‘No Country for Old Men’, Tracfone replacement, ‘Rendition’, wi-fi problem, ‘American Gangster’, security software failure, power failure.
(posted from home)
(this post covers 19-26 March, 2008)
------------------------------------------------------------
Wednesday, 26 March-
This morning we had a power failure. I was in the middle of installing software to report a problem with my PC to the security software vendor so that was clobbered. Labashi had been updating her to-do list but had done a recent save. Oh, yeah—and Labashi’s UPS failed to keep her PC up. It did last long enough for a controlled shut-down but it should have given her the option to continue for up to a half-hour. I think the battery’s about done. I called in the house-power problem and learned I was the only person to call so far so I thought “Here we go again!”. You may remember that we lost our refrigerator last summer because the power to our house failed and was off for a month while we were traveling. But this one turned out to have affected others and the fix was done somewhere else in the neighborhood. We saw the power trucks running back and forth but the drivers only briefly stopped at our house, glanced up at the transformer (I assume to check the fuse), then moved on. Power came up three hours after it failed.
Labashi and I then went into town on a few errands. The primary mission was to pick up some ‘Wholly Guacamole’ at Wal-mart. I LOVE that stuff. While traveling last year we had found a good ‘Yucatan’-brand guacamole in some Canadian Wal-marts so I’ve been looking for it to show up in U.S. Wal-marts. But this ‘Wholly Guacamole’ stuff is even better. And I’ve been in enough Wal-marts lately to find that there are three variations—‘Classic’, ‘Spicy’, and ‘Green Verde Salsa’. I’ve only seen one Wal-mart that carries all three (I think that was Shrewsbury but it might have been Marco Island, FL). The Classic tastes very like a freshly-made guacamole, the spicy is very spicy and the green-verde is a gentle, very-fresh taste. And it’s only $1.88. It’s in the lettuce-and-fresh-veggies case in a box (not a plastic tub).
After returning home with our groceries I fixed a minor problem with the boat numbers on the fishing boat. We had not spaced the numbers out properly on one side of the boat last spring. This was a very minor problem since my registration had been officially reviewed twice in Florida (both times by DCNR officers at ramps) and the officers never said anything about the non-standard spacing. But today at Lowe’s I saw they not only had the correct style of letters and numbers, they also had blanks. So it was a simple fix—just put new numbers over the old, adding two blanks at the appropriate place. Now it’s ‘P-A-blank-numbers-blank-letters’ rather than ‘P-A-numbers-letters’ all strung together.
That evening we watched two more episodes of ‘Twin Peaks’. I don’t know about this one. A little weird but is it a good-weird or a bad-weird? We don’t know yet.
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Tuesday, 25 March-
What the heck is going on? Yesterday Labashi’s PC wouldn’t connect to wireless and I traced that to the MAC filter again. Somehow it had been changed from ENABLE to PREVENT for our addresses so I fixed that. Then this morning the security product on her PC decided the license had expired and shut down the firewall and antivirus. I spent the next few hours in a remote-access session with a technician. He diagnosed the problem as ‘a conflict of some kind’ and we had to re-install the product from scratch to get it back to normal. This was a strange one. The product had done its full-system scan just fine last night and then today up pops this message about ‘activation needed’. The scary part was this: after you click the Activation button, it ran for a few seconds and then just ended with no messages. But I noticed the product now showed a red icon instead of its normal green one. That led to my looking into it and finding the firewall and antivirus product had been shut down, apparently in the erroneous belief that my year-long license had expired only 60-some days into the year. Nice.
That afternoon I decided I needed a walk and since I needed to return a DVD I’d just walk the five miles to the local video store and have Labashi pick me up if I didn’t feel like walking back. It was a windy day around 50 degrees and I had a headwind most of the way to the store but the walk back was very pleasant. I’ve done this walk a few times and normally learn that I have eight- or nine-mile feet I’m trying to use on a ten-mile walk. In other words I normally end up with blisters or hot-spots on my feet. But I guess my four-mile walks this winter toughened my feet a bit.
That evening we watched the pilot and first episode of ‘Twin Peaks’, the old David Lynch TV series. Too early to tell if we like it.
------------------------------------------------------------
Monday, 24 March-
Today I spent the day zipping around on the motorcycle looking at boats and boating stuff. I learned a few things on the Everglades trip. Perhaps the biggest problem we have is we don’t have enough motor for more than one person plus gear and still get the boat up on plane; we really should have at least a 40, possibly a 50-hp outboard on this boat. Also, I’d prefer a center-console to a side-console layout. When boating shallower water I can see a lot better when standing and the ride on a center-console is drier in windy conditions; the side console, the instruments and my seat get soaked from wind-blown spray kicked up by the boat when the wind is coming from that side. Anyway, it was kind of a boat-dreamer kind of day— I was looking at boats we can’t afford but having a good time doing it.
I first stopped at Bass Pro in Harrisburg. I was looking for quick-releases for the pedestal seats but didn’t like what I found so abandoned that for now. But I did get a look at the new Tracker super-jons. And I don’t like them at all; they don’t look ‘right’ and they’re very expensive for what you get- about $14K for a 17-foot center-console and 40-horse 2-stroke. On the other hand, they had a smallish Mako 18 fiberglass center-console with 115 outboard and they wanted $20K for that package!
I moved on to Ducky’s Boats in Middletown and there I found REAL boats. These guys know what they are doing. They have Sea Ark and Duracraft welded aluminum super-duper-jons. They do a lot of boat modifications. They aren’t a Sea Ark factory but I believe they get hulls in and then customize from there. The Duracraft 1860CC looked perfect— a heavy-duty, near-indestructible center-console with 26-inch-high sides. But with a 50 Yamaha and the trailer it would cost over $16K…. waaay too much for my budget. And simply upgrading our Honda 20 to a Yamaha 50 would cost $4K.
I then rode up to Big Bee Boats above Harrisburg and got similar motor-upgrade prices from a not-very-friendly sales guy ($5875 plus controls and installation). I like the center-console Lowe Roughneck boats they have but, again, it’s too big of a jump for us to upgrade. Maybe we’ll run onto a used deal on one somewhere.
That evening we watched ‘American Gangster’ with Denzel Washington. It’s the story of a classy black gangster who, during the Viet Nam war, figures out how to import heroin directly from Viet Nam using payoffs to get military transportation of the drugs to the US. I’d recommend it though it does have some flaws. The story is a little too slick and some of the photography wasn’t lighted properly.
------------------------------------------------------------
Sunday, 23 March-
Today Labashi and I drove to Chambersburg to visit family for Easter. This morning I had gone through Apples’ less-than-friendly procedure to update the iPod with new music and podcasts so we listened to some of the new music on the way. I’m not much of a music fan but do like to occasionally download music I hear in some movie or TV show. After watching the movie ‘Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus’, I became interested in the Handsome Family and used iTunes to sample their music and ended up buying ‘When That Helicopter Comes’, ‘Stalled’, and ‘My Sister’s Tiny Hands’. And this week I saw a viral video about a guy called Jetman who built and flew a set of jet-powered wings. The music accompanying it was very striking to me and took a few searches to track down—it’s ‘Natural Blues’ by Moby. That led me to sample more Moby and I bought that plus ‘Porcelain’, ‘Find My Baby’, ‘Everloving’, ‘Signs of Love’, and ‘Natural Blues (Perfecto Dub)’. It’s interesting music and good listening on my walks.
We had a great Easter meal at Maypo’s and sat around afterwards catching up on the news and fussing over the new baby in the family before Labashi and I headed home that evening.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Saturday, 22 March-
Well, the laptop is being a pain today. Since uninstalling NetStumbler it refuses to connect to my home network via wireless. That’s not a big deal when I’m at home since I can use my wired connection but lack of wireless would be a major pain if it does that on the road. I spent much of the day trying to get it working again. I finally blundered onto the fix doing something that shouldn’t have made a difference. I have the router set up to only accept wireless connections from our machines. I disabled that filter and suddenly my laptop connected. I re-enabled it and connecting still works. Go figure. I assume something along the line was reset when I disabled the filter. Now I’ll have to check it at another wi-fi hotspot to be sure it will work when I need it.
Later in the afternoon I took a walk—my familiar four-miler along the creek near home and spent the evening on the web.
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Friday, 21 March
Today I started off working with a Tracfone technician to activate my new phone. I made the task more difficult by requesting the transfer of my old number to the new phone rather than just accept a new number. The old one was a CDMA phone with service subcontracted to Verizon, the new one is a GSM phone with service subbed to Cingular. So I know the process will take up to a week as Verizon and Cingular work it out. I was surprised to learn, though, that Tracfone doesn’t know how many minutes I had on the lost phone—they will need two weeks to run programs against their logs to figure out how many minutes to transfer to me. Thank goodness I’m not in a rush. The good news is I think I’ve figured out how to cut my monthly bill even more (to $5 a month) and I don’t have to buy a long-term service card. We’ll see if it works out.
Labashi and I went for groceries in the early afternoon and I spent the latter part of the day doing some software upgrades. I’ve been having a lot of problems with Internet Explorer lockups lately and have started using Opera as my browser--- so far so good.
That evening we worked on the web and then watched PBS’s ‘Now’ and “Bill Moyers’ Journal”. I’ve also found I now have a problem with wireless connectivity. After trying Network Stumbler for the last few weeks I decided I don’t like it and un-installed it earlier today. Since then I’ve been unable to connect wirelessly, probably because I’ve mixed up the laptop by installing multiple wireless managers. (Thank goodness I didn’t try the uninstall while on the road!) I can connect via the wired connection I normally use at home so I can use that to research this problem and to ask for help from TechSupportGuy.com.
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Thursday, 20 March-
Today was sunny but very windy. I spent much of the morning talking with my brother Orat and then later working on the web to figure out the best way to replace my lost cell phone. I had held out some hope my phone was merely lost in the far reaches of the van and had somehow escaped my hurried search but I eliminated that possibility this morning as I went through the van very thoroughly. (Actually, I knew it was probably gone after I pulled up beside a pay phone in Collier-Seminole State Park last week and called my cell phone number and didn’t hear a ring in the van). Today I finally decided I’d simply buy an el-cheapo Tracfone and have the service date and whatever minutes are left on the lost phone transferred to it. I went to Tracfone.com and found the models available in my zip code and googled for independent reviews to decide which model to buy. And when the wind dropped a bit by mid-day I fired up the motorcycle and headed to Wal-mart. There I found a Motorola C139 for $12.88. That should do the trick.
I also stopped in to see my buddies at the York Starbucks and chatted with the assistant manager about motorcycles (he has a Triumph Bonneville). I tried their new Skinny Mocha but found I’m not going to be a fan.
That evening we watched ‘Rendition’, an intriguing film about the U.S. government’s policy of ‘extraordinary rendition’, the Intelligence program wherein accused terrorists are whisked off to secret foreign prisons, held incommunicado, and interrogated/tortured. The extras show the chief architect of the program defending it, saying it has been very successful though the US did indeed make a mistake in taking the prisoners to foreign prisons and having them interrogated by foreign governments. I’ll leave it at that. This one deserves to be seen. It’s not a perfect film but it’s well worth seeing.
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Wednesday, 19 March-
Today was rainy most of the day. I did manage to spend an hour or so cleaning out the van but once the rain started in earnest I retreated inside and to the web and later on made a run to the video store. I also spent an hour talking with Maypo, catching up. Incredibly, my cold or sinus infection or whatever the heck it is continues and today it has been giving me a sinus headache.
That evening we watched ‘No Country for Old Men’, the new Coen-brothers film. It’s a quite striking film but I’m not sure that’s necessarily a good thing. The problem is we see completely innocent people die in such a random manner. They just happen to cross paths with the psychopath. If we have any sense of empathy at all, the world is suddenly a place to be feared. The underlying message: none of us are safe. Stay in your home, hide behind the couch and you STILL may have the bad guy come calling. Stop to help a stranger, get a cattle-bolt in your forehead. So say what you will in praise of the Coen Brothers ‘dark style’ but I have to say, sorry, it’s just titillation and gratuitous violence, about taking our money, manipulating us and leaving us no better for the experience. I suppose it’s enough for the Coens to say it’s a genre film but it seems to me a film like this creates an obligation. Like building up carbon-debt, this film builds up a humanity-debt. Get busy, guys—you have some debt to work off.
==== end of post ========
(posted from home)
(this post covers 19-26 March, 2008)
------------------------------------------------------------
Wednesday, 26 March-
This morning we had a power failure. I was in the middle of installing software to report a problem with my PC to the security software vendor so that was clobbered. Labashi had been updating her to-do list but had done a recent save. Oh, yeah—and Labashi’s UPS failed to keep her PC up. It did last long enough for a controlled shut-down but it should have given her the option to continue for up to a half-hour. I think the battery’s about done. I called in the house-power problem and learned I was the only person to call so far so I thought “Here we go again!”. You may remember that we lost our refrigerator last summer because the power to our house failed and was off for a month while we were traveling. But this one turned out to have affected others and the fix was done somewhere else in the neighborhood. We saw the power trucks running back and forth but the drivers only briefly stopped at our house, glanced up at the transformer (I assume to check the fuse), then moved on. Power came up three hours after it failed.
Labashi and I then went into town on a few errands. The primary mission was to pick up some ‘Wholly Guacamole’ at Wal-mart. I LOVE that stuff. While traveling last year we had found a good ‘Yucatan’-brand guacamole in some Canadian Wal-marts so I’ve been looking for it to show up in U.S. Wal-marts. But this ‘Wholly Guacamole’ stuff is even better. And I’ve been in enough Wal-marts lately to find that there are three variations—‘Classic’, ‘Spicy’, and ‘Green Verde Salsa’. I’ve only seen one Wal-mart that carries all three (I think that was Shrewsbury but it might have been Marco Island, FL). The Classic tastes very like a freshly-made guacamole, the spicy is very spicy and the green-verde is a gentle, very-fresh taste. And it’s only $1.88. It’s in the lettuce-and-fresh-veggies case in a box (not a plastic tub).
After returning home with our groceries I fixed a minor problem with the boat numbers on the fishing boat. We had not spaced the numbers out properly on one side of the boat last spring. This was a very minor problem since my registration had been officially reviewed twice in Florida (both times by DCNR officers at ramps) and the officers never said anything about the non-standard spacing. But today at Lowe’s I saw they not only had the correct style of letters and numbers, they also had blanks. So it was a simple fix—just put new numbers over the old, adding two blanks at the appropriate place. Now it’s ‘P-A-blank-numbers-blank-letters’ rather than ‘P-A-numbers-letters’ all strung together.
That evening we watched two more episodes of ‘Twin Peaks’. I don’t know about this one. A little weird but is it a good-weird or a bad-weird? We don’t know yet.
------------------------------------------------------------
Tuesday, 25 March-
What the heck is going on? Yesterday Labashi’s PC wouldn’t connect to wireless and I traced that to the MAC filter again. Somehow it had been changed from ENABLE to PREVENT for our addresses so I fixed that. Then this morning the security product on her PC decided the license had expired and shut down the firewall and antivirus. I spent the next few hours in a remote-access session with a technician. He diagnosed the problem as ‘a conflict of some kind’ and we had to re-install the product from scratch to get it back to normal. This was a strange one. The product had done its full-system scan just fine last night and then today up pops this message about ‘activation needed’. The scary part was this: after you click the Activation button, it ran for a few seconds and then just ended with no messages. But I noticed the product now showed a red icon instead of its normal green one. That led to my looking into it and finding the firewall and antivirus product had been shut down, apparently in the erroneous belief that my year-long license had expired only 60-some days into the year. Nice.
That afternoon I decided I needed a walk and since I needed to return a DVD I’d just walk the five miles to the local video store and have Labashi pick me up if I didn’t feel like walking back. It was a windy day around 50 degrees and I had a headwind most of the way to the store but the walk back was very pleasant. I’ve done this walk a few times and normally learn that I have eight- or nine-mile feet I’m trying to use on a ten-mile walk. In other words I normally end up with blisters or hot-spots on my feet. But I guess my four-mile walks this winter toughened my feet a bit.
That evening we watched the pilot and first episode of ‘Twin Peaks’, the old David Lynch TV series. Too early to tell if we like it.
------------------------------------------------------------
Monday, 24 March-
Today I spent the day zipping around on the motorcycle looking at boats and boating stuff. I learned a few things on the Everglades trip. Perhaps the biggest problem we have is we don’t have enough motor for more than one person plus gear and still get the boat up on plane; we really should have at least a 40, possibly a 50-hp outboard on this boat. Also, I’d prefer a center-console to a side-console layout. When boating shallower water I can see a lot better when standing and the ride on a center-console is drier in windy conditions; the side console, the instruments and my seat get soaked from wind-blown spray kicked up by the boat when the wind is coming from that side. Anyway, it was kind of a boat-dreamer kind of day— I was looking at boats we can’t afford but having a good time doing it.
I first stopped at Bass Pro in Harrisburg. I was looking for quick-releases for the pedestal seats but didn’t like what I found so abandoned that for now. But I did get a look at the new Tracker super-jons. And I don’t like them at all; they don’t look ‘right’ and they’re very expensive for what you get- about $14K for a 17-foot center-console and 40-horse 2-stroke. On the other hand, they had a smallish Mako 18 fiberglass center-console with 115 outboard and they wanted $20K for that package!
I moved on to Ducky’s Boats in Middletown and there I found REAL boats. These guys know what they are doing. They have Sea Ark and Duracraft welded aluminum super-duper-jons. They do a lot of boat modifications. They aren’t a Sea Ark factory but I believe they get hulls in and then customize from there. The Duracraft 1860CC looked perfect— a heavy-duty, near-indestructible center-console with 26-inch-high sides. But with a 50 Yamaha and the trailer it would cost over $16K…. waaay too much for my budget. And simply upgrading our Honda 20 to a Yamaha 50 would cost $4K.
I then rode up to Big Bee Boats above Harrisburg and got similar motor-upgrade prices from a not-very-friendly sales guy ($5875 plus controls and installation). I like the center-console Lowe Roughneck boats they have but, again, it’s too big of a jump for us to upgrade. Maybe we’ll run onto a used deal on one somewhere.
That evening we watched ‘American Gangster’ with Denzel Washington. It’s the story of a classy black gangster who, during the Viet Nam war, figures out how to import heroin directly from Viet Nam using payoffs to get military transportation of the drugs to the US. I’d recommend it though it does have some flaws. The story is a little too slick and some of the photography wasn’t lighted properly.
------------------------------------------------------------
Sunday, 23 March-
Today Labashi and I drove to Chambersburg to visit family for Easter. This morning I had gone through Apples’ less-than-friendly procedure to update the iPod with new music and podcasts so we listened to some of the new music on the way. I’m not much of a music fan but do like to occasionally download music I hear in some movie or TV show. After watching the movie ‘Searching for the Wrong-Eyed Jesus’, I became interested in the Handsome Family and used iTunes to sample their music and ended up buying ‘When That Helicopter Comes’, ‘Stalled’, and ‘My Sister’s Tiny Hands’. And this week I saw a viral video about a guy called Jetman who built and flew a set of jet-powered wings. The music accompanying it was very striking to me and took a few searches to track down—it’s ‘Natural Blues’ by Moby. That led me to sample more Moby and I bought that plus ‘Porcelain’, ‘Find My Baby’, ‘Everloving’, ‘Signs of Love’, and ‘Natural Blues (Perfecto Dub)’. It’s interesting music and good listening on my walks.
We had a great Easter meal at Maypo’s and sat around afterwards catching up on the news and fussing over the new baby in the family before Labashi and I headed home that evening.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Saturday, 22 March-
Well, the laptop is being a pain today. Since uninstalling NetStumbler it refuses to connect to my home network via wireless. That’s not a big deal when I’m at home since I can use my wired connection but lack of wireless would be a major pain if it does that on the road. I spent much of the day trying to get it working again. I finally blundered onto the fix doing something that shouldn’t have made a difference. I have the router set up to only accept wireless connections from our machines. I disabled that filter and suddenly my laptop connected. I re-enabled it and connecting still works. Go figure. I assume something along the line was reset when I disabled the filter. Now I’ll have to check it at another wi-fi hotspot to be sure it will work when I need it.
Later in the afternoon I took a walk—my familiar four-miler along the creek near home and spent the evening on the web.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Friday, 21 March
Today I started off working with a Tracfone technician to activate my new phone. I made the task more difficult by requesting the transfer of my old number to the new phone rather than just accept a new number. The old one was a CDMA phone with service subcontracted to Verizon, the new one is a GSM phone with service subbed to Cingular. So I know the process will take up to a week as Verizon and Cingular work it out. I was surprised to learn, though, that Tracfone doesn’t know how many minutes I had on the lost phone—they will need two weeks to run programs against their logs to figure out how many minutes to transfer to me. Thank goodness I’m not in a rush. The good news is I think I’ve figured out how to cut my monthly bill even more (to $5 a month) and I don’t have to buy a long-term service card. We’ll see if it works out.
Labashi and I went for groceries in the early afternoon and I spent the latter part of the day doing some software upgrades. I’ve been having a lot of problems with Internet Explorer lockups lately and have started using Opera as my browser--- so far so good.
That evening we worked on the web and then watched PBS’s ‘Now’ and “Bill Moyers’ Journal”. I’ve also found I now have a problem with wireless connectivity. After trying Network Stumbler for the last few weeks I decided I don’t like it and un-installed it earlier today. Since then I’ve been unable to connect wirelessly, probably because I’ve mixed up the laptop by installing multiple wireless managers. (Thank goodness I didn’t try the uninstall while on the road!) I can connect via the wired connection I normally use at home so I can use that to research this problem and to ask for help from TechSupportGuy.com.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Thursday, 20 March-
Today was sunny but very windy. I spent much of the morning talking with my brother Orat and then later working on the web to figure out the best way to replace my lost cell phone. I had held out some hope my phone was merely lost in the far reaches of the van and had somehow escaped my hurried search but I eliminated that possibility this morning as I went through the van very thoroughly. (Actually, I knew it was probably gone after I pulled up beside a pay phone in Collier-Seminole State Park last week and called my cell phone number and didn’t hear a ring in the van). Today I finally decided I’d simply buy an el-cheapo Tracfone and have the service date and whatever minutes are left on the lost phone transferred to it. I went to Tracfone.com and found the models available in my zip code and googled for independent reviews to decide which model to buy. And when the wind dropped a bit by mid-day I fired up the motorcycle and headed to Wal-mart. There I found a Motorola C139 for $12.88. That should do the trick.
I also stopped in to see my buddies at the York Starbucks and chatted with the assistant manager about motorcycles (he has a Triumph Bonneville). I tried their new Skinny Mocha but found I’m not going to be a fan.
That evening we watched ‘Rendition’, an intriguing film about the U.S. government’s policy of ‘extraordinary rendition’, the Intelligence program wherein accused terrorists are whisked off to secret foreign prisons, held incommunicado, and interrogated/tortured. The extras show the chief architect of the program defending it, saying it has been very successful though the US did indeed make a mistake in taking the prisoners to foreign prisons and having them interrogated by foreign governments. I’ll leave it at that. This one deserves to be seen. It’s not a perfect film but it’s well worth seeing.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Wednesday, 19 March-
Today was rainy most of the day. I did manage to spend an hour or so cleaning out the van but once the rain started in earnest I retreated inside and to the web and later on made a run to the video store. I also spent an hour talking with Maypo, catching up. Incredibly, my cold or sinus infection or whatever the heck it is continues and today it has been giving me a sinus headache.
That evening we watched ‘No Country for Old Men’, the new Coen-brothers film. It’s a quite striking film but I’m not sure that’s necessarily a good thing. The problem is we see completely innocent people die in such a random manner. They just happen to cross paths with the psychopath. If we have any sense of empathy at all, the world is suddenly a place to be feared. The underlying message: none of us are safe. Stay in your home, hide behind the couch and you STILL may have the bad guy come calling. Stop to help a stranger, get a cattle-bolt in your forehead. So say what you will in praise of the Coen Brothers ‘dark style’ but I have to say, sorry, it’s just titillation and gratuitous violence, about taking our money, manipulating us and leaving us no better for the experience. I suppose it’s enough for the Coens to say it’s a genre film but it seems to me a film like this creates an obligation. Like building up carbon-debt, this film builds up a humanity-debt. Get busy, guys—you have some debt to work off.
==== end of post ========
posted by Bezabor&Labashi | 23:59
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