With the start of my new job last winter I treated myself to a mobile broadband card from Sprint. This PCMCIA card allows me to connect to the Internet while at work (or anywhere else that doesn’t have free Wi-Fi). So far I have only used it in the ThinkPad as I wasn’t able to get it to connect using the Powerbook.
As of right now, that is no longer the case. The steps below allowed me to connect to the Internet using the Pantech 500 card.
Here’s what I did:
You should now be connected. Your mileage may vary. Void where prohibited. Do not take internally. Do not operate light machinery while connected. Not responsible for fire, pestilence, exploding batteries or other damage to you, your household, or computer if you follow these steps.
This morning when I got on the scale my weight was 195.2. I’ve now lost fifty-five pounds. 55. Fünfundfünfzig.
That’s eleven 5-pound sacks of potatoes. It’s five 10-pound sacks with a 5-pounder thrown in for good measure. It’s a seven year-old child.
What is truly amazing about that number is that I carried it around with me all the time. Going to the store and holding eleven 5-pound sacks of potatoes is impressive in itself. Carrying those eleven sacks around all the time, even in a harness to distribute the weight, is tiring even to think about. Since I’ve started losing weight I’ve noticed less knee pain, I have less trouble sleeping, I’ve stopped snoring, and I generally feel better.
Fifty-five pounds. Wow.
Upon setting up the office in our new home this afternoon I tried to send an email only to get a “No Socket” error. I fiddled around with the firewalls (Windows and Zone Alarms) to no avail, and rebooted a couple of times in a faint hope that magic would happen and my mail would be outbound again.
After a chat with Ernesto, a Microsoft consultant buddy of mine, I tried to telnet the Google SMTP port I was using for my mail, only to see a message stating, “Could not open connection on host….” Access to port 25, the standard SMTP is blocked through our DSL connection. (Thanks AT&T!)
A Google search on “AT&T DSL port 25 blocked” revealed several links from institutions explaining how to submit a form to AT&T to get the port block lifted on our account. Then one commenter suggested that we all just try the SSL (secure socket layer) port of 465. I quickly changed my account settings in the Live Mail beta I’m using and, viola!, my mail is outbound once again.
Best of all, its now fully secure on the outbound leg of its journey from my computer to the Google relay.
Some of life’s lessons are more expensive than others. Take the poor guy who backed into my car on Saturday. One minute he and the kids are piling into the van and the next minute he’s out $1968 for repairs to my car. Not including a 4 or 5-day rental while mine is in the shop.
The damage itself appears insignificant, until you start to closely examine the car. Metal is bent, and the underlying brackets and supports are damaged. Worst of all the paint is damaged and has to be redone. The body shop can feather the new paint into the old, but they can’t feather the clear coat. Where ever they stop it will leave a line; so the entire piece has to be cleared. In the case of my car the piece extends up the C-pillar and across both doors and down the A-pillar. A lot of gaskets to be taken off and replaced, and a lot of masking to perform. Two-thirds of the cost is labor, mostly centered around the repainting and refinishing work.
$1968 because he didn’t look.
Over the past week or so I’ve been trying to sell off some spare furniture on craigslist. During the posting process, and with each inquiry you receive you are repeatedly warned about scams and to be wary of certified checks, money orders, escrow, and shipping. At first you think this is all hyperbole, and then you get emails like this one:
Beyond the rather tortured English the most interesting thing is that I got the same email, identical to the letter, for EACH of my craigslist postings. What is scary is that some people, particularly the elderly or Internet uninitiated might fall for the “I’m going to send you a certified check for MORE than you are asking, please cash it and send the remainder back to me” scam. The check is bogus and the seller who cashes it goes to jail. A vicious scam.
It is tempting to reply with a note saying that I work for the Treasury Department Online Wire Fraud Division, and that we are processing the back trace to gain an origin for the senders IP address and that, working with Google, we hope to have their IPS, home IP address and MAC address shortly. That if you want to have a nice rest of your life you should pack your bags now and leave before the armed rendering team blows the door off its hinges.
Tempting. Very tempting.
Yesterday, with the help of an old college friend, Ted, his son Adam, and a former student of Sibylle’s, John, we moved the bulk of our stuff from the apartment to the townhouse. It was a long, hot day, but one that was ultimately successful. Along the way my car was backed into by a careless driver, there were tears, laughter, simple food that was made better for sharing it and the experience around it, and a sense of accomplishment.
Moving Pianos The triumph of the say was the successful moving of two pianos. We used the first trip with the truck as a dry run, to see if I could back close enough to the front door to drop the truck’s pull-out ramp onto the threshold of the townhouse. If I could then we could wheel the pianos on the furniture dolly from the truck to the living room. I was able to ease the truck back and over the curb with out disturbing the contents in the dry run so we all agreed that we would attempt the pianos on the second trip.
With Ted and John doing the majority of the lifting, and Sibylle and I guiding from the sides we were able to position the pianos onto the dolly and then maneuver the dolly up the ramp and into the truck. Once both were in place and strapped down we wedged a couple large, heavy-duty cardboard boxes in on the sides to prevent side-to-side shifting during the 7 mile journey to the townhouse. Because the truck listed its clearance as 11 feet, I avoided the lone railway underpass, which lists its height at 11 feet 4 inches. I didn’t want to take a chance that either measurement was optimistic.
With only a little maneuvering I was able to line the truck up on the doorway and drop the ramp perfectly on the threshold. We were successful in moving both pianos to their new home. The rest of the move seemed, to me, to be almost anticlimactic in comparison, except to say the Tad and John were invaluable help all day and well into the night.
Look Before You Back Midway through the unloading of the first load of furniture and boxes, I happened to be coming back outside in time to see someone visiting the neighbor back his mini-van into the side of my Lexus. Fortunately he only “lightly” bumped the car, but there is still some damage to the passenger-side rear quarter panel and the bumper wrap around on that side. The bumper is plastic and seems to have retained its original shape, although it is scuffed now. There maybe some of the outer layer of paint missing as well. The body panel is also slightly marred but again appears to by finish damage only.
Since the bumper is molded plastic the same color as the car I expect it’ll be several hundred dollars, perhaps a thousand, to replace it. The driver of the van was apologetic and readily allowed me to copy the information on his license and insurance card. He’d like to handle it without involving his insurance, which is fine with me as long as I am reimbursed for my bumper. I’ll have to take time out this week and visit the body shop for an estimate.
Tears and Laughter Early on in the loading process, with people going in and out of the door, one of the cats, Taz, disappeared. I couldn’t find her anywhere I looked. My heart stopped and I had this incredible sense of loss that nearly overwhelmed me. After several minutes of increasingly frantic searching she was located, safe and sound, inside the apartment. The sense of relief was incredible and left me in tears for a few minutes. I think the tears helped me to shed some of the anxiety and stress Sibylle and I have felt for the past several weeks as we prepared for the move. After I was done crying I felt better and more able to face the day.
When we dropped the ramp perfectly on the doorstep of the townhouse and knew we were going to get the pianos inside safely, there were smiles and laughter from all of us.
Friends Sibylle and I have been fortunate this summer in that we had the help of her friends and students when we her from Manhattan to the apartment here. And yesterday we were again fortunate to have help from one of my oldest friends, his son, and one of her former students. We absolutely could not have accomplished this move without their help. That they were cheerful, helpful, and willing the entire day was icing on an already delicious cake. That it was over 100 degrees the entire time we moved, and still past 90 degrees at 11:00 pm when we were finished for the day, puts their contribution to our lives in perspective. They are true friends, and we are indebted to them.
On Tuesday I received a status update email on my passport indicating that the overnight return delivery should arrive Wednesday. Late in the afternoon Wednesday I got a phone call from the local post office regarding the delivery. Because we are in the midst of moving, and not knowing how long delivery would take I erred on the side of caution and put the new address down for the passport delivery, even ticked the “care of” box on the form and filled in Sibylle’s name. The local mail carrier wasn’t buying it, resulting in the phone call. The postal agent who called said that the carrier wasn’t aware that I was living there, and further that there was no one home to sign for the delivery.
I explained that I had hedged my bet regarding the delivery and put the new address down in case we were fully moved from the current one before the expedited processing completed. I also asked that they hold the delivery there at the post office so I could swing by after work the following day to pick it up.
Yesterday, Thursday then, we went to the post office and I got my passport. It is now safely ensconced in the sock drawer with her passport.
Cost of certified birth certificate: $32 Cost of expedited passport: $189.50 Being able to go to Europe with Sibylle: Priceless.
In July 2004 when the move from Illinois to Kansas was completed a considerable amount of stuff was in storage. Anticipating that a 2000 square foot house, with lots of storage and a generously large garage, wasn’t going to fit into a 1000 square foot apartment with very little storage room, I had a storage locker rented, and a U-Haul truck reserved the day the movers arrived with their semi. The plan was to have them off load some items directly onto the U-Haul so it could be taken immediately to the storage facility and locked away. This plan worked flawlessly until yesterday.
Sibylle and I are moving in to a townhouse where a queen-sized bed will fit far more comfortably than a king-sized. So we planned on pulling my queen-sized bed (mattress, box springs, frame, and headboard) out of storage and storing the king-sized one. After several weeks of delaying this task we finally had a pickup truck, and strong back in the form of a co-worker, yesterday to make this possible. The townhouse has a split staircase, you go up 5 steps to a landing turn 90 degrees to the left and continue up to the second floor. The ceiling over the stairs isn’t any too high, in fact it wasn’t quite high enough to fit the box springs through. It took considerable effort by all three of us, several tries, and strap cinched around the springs to compress them a bit, to squeeze through the narrow opening. Actually, in places the opening isn’t quite as narrow as it was before.
When we took the box off the springs early on in this ordeal I remarked that I didn’t remember the springs as having a turquoise blue color. I remembered it as being white. Much later, after fitting a 60-inch wide box springs through a 57-inch wide hole, I noticed that the mattress was also blue, had a large stain on it, and came from Sears, not Sealy. The dawning realization was that by not looking in the boxes 37 months ago before it went into storage, I had accepted the wrong mattress and box springs from the movers.
This would be comical if we hadn’t worked for thirty minutes to force the springs one inch at a time up the stairs and around the landing to the second floor. It’ll take a chainsaw to get it out of the house.
First thing this morning I called the Allied mover in Springfield that had been employed three years ago to see what, if anything, could be done. The mover was sympathetic and passed me on to the claims department. I’ve left a message with them and am very curious what they’ll say when the call back.
Of course this means that somewhere, someone else moved and when they took the boxes off the mattress and springs that were delivered by Allied their 20-year old, sway backed and stained, Sears model had magically transformed itself into a barely used 9-year old Sealy Posturepedic. And obviously they didn’t file a claim as their sleep solution had gotten considerable better in the bargain.
Since the beginning of August my weight has consistently been under 200 pounds. Moreover, for the past six days now it has been under 198; with a new low of 197.2 this morning.
Recently I started actively tracking my eating habits again, to see how much I was consuming in a day, and to show myself more concretely the snacking that has slowly been creeping back into my diet. My new employment situation provides free fountain drinks and I have been partaking. Also, I’ve been snacking more this spring and summer than I was last fall and winter. Writing down everything I was eating in a day showed me that I was eating on average about 2000 calories per day. Since my weight has been no more than 2 or 3 pounds above or below 200 since the beginning of the year, I think I can safely say that 2000 calories nicely maintains my weight.
When I started this project over a year ago my goal was to reach 200 pounds, as I couldn’t imagine losing more than 50 pounds of weight. I’d like to lose another 20 pounds, maybe 25, but I don’t have the same drive I did a year ago when I was very unhappy with my size, shape, and weight.
At the beginning of August Sibylle and I discussed in detail my financial situation and how it impacts us and our future. Disclosing the state of my debt and my on again/off again efforts to eliminate it wasn’t easy, but it was ultimately very good. We have a plan for addressing our debt and savings and future in place, one that is being very ably managed by Sibylle. The hidden benefit, or at least hidden until she pointed it out to me yesterday, is that since we discussed this I have been dropping weight again. From a high of 199 a week ago on the first to a low this morning of 197.2.
It seems that I set down more “weight” with our financial restructuring that I realized. I have to say that losing a few more pounds feels great but that coming clean and sharing the financial “weight” feels even better.
For much of the summer an underlying theme for us has been, “Find Mark’s Passport.” All of the drawers, closets, and hiding places in the apartment were searched and searched again. Numerous trips to the storage lockers were made, and dozens of boxes searched and searched again. A side trip to the emergency room was undertaken after I closed the car door on my finger. Finally after admitting that it was truly lost (perhaps stolen last October when I was robbed) I tossed in the towel and applied for a new passport.
There have been horror stories of people need a passport to travel and not getting one on time due to the backlog at the State Department resulting from changes in US policy regarding re-entry to the country after travel abroad. A ten to twelve week back log exists according to their site, so I paid extra, nearly double, to expedite the processing and return of my application.
This morning in my inbox a message from the State Department appeared, with this key sentence in the middle:
This means you should receive your passport on or about 08/08/2007.
Yay!