All posts by rksmith

There Are Better Things Than Snowblowers

General

The storm overnight brought snow and then wind and then big drifts of snow. I fired up the snowblower this morning at 7 and cleaned the driveway, in front of the mailbox, and the sidewalks before Nina left for the Womens Correctional Center at 7:30 a.m. I left for church at about 8:45 and thought I’d put the garage door down, but when I got home at 12:15 the door was up and the snow was now seriously in the garage. Out came the snowblower and the foot-high drift in the garage along with the snow on the driveway were moved onto the front yard. It stopped snowing about 2 this afternoon but some serious wind continued to blow through most of the afternoon. This is Nina’s week to go back up the prison for meetings this evening, so once again I was out with the snowblower moving the drift from in front of the garage and then cleaning off the front porch and walkway before she had to leave at 6:30. I’m tired this evening! It’s now about 7:30 p.m. and another small storm is making its way through Pocatello and eastward. The winds are out of the south at about 20 mph, down considerably from the 35-40 mph winds this afternoon. Whatever happens, I’m through blowing snow for the day! It’s about this time of the year when I decide once again that there are better things than snowblowers — like living where there isn’t any snow? That would also leave Kentucky out of the picture, wouldn’t it, Jim?

Lots Of Little Stuff

General

The storm that was supposed to arrive tonight seems to be here. It’s about 9 p.m. and the rain started about a half-hour ago. It’s still too warm for snow but that’ll change in the next hour or so. Rain before snow means very slick roads tomorrow morning. Meanwhile, Denver is whomping up on New England (much to Nina’s dismay) in the NFL playoff game. It’s been a fairly quiet day.

We went to town around noon to run errands. I wanted to go to the Sprint store to see about a new phone but the helper person was distinctly unhelpful. She couldn’t figure out how to access my account and the person who could help was “too busy”. I left with little useful information. I’ll call Sprint customer service one of these days and get a detailed explanation on my account so that I’ll know what’s possible when I go back to the store. The new Treo phone really looks nice, but the price is quite high. That was a very frustrating visit to the Sprint store! Nina did a little grocery shopping at Fred Meyers and we came back home for the rest of the day. I’ve been primarily doing computer work since then. I updated software on my computer, on Nina’s computer, on the iMac Mini, and on the two Linux servers. So far all of that has gone OK. For some reason, a couple of programs on Nina’s laptop have lost their link with the start menu, so I’ll need to reinstall them tomorrow after she’s finished working on her talk for tomorrow at the Womens Correctional Center (we’ve been kind of asked to stop using the term “womens prison” for some reason). She’s talking both tomorrow morning and tomorrow evening. Today is Madison’s birthday. Happy Birthday, Madison!

A New Backup System

General, Technical

Now that a number of people are running web logs on my server, it was time to put in place a much better backup process. I don’t want to lose all those good words (or pictures)! I spent the evening figuring out how to make a nightly copy of all the files associated with all the weblogs. While it isn’t particularly rocket science, it did take a lot of trial and error and in the process, was a good learning experience for me. Now all of the weblogs are copied, compressed, and stored on a separate computer every morning about 1 a.m. The entire process takes about a half-hour and results in a backup copy of about a gigabyte of data. Tomorrow I’ll figure out how to shove that information off to a couple of CD’s so I can once a week make an archival copy. The other choice is to figure out how to have my iMac Mini write the whole backup to a DVD. That might be even more interesting.

At Macworld last week, among a host of other announcements, was an announcement of a new upgrade to the Apple operating system. I’m now two versions behind, so it’s time to do an upgrade. With the new version comes a very nice scripting and automation tool and that could be the ticket to automatically write the DVD once a week in the middle of the night (as long as an empty DVD is in the drive??).

Previously I would make a backup of the web server every couple of weeks, or when I remembered. Now it’ll get backed up every morning and a hard drive problem will no longer be catastrophic. Maybe that’ll help me sleep better at night?

A Picture Share!

General



A Picture Share!

Originally uploaded by Roland K Smith.


I took this as I was on my way to work this morning.

It took three times to get this picture sent to the blog (I’m editing the post because typing on the phone is so painful). The first time I sent it was as I was waiting for the train. The phone went through the whole process and then gave me an error message saying I had to try again later. Of course, the message was lost. The second time I tried when I had some spare time this morning never arrived. The picture is on Sprint — but it never got to Flickr or to my blog. Over lunch I figured that problem out. It seems that my phone can’t store the full email address and chops off the last three characters. The full email address is 35 characters long (!!) and the phone can only store 32 characters maximum for an e-mail address. The phone won’t allow me to call up the address and then edit it. I have to type in the entire address every time. That’s a major bummer. This old phone is missing a bunch of capability available in newer phones. Definitely time to upgrade. I think I need a phone with a keyboard.

So I went on the SprintPCS web page to see what phones might be available. It wants my zip code. Mind you, I’ve already logged in and they know my name (it’s displayed at the top of the page). I enter the zip code and Sprint tells me that service is available in my area and I should go to the Sprint store to see what phones might be available. You’d think that by now companies would be a bit smarter than that, but obviously telecom companies didn’t qualify for smart.

Having Fun With the Blog

General

Posting a picture from the camera phone is working quite well — as you can see from the one picture that I’ve posted. The phone, on the other hand, doesn’t work so well. It’s about two years old and has the capabilities from way back then. Writing text on the phone is, well, painful. The phone doesn’t do text messaging — it can receive them in a kind of a funky way, but can’t send them. So writing some text to go along with the picture takes a very long time and is quite frustrating. For instance, the phone wants to capitalize every word! So I have to put in two spaces at the end of a word and then backspace so the phone thinks I’m correcting a mistake and doesn’t insert a upper-case letter. I think it’s time to get a new phone. I’ll do some looking over the next couple of weeks to see if anything catches my fancy. Now that phone numbers are portable, I can go to any carrier and keep my phone number.

I was also thinking about a way to take pictures or video while driving. I did a search on camera window mounts and came up with a couple of interesting options, such as this one which hooks onto the headrest (sometimes this URL doesn’t load — try again). I could mount either the video camera or my digital camera on this thing. I’ve a remote control for both of them…. I could take a picture just as I crash while paying more attention to the camera than to the road! We’ll see what happens. My commute to work is 5.3 miles and takes between 12 and 14 minutes. The time difference has nothing to do with traffic — there’s never sufficient traffic to make a difference. The variable is that I cross a set of railroad tracks on the way. Sometimes I have to wait a few minutes for a train to pass. Occasionally it’s a long wait, particularly for trains coming into town as they are slowing down and sometimes stop before clearing the crossing. There are six stop signs going to work and five coming back. I don’t have to deal with any other traffic control. About two-thirds of the way the speed limit is 25 mph or less. There’s a half-mile stretch of 45 mph after the railroad tracks and before Ross Park. The rest of the drive is 35 mph. I think a video of the commute would be a useful activity (grin)….