I miss my niece Evangaline.
Don’t get me wrong, I love all of my nieces and nephews very much, but in the wee hours of this morning, it was Evangline who was foremost in my thoughts.
My New Year’s Eve activities went pretty much according to plan, attending a dance where the quite awesome Tom Cunningham Orchestra was performing. At the stroke of midnight, I was dancing with a complete stranger who happened to agree with me that it would be a shame to let a perfectly good dance song go to waste. The balloons dropped, the band switched to Auld Lang Syne, and everything was good.
The dance ended shortly after 1:00AM when the band played an encore number on the condition that everyone take home some of the left over cider. Another complete stranger (I think her name was “Marta” — they kind of run together after a while) agreed with me that we shouldn’t let this song go to waste either and that was the perfect ending to my evening at the Spanish Ballroom.
I pulled into the driveway about 1:45, gathered up my stuff and went to open the door. That’s about when Evangline entered my thoughts. As I put the key into the deadbolt, it snapped off at the base.
While I waited for the locksmith to arrive, I kept thinking about the story of how at age eight Evangline picked a lock at her school using no tools other than her father’s driver’s license.
Some people complain that there’s never a cop around when you need one. I’ve rarely had that problem. The only time I urgently needed a police officer (after a hit and run 12 years ago), I found several of them a block away at the 7-11. But if Evangline had been visiting this week, she could have saved me $200 and most of an hour.
So aside from that little glitch, my 2009 is off to a good start. And I’m taking the view that the problem with the broken key simply means I’m getting all the problems out of the way up front. Nothing but up from here, y’know?
May 2009 be the best year of your life so far with the best yet to come.
So what did you do on New Year’s Eve?
All posts by dividingbyzero
Christmas Lights
The first batch of Christmas lights went up on December 7. In keeping with an old family tradition, it was bitter cold when I put them up. I could have waited until the following Wednesday to put them up when the weather forecast was calling for temperatures in the mid-50s, but that would have involved following another family tradition and putting up Christmas lights in the rain.
The streetlight in front of the house gives the scene a kind of orangeish glow. It’s not intentional, but I’ve come to think of it as Christmas meets Halloween. One person I showed the photo to said the lighting combined with the candles in the windows gives the impression that the house has eyes.
The remaining lights went up the following weekend. That was followed by a week of rain and then a cold with the result that I didn’t manage to take any more photos until this past Monday. The details in the large version are a lot sharper because I learned from my previous mistake and used the tripod this time. (That made a huge difference.)
The additional light makes the “eyes” a bit less pronounced, but I’m not sure the multi-color lights are a good combination when paired with the blue icicles. Throw in the orange highlights from that street light and the Halloween effect is even more pronounced. So…
Happy Hallowmas!!!!!
(Or should that be Merry Chrisween?)
Going Downhill Fast
This completely redefines the idea of a dog sled….
JavaScript required.
I’d love to try this with Wylie, the only thing missing is a bit of snow.
Spellcheck
Writing an email for work this afternoon, I discovered that Firefox’s built in spellcheck1 doesn’t recognize the name of Microsoft’s Visio product.
One of the suggested “corrections” is Visigoth. Given my experiences with Viso so far, I don’t find this correction to be entirely incorrect.
1Firefox also fails to recognize the word “spellcheck”, yet it suggests “spellchecker” as a correction. (I can agree that spellcheck shouldn’t be a word, but if that’s the case, then certainly spellchecker — one who spellchecks — is also ineligible.)
Summer Solstice
Today is the Winter Solstice. That means there are only six months to go until the Summer Solstice. More importantly, after today, the day starts getting longer again.
I miss sunlight.
Oops.
The cupboards (and also the freezer and fridge) were quite bare – lacking anything more substantial, dinner on Tuesday was a peanut butter sandwich and a bunch of veggies. (There was plenty of dogfood however, so Wylie and Riley can’t use this as an excuse for why they ate the wall.) So on my way home from work, I stopped off at the supermarket.
Since I was there anyhow, I decided to restock the caffeine supply as well.
I didn’t realize the mistake until I got home. I bought the caffeine-free version instead.
Crap. So much for my super-powers.
Destructomatic Times Two
Riley is visiting for a few days while his humans are out of town.
After taking Wylie and Riley out for their evening walk (in the rain), I was too tired to go upstairs and ended up taking a nap on the couch. When I woke up an hour or so later, I discovered that the two dogs had chewed a hole through the back of the couch. Not only the back of the couch though, they’d gone all the way through the drywall and I could see the aluminum siding and feel cold air blowing through. So now, in addition to still being completely exhausted, I was utterly disgusted as well. It was enough of a shock that my only possible reaction was to fall asleep again.
When I woke up the second time, I discovered that the damage had been a dream. In fact, the destroyed couch was a completely different style than the one I’d been napping on and I never would have painted the walls that shade of green. Wylie had been napping next to me the whole time and Riley was curled up on the other side of the room.
Books for Trade
Back in August, I found about PaperBackSwap from a post on Marauder’s blog. So far, I’ve only managed to send out 17 books, so it’s not done a great deal to help in my efforts to disenclutter, but at the same time, I’ve also received 8 books I’d never read before. So in that regard, it’s at least helping me save a little money as part of my personal economic stimulus plan.
A couple days ago, The Washington Post ran an article about PaperbackSwap. My only fear is that as Spider Robinson pointed out some years ago, being “discovered” is the worst thing that can happen to local bars and restaurants. What I’m hoping though is that more publicity perhaps means more people requesting books and thereby helping with my efforts to disenclutter.
Can I interest you in a book? 🙂
Call For Backup
For years I’ve been urging my friends and family members to back up their computers. In the past 10 years, I’ve probably succeeded in getting fewer than five people to back up their computers even once. (The fact that Dad backs up his important files once a year is one of my greatest success stories.) In that same time span, I’ve probably told at least one person a year – including all three of my brothers – that there really wasn’t anything I could do to help them after something got wiped out.
Probably the one biggest thing that gets in the way of my own backups is that it takes a tremendous amount of time to copy everything to a CD or DVD. (I haven’t done a tape backup in 10 years and it’s probably been closer to 12 or 15 since the last one involving a stack of floppies.) What’s been saving my bacon in recent years has been automation.
Hard drives are cheap these days. You can buy a gigabyte of storage (equivalent to about 714 floppies) for about 60 cents. For the past three or four years, I’ve had an external hard drive hooked up to my computer and set up a program to automatically back up my files every night about the time I’d be going to bed. (I started using Norton Ghost for this, but when I switched to Vista back in February, my copy of Ghost was no longer compatible and I’ve been using the built-in backup program.)
Backing up files to an external drive is a huge step in the right direction and it’s helped me out more than once when I discovered I’d permanently deleted the wrong thing. And if I ever have a computer flat out die, copying everything from the backup beats the heck out of paying a data recovery company a few thousand dollars to try getting everything back. But it doesn’t cover all the bases.
A (hopefully) rhetorical question people sometimes talk about is what would be the one thing they’d want to save if their house was on fire. Aside from the obvious (family members and pets) one common answer is the family photo album. But with the ubiquity of digital cameras, most people’s family photo albums are stored on the computer. And in the event of a fire (or flood, earthquake, etc) the computer’s not an easy thing to grab. (Similarly, in the case of a theft, the computer and secondary drive are likely targets for theft.)
This is why businesses keep a copy of their backups at another location. Individuals can do that too, keeping a back up copy of important files at a trusted friend’s house, but even with the best of intentions, that doesn’t happen very often because it involves actively remembering to do it.
For the past few weeks, I’ve been experimenting with a free online service called Mozy Home. The free service allows you to store up to 2 GB of files on their servers. It’s not enough space for my photo or music collections, but its sufficient for some of the other things I work with quite frequently such as the various web sites I work on as well as both my email and snail-mail address books. For $5 a month, I could get enough space for everything on my computer, including the aforementioned photo and music collections. (Caveat: One thing I won’t share with them is the login information for my online bank account, but I don’t keep that information on the computer anyhow.)
Best of all, the backup program runs automatically every night. It doesn’t take any special effort on my part.
I’m sure this sounds like an ad for the service, but I really do encourage you to check it out. I’d really love to have a year where I don’t have to tell anyone their important file is gone for good.
Taking My Own Advice
One of the problems the Jaycees run into is that few people have heard of the organization. This problem is somewhat self-inflicted because when there is news, they don’t tell anyone. Back in February of this year, my chapter received a number of awards, presented one long-time member with a Maryland Jaycees’ Militia (highest award in the state), presented another one with a US Jaycees Ambassadorship (highest award in the nation), and didn’t send out any sort of press releases because nobody wanted to be seen as “blowing my own horn.”
Some months ago, the Board of Directors asked me to help publicize the chapter. Since then I’ve been working with various project chairpeople to make certain that something gets out to the media about various events, even if it’s just an entry in the community calendar. In order to make the press releases easily available to the next person to do this job (and one of my goals for the next few months is to get someone into this job), I also started a separate Jaycee Blog with the press releases and an occasional event write-up.
I’ve managed to get the Jaycees mentioned in the local newspaper a time or two since then, but last month, I “hit a pothole” when the chapter gave me a Jaycees Militia membership. Suddenly, I was the guy who didn’t want to go around tooting my own horn.
If I’d been the only one to receive an award that weekend, I probably would have taken the easy way out and not done anything. Problem is, I wasn’t the only award winner. Two Jaycees members won state awards, and another one was presented with her own Jaycees Militia membership. (I’d long assumed Nicole was far more likely to receive that award than I was.)
It took me a while, but last night I wrote and sent out a press release to make sure people can find out what the Jaycees have been up to.