorganized both going there and coming home. We will avoid plane changes there in the future.
Our return home yesterday covered over 5000 miles, took 26 hours, and visited 5 airports. We were very grateful to reach our own door at the end of the day. Getting back into the US at Bradley International airport was a lengthy, trying process. There were only two customs agents for the nearly 300 passengers. We stood in line for an hour before getting our turn. After collecting our luggage we discovered, much to our amazement and dismay, that the international arrivals terminal is not connected to the main domestic terminal. When we left the country 12 days earlier we didn’t have to leave the main terminal so we were unprepared to be nearly a mile away from the terminal we needed for our domestic flight home. Fortunately we were able to talk a long-term bus in to shuttling us to the main terminal.
Genesis Our visit with Ted and his family was wonderful. The Genesis concert on Sunday evening was spectacular in every sense of the word. I’ve been fortunate enough to see Genesis in concert 5 times and this show was by far and away the best. The band played for nearly three hours, and included a number of very old songs that I had never heard in concert before. Outstanding.
Germany Sibylle grew up just outside of Stuttgart Germany, and lived in Stuttgart for a time before moving to the US. We toured the entire Stuttgart area, taking in medieval ruins, the Wilhelma Zoo and Botanical Gardens, forests, trains, cafes, and people.
Stuttgart is a beautiful city, now that I’ve been there I can see why Sibylle loves it so much. We made extensive use of the train system to get around, and enjoyed a number of days exploring different parts of the city or surrounding area. I am already looking forward to returning there to revisit some parts, and to explore more of Germany, and Europe.
Great The best part of the trip was sharing it with Sibylle. We had a wonderful time together. Being able to see the places she went to school or worked while living in Germany was fantastic. Exploring together and sharing the sights and sounds was marvelous.