Monthly Archives: April 2006

Paradoxes

General

Soda Springs Attempted Jailbreak

My brother sent me information about two Green River Wyoming men shooting themselves in the hand on a dare (I’m not sure how long the link will be good). Just to show that Green River, Wyoming, doesn’t have the corner on people not functioning on all their brain cells, see the accompanying article from the Idaho State Journal on April 26, 2006. I grew up in Soda Springs but luckily escaped with most of my gray matter intact, no matter what anyone says.

We definitely have spring weather in Pocatello. We had delightful weather on Saturday and we spent a good part of the day outside working in the yard. We have a huge infestation of voles that have done some serious damage in the yard. It’s now eradication time along with somehow resurrecting the grass from their nefarious activites under the snow. Saturday evening mom and dad drove over from Soda Springs and we went to a Michael Ballam concert at the new Jensen Center. It was just him and his piano as he told us stories from his life and sang songs related to those stories. He has the ability to make it seem that it was just you and him and everyone else was just kind of listening in. We’ve decided we need to drive down to Logan for some of the performances of the Utah Festival Opera which he founded. It’s only about 90 minutes south of here and the lineup this year all look interesting to me.

Young men shooting themselves in the hand and kids trying to stage a jailbreak contrasted with the marvelous music in the Jensen Center. The paradox — highly contrary conditions — of these events is another thing that makes life interesting here in southeastern Idaho. Happy seventeenth birthday, Stephanie!


Goodbye, Aunt Bernita

General

My aunt Bernita has passed away. She had been in failing health for a few months and while this isn’t entirely unexpected (none of us get out of this life alive, anyway), it is still sad. Aunt Bernita was married to my mother’s next older brother Art. He died of a heart attack when I was ten years old. School had just started for the year and my sisters and I stayed with our grandmother and grandfather Smith in Preston while mom and dad (and my kid brother) went to Utah for the funeral. Trevor is buried in the same cemetery — which is also the place where Nina and I have our burial plots.

Aunt Bernita married twice after that and the last marriage appeared to be a happy marriage for both her and Bryce. I have several memories of Aunt Bernita. She worked for many years for Utah Power and Light and I’m pretty sure she retired from there. She faithfully attended the Gillette Family functions whenever possible and it was fun to visit with her. I don’t remember going very often to her place except for a Thanksgiving dinner where I got scolded for spilling my water (some of my kids can relate to that…!!). She worked at being a part of the Gillette Family and she’ll be missed at the family events. I know that I’ll miss seeing her and visiting with her. Godspeed, Aunt Bernita.

I understand that the funeral will be on Monday in Salt Lake. We’ll be going down and hopefully will be able to take mom and dad with us so that they won’t have to drive down and back by themselves. We can also stop over and see Aunt Marj while we’re there. She’s now in a nursing home after a difficult bout of pneumonia and probably won’t be able to ever go back to living on her own. That’s another difficult transition as well.

Well, this post is all full of dour news! There are bright spots as well. Spring is definitely here and Nina and I are in the middle of building some garden boxes to be put out back. Nina would like to have stuff planted before we leave on vacation on May 12th. In preparation for that trip we’re also working on the motor home getting it ready to go. There are lots of little things to do around the house in preparation as well. I’m looking forward to the trip. Life is good.

Quick California Trip

General

Maker Fair

I was able to work out a business reason to go to San Jose for a couple of days. I have some staff there that I needed to visit and as long as I was going to be there, I might as well attend the Maker Fair at the San Mateo Fairgrounds sponsored by Make Magazine. And, of course, as long as I was there, I could also make a trip to Frys Electronics just in case I needed something. I was pretty sure there would be an Apple Store somewhere that I might be able to visit. All in all, it was a very successful trip!

The picture is from the Maker Fair which was held in San Mateo on Saturday April 22nd and Sunday April 23rd. I set up return flight up in the late afternoon on Saturday so I could go to the fair. It was very interesting and pretty weird at the same time. I’ve put up a picture album from the trip that shows some of the sights at the fair. The idea is that there are people who are very interested in taking stuff apart and making something else out of it — or at least making something. The San Mateo fair was about third in the series. It was interesting looking at some of the exhibits. The fair was well attended and getting close enough to actually talk to people displaying their handwork was difficult. I did spend some time at the Parallax exhibit and took a class on microcontrollers. The $15 class fee included about $80 worth of parts. The project was a device to calculate distance. It was a lot of fun and I spent more money buying more parts…. There were some other microcontrollers on exhibit, but none of the rest had any kind of hands-on capability.

The mall where the Apple store was located had changed character completely from when I was there last. I was last in San Jose in March 2004, two years ago. At that time this mall was a standard, normal, uninteresting mall. There was construction going on when I was there last, but I hadn’t paid much attention to that. Today, this is a nice, upscale mall with at least four times the store space with all of the interesting stores. I managed to spend some money there (not a lot) at the Apple Store, the Discovery Store, Williams and Sonoma, and the Disney Store. It was fun to watch all the people (and on a Friday evening there were a LOT of people to watch!).

Frys also got a little of my money. It is fun to be in a store that has just about everything a person interested in computers would like.

I was also interested in what hadn’t changed! There is still a lot of building space for rent. While technology business has made a good recovery from the bust in 2001, much of the manufacturing moved overseas and there is plenty of inexpensive building space available in the San Jose area. The traffic is once again pretty intense. President Bush flew into Moffet Field on Friday afternoon (I saw Air Force One fly overhead as it was on final approach to the airport) for some kind of a visit to Cisco. All of the roads in the area were closed requiring pretty big detours. Cisco had recommended to their staff that everyone who could work from home to do so that day to reduce the security issues. That took a lot of folks of the roads as well. Nevertheless, there were still plenty of cars on the highway. There is a lot of road construction underway — and most of it was underway two years ago when I was last there. Road construction moves at a very slow pace in California! This is the pretty time of year to be in the Bay area. The hills are green, the trees in bloom, and everything is quite pretty. In a few weeks the hillsides will turn brown and the prettiness will be gone. My favorite Japanese restaurant in Milpitas has been sold. It is supposedly still a Japanese restaurant, but most of the menu is now Chinese food. I’ve now been to that restaurant for the last time. It was a quick trip — not much free time — so I didn’t attempt to get in touch with old colleagues in the area. I will do that next time. There are some people that I’d like to see once again.

I’m of course back home. I got into Salt Lake City about 8:30 on Saturday evening and drove back to Pocatello. It’s a full two and a half hour drive from our house to the SLC airport when there is no traffic. I’m glad to be home for a few days. We’ll be leaving about the 12th of May to go out to Pennsylvania and back (vacation). I’ll be home a few days before going to Manila for two weeks (business). There’ll be plenty to write about as these won’t be Quick Trips!

A Great Set Of Stories

General

Google has a service where you can set up certain words or phrases and once a day Google sends along links to all the newspaper and magazine articles that came along in the past day containing the word or phrase. One of the words I watch is “mormon”. That Google alert lately has mostly been about the HBO series on the polygamists which isn’t even worthy of a further mention in my blog. Occasionally something interesting shows up … and this time it was a blog from a journalist for the East Valley Tribune published in Scottsdale, Arizona. Slim Smith, a forty-something, single, newspaper writer walked from one end of the Phoenix valley to the other end over a sixteen day period finishing a day or so ago. His Sidewalk Stories along with his own personal blog came up on the Google alert because he spent a part of his Easter Sunday with a Mormon family. That particular entry was interesting, so I went back to the beginning of his trek and read all the way through. It was worth the read — a very enjoyable set of entries.

Perhaps the Tribune is beginning to get it. Blogs have seriously eroded newspaper revenues just as podcasting is now seriously disrupting both TV and traditional radio. There is a significant change happening which is, in some ways, going back to the roots of American journalism. In the early 1700’s, for instance, there were close to thirty newspapers in Philadelphia alone. Each were one or two pages of small print. No advertising. The papers cost about a penny and were sold by kids on street corners. The content was primarily opinion pieces written by the people publishing the paper. If there was any news, it was printed in small boxes on the right sidebar. In other words, the newspapers of that day consisted of the writer’s and publisher’s view and opinion of the news. It was more than a hundred years later before advertising started appearing in newspapers and that’s about the time that newspapers started separating opinion from “news” in order to appease potential advertisers. The Internet has reintroduced that ability — everyone being able to publish their own view and opinion of the news. Some opinions are more valuable than others — but freedom of speech means more than just being able to hear other opinions; it means being able to publish and make known your own opinions. It’s a good change that’s underway. Slim Smith’s trek across the greater Phoenix valley is heartening. Thanks, Google, for bringing it to my attention.

Switch Is Made — Painfully

General, Technical

The switch from CableOne to Qwest is complete, I think. This stuff just shouldn’t be this hard. I started on Saturday thinking I’d be completely switched by Sunday morning. That wasn’t to be so. I think the weblogs have been available only since about 6 p.m. on Monday evening.

WARNING: This now gets long and technical….

The first problem was rearranging the cabling and getting all of the computers to cooperate with each other. In the old arrangement the cable came into the basement storage room, so the cable modem was there along with the wireless router/firewall. The two main servers are also in the basement storage room (it’s much cooler there in the summer time) and all the other computers are in the office upstairs. In the new system, the DSL modem and the wireless router/firewall are in the office by my computer. All the other computers are where they always were. There is one cable going from upstairs to downstairs, so the wireless router/firewall had to come upstairs and an ethernet switch downstairs. It should have been a piece of cake. It wasn’t. After cabling everything up, none of the computers would talk to each other. All of them could get out to the internet, but the inside network was not working at all. I spent a couple of hours going up and down the stairs trying all different kinds of configurations with no luck at all. Finally, because the wireless router/firewall was from Netgear and the ethernet switch was from Netgear, I decided to call their technical support and pay $32.50 for a half hour of support. The support person was in India (often a very bad sign), but they assured me I was talking with a highly-experienced Level Three Technician. They were right. This fellow took a few minutes to understand the configuration and quickly zeroed in on two problems. First, the wireless router/firewall had lost its configuration in all this shuffle. There is a small switch that causes the device to revert to factory default settings. I must have somehow bumped the switch. The second problem was the anti-virus software on all my PC’s in the office. They all have a personal firewall along with anti-virus. As soon as I turned off the personal firewall, everything worked just fine. The $32.50 was well worth it. I should have called a couple of hours earlier!!

After the network had been reconfigured and everything was working with the Qwest network, the next activity was to transfer my domain from CableOne to Qwest. That should also have been easy but it wasn’t. In fact, nothing in this change was easy! I use Network Solutions as the registrar for my domain “rnsmith.com”. They used to have a web page that made moving from one Internet Solution Provider (ISP) to another very easy. When we moved from Colorado Springs to Pocatello, a few clicks on the Network Solutions web page, fill in a few blanks, and the job was done. It must have worked too well, because that link is gone. Now the person doing the switch has to visit several different web pages each of which have a part of the puzzle. This puzzle was beyond me after a while because the instructions on the Qwest website didn’t match up with what Network Solutions wanted to have done. So, it was time to call the Network Solutions help desk. The young lady that took my call was also in India, but she definitely was NOT a Level Three Technician! About 45 minutes later I was no further ahead. Calling Qwest didn’t help, either. They wouldn’t do anything until after I had made the required changes at Network Solutions. However, Qwest did give me enough clues to figure out what had to be changed at Network Solutions for me to eventually get through that process.

So what do these changes have to do with anything? The Internet at the most fundamental level runs on numbers — specifically Internet Protocol (IP) Addresses. These are four groups of numbers separated by periods, such as 192.168.2.25 or something similar. These numbers are hard to remember, so the idea of domain names was invented and a system of converting domain names to IP addresses or IP addresses to domain names was developed. When CableOne was my ISP (Internet Service Provider), the IP address that they rented to me was one out of their pool of addresses. When I changed to Qwest, I was assigned a different IP address. So, I needed to tell all of the address servers around the world that the domain name RNSMITH.COM was now at IP address 71.39.213.121 instead of the old CableOne IP address. Since Network Solutions is the company providing name resolution services for “.COM” domain names, I had to change my data at Network Solutions to say that Qwest was now the authoritative service for converting RNSMITH.COM to an IP address. I further had to change my domain information so that Qwest and not CableOne was the technical provider of services. Once I had the data correct at Network Solutions, Qwest would not make any further entries into their systems until this new information had propogated out from Network Solutions. According to Qwest, this would take a minimum of 24 hours and I would have to wait until Sunday evening to make the rest of the changes.

Sunday evening, I finally saw that the Qwest domain name servers (these are the computers that convert names to addresses and vice versa) were finally responding that they were now authoritative for RNSMITH.COM. So, I went on to their administrative pages and began the process of trying to now say that ninablog.rnsmith.com and james.rnsmith.com, and heather.rnsmith.com … all were being served from IP address 71.39.213.121. Every time I tried to enter the information, it was rejected. I finally called their help desk once again. They couldn’t figure it out either, and got the same responses when they tried to enter the data. So, they took all of the information from me. I needed twelve names set up and associated with my IP address: www, ninablog, james, heather, jaelene, perry, lexie, slocum, pamela, leeann, eileen, and reunion. They assured me that it would be done, but would take four to eight hours to propogate through the system.

I got up this morning to find that it wasn’t done. Another call to Qwest. Repeated all of the information once again. The help desk woman took my cell phone number and said that they would be calling when the problem was resolved. About 10:30, someone from Qwest called and asked for the same information all over again. She didn’t understand what was written in the ticket. She said she’d be calling back later when it was completed. I hadn’t heard anything by 4 p.m. and none of the blogs were reachable, I called Qwest technical support once again. It was again necessary to go through all of the information because the help desk person didn’t understand what was in the ticket. I think it was because the ticket now was very long and the person didn’t want to have to read through the entire history on this ticket. This phone call took 45 minutes with 39 minutes on hold waiting and waiting. All this time I was driving to the CableOne office to return the cable modem and get that service turned off and then over to the hot tub place to return a sump pump, and then back home. Finally, they assured me, all twelve names were working. Just to make sure, I had him call up one of the pages and read me what the first post on the page said. It matched up with what I was expecting. It was about that time I pulled into the garage, came into the house, and verified that all of the weblogs are finally working. BUT!! There was a voice mail message on the home phone number from Qwest. The woman who called me on my cell phone (the number I had asked to be called at) and said that she’d be calling back?? Well, the next call she made to the home phone and not to the cell phone, leaving a message that she needed more information. No wonder at 4 p.m. nothing had happened. Argh!!

The reason for making the switch is first economic — my cost goes down from $124 a month to $58 a month and then performance — at CableOne I was getting about a 1.4mb connection at best and often much slower than that. A Qwest the upper end is 7mb and there is a guarantee of 2.4mb minimum. That should make the weblogs feel a bit snappier. However, I’ve also noticed that Qwest’s method for administering the naming services is very primitive. CableOne had a very slick web interface that worked very, very well. I think that it would take about half the time to move from Qwest to CableOne as moving the other way because there is so much more that I can do myself at CableOne where I’m depending on a technician to do it for me at Qwest. It may be time for me to put up my own name servers and become authoritative for my own domain. We’ll see. I’ve got a couple of more domains that I want to put up. When that happens I might just do the stuff myself and spare me the pain of having to deal with clueless help desks.

This was much too painful and it shouldn’t be. The bright spot was the Netgear Professional Support! It cost me a little money, but the result was that I got top-notch support. It seemed that the rest of the support people were far from useful — more like a “helpless desk”.

Taxing, Taxes, and Refunds

General

The taxes are done. I love electronic filing! I’ve been using H&R Block’s TaxCut program for several years (switched when Intuit put that stupid copy protection scheme on their TurboTax program). Once the program got installed (required their helpdesk to get the installation done — more later on that), I was able to go quickly through the interview and file. Because we’re getting a small refund the process went very smoothly. This is probably the earliest I’ve been done with taxes in many years.

H&R Block sent me a CD in January with the programs ready to be installed as soon as I paid the small fee for the program. I’ve just kept the CD on the desk until time to actually do the taxes. Tonight was the night since the rest of the week is occupied with other stuff and I didn’t want to wait to the weekend to find that I needed a piece of paper that I couldn’t find. So, I popped the CD in and started the install. The system quickly dinged my credit card for the $24.95 charge for the program, got 21% done, and stalled. I finally killed the program and restarted the install. Same place, same thing. So I called their help desk. Several menus and menu selections later, I got to a fast-speaking person who knew exactly what the problem was. “TaxCut and Windows XP don’t like each other,” she said. What? The program is incompatible with one of the most popular operating systems? That turned out to be true. She talked me through turning off a whole bunch of services, rebooting my computer, doing the install, turning the services back on again, and rebooting a second time. Very strange. I’d think that they would have tested this program before issuing it! That was the only glitch, but I’m afraid that my confidence in this program is more than a little shaken. Maybe next year, Intuit gets my $25.00…. While I’m sure that H&R Block pays no attention to anything being said about them on weblogs, they should be!

My dad celebrated his 85th birthday last Sunday. We drove over to Soda Springs to spend the afternoon with them and had a very nice time. A few weeks ago he was feeling quite out of sorts. He had an irregular heartbeat and appeared to be in some pain. Since then he’s gone into the cardiologist who shocked his heart back into rhythm and dad is pretty much back to normal. He’s bought a band saw at a pawn shop in Salt Lake (without a motor) and is rebuilding a motor to make it functional again. I sure hope I’ve got his energy and desire to be up, about, and doing at eighty-five. Way to go, Dad!

A Wonderful Saturday

E-Mail Musings

Yesterday morning I was working on the Smith Family Reunion website, I decided it would be good to go look at a couple of alternatives for where the reunion might be held. It was a very nice day out with warm temperatures and no rain forecast. So, we abandoned all the other Very Important and Necessary tasks, gathered cameras, loaded the car, and headed out. We drove south on US91 through Downey and into Preston. We stopped there at the Arctic Circle to pick up a hamburger for my lunch (Nina brought her own lunch with her). Our first stop was nine miles up Cub River right at the National Forest. There is a guest ranch there that could possibly be a venue for the reunion. I’ve never been on that road before. There were some lovely sights along the road, including an old steam tractor and a house with all kinds of old farm equipment on display, fenced in with a plethora of old metal wheels. Very impressive!

We returned to Preston and drove out to Riverdale. This water park resort could be a very good location. We need to get the date firm and an attendance figure. What if a hundred people are coming? That would overwhelm any of the venues we’re currently considering.

On the way back up route 91, we went off the main road over a steep, winding, rutted dirt road over to Twin Lakes Reservoir. This turned out to be a very pretty place. Nina took a lot of pictures (see her picture album). On these excursions, I navigate and Nina drives. That allows her to stop wherever she wishes to take pictures. We will want to go back there again. For the bird lovers, this area is a bird refuge and there were plenty of birds to watch and photograph.

My final stop was at Downata Hot Springs near Downey. I know of another large family who held their large family reunion there and were quite pleased with the location. Right now this place is fourth of four locations in my opinion, but probably the place that could accomodate the most people of the four.

I would like to do a family history tour as part of this reunion. There is the Smith home in Preston to visit (perhaps the current owner might let us in?). Then up route 91 to Banida where the Nathan and Hannah Smith home is preserved. then over to Treasureton (dirt and gravel road) where the calacite business was located. From there to Cleveland and the old farm house. Finally to the cemetery where they are buried. We could have each of the family heads tell the story of that location. I think this could be very informative. I’d videotape these events and have them for family members on a DVD after the reunion and in a small way pass along this history to future generations.

We had a very good day. I’m looking forward to the reunion and meeting family members. The day was fun. Nina got a lot of great pictures. The reunion is starting to come together in my mind. Indeed a Wonderful Saturday.