Yes, it was 250 miles away. Yes I felt it. I was in a meeting when we saw the blinds start to rattle a bit and saw the hanging lights sway a bit. Things just felt a bit swervy for a few seconds. Our group ran outside so the news engineering team would survive the quake to bring you the news. We were pretty lonely out there and felt pretty ridiculous.
So yes, I'm alive. It was far away and everything is fine. I haven't even noticed anything that fell over. Thanks for caring.
Garmin recently announced two new GPS receivers, the GPSMap 60C and 60CS.
Improvements over previous units include color, a USB interface (instead of serial), a special "Geocaching mode" and 56MB of memory. They'll be about $400+ though.
I'm skeptical that the Geocaching mode would be able to match a my eTrex Vista + CacheMate, but it looks interesting. Color is nice though and USB sure would help make downloads of maps faster. I would rather have bluetooth instead so I don't have to bother with all these cables and a media card slot would also be handy for keeping lots of data on there.
Damn, my 2004 Christmas list is quickly taking shape!
It's strange how you find things sometimes. Via this geocache, via my mapping tool, via ACME Mapper, via GeoURL, I found Bill Reardon's weblog (who also happens to work at Yahoo!), which brought me to his home page where I found this amusing story about eating 50 Chicken McNuggets in one sitting. I've been hearing ads for the new "white meat" McNuggets. I wonder if they would have the same effect.
I started a tradition of ridding myself of Fast Food several years ago, mostly for my own health. One year for New Year's, I decided to give up eating at McDonalds. The next year it was Burger King. Then Jack in the Box, then Carl's Jr., then In-n-Out. Living 200 feed from a KFC made it easy to give that up the next year. Then Taco Bell. The only one left now is Wendy's, but I need something to eat when I'm on the road for one reason or the other. At this point I'm out of restaurants to give up. That A&W down the road is pretty nasty. Maybe I'll give that up. Beef Bowl is really bad for me I'm sure, but I don't live very close to one these days, so that would be a freebie.
So with the exception of Mardi Gras where I make an exception for myself and eat at McDonald's (if I remember to), I've been mostly fast-food free for about 7 years now.
Lately I've been having some nasty cravings for KFC. Today while grocery shopping, I was plotting buying some of that fried chicken they sell at the deli counter. Mmmm. They'll be much gluttony over the next week's holidays, that's for sure.
It's frigtening to think that Christmas is almost here. December is definitely the shortest month. I think eating chocolates out of our Advent calendar makes it even worse because every day you're reminded of how few days there are left. I think I'd like to just fast forward to January 2004 now and get back to normal life.
It's annoying that the one place in the house where I need a good Wifi signal (the living room couch) is the weakest spot in the house. It's not like we live in a big house, either. It's about 30 feet for the signal to travel, though it's through two walls. I don't know why, but today the signal is really bad and just keeps cutting in and out. It's so bad, I'm writing this in notepad, with hopes that I'll have a signal long enough to post this eventually.
My first attempt at fixing this was upgrading from the Internet Connection Sharing from the Airport Card I have in my G4 to a real router. Surely having a real router with a real antenna would make for a better signal. I got a SMC Barricade 7004VWBR which is nice because it has all the firewall stuff in there and a switch, so I can connect my various machines to it. Unfortunately, it didn't help the signal. I tried fiddling with the antennae, no luck there either.
My second attempt was to buy a new PC card for my laptop. The one I had was an old Compaq one and was barely supported. So I bought a Netgear 802.11g card (hey, why not). That seemed to work better at first, but overall I don't think it's made much of a difference.
The weird thing is that some days it works fine, and other days it's horrible. Our 2.4Ghz cordless phone definitely interferes with it, but only when you're talking on it.
I've thought about trying to move my base station closer to the living room, but the wiring would be a nightmare. I guess my next step is to get an 802.11g router, so I can try to drown out whichever neighbor of mine who has a network called "river_rock". Hey neighbor, my network is open, how about opening up yours so when you kill my signal, I'll at least be able to surf!
This wifi stuff sure is cool when it works, but it's just got to get a lot better.
Once again, Joel Spolsky is right on in his latest essay.
Joel on Software - Biculturalism
I've encountered too many Unix programmers who sneer at Windows programming, thinking that Windows is heathen and stupid. Raymond all too frequently falls into the trap of disparaging the values of other cultures without considering where they came from. It's rather rare to find such bigotry among Windows programmers, who are, on the whole, solution-oriented and non-ideological.
"I'm Saddam Hussein. I'm the president of Iraq and I'm willing to negotiate."
- Saddam Hussein just before capture
"President Bush sends his regards."
- U.S. Troops.
Methinks he's about 8 months too late.
Wow, I never thought I'd see this happen. Doesn't look like this guy was doing a lot of commanding of rebels from his hole though.
I was looking through my access logs today and noticed a lot of 'cute' referrals.
Apparently, my cat is considered to be one of the top 20 cutest images in the world. (Last row, bottom right.)
If this picture had sound, I bet it wouldn't seem so cute. Meow, meow, meow, meeeow, meow, meow, meow... shut up already!
I'm also the #6 result on "people swimming". Maybe Jeremy is right - PageRank is broken.
I want a Griffin Technologies RadioSHARK. It's TiVo for radio and it just plugs right into your Mac. I'll never miss car talk again.
Nevermind, I don't think I'll be able to wait that long.
"We don't need to panic or assume that the worst case scenario is going to happen to everyone. Most of us will get through this fine."
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Julie Gerberding on the widespread flu outbreak.
Most??
Movable Type allows you to enter a description or tagline for your blog. Currently I have "Because personal home pages are so 1997." That's true of course as blogging is replacing all the home page builders of that era. Blogs are easier to set up, don't require knowing HTML and they're quicker to update. There must be millions of home pages out there that were created once and never updated.
Anyway, I've been thinking about some other appropriate taglines.
I just got back from what was probably the easiest dentist appointment of my life. I've been scared into taking much better care of my teeth in the last 6 months.
In the spring, one area of my mouth was feeling achy, but I couldn't pin it down. I finally went to the dentist and he found a monster cavity between my teeth which led to multiple visits and replacing a whole bunch of fillings. It was pretty painful for a while. The replacements were cool ceramic tooth-colored ones rather than the ugly silver ones though and you can't even tell they're there.
Anyway since then I've been afraid to repeat that experience, so I've been more conscious about taking care of my teeth. I love my electric toothbrush and it does a great job, but it's almost too mindless. I used to read while I brushed my teeth, but I found that I would forget to move it around to different areas of my mouth, so no I try to concentrate on brushing for 4 minutes a day. One problem it creates is that it can rub your gums too much and there are a couple spots where my gums have receeded a little because I let it brush too much there.
My biggest problem was flossing. I hated doing it. I tried buying an electric flosser, but it didn't really work. It can't actually get all the way between your teeth. I bought a Glide floss holder and that did work. It gives you a lot more leverage than trying to use your fingers and it's got an easy dispenser. Now the only problem was getting myself to use it regularly. I found the problem was that when I'm about to go to bed, I'm too tired to floss, nevermind brush and rinse. So I had the idea to leave the flosser in the living room. Anne really hates listening to me floss while we're watching TV, but I think she'd hate it more if my teeth were all rotting away. I now floss pretty regularly and easily. Ta da!
The hygenist and dentist were impressed. Not much picking at all, except for a few spots that I tend to forget. I was also happy that my dentist didn't seem to know about my previous rant about dentistry and his Porsche.
Afterwards I treated myself to a Jamba Juice. I used to run to the nearest conveience store and buy a ton of candy immediately after I went to the dentist, but I think I'm over that now.
Overall, I'm pretty impressed with myself. My teeth may actually outlive me.
Uh hi, what are you doing here?
Mom, Dad, geez, most of my friends are here.
Shouldn't you all be at work 3000 miles away?
Anne, why are all these people here? It's not my birthday.
My email? Yeah, I just checked it a few minutes ago. I didn't see anything about this.
What do you mean how often do I check it? I don't know, a few times a day?
Well I do have my email program running all day, so I guess it's checking for me every few minutes.
OK, yeah so I check it sometimes anyway when I'm waiting for something else, but it's cool.
No, I don't think I check it too much. I'm totally in control of it. I don't have to check it, I just like to. I can stop anytime I want.
Well yeah, I have been doing this for a few years, but so is everyone else, right? It's just email, you know. It's not like I'm obsessively refreshing web pages.
Well thanks, I care about you all too.
What do you mean I have to stop? I don't think it affects my life at all. I need it to work. I'm not hurting anyone.
I'm gonna go check ..., uh, it's been great to see you all, but I'm really busy with the holidays and all and I'm sure you all need to catch your flights.
Anne, would you ask them to leave?
Look, I already told you, it's not a problem! This is ridiculous! Get out of my way, I'm leaving!
(Two days later)
Hi, my name is Jeff, and I'm addicted to email.
It started just as a fun way to relax, you know, to be "cool".
I think my personality lends itself to this kind of thing. When I was a kid, I would check the postal mail for fun. Of course I didn't get much mail as a kid. Now I don't even bother with postal mail. It just doesn't do anything for me anymore.
At first it was just some local BBSes you know, a few messages here and there. And then I started doing BITNET and exploring a whole new world. Soon, I was experimenting with several accounts, but I kept it pretty simple -- all terminal-based stuff like 'mail' and 'pine' or whatever.
Then I went to college and met some people who were into some different stuff: POP, IMAP, Eudora and procmail. That was some great stuff. I got into a lot of mailing lists around then and I really liked it.
I guess what does it for me is the rush of "send and recieve" - the anticipation of all the possibilities of what I could be about to read. What's news and what's spam. Has my order shipped? Who found my cache? Are hard drives on sale?
Email leads to web pages and then to more email. It just feeds on itself.
Soon I got into making my own email filters and I found I needed more and more email.
I got into custom email after that, getting my own vanity domains like boulter.com.
I spent days analyzing spam and writing filters to handle it. I got into some new stuff like hotmail, yahoo mail, web mail, AOL, and checking it on my phone.
Often I'm checking it while doing other things. I have the laptop and the wireless connection in the living room, and often I'd take a hit while watching TV. Half the time I can't remember what the show was about.
Yeah, I have checked it while driving.
Currently, I'm on Mozilla Thunderbird and Apple Mail. On the backend I've got fetchmail doing POP and Mail::Audit. They're all pretty powerful.
A couple of days ago, all my friends and relatives just showed up at my house to talk about my 'problem' and now I'm here.
Well I think that's my story. I'm looking forward getting 'disconnected' once and for all, so I can get back to living a normal life. You know, going outside and other places out of wireless range. I just feel so guilty.
I've had Top Gun SSH for my Treo installed for a while now, but it always looked bad because I needed to install the right term entries, whatever that was. I finally figured that out today.
The easiest way is to just get the latest mater list and update all of them into my local account. I think if I were to run this as root, it would update the entries /usr/share, but I'm not feeling that brave.
In the end, it came down to this:
wget http://catb.org/~esr/terminfo/termtypes.ti.gz
gunzip termtypes.ti.gz
tic termtypes.ti
rm termtypes.ti
That's it. Then I run 'screen' once I log in and I can be mobile AND dangerous.
Throat feeling scratchy ... feeling a little hot ... slight headache ... I might be getting sick.
Oh well, it could be an excuse to stay home, get a Jamba Juice and catch up on TiVo. Last year I was sick at Thanksgiving, which totally sucked. Flying while sick sucks. Trying to eat turkey while sick sucked.
I figure I'm gonna get good and sick at least once a year, so bring it on and let's get over with it. Now where's my Advil Cold and Sinus?
"You know when you have a really ugly baby and you just want to throw it off a cliff?"
- Nameless person who will never babysit my theoretical children
Well, I'm physically home I think, but mentally, I think I'm somewhere over the Rockies. I've got that surreal feeling that I always get when I spend the day flying. What time is it? Should I eat or just go to bed?
We had a good Thanksgiving x 2 again this year and got to spend a lot of time relaxing in NH. Our flight was overbooked, so we volunteered to take a later flight and got $400 on Delta as compensation. Woo hoo! The flights were a little delayed, but we made it. We were greeted with a lot of rain in San Francisco.
Amusing thing I saw on the jetway boarding one of our flights: There were some ear protectors for the guys that work on the ground. One side was labelled "What?" and the other said "Huh?"