Does this still work

Its been years, does this still work?

Fire Rant

        Over the past few weeks there has been a fire burning through the Lake Tahoe area. The fire came extremely close to my family’s house. I was reading news reports and one had an interview with someone that lived only a few streets away talking about how he could hear the fire coming. Well I figure the house is gone and I call my dad to let him know that all that work he did rebuilding the house would be gone but on the bright side he could correct those things he felt he never got right. My dad being the ball like he is was already looking through magazines of prebuilt log cabin homes that can be delivered. Let to the real reason of this rant......Google.

        Google you say...bah, they didn’t start the fire. True. However in tried to ascertain where the fire was and if I still had a place to visit in the winter I fired up Google Earth and Google Maps. Either one showed the burn area or the fire. That’s OK I thought, maybe they will update their stuff over night so I check the next morning, nada. In fact I have checked every day and still no updated images. Here we have a great tool to ascertaining the damage of natural disasters and it is not used. Instead I had to sit on hold for hours on the emergency damage line that had been set up for people who were out of town and needed to check to see if their houses had burned down.

        Now satellites in Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) have a period of up to 4 hours. Even if the satellite was further out, there is really no reason that in a 24 hour period google couldn’t have gotten updated images for the area. Actually the way Google Earth works, Google didn’t need updated images, California State Government could have hosted the updated imagery and all they had to do was publish a url that Google Earth could use to get images for that area. The vehicles are already in space taking pictures so why would it be so difficult to get them out in times of natural disasters? Even if the IC was afraid to show pictures, they could degrade the images to they looked like the other stuff used by Google. I just keep hoping that someday the 21st century will really arrive (Damn kids and their packets networks....)

No such thing as a free safe

        My friend Lucy Furr, after going through a divorce, is selling (actually sold) her house and has moved to the land of spells and fairies. Before she left she asked me if I wanted her gun safe. It is the big massive safe that would be great to have to store important papers and such. I have wanted a safe for the house since moving in but for whatever reason it just never bubbled up to the top of the priority list. Anyhow Lucy calls me and says that the movers just picked up the safe and they are on the way to my house. In all my excitement I forgot to ask about what is the combination to the safe. So I press redial her phone number and ask “What is the combo...” and her response is “Well the combo is in my speed safe, let me call you back.”

        The movers show up to my house with the safe and we get the safe “safely” (haha) put in the garage when Lucy calls and says “I’m just finishing up with the police. I can’t seen to find my speed safe. I think it has been stolen.” Great. Now I have a big safe in my garage that is so safe that no one can get into it. Lucy show up at the house with some great news, she is sure she remembers the first and last numbers and is pretty sure that the second number is in the fifties. Well how hard could it be to try ten different combinations to find the correct one. Well some time later after trying both the fifties and the thirties and still no luck we figure that maybe she isn’t really sure of the first and last numbers. Well how hard can it really be to open an S&G lock without any idea what numbers to use. I get the bright idea that I’m going to grab a stethoscope and see if I can crack the safe. Let’s just say I’m not quitting my day job anytime soon for a life of safe cracking. While this is going on, Lucy calls the manufacture of the safe to see if they can give up the magic digits. The call goes something like this. “No, I didn’t register the safe”, “Yes there is a silver label on it.”, “No, its pretty messed up, I can’t read the serial number off of it.”, “Locksmith, yeah I can look them up. Thanks.”

        About this time it is getting late and Lucy needs to get on the road if she is going to make it back to spell and fairy land. So now I have this big safe, kind of like an adult grab bag, The plan now is when Lucy returns from spell/fairy land next time, she will be accompanied by a lock smith with a drill. At this point I wonder what I can get on a trade-in of a *hmm* slightly damaged safe. To be continued......

Power

        This weekend we had the sheer joy of having the power go out, for thirteen hours. According to Southern California Edison web page they strive to have 99.98% availability of power. That means they can have 1.75 hours a year of outages which they have blown this year. If they have no more outages then they will be at 99.85%. More importantly, my life without electricity is very boring. At one point I was sitting on my normal place on the couch where I normally watch TV except for the fact the room was completely dark. The surprising thing was how many things I do around the house require electricity and how lost I was with out it. We could hear our neighbor run a generator so I guess I’m not the only one with issues when there is no power. This event did make me decide to look into different ways of suppling the house with power but much to my dismay generators are still really expensive and it appears solar still has ways to go before it is really viable.

Vacuum Cleaners

        I must be totally domesticated at this point in my life to be writing a blog entry about buying a new vacuum cleaner (can you believe it ladies, my pale, computer programmer body has already been snatched up, sorry). This all started a few weeks ago when I was doing some house cleaning and noticed that the vacuum’s hose attachment hose had some holes in it and generally it was not providing much in the way of suction. I used some electrical tape to “repair” the hose and I took the vacuum apart to pull all the clogged dog hair out of it. That is when I got the idea to get a new vacuum. After doing some research on the web I decided I was going to be tool of the brain sucking marketing blob and get a Dyson. I figure I already use a mac and drive a bmw so joining the Dyson lunatic fringe wouldn’t be all that traumatic. After I got it home I decided I would do the head-to-head challenge between the Dyson and old vacuum (Eureka I believe). I first vacuumed the floors with the old vacuum and then went over the same area with the Dyson and much to my surprise the Dyson did pick up quite a bit more dirt and dog hair that the Eureka had left behind. Maybe there is some truth to all the hype around them Dysons. The other nice thing is the Dyson should not get clogged up with all the dog hair that normally reeks havoc on our vacuums. As sad as it might seem, this really was the highlight of my day unless you could watching a RAID container rebuild itself over the course of 12 hours because of the scheduled and unannounced power outage.

        Honestly...I promise to hit the fatherhood topic shortly......

Limits on lengths of posts

        Well I just found out the hard way that there is a limit on the length of a post that MJ will upload to blogger. I had this great paragraph on feelings of fatherhood that is now lost to the great bit bucket, Charlie Brown. Basically what it said was my wife is having our first kid and will start blogging more about that experience and that my friends with kids can follow along and probably understand and my friends without kids and see what this experience does to someone like me.

        Time to go file another bug report with MJ. Later.

Follow-up and other ramblings

It has been a few days since I have posted anything so this update is going to kind of scattered all over the place. First lets start with an update to my MacJournal adventures. After I blogged about tags applied in MJ not being copied to blogger I submitted a bug and Dan Schimpf from MJ got back to me the next day to let me know that is a new feature that will be out in the next point release of MJ. I enjoy when a software is that on the ball with stuff so I went ahead and purchased MJ and will continue to use it. Lets see how that works out.

        Speaking of software, the Omni Group makers of such fine software as Omnigraffle and Omniplan are working on a new piece of software called Omnifocus. It is supposed to help people implement David Allens Getting Things Done (GTD) way of task management. They also hope to have a stripped down version for the iPhone. I am hoping that this is another quality piece of software and can’t wait for it to be released. Plus I’m getting tired of checking there website every half hours like a junkie needing a fix.

        Other fun this week was the complete crash of my hard drive at work with 3 years of work and email stored on it. Yes I know I should have back-ups but my excuse is due to the sensitive nature of my work I didn’t want a lot of copies floating around on the network.....That is my story and I’m sticking with it. While I wait for a new machine at work which could take up to a couple of months I limp along with borrowed equipment and unstable network connections...so much fun.

Well Good Night

It looks like labels from MacJournal don’t get transmitted to blogger correctly. That is a serious bummer. :( I guess the dream of just using blogging software like MJ to completely manage a blog is too much to ask for in the 21st century.

Test Post

After threatening to all weekend, I finally got around to setting up a blog on blogspot and give MacJournal a try. This is just the first random test post to see how well this works out.