For our trip to Germany, Sibylle and I discussed at length whether or not to take a laptop computer with us. We were concerned about weight, space, and possible theft or damage. In the end we decided to go without a computer and trust to finding an Internet cafe for our needs.
We were very successful in finding and using an Internet cage in Winnenden. Almost every day we would stop in to catch up on email and upload pictures to our respective Flickr accounts. In order to be able to remove pictures from the cameras’ memory cards I brought a portable 40 GB USB drive in my bag, and the memory card readers for our two cameras.
Transferring pictures from the memory cards to the hard rive worked very well the first couple of times we tried it. Then one day I got a Windows Explorer window showing the file structure on the memory card rather than the usual Camera and Scanner wizard. I tried several times to get the wizard to start to no avail. Now, after returning home I know why.
Our cards had become infected with a virus. One of the machines in the cafe didn’t have a working firewall and was infected with a variety of viruses, it seems. Both of our cards, when plugged into our home machines, triggered an immediate virus quarantine. Both Norton (Sibylle’s computer) and Zone Alarm (my laptop) recognized three different viruses on our cards. Even after the cards were cleared of the viruses the picture copying wizard wouldn’t activate. Sibylle was able to recover her pictures using her camera rather than the card reader as the input device to the computer. I plugged my card reading into the Powerbook (Mac OS X) and was able to import all the pictures there. Windows viruses simply aren’t a problem for Macs.
Until today I had no idea that a camera memory card (and I suppose a PDA card or cell phone card) could be infected with a virus. It makes sense however, to the operating system it’s just another removable storage device.
Our cards have been cleaned and medicated. Next vacation we’re taking a laptop with us.
Sibylle and I are making good use of a small internet cafe in Winnenden Germany, near where her mother lives. We’ve been able to check our email, copy pictures from cameras to our portable hard drive, and generally feed our nerd needs.
Computers are universal, it seems, although there are some differences. The German keyoard has some extra keys, for ß, and ö, ä, and ü, It also moves some of the symbols around. Strg-Alt-Q is required for the at sign, for example. The hardest change is that the Y key and the Z key are reversed in position.
We created a Wordpress.com site to record our travels on. You can read our impressions and thoughts at sibylleandmark.wordpress.com.
On both of our flights today the seat tray tables had embedded ads. When you unfolded them for use the tray table top had a full-color ad that covered the entire surface. Maybe this is just a US Air innovation, maybe everyone is doing it now; I fly so infrequently that I am not up on the current trends. My first thought when I saw the ads was that planes are going to be the next stadiums. Just as we now have stadiums named for corporations or their products, we’ll soon have flights named for or sponsored by corporations.
“I’m taking the HP ScanJet flight to LA tomorrow.”
In about 90 minutes I’ll complete the last day of work before the start of our vacation. Sibylle and I are taking two weeks and traveling this year, all the way to Europe. And back. As with all vacations some measure of the fun is the anticipation leading up to the event. I’ve had a running countdown on my whiteboard at work for the past several weeks (Tage bis zum Urlaub: Eins), and I’ve got widgets on both laptops ticking away the time until our flight takes off tomorrow (20 hours and 40-odd minutes).
Mentally I think my vacation started yesterday. While I’ve been at work all day today, I’ve not been overly productive. I sent a few emails, updated a couple of documents and prepared my status reports for the next two weeks. Now that it is past lunch and the only thing remaining on my work calendar is a weekly team meeting, I’ve pretty my checked out.
On a related note, posting maybe sparse here at zanshin.net for the next couple of weeks. I have visions of putting up a Flickr picture or two while we are away, and maybe a posting here or there, but the truth is, I’ll be largely on vacation from this site too.
See you in October.
Several times in recent weeks the wireless broadband card I have from Sprint has been pressed into service while traveling in the car. The I-70 corridor from Kansas City west to at least K-177 (the Manhattan exit) has good data coverage. With Sibylle driving the car I’ve been able to connect, view emails, chat, even VPN into my workstation at work and accomplish tasks “at” work.
Last evening Sibylle got a chance to try this marvel out for herself, while I was driving. We both agreed that it is at the same time amazing and, almost, expected. Of course we can be online in a car traveling 70 mph on the highway, why would it work any other way?
When I was growing up my parents always had a subscription to National Geographic magazine. I was always fascinated with the maps, and looked forward to new ones.
While I was in high school I did a couple of back packing trips to the Tetons and during one I took a one-day climbing school course. The guide was introduced as (then) the third-best rock climber alive. He had completed a frightfully difficult climb at Tierro del Fuego - 4,000 feet up a sheer cliff that was separated from Antarctica by only ocean. The introduction indicated that the details of the climb could be found in a recent Geographic issue. When I returned home I dug through the issues in my parent’s basement and found the one in question. Fascinating. I knew a guy who was in National Geographic.
Sibylle had a collection of National Geographic magazines in her home when we met. She had allowed her subscription to lapse, however. Over the summer we were talking one day about random stuff and I said, “I really like the maps that came with…,” and Sibylle completed the thought by saying, “Me too.” Neither of us said aloud the words National Geographic. We both just knew where maps came from.
A couple of weeks later I got a gift card in the mail from the National Geographic society telling me that a subscription in my name had been given to me by Sibylle. Now I am someone who gets the Yellow Map Magazine.
The new neighborhood that Sibylle and I have moved into is bounded on the east by a pair of railroad tracks, and on the west side by the terminus of a relatively busy state highway.
The highway is slightly noticeable at certain times of the day; the dull hum of tires on pavement can be faintly heard in the background when all else is quiet. The railroad tracks are another story entirely.
The tracks are, apparently, one of the major lines into or out of Kansas City. The parade of trains in either direction is endless. During the daytime you hear the whistle during the approach to one of the nearby crossings, but otherwise you are unaware of the train. At night, the carrying power of the whistle really shines. The distance measuring tool on Google Maps shows that we are approximately 2430 feet from the nearest crossing, and yet the train whistle at times sounds like it is in the backyard. One memorable whistle neatly mimicked the duh-DUH theme used for the shark in Jaws.
We’ve been in the townhouse for about 5 weeks now, and I am slowly getting used to the nightly whistle parade as one train after another makes its way north or south past our neighborhood. Most nights I sleep undisturbed by the wailing two-tone note or by the deep rumble of the engine as it dopplers past our windows. The past two nights have been slightly different, however. The temperatures have been low enough to warrant open windows at night. I have new respect for the sound insulation properties of our windows as a result. The volume of the train in the middle of the night is significantly louder without the few millimeters of glass in the way. I am still able to sleep, but when I am going to sleep, or happen to be awake in the night, the whistle is amazing loud.
To be fair, the apartment we just moved out of had the world’s air circulation fan. When either the A/C or the heat was on, the start of the cycle was announced by a tremendously loud metallic crash - almost as if someone had kicked open a metal door. The fan itself was loud enough to drown out the television or stereo unless the volume was turned up. The first few weeks in that apartment, the start of the heating or cooling cycle woke me up every time. The trains only startle me occasionally.
I can’t imagine what it is like for the poor souls who live mere feet from the tracks.
Earlier today I saw Kottke’s posting about finding 68 cents in his pants, immediately after guessing aloud that there was 68 cents in his pants.
Just a few minutes ago I saw that Shawn Blanc over at shawnblanc.net added his two cents to the discussion, with his posting, Jason Kottke and his 68 cents. Shawn’s posting takes the thought in an entirely new and interesting direction. That of what to post. And what it is like to have people discover you have a blog.
Zanshin.net has always been a place for me to catalog all my 2 cent thoughts, and occasionally one that might be a tad more expensive. I guess I’m not bothered by the rare topic suggestion I get for my site. If nothing else if gives me some feedback about what other people are thinking and what interests them.
Shawn goes on to talk about the moment of awkwardness that comes up when the subject of his blog comes up in front of people who didn’t know he had a site. Many, many years ago I worked as a summer camp counselor, shepherding a cabin full of 8 and 9-year old boys around for a week at time. The first time you share a communal shower with several cabins worth of prepubescent boys, and one of them says, in a stage whisper, “He’s got HAIR!” you pretty much lose the ability to feel awkward at people discovering new facets of your personage.
Hello, World. I’ve got a website.
The Goal I want to be able to read all my email, including my GMail accounts, via the OS-based client on the laptop I am currently using. I have two primary computers, a Powerbook running Mac OS X (10.4.10) and a ThinkPad running Windows XP SP2. On the Mac I use Apple Mail, and on the ThinkPad I am currently using Windows Live Mail (beta).
The Accounts I have five email address I want to consolidate into one, easy to access solution. Three domain accounts, A, B, and C; and two GMail accounts, my primary email address G’ and a secondary GMail account, G’'.
The Setup Following the directions on GMail’s account tab, I configured GMail to read my domain accounts (A, B, and C) via POP3. Using the mail forwarding tab on GMail, I configured the secondary GMail account (G’’) to automatically forward all incoming email to the primary GMail account (G’).
Now, if I was satisfied to use the web interface, I could access all my mail in one place: GMail.
However I want to use the richer text editing features of an OS-based client for my mail. Furthermore, I want to use two different email clients on two different machines. Oh, and I want to download all the messages to either machine so they are in sync all the time. IMAP is the protocol to allow this type of access, unfortunately GMail doesn’t allow for IMAP access. You can configure your desktop client to read your GMail account via POP3, with an option to leave the read messages behind on the server. If you wanted to use a single computer for email, this would be the solution for you.
IMAP to the Rescue Using IMAP is the answer, but not obviously so. I created a new domain email account, call it “I” for IMAP. This account will be the only account my laptops access. Since it is IMAP, each machine will be able to synchronize its list of message regardless of how long it has been since that machine was used for email.
Using the email forwarding tab on GMail again, I created a rule to forward all incoming email from my primary Gmail account (G’) to my new domain account. Furthermore, I configured each OS-based email client (Apple Mail or Windows Live Mail) it to use the Google smtp server for sending mail. Within each client, I also checked the “save sent mail on server” option. By using the GMail smtp server all mail I send, from either laptop, appears to come from my primary Gmail account, and is saved in the primary GMail account sent folder on the server.
What This All Means Any mail sent to one of my five email addresses ends up in the primary GMail account inbox. Mail sent to my domain accounts is ready by GMail, and mail sent to my secondary GMail address is forwarded there.
Any mail in my primary Gmail inbox is forwarded to the IMAP account (“I”) on my domain.
Both of my laptops are configured to read the domain IMAP account, and to use GMail as the outbound smtp server. Any mail I send goes through GMail, gets saved on the Gmail server, and has my GMail address as the reply-to value.
I can now read my mail via the GMail web interface (handy when I’m not at one of my computers), through Apple Mail, or through Windows Live Mail. I see all my mail in either of those places, and all my mail is synchronized regardless of where and how I access it. As an added bonus my mail is filtered through the GMail spam filter before being filtered through my OS based email filters a second time.
For the first time since early this summer, perhaps even as early as May, we were able to sleep with the windows open last night. This was also the first time in years that I have slept with the windows open in my home in a cross-breeze. The apartment I lived in for the last three years had all of its openings on one side of the building, consequently getting any kind of breeze at all was rare. To be able to lie in bed and feel a gentle current of cool air moving through the room on its way from one set of windows to the next was delicious.
The break from the summer heat was good too. After several weeks of high 90 and low 100 temperatures getting up this morning to an outside temperature of 64 degrees was very nice. For its cooler temperatures and crisp mornings, I have always looked forward to autumn. Getting an early taste of it today makes starting the work-week just a little more palatable.