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,

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.

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 absolute