I started receiving an error when attempted to synchronize data to/from my Blackberry and Microsoft Outlook using the Blackberry Desktop Manager.

The error I received when I attempted the sync was Intellisync error 0x8004ffff.

The error appears to have been caused by a record in Outlook Notes being too long.  When I split the long note into two shorter notes, the error went away.

Monday

First thing went to get the ultrasound of my gall bladder.  That took most of the morning.  As best I can remember, that was the first ultrasound I've ever had.  The technician didn't offer any comments, so I am assuming there was nothing exceptional.  I'll find out in a couple of weeks when I have the follow up appointment with the gastroenterologist.

After returning home, Jeanie and I drove to Jacksonville Beach to pick up my mother from the hospital and take her back to her place.  My mother seemed to be doing remarkably well, and it appears that most of her recent "back pain" was in fact pain from her gall bladder.

Got home around 6:00 PM and headed off to bed pretty soon after that, as both of us were beat.

Tuesday

Jeanie took me to the hospital for my Upper GI (EGD).  We got there a bit early, but the wait wasn't too bad, and they took me back right on time.  The staff was friendly and efficient.  The actual procedure was a non-event for me.  Last thing I remember was them wheeling me into the procedure room and having me bite down on the plastic mouthpiece that serves to protect the patient's teeth and the endoscope.  Next thing I knew, I was in recovery being offered a tasty muffin and some juice.

I am not sure exactly when we got back home, but I had no after effects from the anesthesia or the procedure other than I was a bit tired and spacey for the rest of the day.  As such, I chose to take the day off.

Wednesday

Worked from home in the morning.

In the late afternoon, I went flying with one of the other flying club members.  He just wanted some company while he did some touch and goes and some air work, and I was happy to just sit in the right seat and enjoy the beautiful day.  It still amazes me how much more of the scenery I "see" when I am not the one actually flying.  I did do a little flying from the right seat which I found very interesting, as while it's not that different from the left seat, it's just different enough - in sight picture and in the fact that you "switch hands" (i.e. left hand on the throttle, right hand on the yoke) - that it was interesting.  When we got back, we decided to switch seats so I could do a few touch and goes myself, which I did.  I was pleased with my landings.  It was a very nice afternoon.

Thursday

Worked from home.

In the evening, I installed the new CSH Inc. FCA2-05 Failed Circuit Alarm I had purchased from Amazon.com. 

I finally broke down and purchased one after Jeanie discovered last weekend that the GFI outlet had once again tripped (most likely due to a power "burp" caused by high winds) and the refrigerator/freezer in the garage was without power.  Fortunately, it hadn't been without power for too long, and it was during the cold spell, so nothing spoiled, but still.

Overall, I am pleased with the alarm.  It is well made and well thought out.  Even the way the screws affix the cover to the rest of the box are well engineered.  Two of the screws affix the box to the wall, and then the other two screws affix the cover to the box.  The unit has an on/off switch and a test switch, and plug that goes into the wall outlet is of the piggy-back variety so you don't lose the use of one of the outlets.  The only complaint I have about the unit is that the alarm could be louder - it is just barely audible when standing in the kitchen.  It is not at all audible in the bedroom.  I think it would also help the alarm be more easily heard if it were a warbling type - like on a home smoke alarm - rather than a constant tone type.  The cost was $29.95 plus $7.49 for shipping.  Given the quality of the construction and design, and given that it probably only has a modest market so it doesn't enjoy huge economies of scale in manufacturing, I guess $30 is reasonable, but definitely not "a deal."  Because I really do think it is a good product, and the one "issue" I have with it is the alarm, I did something somewhat unusual (for me) and wrote an email to the company providing my feedback.  I was extremely impressed when I received a response to my email within two hours thanking me for my feedback and suggesting a possible adjustment that might increase the volume of the alarm and also offering to send me a new buzzer.  I haven't gotten around to trying their suggestion, but I am very impressed with their responsiveness.

Friday

Work from home.

Saturday

Went to the Doo Wop Diner on 14th street on-island.  Doo Wop's had formerly been in Yulee, but had closed a number of months ago.  Jeanie had a stack of blueberry pancakes and I had two eggs over easy, toast, hash browns and coffee.  The food was tasty and served hot, but I felt it was expensive at $14 for the two of us, and the service, even though they weren't that busy, was mediocre at best.  Decor was cute, and the music was enjoyable (50's standards, as you'd expect) but a little loud for my ears.

After breakfast, we went downtown and strolled the farmer's market, then walked down to the marina, then stopped by Publix on the way home.  Jeanie bought a couple of loaves of bread - one cranberry walnut and one peasant boule - and categorically demonstrated that any basic white bread (artisan or not) will start her coughing in no time.

We went home and started "Duplicity" with Julia Roberts and Clive Owen.  Jeanie fell asleep part way through, so I switched to watching the premiere of "Caprica" on Syfy.  There is a great article on Wikipedia on the show here.  I really enjoyed the show.  I find it to be less dark (literally and figuratively) than Battlestar Galactica and I think I am going to enjoy the moral and ethical questions it appears it will explore.  While in some scenes it still is easily apparent that computer graphics (CG) are being used, in some scenes - especially ones with Serge - I found myself forgetting that "he" wasn't "real."

Sunday

I went to coffee at the airport.  After about an hour, I had to go to the car to take a work teleconference.  After the call, I went back to the coffee for another half hour or so.

While I was gone, Jeanie did some laundry and made a homemade vegetable soup and a really yummy vegetarian (of course) chili.

The plastic had ripped away from the staples in a number of places on the lanai, so, taking a suggestion from my brother-in-law, I used strips of wood, in the form of some wide thick wooden tongue depressors, as sort of reverse furring strips.  I would have used real furring strips, but I didn't have any, and was too lazy to go get some whereas I had a bag of the tongue depressors.  So far, they seem to be working okay.

Jeanie and I were supposed to take all of the Christmas decorations back to the storage unit, but both of us were feeling really tired, so we gave ourselves the rest of the day off.

We watched the rest of "Duplicity" which we both thought was okay at best.  The interplay between Julia Roberts and Clive Owen was cute, but the movie had lengthy slow portions and the plot twists were a bit too convoluted.

I continued to wrestle with my esophageal discomfort all week.  It wasn't horrible, just mildly annoying.  Still, I'd prefer for it to go away.  Hopefully, when I see the doctor week after next, he'll tell me it's nothing major, and be able to prescribe something to resolve it quickly and easily.

Well, we've actually had them for quite a while, but I am just getting around to posting about them.

Because when I work from home I am often participating on teleconferences, and given that my office is right next to the living room, we needed to come up with a way for Jeanie to be able to listen to TV while I am in the office.

Our solution was to purchase a rechargeable stereo wireless headphone model number 33-1197 from Radio Shack.  The headphones plug into the headphone jack on our home theater amplifier.  Pushing one button on the front of the amp mutes the external speakers, making things easy to use.

The specs include: 900MHz - coverage is good throughout the house and evening in the garage and yard, PLL synthesizer eliminates the need for fine tuning - no little dial to have to twiddle with to try to tune into just the right frequency and off/off and volume controls on headset which just make life simpler.

Jeanie and I have both found the headphones to be light weight and comfortable - even after extended use.

The headphones use three AAA batteries.  These can either be alkaline or rechargeable (Ni-Cd or Ni-MH).  We choose to use three of our Eneloop AAA batteries to provide rechargeable functionality, and this is working very well.  The batteries are recharged each time the headphones are placed back on their cradle, and Jeanie has worn the headphones for hours without having the batteries go dead.

The accepted practice for affixing the various patches, badges and grade insignia to a flight suit is to use Velcro.

Most of the items can be ordered with the Velcro (also known as hook and loop fasteners) already affixed to the item.  Typically, the "hook" is already affixed to the item, and a correspondingly sized piece of "loop" (sometimes called "pile") is sewn to the flight suit in the proper location.  The significant exception to this, at least for the Civil Air Patrol, is the grade insignia, which are encased in plastic.  The options are to either sew the plastic directly to the flight suit, or glue the hook Velcro to the insignia and sew the loop Velcro on the shoulders.

I believe that overall, the use of Velcro is preferable to sewing the items directly onto the flight suit.  This way, when you need to launder the flight suit, it is easy to remove all of the items so they don't get messed up in the wash.  Also, it is easier to deal with changing the insignia due to promotions.

So, the challenge I faced was finding Olive Green - or as we used to say, Olive Drab (OD) - Velcro.

I ended up finding a number of sources:

www.flightsuits.com (Gibson & Barnes) does not sell Velcro through their web site - but you can call them at  800-748-6693 to order it. They stock different widths - 1/2", 1", 1.5"", 2", 4" - and they sell a minimum of one yard.

Emdom USA have widths from 1" to 4" ranging from $1.00 per foot to $3.00 per foot.

Williams & Williams sells 2" x 4" pieces for $0.50 and sells 4" wide Velcro for $2.00 per foot.

The Hock Shop offers 2" x 4" pieces for $0.30 each.

Vanguard Industries sells 4" x 12" sheets:
One 4" x 12" sheet of male (hook) Velcro is $2.35 (part number CAP0599W )
One 4" x 12" sheet of female (loop) Velcro is $2.35 (part number CAP0599X )

I ended up going with Vanguard, since I've dealt with them before to purchase various CAP items, and I've always been satisfied with them.

I did read some discussion online regarding whether Olive Green or Sage Green more closely matched the color of the green Nomex flight suit. I guess I'll see when the Velcro arrives.

UPDATE: the order arrived from Vanguard this week and the color matches perfectly.  One other thought for the future is that even though for my needs at the moment, the 4" pieces will work fine, for those applications where I truly only need a 2", 1 1/2" or 1" piece, it is probably better to order it as such, as that way, the pieces are properly edged; when you cut a larger piece down to size, you end up with the pile going to the very edge, which I imagine might cause it to unravel a bit vs. using a piece that has finished edges.

There was one last challenge that I encountered with the installation of the new Netgear DG834G Wireless-G Router with built-in DSL Modem Gateway.

The challenge was the connection speed of my AT&T Network VPN Client to work.  The speed was horribly slow.  I was seeing connection speeds of 5 kbps rather than the normal 150+ kbps - IF I was able to maintain a connection to the network resource at all.

I had a funny feeling that this issue might also be related to the NAT loopback issue, so I went ahead and installed the DG834v4/DG834Gv4 Firmware Version 5.03.16 (for North America) that I downloaded from http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/11882

Long story short. after the upgrade, connectivity to work worked like a charm, and, as an added benefit, I am now able to access my web sites from the local area network without having to add hosts entries to each PC on the network.

Jeanie also reports that Internet access is much faster from her laptop than it was on either the old or new 2Wire gateways, and, I think that the administrator interface is much better on the Netgear; plus I really like its ability to allow you to back up the gateway's configuration to a file on the PC.

I have struggled the last few days to overcome challenges with our Internet access.

I noticed on Thursday that we had lost Internet connectivity.  After doing just a bit of problem determination, I realized that the problem was that the 2Wire HomePortal 1700HW gateway that AT&T had provided four years ago had died.

I called AT&T and began what ended up being a very frustrating experience.

The agent I talked with told me that I would have to purchase a new gateway for $70.  I said okay. Next thing I knew, she was telling me it would arrive "next week."  I told her that was unacceptable.  She told me the order had already been placed and she had no way to edit it.  I asked her to cancel it and told her I would purchase one locally.  She said she couldn't cancel it, and the group that could was gone for the day.  She offered to call me back the next day and connect me with the group that could cancel the order.  I said okay.  In the interim, I searched for a local AT&T store using my work laptop and the tethered cellular modem mode of my Sprint Blackberry.  There was one on the island, but when I called, they said they didn't stock the 2Wire gateways.  I searched more and found one in the River City Marketplace near the airport.  I called them, and they said they had them in stock.  So, Jeanie and I drove there, only to find out that they did NOT in fact have any in stock, and if they did, it would be $100 - not the $70 quoted by the telephone agent.  I decided to try Best Buy, and they did in fact have the 2Wire for $100.  They also had a number of other Combination 4 port switch/wireless access point/router/firewall/DSL modems, but I decided to go with the 2Wire, since I had been told by AT&T that was the only unit they supported.

We got it home, and the setup wizard worked well, and in no time, the gateway was working - sort of.  There were two primary problems: 1. the wireless kept "dropping," and I couldn't get to my web sites from the local area network.  Strangely, I could get to them from outside of the house (I knew this thanks to the Blackberry).

I did a bunch of Internet research, and found that both of these issues were widely known problems with the 2Wire.  By now it was late, so I decided to call it a night.

The next afternoon, I called AT&T technical support.  That turned out to be a joke.  The first person with whom I spoke was level 1, and all she could do was read the script to open up the ports in the firewall to allow access from the Internet to the web server - which of course I had already done.  I asked to speak to Level 2 and ended up on hold for a total of almost an hour, getting bounced to four different agents, none of whom could help me.  I decided to call back, and was basically told that if I wanted level 2 support, I would have to pay for it.  I told the agent "no thanks."  My Internet research indicated that at least one of the problems was related to the software version of the 2Wire, and apparently, there was no update available and no indication of when, or if, there would be one.  I decided I would return the 2Wire and purchase another brand of gateway.

The agent from Thursday did call back in the afternoon, only to tell me that there was no way for AT&T to cancel the order, and my only option was to reject the shipment when UPS delivered it.  I asked what if I wasn't home when they delivered it and she told me I would have to call UPS to come pick the package up and that I should write "rejected" on the box.  Arg!

On Saturday, we went to the local Staples and purchased a Netgear DG384G Wireless-G Router with built-in DSL Modem.  The installation using the wizard was very simple.  I did have to make some edits to the network configuration, as the Netgear used a different IP address and gateway address than the 2Wire, but it was fairly straight forward.

Unfortunately, I experienced the same problem of not being able to access the web sites on my web server from my local area network (LAN).  After doing some more research, I discovered that the problem was that the gateway was not running NAT loopback.  Turns out there were two possible fixes.  The first one I found was fairly simple: just edit the hosts files on my local machines (/etc/hosts file (*nix) or C:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts (Windows)) to include entries for each of the three web sites I host (www.blogdom.org, www.witsdom.com, www.dealdom.com) - found at http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-390461.html  The other was to update the firmware on the gateway to a version that supports NAT loopback - http://kb.netgear.com/app/answers/detail/a_id/11882.  There was actually a third option - http://www.nikrivers.com/2009/10/26/netgear-dg834g-and-nat-loopback/ - but it wasn't necessary given option 2 that added the NAT loopback support.

I chose to implement option 1 for now, as it was quick, and I didn't want to have to hassle with reconfiguring the gateway after the software update.  Maybe I'll do that in a few days.

Just about a year ago, I posted about finding a new supply link.

Well, I have found a new, and even better option: CVS Wooden Cotton Swabs.  They are available at CVS retail stores, or on-line.

They are more expensive than the ones I found on e-Bay - $3.69 for 125 (about 2X more per double-ended swab), but, they are very good quality - strong wood sticks, lots of cotton on the tip - comparable to what I remember the Q-Tips brand being like, and definitely a step up from the Royal brand.

At the moment, the CVS swabs are on sale on-line for $2.21.

Regarding my previous post on this subject.

Yep, the problem was in fact tied to a lack of available memory.  I encountered the error again, and when I checked Options, Status, File Free: showed 0 Bytes.  Performing a soft reset (simultaneously pressing the left ALT and right Shift and DEL keys) and then trying the synch again after the BB had reset allowed the synch to complete without error.

While trying to synchronize my Blackberry today, I got the following error:

Error Encountered.  Error code - 0x80040fb3.  Check documentation.

This occurred synchronizing the Outlook Notes to the Blackberry MemoPad.

Long story short, performing a hard reset of  the device by removing the battery then running the sync again fixed the problem.

My guess is that the device had run low on available memory, and that's what the real cause was.  Guess I won't know unless it happens again and I think to check the free memory before pulling the battery.

Long story long would involve talking about clearing the data for the MemoPad from the device by going into Backup and Restore, Advanced from the Desktop Manager, then changing the settings on the synch to only write from Outlook to the device (rather than bi-directional), looking at the log file under synchronization configuration and wondering why it just stopped part way after starting the "Updates To First System:" phase.  But, that would take too much typing and reading effort.

This happened a few months ago, and I thought I had documented it here on Blogdom, but apparently, I only documented it in the Word document that I maintain on my PC in which I track each installation or removal of software.  Long story short is that there was a registry entry with an incorrect permission that caused the installation to fail.  Details follow:

When I installed (as an update to the previous versions) the Blackberry Desktop Manager v4.7 and BB Handheld Software v4.5, this killed the synchronization of data from Outlook to the Blackberry. I uninstalled BBDM 4.7, and tried to reinstall BBDM 4.2.2 but got an error 1720. I downloaded a new BBDM 4.2.2 from Blackberry and tried to install, but the install failed. I downloaded BBDM 4.7 from Blackberry and installed (it encountered a few errors, but I was able to continue through them. After installing BBDM 4.7, I still received an error when trying to configure the synch with outlook. I was able to resolve the error by doing the following:

• Initial error when trying to configure synchronization: "the application's section is not file-based"
  • Suggested fix for this error:
    • Unregister the old Microsoft Outlook connector ilxolkCompanion.fil by completing the following steps:
      • 1. From the computer, open the command prompt.
      • 2. Navigate to C:\Program Files\Research In Motion\BlackBerry\Connectors\MS Outlook Connector.
      • 3. Type regsvr32 -u ilxolkCompanion.fil in the command prompt.
      • 4. Open BlackBerry Desktop Manager. Microsoft Outlook no longer appears in the Available desktop applications list.
    • Register the most current Microsoft Outlook connector msoutlookconnector.fil for BlackBerry Desktop Manager 4.3 by completing the following steps:
      • 1. From the computer, open the command prompt.
      • 2. Navigate to C:\Program Files\Research In Motion\BlackBerry\IS71 Connectors\MS Outlook Connector.
      • 3. Type regsvr32 msoutlookconnector.fil in the command prompt.
      • 4. Open BlackBerry Desktop Manager. Microsoft Outlook appears in the Available desktop applications list.
• Error when running C:\Program Files\Research In Motion\BlackBerry\IS71 Connectors\MS Outlook Connector>regsvr32 msoutlookconnector.fil
  • DllRegisterServer in msoutlookconnector.fil failed. Return code was: 0x80070005
• Solution from: http://www.cryer.co.uk/brian/windows/trbl_nt_rgsvrfld80070005.htm
• Had to edit the following Registry entry: \HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Classes\MsOutlook.ConnectorManager.1
  • Right click on it, select Permissions, highlight Administrators under Group or user names:, click on Allow Full Control, click OK
• Was then able to successfully run: C:\Program Files\Research In Motion\BlackBerry\IS71 Connectors\MS Outlook Connector>regsvr32 msoutlookconnector.fil

This past weekend, I received my Blackberry HS-655+ Bluetooth Wireless Headset that I purchased from 1 Sale A Day for a total of $4.95 including shipping (after rebate)...

It appears to be a Blackberry branded version of the Plantronics Discovery 655 Bluetooth wireless headset.

So far, I am quite pleased with it.  It is light weight and very comfortable.  I choose to also install the ear hook, just to be safe, but I am not sure it is absolutely required, although I find no discomfort in using it.  One complaint I have heard in general about Bluetooth headsets, and which I experienced the last time I purchased one, is a lack of sufficient volume.  I find I have to turn the volume up all the way both on the Blackberry and on the headset, but when I do this, I find the volume is adequate - at least as long as I am not in a very noisy environment.  Charge time is very reasonable at 3 hours, and use and standby times appear to be reasonable - at least on paper.  I haven't tried pairing it with my laptop yet, but the pairing with the Blackberry was quick and painless.

It has an Interesting charging pod.  The version I received included the charging pod with a mini-USB female jack, A/C adapter with male mini-USB jack, ear loop and three ear pieces of varying sizes. I found the smallest of the three to be most comfortable. It appears that I can also purchase a cigarette lighter adapter for the charging pod or even an adapter that allows me to charge the headset using a AA battery.  For the time being, I'll just stick with what I have, since I believe I could also use the Blackberry USB cable to charge the headset from my laptop.

The user  manual that came in the box was less than stellar, but I was able to find a vastly superior Plantronics version of the manual here.

The charging pod has a pocket clip, so I guess I could just use that on my pocket or belt to carry the headset, but it doesn't securely hold the ear piece, and I am afraid I would lose the ear piece, so I think I will carry it in a small ziplock bag in my pocket.  The down side of this is that it will be harder to get to quickly, and I won't be able to use the cool feature that automatically answers the call when you remove the headset from the pod, but the up side will be that I will be less likely to lose the earpiece and potentially even the entire headset.

Monday

I met the Fernandina Beach squadron commander at the airport at 0630 for a transport mission.  I flew us to Craig (KCRG) and dropped him off so he could fly the Craig squadron's aircraft down to Daytona for service.  I followed him down to Daytona, and then flew the both of us back to Fernandina Beach and was still in the home office working by 1300.

Tuesday

Worked.

Wednesday

Worked.

Thursday

I worked in the morning.  Mid-afternoon, I went on my first real CAP SAR (REDCAP) mission - a report of a missing aircraft.  I got the call at 2:00 PM, we were wheels up just after 3:00, and back at base just after 5:00.  I served as Mission Observer.  We had been given coordinates of the last known position of the missing aircraft, so we flew directly to that location.  After arriving at the location, we began a point search (expanding square).  We found the wreckage on the third leg of the expanding square.  As was reported in the local media later that day, unfortunately, there were no survivors.  If we hadn't known we were looking for a crashed airplane, I never would have recognized it as such.  Even knowing that's what we were looking for, it didn't look anything like an airplane.  It was sad to know that an aviator had perished, but there was some comfort in knowing that we might have in some small way helped in at least providing confirmation to the family, as not knowing is sometimes worse than knowing.  It was also gratifying to see that the time we spend training can result in performing an actual mission effectively.

Tweaked Witsdom.

Friday

I took the day off from work, and Jeanie and I spent the bulk of the day cleaning out the garage to create a walk way so the fridge could be delivered on Saturday, and moving a shelving unit that was packed with food from one location in the garage to another so that there would be room for the refrigerator near an electrical outlet and near the door from the laundry room into the garage.

Saturday

I flew the aircraft currently assigned to our CAP squadron down to Craig (KCRG) so that the Craig squadron (which is still without their aircraft (see Monday) could do some Mission Scanner and Mission Observer training.  The weather was a little marginal at KFHB, so I had to wait a bit to launch, and even with that, ended up flying through some rain and ended up arriving about 30 minutes behind schedule.  I ended up spending the first part of the day providing Mission Observer ground training to two senior members, and then flew two training missions as Mission Pilot (my first two) so that another senior member could get his two Mission Scanner missions and earn his Mission Scanner qualification.  I didn't end up getting home until around 1700.  All together this week, I logged 4.6 hours of flying and 6.6 hours of total time in a small aircraft.

While I was away, Sears had delivered our refrigerator for the garage, and Jeanie had spent much of the day transferring items from the kitchen fridge to the garage fridge.

Also while I was away, I realized I have allowed my priorities in life to get disordered and have generally allowed things around and involving me to get out of balance.  I am renewing my resolve and focus to rectify that.

Sunday

I did the normal Sunday morning coffee thing at the airport, then attended the monthly flying club meeting.  Jeanie and I drove to Jacksonville and took my mother out to lunch at Maggiano's.  We spent about three hours with my mother, plus another hour each way in travel.  Lunch was yummy and we had a pleasant visit with my mother.

I spent a couple of hours in the evening deal with various Blackberry issues as noted in this post.

Jeanie spent the time I was working on the Blackberry feeding her new Facebook addiction.

I spent a good part of the evening fighting with my Blackberry.  For some unknown reason, it decided to switch the synchronization setting for my address book back to wireless.  This caused it to no longer synch properly with my Outlook address book on the home PC.  Long story short, it appears there is a bug in the synchronization software that occasionally creates an extra address book database.  Right now I have four on the Blackberry, and there appears to be no easy way to delete them.  So, I simply cleared out the entries for all of the address book databases, and then reconfigured the synch settings to perform a one-way transfer from the PC to the Blackberry, performed the synch, then changed the synch config back to bi-directional.  I still have empty extra databases, but it doesn't appear to hurt anything.

To clear the entries in the databases without having to delete each entry manually, I first ensured that all of the databases were set to NOT synch wirelessly by going into the address book application, then selecting Menu, then selecting options, then highlighting each database and pressing the trackball and ensuring the Wireless Synchronization setting was set to either Not Available or No.  I then started the Blackberry Desktop Manager on the PC, selected Backup and Restore, selected Advanced, highlighted Address Book in the right hand Device databases window, then clicked on the Clear button.

As an aside, a while ago, I had an issue where I when I went into the Address Book on the Blackberry, every entry showed twice.  It turns out the cause of this behavior was that there were in fact two separate address book databases (see above) and the address book application was configured to Show All Databases.  The quick work-around was to go into Menu, and select "Select Address Book..." then only select one of the databases to display.  The longer term solution was to clear one of the databases using the procedure above.

I had one other issue with the Blackberry, which was that when I tried to perform a backup of the databases, in the middle of the backup, I received an "Unknown Error."  By selecting the Advanced Option, then highlighting all of the databases (highlight the first one, scroll down to the bottom, press shift and click the last database) I was able to see exactly where the backup died.  I was then able to deselect the database immediately following (by holding down the control key and clicking on that database), and rerun the selective backup and get a successful backup of all of the databases other than the corrupt one.  Just as an aside, the database in question is "Location Based Services" which has no records, but can't be deleted because it is grayed out in the databases list.  I think the only way to totally resolve this issue (and the duplicate address book databases at the moment) is to wipe the unit and reload it, but that's more hassle than I am willing to deal with at the moment.

The AOPA has just released a really cool application for the Blackberry...

The application is their airport directory.

There are two things that make it especially cool.  The first is that it is free for AOPA members.  The second is that it is the first Blackberry application that I have seen that allows the database for the application to be stored on the SD card, rather than being required to reside in system memory.

The application is also available for Windows Mobile devices, iPhone and iPod Touch devices and can be downloaded from here.

So, I've continued playing with the free GPS / Mapping applications I have loaded on my new Blackberry 8830.

I currently have five installed:

• The native Blackberry mapping application
• Google Mobile Maps
• Nav4All
• amAze GPS
• Windows Live Search. You can download it here: http://wls.live.com

So far, my favorite overall application is Nav4All, although I just installed a new version of amAze GPS (v4.5) that seems to be a major improvement over the previous version.  The things I like about Nav4All are: it is generally fairly easy to use, it has good voice prompts, and it is reasonably reliable.  It does have a few negatives including a bug in v9 that truncates the last bit of each voice prompt, occasional difficulty in recognizing a street address when entering a destination and less detail in the moving map and directions list view than I would prefer.

Google Mobile Maps is great for it's level of detail in maps and directions and its ability to assess its location by triangulating cell phone towers if it can't "see" the GPS satellites.  Its one big negative is the lack of voice prompts.

A relative newcomer, gokivo looks really interesting, but it appears it only runs on a Blackberry Bold only on AT&T.  If you have a Bold and are on AT&T, you can get it from Blackberry Appworld which you will have to install from http://www.blackberry.com/appworld/download

Stinsonddog has a great overview (although a bit dated) of not free GPS applications for the BlackBerry at http://home.comcast.net/~tamsterra/OP/Blackberry_GPS.htm

Brent Meganowen has a greate overview of free and pay GPS applications at http://brentmeganowen.tripod.com/blackberry.htm

I purchased a new headset on eBay from a vendor named Mafia Buys that works both with the cordless handset at home and with my Blackberry...

I got a Plantronics MX505 based on the recommendation of a co-worker.  The advantages are that it was moderately priced ($20 shipped), that it has enough volume that I can hear well even in a car, that it has a voice tube so the person on the other end can hear me well, that it has a mute and volume control on the cord, and that it is moderately comfortable.

On the disadvantages side, because of the voice tube, it is not convenient to carry it around all the time, the cord (as are all cords) is a hassle and gets in the way, it isn't totally comfortable for hours at a time, and it doesn't have a button anywhere to initiate or end a call.

I always enjoy seeing interesting animated gifs in instant messages...

Every now and then, I even get motivated to search for new ones, or come across an interesting animated gif in some other environment - like an email or a web page.

The problem is, sometimes, the gif is really too large to be appropriate for an IM.

So, after happening upon an animated gif that I thought would be fun for IM, if only it were smaller, I went searching to see what options I had to shrink the gif.

I thought about just placing it in a cold swimming pool, but soon realized that gifs aren't subject to shrinkage in that way.

After doing a bit of Googling, I was able to find a great free option: GIFWorks.com.  While there might be other sites that offer similar functionality or there might be downloadable freeware that accomplishes the same result, GIFWorks did exactly what I wanted, quickly, easily, and freely.  You can find instructions here.

The washing machine seems to have a knack for breaking at extremely inconvenient times...

This time, I was out of town in Dallas on business.

Based on the symptoms Jeanie described, it appeared to be another failure of the drive coupling just like what happened last February as documented in this post.

Well, it turns out that there is a Sears parts center less than five minutes from the IBM site I am working at, so on Wednesday, I ran over to the parts center and picked up another part# - 285753A.

This morning, I was fortunate that I had a lull in the action at work, so I went to replace the coupling.

The good news is that the clothes washer is once again working.  The bad news is that I made a few mistakes that created extra work, aggravation, and a sore back.

The mistakes included:

1.  I removed the screws at the top back of the control panel

which I shouldn't have.  The cover does need to be removed, but not these screws.

Only the screws on the bottom front (under the cover panel) need to be removed.

see the original post for the full sequence to remove the cabinet.

2. When you remove the hose from the tub to the pump, what appears to be just a little bit of water in the tub ends up being a LOT of water on the laundry room floor.  I'm not quite sure what the right answer would have been, as there isn't a lot of room between the bottom of the hose and the floor (maybe a garbage bag?) but a small catch pan didn't cut it.   Have lots of old towels available too.

3. It turned out the drive coupling was just fine.  My guess is that maybe the impeller in the drain pump got jammed as happened in November of 2003, as was documented in this post.  I didn't find a sock, but there was a lot of wet lint in the water on the laundry room floor - maybe that was enough to jam it.  It doesn't take much to jam the impeller on the drain pump.  Lesson learned is, before you remove the motor, check the drain pump to ensure it moves freely.

4.  I had a devil of a time getting the cabinet back on the washer.  Lesson learned was: when placing the cabinet back on the washer, the majority of the cabinet sits on TOP of the washing machine bottom frame member.  Only the very front of the cabinet slides under the frame.  In order to get the cabinet to align with the tabs on the top of the frame, you must tip the cabinet forward quite a bit (more than you would think) as you slide it back the last inch or two.

I got assigned to a new engagement on Friday, so my nose is back to the grindstone...

So much for me planning to catch up on some of my half-drafted posts and increase the frequency of my posting in general.

Yesterday was spent taking my mother to the hospital for back surgery.  She tolerated the surgery well, and tomorrow Jeanie and I will move her to a rehabilitation facility.  The timing was lousy, as I really needed to be in Dallas this week to get a good start on this new engagement - oh well.

In between the cracks today, I upgraded my Blackberry's OS software to version 4.5 and the Blackberry Desktop Manager software to version 4.7.  The OS update went fine, as did the BBDM software on my work laptop.  The upgrade on the home PC was an absolute nightmare that ended up me losing the ability to synchronize my address book and memos from Outlook to the Blackberry.  With LOTS of Googling, I was to finally able resolve the error and get the sync working again.  As a bit of "giveback," I posted the results of my discoveries on the Blackberry Support Community Forums here and on the BlackBerry Forums here.

Anyway, I guess I'd better call it a night, as tomorrow will be a long day.

As they say in the old joke, "...break time is over, back on your heads!"

My US geography has always been weak...

Forget knowing all of the state capitals, I can't even name all of the states when looking at a map with the states outlined!

I am reminded of this every time I see a weather report on TV, and was even made more aware of it watching the super Tuesday election coverage.

So, I decided to try to rectify the situation.

With trusty Google at my side, I searched for interactive us states map game and discovered a number of interesting and educational sites.

Among my favorites were:

The US Map Game - Drag and drop the state with outlines on the US map

Sheppard Software's US States Tutorial - point and click on a US map with state outlines to have the state name read aloud

Sheppard Software's US Map Game - Drag and drop the state with no outlines on the US map.  If you miss, the game tells you how far off you were, and shows you where the state should be

Your Child Learns US Map Puzzle - drag and drop the states with or without (your choice) outlines on the US map.  Without lines, if you miss, you aren't told where it should have gone.

Ben's Interactive Games - Drag and drop with or without outlines - shows name of state capital as you drag the state

About six weeks ago, I finally accepted that my old Dell P991 had about reached the end of it's useful life...

The problem was that even at the lowest brightness setting, the screen was too bright.  In addition, the letters was starting to look a bit fuzzy, and I was getting headaches after using it for extended periods.

It turns out that this brightness problem is well known.  Google "Dell P991 brightness" and you'll find a number of hits.  There are two well documented fixes for the issue.  One is to solder a new resistor onto the controller board, the other is to make a software adjustment to the monitor using a special cable and software.  Unfortunately, it appears that there are two different Sony chassis styles that were used in the P991, and the one that I have used a different controller board - for which I couldn't find a resistor fix - and didn't have the port to enable the software update.

So, I decided to break down and purchase a new wide screen LCD monitor.

After doing some research (online and dragging Jeanie across half of Jacksonville) I elected to purchase a 22" HP w2207h.  I liked the fact that it used "glossy" glass rather than the non-reflective glass, as I believe that the glossy glass offers a brighter, more vibrant, sharper image.  While in a high glare environment (like an office with florescent lights) a glossy screen might have so much glare as to be distracting, in my home office, this is not a factor.  I also liked the highly adjustable base (tilt and height), that it had both analog VGA (15 pin) and HDMI ports, and I thought that the ability to rotate the screen 90 degrees to use the monitor in portrait mode was a neat feature.  The fact that I could get it from the local Staples, and that it was on sale, sealed the deal.

It turned out that the local Staples was out of stock, but they were happy to order it for me.  Two days later I received it and hooked it up.

I liked the monitor pretty well, but even though the native resolution (1680 x 1050) had the best sharpness, the text was just a bit too small for me.  I tried a number of other resolutions, and while the text was larger, it also lost some of its sharpness due to the interpolation of the pixels.

Over the ensuring couple of weeks, as I have been known to do, I started second guessing my decision.  There had also been a 24" monitor that not only was 2" larger, it had a DVI port in addition to the VGA and HDMI ports, was capable of true 1080p (1920 x 1200) resolution (in case I ever wanted to use it as an HD monitor for TV), and was $20 cheaper!

So, I packed up the HP w2207h and took it back to Staples (they were "no hassle") in giving me a refund, and purchased an Acer P241w.

Long story short, after two weeks, I decided that I liked the HP better (it was sharper, more vibrant, had better contrast and had more even back lighting), so I boxed up the Acer, took it back to Staples (I didn't feel quite so bad, as the Acer had been a floor sample), and ordered another HP w2207h.

Interestingly, after loading the drivers for the screen, as well as installing the "HP My Display" utility and running the wizard, the display looks even better than I had remembered.  In fact, I am running the monitor in its native resolution and finding that I am no longer getting headaches  (see below for caveat).

The HP also has built-in speakers and a 2 port USB hub, but I am not using either of these features, as my desktop speakers are much better than the speakers in the monitor and I already have a USB hub convenient to my desk.

The one problem I ran into was that my KVM can't drive the monitor at it's native resolution.  The text looks fuzzy, and it wavers a bit.  So, for the moment, I am running the keyboard and mouse through the KVM, but I am manually switch the VGA cable between my primary home PC and my work laptop.  If I have to access my Linux server or the secondary home PC, I use the KVM and just deal with the issues - as I don't spend a lot of time viewing these systems.

All things considered, I am quite happy with the HP screen.

I'll be even happier after I break down and purchase a new KVM that can deal with the resolution...

And strangely enough, I haven't been that busy with work...

Which would then make it even harder to understand why I haven't been posting.

The engagement I worked on most of last year (successfully) closed on New Year's Eve.  I spent a few weeks in January doing close-out work, and since then, I've actually taken some time off.

I've been busy spending time with Jeanie, doing a fair amount of flying, working on a new set of web sites for the CAP squadron, catching up on a bunch of training for work I hadn't been able to do last year and just generally letting my batteries recharge.

I did pass my Form 5 check ride, and have been able to fly over 5 hours in the 182.  Interestingly, all of it has been with instructors - which has turned out to be great, as in the last few weeks I have almost doubled the number of hours I have "under the hood" as I've started dipping a toe into the pursuit of getting an instrument rating.  I also got an hour in a G1000 "glass cockpit" C-182T.

For the CAP squadron web sites, I decided to use Google Sites, which is really cool.  I am also using Google Calendar, which has some really cool features.  One of the really nice features is that both use the same Google Account as Google Mail (Gmail) so I don't have to manage a bunch of user ID's - each squadron member can manage his own.  Another nice feature is that it's all free!

In addition to the above factors, I went with the Google Apps because they are easy to use, provide good functionality, and will allow the squadron to share the work of managing the sites rather than being dependent solely on me.

I figure it's only a matter of time before I get assigned to another engagement, but in the interim, I'll try to work through some of the backlog of half-completed posts I have in draft mode.

There are some things in life I just haven't been able to adjust to as the times change.  One of those is cotton swabs with paper or plastic sticks as opposed to the old fashioned wood (or is it wooden) sticks.

Fortunately, after some hunting, I was able to secure a new supply of Q-Tips with wood sticks.

Well, technically, not Q-Tips, since I believe these are no longer manufactured under this brand, but instead, Royal brand cotton swabs I purchased "buy it now" off of eBay.

So far, Jeanie and I are very pleased with them.  They were (relatively) reasonably priced - $15.74 including shipping for 4 boxes of 300 per box - and they appear to be good quality: solid sticks and adequate cotton at both ends.  This differs from the Drugstore.com brand that are more expensive - over $4 per box of 125 - and have spindly sticks with an inadequate amount of cotton, or the Q-Tips brand that are still the "gold standard" in terms of quality which can still be found on eBay but at outrageous prices.

Dramatic title, isn't it?   Sounds like something gory, no?  Fortunately, not.

After doing some work work and some personal paper work, I went to install the resistor (part number 279872) that Robby had hypothesized was causing our Kenmore 70 Series clothes dryer not to work.  The symptom was that nothing would happen when you pressed the "push to start" button.  Per the enclosed instructions, I cut the wires on both sides of the old resistor - which was blackened and nasty looking - and installed the new resistor.  Unfortunately, that didn't solve the problem.

After doing a few Google searches, I found a few pages that suggested that the problem might be with the "push to start" switch, or the thermal fuse (part number 3392519).  I used an ohm meter to check the switch, and even though it didn't ohm out exactly as I would have expected, that didn't seem to me to be the problem.  When I checked the thermal fuse with the ohm meter, it showed infinite resistance, which led me to believe the fuse was in fact blown.  I shorted the leads from each side of the fuse together, pressed the start button and behold, the dryer started! This led me to believe that the thermal fuse was in fact blown, and that installing a new one would fix the dryer.  Jeanie called the local Sears store and as expected they didn't have the part, but they referred us to the parts center in Jacksonville which did have the part and was willing to put one on hold for us.

Even though getting the dryer operational was a high priority, getting my hair cut was a higher priority given that I have a client meeting next week, and I was looking shaggy.

So, I headed off to the island to get my hair cut.  I went to the same place I've gotten my hair cut at since we moved here, but the guy who cuts my hair has cut back to only working Tuesday through Friday.  I didn't want to take the chance of having to head off again without getting a trim, so Michelle cut my hair.  She did an okay job - not as good as Kevin, but I've pretty much got the drill down, so I was able to guide her... clipper the sides with a number three guard, then blend up and onto the top, be careful not to get too short at the crown so my thinning spot doesn't get too obvious, then use a thinning shear right down the middle of the top to knock down that Klingon ridge.

Next, I went to donate blood.  The Blood Alliance had been nice enough to call yesterday to inform us that they would be in town today.  Unfortunately, the first tech who stuck me gave me the worst stick I have ever had.  It hurt quite a bit, and the bag wouldn't fill - even after another tech tried to adjust the needle - and hurt me more in the process.  I agreed to let them try the other arm, which worked out fine.  Good stick, quick fill of the bag.

I stopped by home to pick up Jeanie and we headed off to our friends at the Sears Home Central Parts and Repair Center, 3555-1 St. Johns Bluff, Jacksonville, FL 32246 (904) 998-6597.  The part was waiting for us as promised.

Since we were in the general area, and I hadn't seen Mom in a while, we stopped by to visit for an hour or so.  Mom was quite sweet and was doing okay physically, so it was a pleasant visit.

We then headed home and I replaced the thermal fuse.  I found the following web sites particularly helpful in diagnosing and resolving the issue: http://applianceguru.com/forum2/1505.html and http://www.applianceblog.com/mainforums/showthread.php?t=5517 and http://www.applianceblog.com/mainforums/showthread.php?t=2527 which led to http://www.applianceaid.com/dryers.html

Jeanie was probably right in her observation that when you add the cost of the resistor, the shipping cost for it, the cost of the thermal fuse, gas to drive to/from Jacksonville and the money that she had to spend over three or four weeks to drive to the laundry mat and to pay for the use of their dryers, it probably would have been cheaper just to have called Sears and had them send over a technician to diagnose and fix the problem.  Oh well.  There was great value in giving me the opportunity to actually be able to feel like I was able to be given a challenge, identify the issue, and successfully effect resolution.  Something severely lacking at work lately...

Speaking of work, as an interesting aside, as of today,  I have had only one full day off in the last 56 days and have worked an average of 75 hours each week.  And that includes the week that I traveled to the Mayo clinic for evaluation of my schwannoma.

While on the one hand, I am quite grateful that I have a job, and one that pays well at that, and that doesn't involve extreme physical danger, discomfort or having to do something really disgusting.  One the other, it seems like there has to be a better way...

Back on November 23, 2003, our Kenmore Series 80 washing machine died mid-load...

Well, it happened again yesterday, although with different symptoms.  This time, the tub drained, but the washer would not spin.  I could hear a noise like a motor running when the spin cycle was engaged, but the basket would not spin.  I tried running the wash cycle.  The tub filled with water, but when the agitator should have started agitating... nothing.

Fortunately, the link from my previous entry to Appliance Aid still was active, so I avoided a lot of hassle, as I would have first tipped the washer onto its side to try to access the motor had I not had this entry as a reference.

Jeanie helped me get the washer onto our hand truck and move the washer into the garage.  The pile of black "dust" on the floor where the washer had been did not appear to be a good sign.

After removing the cabinet,

Note: do NOT remove the screws shown in the first two pictures (the ones on the top back of the control panel) only remove the screws shown in the picture below (on the front bottom of the panel).

pump and motor, I was able to identify what appeared to be the problem: the rubber coupling between the motor and transmission was mangled, and the plastic drive pins on the motor and transmission drive plates were snapped off.

Jeanie jumped on the Internet and accessed the Sears Parts Direct web site.  I was pleasantly surprised that a search using the part number stamped on the drive plate - 62672 - actually came up with the proper replacement part# - 285753A.  I was even more surprised to learn that there was a Sears Parts Store in Jacksonville, and that they had the part in stock - although confirming that they had them in stock and finding out what their hours were was a two hour frustrating experience that involved multiple calls to the store, only to have our call answered by a fax machine, multiple calls to the Sears 800 number, and finally looking in the white pages and calling the Sears Sewing Center, which just happened to be located in the same building as the parts center.

Once we confirmed that our trip would not be for naught, Jeanie and I drove to Jacksonville and picked up the part.  Turns out they had quite a few, as this part apparently is prone to failure.  I did notice that the replacement part had a number of design features that were different than the original including a metal insert at the center of the drive plate and more robust drive pins.

Cleaning and installing the new parts was a fairly simple affair.  Fortunately, I had thought to take photographs as I disassembled the washer, so between the Appliance Aid site and the pictures, I was able to figure out what went where.

The good news is that the washer appears to be working correctly.  I much prefer the $16.57 in parts and a few hours of driving and manual labor to the thousand or so dollars that we would have spent on a new washer.

Other notes...

When placing the cabinet back on the washer, the majority of the cabinet sits on TOP of the washing machine bottom frame member.  Only the very front of the cabinet slides under the frame.  In order to get the cabinet to align with the tabs on the frame, you must tip the cabinet forward quite a bit as you slide it back the last inch or two.

It doesn't take much to jam the impeller on the drain pump.  Before pulling the motor to check the drive coupling, remove the impeller and check that it will spin freely.  Be aware that way may appear to be a small amount of water in the washing tub, turns into quite a lot on the laundry room floor.  Be prepared with a large bucket when you pull the hose that goes from the tub to the pump.

Post updated 4/10/09 to add lessons learned on that day.

Well, that's what it seemed like at first...

Symptoms were that keystrokes were getting lost - i.e. I'd type a word, but some of the letters vanished into the ether, and the mouse pointer was erratic and not all of the clicks were recognized.

At first, thought it was just batteries getting tired.

I changed the batteries on the keyboard, which was no big deal, and on the mouse, which is a major hassle since I forgot that the batteries go in the top rather than the bottom.  Why should this matter, you wonder?  Well, the tabs on the plastic piece that keeps the mouse ball in place are broken, so I have to keep it in place with tape.  The tape has to be carefully placed so as to not block the mouse hole.  Removing the tape leaves sticky residue from the tape which must be removed or my hand sticks to the mouse and the mouse sticks to the mouse pad.  As long as I had the ball out, I cleaned the rollers that track the mouse movement and tend to get gunky after a while.  As usual, I forgot that after removing the batteries, a connection with the base must be reestablished, and this is accomplished by pressing a button on the bottom of the mouse - a button that ends up being covered by the tape that holds the mouse ball retainer in place, so I had to remove the tape and reapply it.  At least after I did this, I thought to write a note to myself on the tape on the bottom of the mouse reminding me that to replace the batteries, I need only remove the top cover - not the tape.

Anyway, after doing all that, I still had the problem.

Turns out that the culprit wasn't the batteries, but the fact that I had placed my new Blackberry next to the wireless receiver and apparently, the Blackberry was creating interference.  I have noticed this when someone sets their blackberry too close to a Polycom conference call unit - you end up with an annoying hum or buzzing.

Moving the Blackberry down one shelf on the stand solved the problem.

While it was a bit of a hassle, and I probably ended up throwing away a set of AAA batteries that weren't quite dead (I did save the AA's), at least I now have a clean mouse and fresh batteries in both the mouse and keyboard.  As long as I don't forget and end up placing the Blackberry next to the receiver again, I should have a trouble free keyboard and mouse for a while now.

I ordered a couple of these from Woot a few weeks ago.

Overall, I have to say I am disappointed.

On the plus side, the unit did charge quickly, and I had no problems pairing it either with the Blackberry or with my Lenovo T60P.  Well, I had no problems with the T60P once I had uninstalled the Bluetooth driver and installed the latest version - but I attribute that to the OS build that was supplied with the system when I received it, not with the headset.  As a hint, after you remove the old Bluetooth driver and reboot, you must press Function+F5 to get the system to activate the Bluetooth so the system will complete the rest of the installation.  As with many devices, you must cancel the Microsoft default driver installation, and manually run the updated driver installer.  You must be VERY patient with the new driver installation, as it installs a number of services / sub devices which take quite a while but don't provide progress bars to let you know that something is going on in the background.

Price was good - $6.95 each plus $5 shipping.  But, I guess you get what you pay for.

Shipping took a ridiculously long time.  Woot appeared to get the product out of their warehouse in a reasonable amount of time, but then the box just languished with the shipper.  All told, it took fourteen days to arrive.  Granted, I ordered it shortly before Christmas, so there was the Christmas rush, plus the New Year holiday, but still... I could tell from the tracking information that the box was just sitting in a "sortation" center.  In looking at the Woot forum entry for this item, it appears I was not alone.

Good thing I ordered two, as the first one broke within two days.

The earpiece isn't horrible, but it isn't comfortable either.  Without the ear stablizer hook, the unit wouldn't stay on my head, as the ear plug is quite large.  Because it doesn't fit snugly in my ear, there is some background noise which makes it difficult for me to hear, even with the volume on both the unit and the Blackberry turned up to maximum.

As an experiment, I tried to see if the earpiece from my Jabra headset would fit on the integrated ear piece.  It did, which helped both with the volume and the comfort.  I don't know if putting the Jabra earpiece on had any effect on the unit breaking, so I am not taking a chance with the other one, but if it did, that speaks to the overall (lack of) quality of the item in my opinion.

Another big issue is the constantly blinking blue led embedded into the headset.  During the day, it makes you look even more dorkish that you already do wearing a bluetooth headset.  At night, the light is bright enough to be downright distracting / annoying.

This is my second bad experience with Soyo.  When I built my first PC from components, I purchased a Soyo motherboard.  I had problems with it from day one, although I did finally get it working for the most part, only to have it die a year or so later (post warranty) due to faulty capacitors.

Even at $12 total, I would not recommend this headset.

PS. A few days after I wrote this (but before I got around to publishing it) I sent a note to Woot asking what my options were.  In part, I said:

I have taken a look at the Soyo web site (http://www.soyogroup.com) to see about getting warranty service.  Unforunately, Soyo appears to charge $5 for warranty service.  This seems quite unreasonable for a product for which I only paid $7.99 and which only worked for two days!  Not to mention, I will have to pay to ship it to them.  I have also read that generally speaking, Soyo warranty service leaves much to be desired.  I know my previous experience with Soyo was less than satisfactory – in fact I really struggled with whether to partake in this Woot because of that.  Guess I’m a slow learner.

I almost immediately received an automated response which in part read:

Your email to Woot Member Services has been received. This is an automated reply.

Your request has been assigned Case # XYZ.

As you might expect, we receive a fairly large volume of emails. This reply is sent from our case assignment system to indicate your position in the queue has been reserved. Our staff works Monday through Friday during normal business hours in an effort to keep response times under 1 business day. However, in recent peak times we have fallen behind-we thank you in advance for your patience as we work to improve our efficiency. Please be confident that we will respond and resolve your issue.

We have made recent moves to increase staff, cross-train for interdepartmental assistance, and improve case handling automation to serve all members better in the near future. For information on job openings in the Dallas area, visit: http://www.woot.com/Jobs.aspx

Thank you for your support,

Member Services

I found this to be pretty cool.  Quick response, set my expectations, and did some recruiting all at once.

I found it even cooler when a couple of days later, I received an email from Woot customer service apologizing for my difficulties and informing me that a replacement unit would be sent out to me at no charge within a few days.  I still haven't received a shipping notification much less the replacement unit, but I am hopeful.

I still won't say overall that this was a great purchasing experience, but Woot's handling of my email left me feeling much less negative.  I might be a bit more careful as to what I order (I was quite pleased with my other purchase from Woot) but I am fairly confident that I will do business with them again.

For the moment, I plan to stick with my old school wired Jabra headset for use with my Blackberry, and plan to use the Soyo headset for Skype / OneSuite IP telephony with my laptop, where I am likely to be in quieter environments (where the lack of volume shouldn't be as big an issue) and where I would appreciate not being tethered to the laptop by a wired headset.  Plus, if I use the Bluetooth headset, the purchase won't be totally for naught, and I won't have to buy an adapter to use my Jabra headset with the standard two jack (separate headphone and microphone) PC audio connections or continue to suffer with the uncomfortable cheapo headset/microphone I purchased in The Netherlands.

The company changed its policy on cell phone reimbursement.

Used to be, you selected your carrier, plan and device.  You were personally liable for the monthly payment, and you had to pay for the device yourself.   On a monthly basis, you submitted a request for reimbursement for the actual business use charges up to the amount of the monthly cap that was set by each individual business unit. 

The new policy is that in order to not have to pay for the monthly service out of your pocket totally, you must participate in the company's corporate managed wireless plan.  The good news is that you don't have to pay for the charges out of your pocket and then submit an expense each month, you don't have to pay for the cellular device, and you are protected from being directly personally liable for charges - of course you are still liable to the company for any charges that are not consistent with policy.  The bad news is that the company decides which carrier to assign you to, and severely limits which devices you may select.  There is no provision, even as an exception, for someone to purchase their own device and then have it added as an authorized device to the company selected carrier / plan.

In my case, Sprint was selected as my carrier.  I have been a Verizon customer for years.  Long ago, I had convinced my entire family to switch to Verizon so we could enjoy in-network free calls.  Oh well.

And what of my Kyocera 7135 and all of the Palm applications I have come to depend on?  Sorry.  There were no Palm based devices offered as one of the devices I could select.  In fact, there were only three options offered to me when I went to the site to sign up - a low end Samsung phone with no camera (for those clients who do not allow phones on their sites), the Samsung Katana II, and the Motorola MotoRazr v9.

Long story short(er)... I whined to my manager, and he asked why I hadn't ordered a Blackberry.  I replied that it wasn't offered as an option.  My manager suggested I see if I could get on the Blackberry list.  After many emails and calls, the corporate program manager approved me having a Blackberry.  I ordered the one available option, the Blackberry 8830 World Edition.

On the plus side, having instant access to my email and calendar without having to do anything special is pretty cool.  My corporate plan has over four times as many monthly minutes as my old plan did and nights and weekend free minutes start at 6:00 pm; plus I have unlimited data.  The 8830 is pretty sexy - the 7135 was definitely old school dork.  I really like the trackball situated in the center of the device.  The fact that it lights up along with the rest of the keys is way cool.  I was able to configure the sync so that rather than syncing to my Notes Journal and Address Book, I sync (via usb) to my personal Outlook Notes and Address Book, just as I did with the Kyocera.  I elected to let the Blackberry wireless sync to my Notes task list, rather than to Outlook, as when I really assessed the situation, I acknowledged that I really didn't use my personal to-do list effectively on the PDA.  Having a fully featured mobile web browser is pretty neat too.  Although not as sweet as Jeanie's new Garmin Nuvi 650, the free (for the time being) Nav4All GPS application should be very helpful to me as I travel.  And if I don't like it, I can always use either the Blackberry Maps/GPS application, Google Maps Mobile or I can sign up for the Sprint Navigator for $9.95 per month.  Voice dialing, without having to do any training, while far from perfect, works better than I would have expected; my guess is it will do even better once I get accustomed to using it.  The level of customizability of the notifications (phone, reminders, mail, etc.) is quite amazing.  The leather holster, with it's hidden magnetic sensor, is quite nice.  Being able to charge the Blackberry from my laptop's USB port will eliminate one travel charger from my suitcase.

On the minus side, the size and proximity of the keys are just barely large enough to be usable with my short fat thumbs.  I find that I can't effectively type with the pads of my fingers - instead, I end up using the edges of my nails.  The screen seems smaller than the Kyocera - technically it is wider and shorter, but it "feels" smaller (5mm wide x 3.7mm high vs. 4.6mm x 4.7mm) The distance between the speaker and the microphone is much shorter than on my clamshell Kyocera, so I am concerned about how well callers will be able to hear me - although this may be less of an issue once the bluetooth headset that I ordered on Woot for $6.95 arrives.  No stylus support - although the keypad obviates the need for handwriting recognition (which I always struggled with) and the trackball handles cursor movement, there were some applications - especially some games - that worked really well with a stylus.  Plus, I could scroll a lot faster with the stylus than I can with the trackball.  I will have to purchase a new automobile adapter to power the Blackberry when I will be on extended trips in a car.  Limited memory - although I can (and have) added a micro-SD card (1GB) to the Blackberry, it can only be used to store files, not programs (unlike a Palm device), so I may find myself running into a memory limitation at some point.

And then of course, there are the applications on my Kyocera 7135 that don't have direct corollaries on the Blackberry:

• Co-Pilot
• Tide Tool
• Date Calculator
• AvantGo - see update below
• Support for Microsoft Office documents - you can view them as email attachments, but can't edit them
• Freeware in general

Co-Pilot

Search as I might, I have not been able to find anything even close.  Not for love or even money.  This one omission will force me to continue to have to keep the 7135 in the charger so I can throw it in my flight bag as I get ready to go out to the airport.  Fortunately, with the telephone portion turned off, the battery life on the 7135 goes from a day to a week.

Tides

I searched quite a bit, but could not find a tide prediction program for the Blackberry.  Many of the web sites that provide tide information on a PC based browser (such as www.accuweather.com) don't provide this functionality from a mobile browser, or don't provide the data in a format that is usable on the blackberry (such as www.noaa.gov).  I did finally find something that will allow me to make due:

Tide information for Fernandina: http://www.mobilegeographics.com:81/locations/6122.html

Eastern US: http://www.mobilegeographics.com:81/zones/:America/New_York

or alternatively: http://www02.coconet.com:8080/locations/5474.html which seems a bit faster.

Both appear to be XTide servers.

As an aside, I found a good compendium of tide information and prediction tools: http://ocean.peterbrueggeman.com/tidepredict.html

Date Calculator

I don't use it very often - usually only after I donate blood and want to figure out what date is 56 days hence - but I do find the date calculator handy every now and then (it's also good for calculating when my passenger carrying night  currency will expire 90 days from my last three night landings).  There are a few date calculators that I have found, but I just can't justify spending $9.95 for such a little used specialized application.

AvantoGo

The browser on the Blackberry is pretty good, so much of the content that was available via AvantGo can be accessed by going directly to the appropriate web site.  An application that appears to have similar functionality is http://plusmo.com/homepage/home.shtml

Update: Turns out that AvantGo IS available for the Blackberry.  For more information, go to http://my.avantgo.com/rim/

Support for Microsoft Office Documents

My guess is that if I searched hard enough, and was willing to spend some money, I could find an application to address this issue, but it's not a big deal yet.

Freeware

There just doesn't seem to be nearly as much freeware available for the Blackberry as there was for the Palm.  This seems especially so for little utilities and games.  I guess folks figure if someone has a Blackberry, most likely it is being provided by the person's company, so they can afford to pony up some bucks to purchase these things.

Other Miscellaneous Thoughts

One other thought that surprised me... I never would have thought that I would have seen any value in having a camera built into a cell phone.  That is, not until my recent trip to The Netherlands (LINK).  It was really nice having a phone with a camera.  For the trip, had I not had one, I wouldn't have had any pictures of the trip, as I didn't take my regular camera which is bulky and somewhat broken.  In general though, the idea of having a camera at hand all of the time for impromptu picture taking is cool.  Too bad the Blackberry doesn't have one.

It seems like Wi-Fi capability would have been nice too, but with the EV-DO network speeds and unlimited data, and the relative scarcity of free access points, maybe that isn't such a big deal.

There's other stuff I might get around to playing with to enhance the functionality of the 8830 including:

• Beyond411. Info link.  Install link.
• Java Midlets.  http://midlet.org and http://www.javamobiles.com/midlets/  Depending on how well these work, they may somewhat mitigate the dearth of freeware.

Were I looking for a device to purchase myself, and I had to stay with Sprint, I'd consider the Treo™ 755p by Palm if I were intent on retaining my existing Palm apps, or if I was willing to consider switching over to Windows Mobile, either the IP-830W by Samsung® or the Mogul™ by HTC.

Of course, if I were in Europe, I'd have a huge array of choices.  While I was there earlier this month, I was amazed at the number of options available - especially if you were willing to pay full boat for an unlocked device.

Summary

While not perfect, the Blackberry 8830WE is pretty cool and I am having fun playing with it.  Throw in that the company is providing me with the device at no cost to me, giving me a boat load of minutes each month, and providing me with unlimited data access, and I am left with the thought that I am quite fortunate.

I sometimes have the desire to display HTML code in a post rather than having the browser interpret it.

Lately, I have been using the wonderful WLW plugin Insert Code Snippet to accomplish this.

In my wanderings today, I learned about two alternatives - the HTML tags <pre></pre> (for preformatted text) and <xmp></xmp> which indicates a block of text where all HTML tags are ignored.  Of the two, <xmp> more precisely accomplishes what I want, but it is deprecated.

As an example, consider the following:

<> & &plusmn; <ahref="http://www.blogdom.org">test</a>

using the <pre> tag, you end up displaying:

<> & ± test

with the <xmp> tag, you get the full desired string of:

<> & &plusmn; <ahref="http://www.blogdom.org">test</a>

Interestingly, while entering this entry, I discovered that if I just type the HTML in any view other than the HTML Code view in WLW, what I type is what gets displayed in the blog entry (i.e. WLW translates the special characters into HTML entities rather than writing them to the blog for them to be interpreted by the browser).

Hmm...

ScottIsAFool wrote a wonderful WLW plugin he calls the Insert Placeholder plugin.  It can be found here: http://groups.msn.com/windowslivewriter/generaltopics.msnw?action=get_message&mview=1&ID_Message=5698

The plugin allows you to include text you want to appear in your blog entry that you don't want WLW to munge or to interpret while you are editing.  The example Scott uses is adSense javascript code, but it also works for any HTML type code that you want to protect from the WYSIWYG munger.

For the example below I entered the regular characters into the Writer Editor box and the HTML entities into the blog entry box.  As a note, I could have also entered the HTML entities into the Writer Editor box - the plugin protects the HTML entities from the WYSIWYG munger.  The advantage of doing this is that you can see what the HTML entities will look like in the posted entry prior to publishing.

The one negative with the plugin is that it forces the blog text onto its own line, so you can't use it to embed inline HTML within a sentence.  Still, it is a great plugin for what most people would want to use it for.

A couple of times, I have encountered an issue with Windows Live Writer related to the handling of special characters like in Crème Brûlée.

The issue was that in WLW everything appears fine, but when posted to the blog, it displayed as Crème Brûlée.

The only way I could get the text to display properly was to enter the special characters as HTML entities like this:

Crème Brûlée

I should note that in the above initial example, I did not enter the characters directly into WLW, but instead copied them from a web page then pasted them into the WLW editor.

I posted an item on the Windows Live Writer MSN Group and got a very quick response.

The net of the solution was:

Ah, here's the problem. The encoding is simply declared incorrectly in your blog template. If you change this:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />

to this:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

everything will work fine. You can confirm this by forcing your browser to display your homepage in UTF-8 (in IE7, right-click on the page and select Encoding | UTF-8; in Firefox, it's on the View menu).

Here is a sample of Crème Brûlée that was copied from another page and pasted into WLW so you can see the difference between the display with iso-8859-1 and UTF-8 encodings (you'll have to force the display as noted in the solution above).

So, one option is to edit each of the master templates in Movable Type to use the charset-utf-8 directive and then rebuild the site.  Since I don't use special characters that often, I am going to hold off on doing that since I am concerned that the change might break something else.

The other option is just to convert the special characters manually to HTML entities.  Of course, to do this, one would need a list of the characters and their corresponding Entity Names.  Fortunately, there are many pages out there with this information concisely captured and nicely formatted including:

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_entities.asp

and

http://www.cookwood.com/html/extras/entities.html

just for starters.  For a longer list, Google HTML Entities.

Unfortunately, there is what I consider to be a bug in WLW.  If I enter the HTML entities into WLW in the HTML Code View, then switch to any of the other views, when I switch back to the HTML Code View, the HTML entities are converted into their character equivalents, effectively overriding the HTML code that was entered.  The only way I have identified to work around this is to not switch back to a WYSIWYG view prior to publishing. Of course, if you have want to edit the entry at a later date, you will have to remember to switch to the HTML Code View prior to opening the entry, or the HTML will get munged.

One of the great values that Blogdom provides to me is that it serves as a repository for helpful tips and tricks that I have discovered along the way.  Unfortunately, my mind usually isn't sharp enough to remember the tip or trick, but fortunately, at least sometimes, it is sharp enough to remember that I had encountered the challenge previously, came up with a solution, and maybe even recorded the solution for posterity in a post.

Such was the case today.  I had received a Lotus Notes email at work with an animated GIF as an inline (or embedded) image.  To my knowledge, there is no easy way to save such an image from Notes as a GIF file - even saving it as a BMP is a bit of a challenge.  But, I figured I could forward the email to my personal email account, then extract the image from Outlook.  Ultimately, it turned out I was right, but I needed the trick captured in this post from 2004 to accomplish it.

On Friday, the Court decided to appoint Jeanie and me as Emergency Temporary Guardians for my mother...

I would have much preferred that the situation with my mother had not forced us to this point.  Other than the good karma of taking care of someone who can't care for herself, there is no upside to being a guardian - it takes lots of time, money and emotional capital.  Unfortunately, other than Jeanie and me, there is no one else to do it, and we were all but begged to take on this responsibility by the staff at the Assisted Living Facility where my mother resides.  It doesn't appear that this is going to be a short term need on my mother's part, so we told the attorney to proceed with pursuing permanent guardianship.  The attorney said that given my mother's condition, she was all but sure that the court would appoint permanent guardianship.  The temporary order is for sixty days, which should be sufficient time for the court to process the evaluation for permanent guardianship.  From what we understand, the process for permanent guardianship is much more involved.  It will require Jeanie and I to appear in court, along with my mother.  That will be no fun at all.

It turns out that there are a lot of responsibilities and regulations associated with being a guardian.  It is not as simple as "okay, look after your mother's needs."  There are all sorts of things that you "must do," and many things that can only be done with the court's approval.  Seems like along with the copies of the "Letters Of Emergency Temporary Guardianship" and the "Order Appointing Emergency Temporary Guardianship," either the Court or our attorney would have provided us with some sort of a booklet outlining the responsibilities and regulations associated with this.

Jeanie and I are both becoming increasingly disheartened with the lack of service in our service based economy.  It used to be that the people who undertook "helping" careers - people like doctors and lawyers - would make the effort to ensure that you had all of the information that you needed - proactively.  Now, they only give you the answers to the questions you ask, and then only begrudgingly and often incompletely.  If I knew all of the questions to ask, chances are I wouldn't have to be paying them hundreds of dollars an hour to help!

Fortunately, with a bit of Googling, I was able to find some pertinent information, in order of increasing detail / complexity:

Guardianship Basics - A Handbook for Guardians: http://www.rgllaw.us/GuardianshipBasics.pdf

Guardianship Basics - A Handbook for Guardians corrections: http://www.rgllaw.us/handbookcorrections.pdf

FLORIDA GUARDIANSHIP LAW AND INFORMATION: http://www.flcourts18.org/PDF/gurardianship_rev1-07.pdf

Florida Statutes - Chapter 744 - Guardianship: http://www.leg.state.fl.us/Statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Display_Statute&URL=Ch0744/ch0744.htm

I found the coolest site this afternoon: http://www.guiweather.com/

Among the many way cool features are a number of KML files for Google Earth.  My favorite is the Level II Radar that can display the latest static radar map or a loop automatically updated every five minutes.  To install it, with Google Earth open, all you have to do is click on this link.

Another source of weather data including Nexrad Radar and Airport Weather Observations (METARS) is http://earthnc.com/  They also offer all sorts of boating related overlays if your interests sway more to the nautical.  In order to access the features you need to register, but registration is quick, easy and free.

Another site with some interesting KMLs is http://www.weatherstationmaps.info/weather/radar/googleEarth.jsp, which is also a cool weather site in its own right.

Finally, one more site with interesting KMLs is http://wdssii.nssl.noaa.gov/geotiff_new/index.html.  I particularly like their regional loops, which seem to have better resolution than some of the other sites'.

I could burn lots more time playing with this as Google returned 288,000 hits from a search string of:

Google Earth Weather with online RADAR overlay

but I should go do something more productive.

Ever encounter a site with lots of content that doesn't have a local search function?

Frustrating, isn't it?

Well, those crafty folks at Google have a simple solution for you already built into their search engine.

All you have to do is enter the following as your search string:

keyword site:URL of site

for example, to search Blogdom for "TV" you would enter:

TV site:www.blogdom.org

You are not limited to just searching for one word.  Keyword can be multiple words if you want - a keyphrase so to speak.

Of course, Blogdom has it's own search function, which is a bit more elegant than the Google approach (I don't take credit for it, it was written by someone else and is specific to Movable Type), but for something say like MSN Groups, which has no search function, it is terrific.

For other cool Google search tips, check out http://www.google.com/intl/en/help/refinesearch.html

I came across this word twice today: Once listening to NPR and once reading the Costco monthly magazine.  I don't get to listen to NPR that often, but I spent the day at a VMware seminar in Jacksonville (cool product, so-so seminar), so I got to listen to NPR on the way there and back.  Had I remembered to bring my Nomad, I would have listened to tunes, but I didn't.  If you smirked at the thought of reading the Costco magazine, you shouldn't; it has some really interesting articles usually.  I had no idea what the word meant, but given encountering its use twice in one day, I was motivated to look it up.  I am glad I did.

Links:

Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary with audio pronunciation

Dictionary.com

Well, sorta new...

It is new in that we just purchased it, but it isn't really new in that it is an exact replacement of our old kettle.  Technically, it is a replacement of a replacement of a warranty exchange of the kettle we purchased at least six years ago.

I am guessing that this one will last longer than the previous ones have because I think I've finally figured out what was causing the major reason that we would get a new one - slight leaking at the base.  My belief is that we were contributing to the problem by leaving water in the kettle most of the time.

We had looked at kettles costing twice as much as our Wal-Mart G.E. Chrome Electric Kettle 168950, but after reading reviews on many different models on-line, it didn't appear that any of the more expensive kettles functioned any better or lasted any longer, and some had serious design defects.  The way I look at it, we like the features, and even if (although it is unlikely) we had to replace it twice as often as a more expensive model, we'd still be better off after taking time value of money into account.

Speaking of on-line reviews, I added another first to my list today - my very own (other than on Blogdom) first on-line review.  You can read it here.

I was leafing back through the Blogdom archives and saw a post about OpenOffice.org 2.1 and thought that it would be only fair to make an entry about another free office suite, the recently released IBM Lotus Symphony, which can be downloaded for free from here.  Symphony is available for Windows or Linux, and offers a presentation program, word processing and a spreadsheet.

Which is better?  I can't say, as I haven't really spent that much time playing with either application.  But, the cool thing is that you can download both for free, and decide for yourself.

I was walking yesterday evening and noticed a beautiful large yellow butterfly sitting atop a bottlebrush tree and decided to pause and enjoy the journey and take a closer look.

As I neared the tree, I also saw a large number of the most amazing looking bugs feeding on the bottlebrush flowers.  I thought that they were so cool that I called Jeanie on the cell and urged her to come over to take a look, which she and Cali did.

After getting home, I set about trying to figure out what the bug was.  It took a number of iterations of Googling, but I did finally figured out that it was a Polka-dot Wasp Moth (also known as the Oleander Moth), which is the adult stage of the Oleander Caterpillar.  Although it would appear that many (most?) consider this insect to be a pest, and I guess I would if I had lots of oleander bushes, I think it is really beautiful, both at rest, and in flight.

Here are some other sites with pictures and information if you are interested: http://creatures.ifas.ufl.edu/orn/ole_cpillar.htm, http://www.floridanature.org/species.asp?species=Syntomeida_epilais#photos, and http://edis.ifas.ufl.edu/pdffiles/IN/IN13500.pdf

In my searching, I found a site which I thought was really cool.  The site is What's That Bug?  In addition to the great information and photographs, I found it nice that this site considers bugs to be more than just nasty things that need to be eliminated.  And, if you see a bug that you can't identify, and you can't figure it out using their photos and search engine, just snap a photo and send it to them, and they will do their best to help identify it for you.  It has a number of good Oleander Moth photos, and addition to other cool moth photos here.

Jeanie and I had a lovely day trip to St. Simons Island yesterday.

When we started the drive, the weather was a bit "iffy," but as the day progressed, the weather improved.

We started out going to our island to have breakfast, but unfortunately, the restaurant we had in mind (Miss Carolynn's) was closed for the holiday.  So, we stopped by the Kofe Haus and grabbed cups of their delicious coffee and a pastry to take the edge off while we headed off towards St. Simons.  We ended up eating breakfast at the Cracker Barrel at Exit 3 and then proceeded north.

Our first stop was at the Visitor's Center which is near the southern end of the island near Neptune Park.  The Visitor's Center was clean and attractive with friendly attentive staff.

We then headed up to the north end of the island to visit Christ Church, Frederica and walked around the grave yard (one of Jeanie's favorite pastimes).  Unfortunately, the church itself wasn't open to visitors (it is only open 2pm - 5pm) so we didn't get to see the inside.  Also unfortunately, I wasn't feeling too well, suffering from a bit of stomach upset and a moderate headache.

We then headed back down to the south end of the island (note, this is all of a twelve mile drive from one end to the other) to see what else there was to see.  We went to the light house and walked around and read the signs, but decided to defer the guided tour and climb up the lighthouse till another day.

We then went to the downtown area and walked around, partially just to tour and partially to find a place to eat and have a drink.  We didn't find any place that suit our fancy, and I remembered seeing a few other restaurants farther down Ocean Drive, so we headed off.  Those restaurants turned out to not be what we had in mind either, so we headed back toward downtown.  I dropped Jeanie off at a restaurant named Mullet Bay and I headed over to the quick stop to buy myself some Excedrin.  I have found that nothing is as effective in relieving the symptoms of a headache for me as Excedrin.  It turned out that the Menu at Mullet Bay had some interesting possibilities, so we decided to eat there.  What Jeanie had really wanted was a fried shrimp appetizer with remoulade sauce.  What got her in the mood for this was a sample we had tasted at one of the restaurants downtown.  Unfortunately, when we had gone into that restaurant, it looked a bit sleazy, the service was slow, and the only offered the shrimp as a full meal.  While Mullet Bay had some shrimp appetizers, they didn't have a fried shrimp appetizer on the menu.  Usually, I am the shy one who doesn't make special requests and Jeanie is the one who isn't hesitant.  For some reason, on this particular day, we switched roles.  I told the waitress that what Jeanie really wanted was a fried shrimp appetizer.  The waitress informed us that while there wasn't one on the menu, they did in fact offer one, although not with a remoulade sauce.  I wasn't that hungry, so we ended up ordering the shrimp and a Vidalia onion rings appetizer, which came with a spicy horseradish dipping sauce for us to share.  Jeanie had also asked for some ranch dressing as a dip.  When the food arrived, I had another inspiration - I suggested trying to mix the horseradish dipping sauce with the ranch dressing.  It turned out to be very similar to the remoulade sauce at the other place and was quite tasty!

I should mention that there was one other thing that Jeanie was in the mood for - a fruity tropical frozen adult beverage.  What Jeanie really wanted was a banana daiquiri like we had on our honeymoon in  Jamaica - one made with real bananas and ice cream.  Unfortunately, all the restaurant could offer was either a peach or banana drink made with Island Breeze mix.  I lobbied for the banana and Jeanie demurred.  Sadly, Jeanie wasn't too crazy about the drink, but happily, I was.  Between the Excedrin, the food and the drink, by the end of lunch I was feeling much better.

After lunch, with Jeanie at the wheel, we headed off to visit the local airport - Malcolm Mc Kinnon Airport (KSSI).  I had been to the airport once on a recent night cross country, but had never been in the terminal/FBO building.  It is a very nice facility with both a Hertz and Avis rental counter, a pilot briefing room, a pilot rest lounge, clean bathrooms and even a small pilot store.

After I got my fill of the airport, we realized that it was now after 2:00pm so we headed back up to Christ Church.  Not only did we get to see the inside of the church, but we got a wonderful tour / history from the docent.

After leaving the church, we decided to go visit neighboring Sea Island, but we didn't get very far as we didn't realize until we got there that visitors and sightseers are not permitted as the entire island is accessible only to homeowners, club members and guests of the resort.

By this time we were both ready to head home, so we did.

Overall, we had a lovely day.

I was very taken with St. Simons.  I found it to be much more of what I think Fernandina should be.  I found the downtown area to be more inviting than downtown Fernandina and found the island itself to be more accessible, attractive and interesting.  St. Simons appears to embrace visitors, yet doesn't seem "tacky" like some tourist destinations can be.  Fernandina on the other hand seems to resent visitors (and airplanes) and seems determined to hold on to its blue collar mill town heritage - even if it kills it.  Jeanie felt that downtown Fernandina was more quaint, cleaner and had a better selection of interesting / good restaurants and bars, although she did agree that the island was lovely and hospitable.

PS. As a note, I had trouble deciding which site to use for the main St. Simons link at the top of the entry, as none of them were exactly what I was looking for.  Other sites that also seemed interesting included http://www.gacoast.com/ssi.html which I think is the best of the general sites, http://www.saintsimons.com/ which is not very pretty, but seems to have good content, http://www.explorestsimonsisland.com/ and http://www.stsimonsguide.com/ which both seem like they may be a bit ad biased, and http://www.world66.com/northamerica/unitedstates/georgia/stsimonsisland which is has good short summary information, but a bit light on detailed content.

Since I was already ordering stuff from Newegg (the new hard drive for the backup PC) I finally decided to break down and order some upgrades for the main PC.  Nothing earth shaking, but enough to provide a reasonable - for the price - improvement in performance.

The upgrades included:

An A-DATA 1GB 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Desktop Memory Model ADBGC1A16 - Retail to replace the existing 512 MB (2 x 128MB) of PC2100 DDR memory.

An Intel Pentium 4 2.8 Northwood 2.8GHz Socket 478 Processor Model RK80532PE072512 - OEM to replace the existing 2.2 GHz Celeron processor.

and

A BFG Tech BFGR5500OC GeForce FX 5500 128MB DDR AGP 4X/8X Video Card - Retail to replace the existing 32MB MX-400 NVidia card.

Total bill (after a $35 dollar rebate for the video card) came to less than $140.00.  Much cheaper than I could get a new PC for, and none of the hassle of having to reinstall all of the software that would have come with a new PC.  If I were to get motivated, I could reduce the cost of the upgrade even more by selling the old processor and video card on Ebay - although I doubt I'll get that motivated - more likely they will just gather dust along with all the other bits I have stashed in my parts bins.

Most amazing of all to me, all three upgrades installed without a hitch.  I decided to retain the existing processor heat sink, but I did take the time to scrape off the gunk from the bottom of the old heat sink and to use a liberal glop of new heat sink compound.  I did actually take the precaution of wearing a grounding wrist strap for the installation of the processor and memory.  I elected to remove both of the old DIMMs and just go with the new memory, as I didn't want to slow down overall memory access by leaving one of the old chips in.  I actually did read the directions first before installing the video card, which guided me to remove the old video driver prior to installing the new card, then canceling the Windows new hardware wizard and running the install from the supplied CD.

The machine still won't be blazing, and won't be beefy enough to run any games made in the last couple of years, but it definitely does handle my mundane daily chores with a bit more zip.

One of the hard drives on the new Vista machine is near death.  The drive is generating all sorts of errors when you try to read from it.  The drive in question is not new to the machine; I have had it for years - I estimate it has run for ~30,000 hours.  This drive, as with all of the drives other than the new system drive are just used to back up data from our main home PC.  I decided to purchase a new drive to replace the one that is almost dead.

The replacement drive I ended up with is a 400GB Samsung 3.5" HD403LJ SATA 3.0 drive from Newegg costing around $85.00.  Not to date myself, but I can remember when a 15MB (yes, Megabyte!) drive weighed over fifty pounds, was the size of a file cabinet drawer and cost thousands of dollars.

My thought was that I will use it to replace both the 180GB drive that is failing, as well as a 200GB drive which also has many hours on it.  I'll set the 200 gig drive aside to use as a replacement when one of my other 200's dies.

My first question was whether to partition the 400GB into two 200GB partitions.  I decided to leave it all as one big partition.

The format went fine, and the configuration of the drive as a shared drive seemed to work fine.  I could see the drive from the other home computer.  I could map it to a drive letter.  But when I tried to access it, I received an access denied error.

Long story short, to get it to work, I ended up having to modify the security settings on the shared drive to match one of the other drives in the system.  This required creating two new Users groups and a new Everyone group.  Quite the royal pain.  Seems like Micro$oft would have created a nice little wizard to help users with this task.  Oh well, it appears to be working now.

As an aside, I did also find a number of nice utilities that can read the S.M.A.R.T. data on the disk drives.  For the XP machine, I went with HD Tune and for the Vista machine, HDDlife.  Both were free and I like HD Tune better, but it didn't run on Vista.  HDDlife is okay, but the free version is quite crippled.  I also installed SpeedFan on the XP machine in preparation for some future upgrades.  More on that in the next few days...

I was just reminded that I neglected to mention something in my Form 5 renewal post...

Part of the Form 5 renewal includes flying "under the hood."  "The hood" generally refers to a device worn by the pilot to limit his or her view so as to prevent being able to see outside of the aircraft.  The purpose of this is to simulate flying in IMC (Instrument Meteorological Conditions) i.e. in the clouds.  While not legal for non-instrument rated pilots, VFR pilots sometimes accidentally find themselves "in the soup" and without training, they typically lose control of the aircraft within minutes.   In the old days, this was accomplished by donning various visor type devices.  These were awkward and uncomfortable.  Some bright person came up with the idea of creating a pair of glasses which had all but a small area at the bottom frosted - thus accomplishing the goal of preventing the pilot from seeing outside, but in a much more comfortable fashion.

The only problem with this approach comes when the pilot in question's near vision isn't what it used to be, and he needs a little bit of optical assistance.

Last time, I tried wearing the foggles over my glasses.  It worked, but wasn't the best solution.

This year, I got a bright idea.  I ordered a pair of Optx 20/20 Stick On Reading Lenses For Glasses.  While you can buy them from your favorite pilot shop for $20 bucks or so, you can also get them from eBay for 1/2 that price.  I got mine from the eBay store of CC-Cards-N-Stuff for $12.99 delivered.  I had to guess a bit as to the proper strength to order, but after a little experimentation with a few pairs of retail reading glasses at the local drug store, I guessed that the +1.25 strength would be best for me, and fortunately, I was right.

While I plan to just leave my Optx stuck on to the foggles, they are pretty cool in that they just adhere with water, so you can move them from one pair of glasses to another simply by wetting them and then placing them on another pair.

When the Linux server was revived, one of the things that I didn't get working was the UPS signaling.  I kept getting a message that the getty was respawning too rapidly and I couldn't figure out how to fix it, so I just disabled the entry in /etc/inittab.

I decided to play with it a bit today, and I partially fixed it - at least it's back to functioning the way it used to, which wasn't quite right, but close enough.  The not quite right part is that if I call powstatd as part of the boot process (i.e. from /etc/rc.d/rc3.d) as soon as I log in, the sytem shuts down as if the UPS were sending a low battery signal.  However, if I run powstatd manually after logging in, it runs fine.  My guess is that this is a bug in powstatd, but I don't have the interest to install the latest version right now, and it really doesn't matter, since once the system shuts down if the battery goes low, I have to manually power it back on, so I just restart the UPS daemon after I do so.

As to the specifics of the problem, the initial symptom was that the console would generate the following message:

INIT: Id "S0" respawning too fast: disabled for 5 minutes

This appeared to be a problem with how the serial port was configured, so I tried a whole bunch of different settings for S0 in /etc/inittab with no luck.  I searched through /etc/gettydefs and tried calling different stanzas in /etc/inittab with no luck.

I thought maybe there was a problem with the physical port not reporting its UART correctly, so I tried running the setserial command with various parameters with no luck.

Somehow, it finally occurred to me to see if maybe the problem was that even though there is only one serial port on the back of the system, that it was configured as Com1 rather than Com0, and maybe I should change the line in /etc/inittab from:

S0:2345:respawn:/sbin/uugetty ttyS0 F38400

to

S1:2345:respawn:/sbin/uugetty ttyS1 F38400

That fixed the respawning message, but still didn't get the powstatd running correctly.

I did some more digging, and discovered that I also had to modify /etc/powstatd.conf from:

# Watch /dev/ttyS0
watch ttyS0

to

# Watch /dev/ttyS1
watch ttyS1

I still haven't fixed the locale error message when httpd starts, nor have I fixed Xwindows, but I am happy now that the UPS signaling is working again.

What more could you ask for...

A Cappella singing and making fun of lawyers - all in one!

Actually, they parody more than just the legal profession, although most of their material is legally themed.

If any place in the world was going to have a bunch of really talented singing lawyers, a good guess would be that it would be Austin, Texas - which is exactly where this group hails from.

For more information, as well as links to a few samples, check out http://www.singers.com/contemp/barandgrillsingers.html

I stumbled upon this really cool site this morning...

It's an archive of Dilbert strips going back to the summer of 1996.

Here's the URL: http://pag.csail.mit.edu/~adonovan/dilbert/

Both the front door to the house and the door to the garage hadn't been closing well.  When you went to swing the door shut, it would hang / stick when the lock striker hit the strike plate.  If you swung the door hard enough, it would latch, but, that didn't seem like a good long term solution.

I guess I must have read a hint somewhere along the way, although I can't remember when or where.  I don't think I am creative enough to have devised this solution on my own.

Anyway, the solution was quite simple.

I simply took a regular #2 pencil, and rubbed the point of the pencil all over the striker - think "colored in" all of the metal surfaces.  I believe the rubbing accomplished two things:

1. The rubbing removed any corrosion from the surface of the striker, reducing the friction between the striker and the lock body and between the striker and the strike plate
2. The graphite in the pencil acts as a lubricant

Regardless of the hows and whys, the doors latch easily and smoothly now.

For years, I have used StatBar as my Windows status bar.  It is a great little program - small, simple, and free.  I only have two complaints with it: it hasn't been updated in years and it is a bit of a CPU hog.  It also doesn't have a clock, which is a bit of an annoyance.

For whatever reason, today I decided to look around to see what other options there were.  One program which looked interesting was WinBar.  It is quite similar to StatBar in pretty much all respects, except it has a clock and may be a bit less of a resource hog.  On the down side, it only has indicators for num caps and scroll lock, not for insert.

Since I went to the work of installing WinBar and deactivating the automatic startup of StatBar, I guess I'll use WinBar for a while.

I found one other program which appears to be absolutely amazing - Samurize.  It appears to be incredibly powerful and configurable.  My guess is it could do everything I would want and then some.  Unfortunately, it is a bit too configurable.  I spent a bit of time looking at the site, tutorials, forums, etc., but I'm afraid that it would take me days to figure out how to configure the program to do exactly what I want.  It does appear to be in active development, and appears to have a large community creating plug-ins and added functionality.  The other issue with Samurize is that many of the plug-ins attempt to execute code which is flagged as potentially malicious.  Without knowing the authors, and without the sort of self-policing provided by the open-source community, I am wary of allowing the flagged code to execute.

While I was searching, I did find a site with a good list of free PC programs to fill various needs: http://www.cronc.com/resources/ is the main page which has links to sub-lists, http://www.cronc.com/resources/recovery-system.php is a list of system type utilities.

So, I learned a few new things today.

You know those challenge dialogs which ask you to look at a distored picture of numbers/letters, decipher them, and type them into a box, something that a human can do fairly easily, but is extremely difficult for a computer to do; typically as a method to prevent automated computer entries into a web page?

Well, those things are called a CAPTCHA, which is based on something called a Turing Test.

Well, doing a Google using CAPTCHA as the search phrase yields lots of hits.  While the top rated ones seem to be related to CAPTCHAs written for .asp or .net, if you hunt, you can find ones for perl or php.  Here is a link to a php script.

Doing a search using: captcha movable yields lots of hits including a nice implementation specifically for Movable Type written by James Seng called MT-Scode.  Its installation is a bit more involved, and requires the installation of a couple of additional modules on the web server.

MT-Scode Quick Links:
- Download latest mt-scode
- You need GD for this plugin to work
- You also need GD.pm

I also found the very interesting Six Apart Guide to Comment Spam which frowns on CAPTCHAs because of their negative effect on accessibility, but offers lots of good suggestions to managing/mitigating comment/trackback spam.

The big question is my mind is...

Do I implement a CAPTCHA, which would take quite a bit of time up front but which should allow me to re-enable the subscriptions and significantly reduce the time I spend removing spam, or do I just spend the few minutes a day with MT-Blacklist to delete the spam and rebuild the blog?

Considering that I've yet to have someone complain about the removal of the subscriptions - or the fact that they didn't work for so long, at least for the moment, I think I'll stick with the latter, but at least I've now documented an alternative, should I get inspired...

So, another vexing problem solved!...

I guess I've been living under a rock for a while, or maybe this is an indication that I'm getting old and am no longer "with it..."

I just discovered the phenomena of Social Bookmarking.  I guess this is somehow related to Social Networking, which I also don't understand.

Anyway, there are loads of sites that focus on this including: 

http://www.blinkbits.com

http://www.blinklist.com

http://blogmarks.net

http://co.mments.com

http://www.connotea.org

http://del.icio.us

http://de.lirio.us

http://digg.com

http://cgi.fark.com

http://feedmelinks.com

http://www.furl.net

http://www.linkagogo.com

http://ma.gnolia.com

http://www.newsvine.com

http://www.netvouz.com

http://www.rawsugar.com

http://reddit.com

http://www.scuttle.org

http://www.shadows.com

http://www.simpy.com

http://smarking.com

http://www.spurl.net

http://tailrank.com

http://wists.com

http://myweb2.search.yahoo.com

WLW, in its most recent beta, has added support for tagging, which should help more easily integrate social bookmarking into more blogs.  I think I'll have to spend some more time playing with the feature, as I'd like to be able to automatically insert multiple tags as illustrated by This post on GeekCapital.com, but for a start, here's one: 

I just found another interesting option for performing Internet searches: SearchWeaver.  With SearchWeaver, you can

1. Search Multiple Websites

• You can select multiple websites/search engines to search from each category.
• After selecting the website(s), you have the option to set it as the default selected websites for that category.

2. Search Multiple Keywords

• After selecting the website(s) to search, you have the option to search up to ten (10) keywords at a time.

3. Show Results in Tabs

• Most search results can be shown in tabs for easy and fast access to different websites. It also includes the option to re-search keywords.

Pretty cool... check it out.

PS. The numbered, bulleted list above was copy/pasted directly from the SearchWeaver web site into this entry - yet another way cool feature of Windows Live Writer.

I have continued to play with Windows Live Writer, and I must say, the more I use it, the more impressed I am.

The major new "feature" I discovered?

When you modify an entry which has already been saved and published, and then (re)publish it, WLW updates the entry in Movable Type.  With SharpMT, editing an entry and posting it results in a second entry being added to the blog.

I did also notice that the last entry did not have a Trackback link.  I don't know if that is because I reconfigured the default in MT to turn Trackback off - no one ever used the feature for anything other than spam - or if because it is another MT unique feature and therefore not supported by WLW.  I am going to set the Trackback in the Properties tab to "Allow" to see what happens with this post...

I am not putting SharpMT down - it still has a lot going for it, especially the full support of all of the unique features of Movable Type, but, I am impressed with WLW.  If only it supported Extended Entry...

There are a slew of flight tracking sites available for free on the Internet, my newest favorite being...

Do you have money sitting in your regular checking or savings account gathering more dust than interest?

Here is an updated compendium of interesting flying related sites, new ones listed first...

This is just too cool (thanks to Aunt Tim for the tip)...

I am making a concerted effort to get the age and number of unread messages in my personal inbox down to a reasonable number...

I've always enjoyed the interesting words used in the English language to refer to groups of things (especially animals)...

I have learned quite a bit about capacitors over the last few days...

Okay, so things are never quite as simple as they "should" be...

The Cheap Monitor Extension Cable Is Gone...

I had a bit of a challenge installing AvantoGo onto my notebook computer today...

I really love AvantGo...

I spent a couple of hours today trying to resolve a strange behavior on my Kyocera 7135...

Jeanie and I have been using OneSuite for over a year now, and we're really happy with it...

So, now that I switched to BellSouth, my outgoing email on my server stopped working...

I just installed my new BellSouth FastAccess DSL with the 2WIRE Home Gateway...

I was writing an e-mail to someone early this morning - early because I couldn't sleep last night, but that's a different story - and wanted to use the above expression, when it occurred to me that I didn't know which spelling to use...

I had the strangest problem with Quicken over the past few days...

Sometimes the most vexing problems turn out to have the simplest solutions...

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Posted by David at 06:00 PM | Permalink | Categorized under: A day in the life, Reference | Tickle me