On my second day in Maui, I got a serious case of Information Anxiety.
I wonder how much email I got? Is there anything important happening in
the news? What's YHOO at? Since we apparently have the only cable
system on the planet that doesn't have the weather channel, what's the
weather going to be like here for the next few days?
My plan to connect my Treo to my laptop using WirelessModem didn't
work. For some reason, the Treo couldn't talk to the laptop. I would
have tried it at home, but it was demoware and I didn't want to install
it and then have it expire halfway through the trip.
I popped in my wifi card and got a few blips, but nothing I could
connect to from inside the condo. So I opened the door and started
wandering around through the condos in the dark, scanning for networks.
I got a few, but I couldn't connect to them. Finally - gold! - a
network named 'default' meaning someone took their wireless router out
of the box, plugged it in, and did nothing to it. It was wide open,
gave me an IP address, and I was connected.
The only problem was that I was now standing in the middle of a road in
the dark. There wasn't really anywhere to sit down, so I just stood
there. The glow of my laptop must have made me really stand out. Cars
went by and I got buzzed by the community security guy on his golf cart
as I downloaded my email. Another guy on a bike laughed as he went by
and asked me if I was "pirating an internet connection."
I was standing in front of a trash dumpster with the laptop on top when
the security guy made his third pass and stopped to ask me what was up.
I told him what I was doing and he seemed satisfied and took off.
It felt good to get current again, even though I'm supposed to be on
vacation. I didn't check my work email or anything, so it's not like I
was working, just seeing what was going on in the world. I'll have to
see if I can scope out a less conspicous spot tomorrow to get my next
fix.
Yet another way to waste time with GPS. Drive hundreds of miles just to create some really big line drawings using your track log.
As if blogging about blogging isn't ridiculous enough, I've recently discovered something very distubing about the words I put here - people are reading them.
It's not just a few friends and family either. People at work read it. Some are people I don't know. Others are people I know somewhat. More are people that work in the same group as me and I might have lunch with. It gets really scary when my boss and people who work for me start reading this drivel. I really should demand that my reports not read it as they're wasting time that should be more usefully spent on our long list of projects to do.
The reason I know this is not because people have told me they read this or they've been posting comments. By default at Yahoo, your desktop computer is named the same as your email name. Worse, when you visit any web site on the internet, there are no protections to disable that name from appearing in the site's logs there. Exploiting this fact, I went through the website logs on Boulter.com and ran a report on who was reading my blog.
It's really bad when you interview a guy and he already knows you from your blog. "Yeah, you're the geocaching guy!" Oh boy, I hope not.
Again I realize the irony of saying this, but it's weird having people I know in one sphere of life being so aware of what's going on in other parts of my life.
Oh well. There's probably only one thing I'll ever agree with Scott McNealy, CEO of Sun, and it's this quote: "You have zero privacy anyway. Get over it."
We made a bunch more RSS feeds available from Yahoo! News today. All the popular indexes by category are now out there. Check 'em out here:
Enjoy.
The next time you find yourself in line at a Beef Bowl (aka Yoshinoya), please make sure you've read and understand this terminology first:
Combo: A rice meal with shredded beef, chicken and vegetables
Value Meal: Any number of options that include a main serving with a drink and side option (like strawberry shortcake or flan)
Idiot: The guy working behind the counter
Anne's out of town again, so I'm fending for myself and as you know, I can't cook. So after doing a quick cache, I tried to think of where I should grab some food on the way home. I got a hankerin' for some beef bowl, so I headed down to the one not too far away in Cupertino.
Maybe it's because I was the only white guy in there, but they had changed the menu and I couldn't make sense of it. After staring up at it for a while, I asked for "a large beef bowl; a combo", looking at the picture of a large beef bowl with a drink and side. He took my order and asked for $9.02. I thought that seemed a little high for taxes, but I went with it.
He took the next order while I waited and then he said my order was ready. I looked inside and saw two large boxes, no drink, no strawberry shortcake. I explained to him that it was not what I wanted, I wanted just the "large beef bowl combo". He asked for my receipt, my change back from my $20 and then gave me back another $4. $4? The meal was $6 without tax. I thought I'd be a good boy and told him that he had given me too much money back.
At this point he explained to me that I had ordered the combo which was the rice with beef, chicken and vegetables. Of course I didn't want the combo, I wanted the beef "meal" with the other stuff. #5 on the board. "Oh, you want a number #5" Maybe this is why asian restaurants number all their items. Even when they're in English, they're impossible to understand.
So now he asked for all the change he had given me and we started over. I paid my $6.99, he gave me the large beef bowl, an orange soda and my strawberry shortcake. He gave me my receipt and I checked it this time.
Maybe I should just stick to Wendy's.
Yes, Reagan is dead. He'll be that way for some time into the future. But it's been a month now and it's time to raise those flags all the way back up. Every time I drive by a flag at half mast, I freak out thinking someone died or some major tragedy I didn't know about just happened.
From: http://www.ushistory.org/betsy/flagetiq.html
"The flag shall be flown at half-staff 30 days from the death of the President or a former President; 10 days from the day of death of the Vice President, the Chief Justice or a retired Chief Justice of the United States, or the Speaker of the House of Representatives; from the day of death until interment of an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court, a Secretary of an executive or military department, a former Vice President, or the Governor of a State, territory, or possession; and on the day of death and the following day for a Member of Congress."
30 days sure is a long time. I don't remember those flags being down so long when Nixon died. Maybe people just didn't like him that much.
We've had the new cat for a month now and I thought I'd give an update.
- We've settled on the name Signal. It just seemed like the cutest name.
- He got pretty sick about a week after he came home. Apparently he caught a very common upper respitory infection at the shelter. He was sneezing constantly and had runny eyes. I brought him to the vet and got him on some antibiotics which had him all better within a few days. The vet's assistant refered to him as "snurfely."
- Until he got better, we kept him quarantined in the office. That was a real pain. We let him out occasionally while locking Pixel in another room and he loved it. Finally we let him out permanently and let the chaos ensue. Hissing, growling and all that (mostly by Pixel).
- It's amazing how they adapt in just a week. Pixel no longer seems to care that he's here and they even seem to 'play'. Play being laying on the ground and wrestling each other, followed by periods of chasing each other through the house. It sure seems to keep Pixel distracted.
- Signal has taken to sleeping with us. And not just at the end of the bed, but on the pillow right between Anne and me. You open your eyes and there's a cat 4 inches from your face. This is cute and all until about 5:30 when he wakes up and decided to play with, oh, nothing in particular on the bed.
- This cat has a slight odor problem. If he walks by you with his tail up, you'll get a nasty whiff of it. The vet seemed stumped, but suggested we could try changing his food.
- I'm progressively moving his littter box and food into the garage, getting ready for the big 'merge'. Pixel already has no problem using Signal's litterbox and drinking his water.
- Signal hasn't seemed to figure out the cat door yet, which is a prerequisite for moving all his stuff into the garage.
- He's been gaining a ton of weight. When we picked him up from the shelter, he weighed just under 3 pounds. A week and half later he was almost 4.
- His coat went from a thin, smelly mess to a nice, soft coat in a short time.
- His favorite toy seems to be Anne's nylons. We've been finding them all over the house. When it's dark, they look surprisingly like the cat had an accident.
- I had forgotten how kittens like to chew and lick your fingers.
- He really enjoys chewing on cables, which could eventually could be a problem.
- He's really a lap cat; he'll just sit on your lap for hours. Like right now for example.
Overall, the transition has been pretty smooth and the cats are providing lots of cheap in-house entertainment.