In order to renew her passport, Sibylle needed to travel to Chicago, where the nearest German Consulate is located. We debated several options for getting her to the city and back again. Flying by herself, the pari of us driving, or the pair of us flying.
At the start of the weekend we were prepared to drive to Chicago on Sunday, visit the consulate first thing Monday morning, and then drive home. At 550 miles each way, we were looking at 16 hours in the car in two days. Needless to say our enthusiasm for that much driving was rather low.
Sunday morning we finally decided to fly, together, rather than drive or her fly solo. Southwest has direct flights several times each day, and we could get their “Anytime” fare, which would give us some flexibility on our return flight. After scheduling the flight we ventured out to the mall to see if the Eddie Bauer store there had the backpacks we wanted.
We have been talking about getting one or two good travel backpacks, which hip belts, to use in Europe this year. Last weekend we saw some at the Eddie Bauer store downtown that we really liked. Moreover they were on sale through the 4th, and we wanted to take advantage of the $20 on each backpack. Being out in the mall, and doing some window shopping was light and carefree, in large part due to our decision to fly rather than drive. It’s not that we were in a bad mood prior to making the fly decision, but making it certainly made us feel more in control.
This morning we got up at 3:30 am, in order to be at the airport shortly after 5:00. Our flight, which was surprisingly full, left promptly at 6:05 am. By 7:25 we were on the ground in Chicago, and shortly before 9:00 we had arrived in downtown, having taken the CTA “Orange Line” from Midway to the Loop. It took us perhaps 30 minutes to walk to the consulate, and we were third in line once we arrived there.
The consulate passport clerk was efficient, if a bit humorless. Sibylle’s expedited passport renewal was completed and we were back on the street shortly before 10:00. With our new backpacks on, we walked out to Navy Pier and then took a trolley back to Wabash for lunch at Pizzaria Uno. After lunch we walked up Michigan to the Water Towel shopping arcade, and then made our way back to the Loop and our train to Midway.
Our flight home should have us back in Kansas city by 6:30; we’ll be home by 7:30 at the latest. All in all, not a bad day. As a bonus to getting her passport renewal in the mail, we also got to test the new backpacks, and to try out some walking shoes. The backpacks are superb; having a good hip belt makes all the difference in the work when carrying any kind of weight. The shoes I wore, while okay for work, were not good for extended walking. Even with a good leather arch support added, my fallen arch was painful most of the day. I’ll definitely be taking my boots to Europe; they were excellent for walking last year. Sibylle tried out a new pair of sandals today, and wasn’t too happy with how the right one pinched her foot. She may take them to Europe, but will definitely have an alternate pair of shoes to wear.
Earlier this week, Sibylle and I took a box full of used books to the Half Price bookstore we frequent. Between the two of us we have lots and lots of books, some that we no longer want. Recycling them through the bookstore allows us to clean away some of the clutter, and gives the books a second chance.
The appraiser was thorough enough to discover an old money order tucked away in one of the books. A $50 money order from July 2003. Examining the check revealed no time limit on cashing it, which makes sense in a way. After all, the sender put $50 down on the counter, plus a small fee to buy it.
The fine print on the back of the money order said there would be a 35 cent charged, per month from the original purchase date, if the check wasn’t cashed in the first year. Since it has been 60 months, that fee now amounts to $21.
On my way home from work yesterday I stopped at my credit union. The teller there had to speak with her supervisor about the check, before telling me that they couldn’t cash it. It seems that the issuing back isn’t part of the Federal Reserve system, and therefore my credit union isn’t guaranteed payment. That, and the question of the 35 cent fee, eliminated the credit union. The teller did suggest that Walmart was the source of many money orders, so I went to Walmart next.
The “Money Place” at our local Walmart also wanted nothing to do with the check. Primarily due to fact that it isn’t a Walmart issued money order. And that it is five years old. Their suggestion was a check cashing location. You know, one of those places with the gaudy flashing sign about “CASH CASH CASH!” I’m sure they’ll want a fee on top of the 35 cent per month fee.
I am reluctant to go to one of those check cashing locations; they seem like the corner loan shark somehow. But I am also determined to get at least some of the $50 back. That some third-rate (not even Federally insured) financial institution may get to keep $50 from a woman living who was living on less than $800 a month, just bothers me.
My note taking involves three kinds of paper. Plain, or blank paper, lined paper like we all used in school, and graph paper.
At home and at work I tend to reuse paper for random notes or temporary lists. Anything the I print out single-sided gets torn into quarters and used a scrap paper. When I stumble onto a website or snippet of information that I want to record, I’ll reach for one of these quarter sheets and jot it down. Grocery lists are the other prime user of these paper scraps.
Recently at work, all the printers capable of two-sided printing have been defaulted to that mode, so the amount of scrap paper I’ve had access to has dropped. I now sometimes grab a half dozen pristine sheets of paper to use as scrap.
Having plain, unlined paper is nice. There is no imposed structure or order on the paper to begin with. Notes can, and are, written at angles to each other; and some pages end up with several generations of notes scattered about their edges.
Lined paper feels more formal; there is structure imposed before the first word is inked onto the page. I prefer narrow lines to wide, and white paper to colored. In the last year or so I have started using spiral bound stenographers pads for daily task lists or meeting notes. Knowing just enough German to date them in German, I flip to the next empty page every morning, date the page and use it through-out the day for notes that I may want to return to later.
Lined pages tend to have less doodling than their plain cousins, but geometric doodles to appear from time to time.
Graph paper is special, not only is there structure, the structure runs in two directions. Because the grid of faint blue lines lends itself so nicely to scale drawings and precision sketches, I tend to reserve any graph paper I have for those purposes. Note taking on graph paper rarely works out well for me, as I tend to explore the geometric doodling possibilities of the page to the extent that there is no room for notes.
Sibylle and I are preparing for our next overseas trip, which starts in just six weeks. Travel brochures, train schedules, dreaming of places to go, et cetera. Last year, after some deliberation, we opted to not take a laptop with us. Instead I took a 40 GB drive in a USB/Firewire enclosure, and the card readers for our cameras. We relied on an Internet café for getting email, and to transfer pictures from camera to had drive.
By and large this was successful, although not every machine in the café worked with USB, and, as we discovered after getting home, the machines were virus infested. Both of our camera memory cards had to be cleaned using anti-virus software once we were home.
The other inconvenience was not having a computer ready to hand when a blog posting idea struck, or when we had some down time that could be filled with picture moving. Therefore, this year we are planning on taking a laptop with us.
There are enough stories about laptop thefts in airports and tourist areas to make me nervous about taking my prize machine out in to the wild. I have a cable lock that would slow down an opportunistic thief, but there is still a real chance it could get taken. There have also been a few horror stories about border agents confiscating laptops, or sifting through their contents. We talked about investing four or five hundred dollars on a used laptop for the trip. Enough machine to do email, web browsing, and picture off-loading. The added advantage to a new (to us) machine is that it would have no, or very little, information about us on it. If it were stolen or confiscated, we’d lose nothing, especially if we had kept a copy of our pictures on the memory cards.
Tonight it occurred to me that I have the original hard drive this machine came with - it’s the 40 GB portable that went to Europe last year. Why not swap the 100 GB drive out, put the original drive back in place, and install a fresh copy of OS X? We’d could setup our email accounts, import browser favorites and bookmarks, and we’d have iPhoto for picture duty. Best of all, the accumulation of my digital life, would be home in relative safety.
The machine itself is valuable to me, but nowhere near as valuable as the pictures, files, documents, and other bits of digital flotsam and jetsam it contains. Not risking those irreplaceable parts of my life feels like a very smart thing to do, being able protect those digital parts of my life with something as simple as a hard drive swap feels very good.
Amateur Neurotica has a new posting about those incredibly annoying telemarketing phone calls that greet you with a computerized voice when you answer the phone. I couldn’t agree more with the sentiment expressed in her posting. I would add, however, that until you endure the computerized greeting, and the hold time, and tell the human at the other end of the wire not to call your number any more, your phone number will remain on their list for future calls.
(These steps assume you already have a version of Eclipse installed under /opt.)
Like this:
$ wget http://ftp.osuosl.org/pub/eclipse/technology/epp/downloads/release/ganymede/R/eclipse-jee-ganymede-linux-gtk.tar.gz
$ tar xzvf eclipse-jee-ganymede-linux-gtk.tar.gz
$ cd /opt
$ sudo mv eclipse eclipse-europa
$ sudo mv ~/eclipse . You should now be able to launch Eclipse Ganymede using the same shortcuts or scripts as before.
coconutBattery
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Being a “Class A Nerd,” that fact that my battery has only lost 2% of its original capacity in 69 months of continuous use pleases me to no end.
Increasingly the places where I work required frequent password changes. And the new password policies also tend to stipulate lengthy, complicated passwords. “Must contain upper and lower case letters, numbers, symbols, et cetera.” The kicker is not being allowed to repeat a password for so many iterations.
Developing a good 8 - 12 character password isn’t too hard, but having to come up with one every month (or two or five) and not being allowed to repeat them until six or seven expirations periods have passed, is painful. (In one case passwords couldn’t be repeated for 15 months.)
So I developed a pattern on the keyboard that allowed me to create a new password that met the most stringent of pattern requirements, with the bonus of being flexible. I could simply adjust the starting point and have a new password in seconds.
Problem solved.
Well, almost. You see I want an iPhone. I’ve been to the Apple store numerous times to play with the displays and I am hooked. There’s only one problem. The touch keyboard only displays letters or numbers and symbols. Moreover, the physical relationship of the keys isn’t quite the same as on a standard 102-key keyboard. My password pattern is broken by the input device.
Time to develop a new password pattern, or convince the various powers-that-be in my professional life, that once I’ve created a strong, 12-character password that utilizes capitalization, numbers and symbols, there is really no need to constantly change it.
With the release of Wordpress 2.6 this week I was preparing to update both my test sites and our public sites using the rsync method I wrote about in April. Quite by happenstance I read an article on Download Squad about the Wordpress Automatic Updater plugin, and decided to give that a try instead. In short it worked perfectly.
After downloading the plugin and installing it, I was able to upgrade each site from version 2.5.1 to 2.6 in a matter of minutes. I opted to use the manual progression through the upgrade process, which is nicely laid out. After verifying that my server would allow the plugin to work, backups were made of my Wordpress installation and content database. The database backup allowed for dumps of add-on tables, which was very thoughtful. After turning maintenance mode on, and disabling all the active plugins, except for itself, the plugin downloaded a copy of the latest release from Wordpress, unzipped it, and then installed it. Wordpress Automatic Updater even allowed for the possibility that the underlying database structure would change as a result of a new version, and provided a link to a new browser page that let me trigger a database update.
At the end of the process a log file was displayed with a complete record of all the activities completed, and the I was given a option to clean up the temporary files created by the process.
Except for some mildly stilted (English as a second language?) phrasing in some of the prompts and informational messages, I found nothing about the plugin not to like. An excellent addition to Wordpress, and one I highly recommend.
Ever since getting my first Palm Pilot many years ago, I have been a big fan of electronic books. First with Peanut Press, and now with eReader, I have collected nearly 400 electronic books. The diminutive screen size has never bothered me, and I have enjoyed the portability and availability of having one, or two, or twelve, books in my pocket.
I was quite pleased to discover that the folks at eReader have ported their reader application to the iPhone and iPod touch through the new Application Store. The embedded video below demos the features on a new iPhone.
I am looking forward to the day when I can have one of these wonders in my pocket.