Lee.org

I’ve been using Spenix.com for my ISP for several weeks now and I’m very happy with them. Their tech support is very good, price is excellent, up-time is very good, services are just great (I got my SSH command prompt :-) )

or

You know that there are unresolved issues in your life when…

You buy one of these:

I was down a gallon of antifreeze. The coolant system likely had a vaporlock condition. Still… where did that gallon of antifreeze go?!? Especially since I had an oil change at the dealer just a month ago. They are supposed to check for that kind of stuff.

I’ve had my 1998 Chrysler Sebring for 5 years, 1 1/2 months. I know this partially because I got the car on my birthday. The other reason is that I purchased a 5 year extended warranty on the car for about $1,400. Nothing ever went bad on the car in all that time. . . . . . until tonight, 1 1/2 months after the warranty and service plan expires.

I swear, they have a little timer in them. That’s why you can’t buy the extended warrantee after the car leaves the showroom; they have to set the timer before you get it.

I was driving along and noticed that all of a sudden the heat wasn’t heating. I looked down and noticed that the temperature gauge was high and rising so I pulled over at a rest stop. After waiting 30 minutes and walking to the Delaware river to fill my water bottle for the radiator, I got back in the car and took off. I made it just 1 mile before it was topping the red zone again. I realized I wasn’t going to limp home. I pulled off at Rt 80 Exit 4 (20 miles from home) into a truck stop, called a friend to pick me up (thanks Jack), called a nearby mechanic and waited to be picked up at McDonald’s.

If I learned one thing from this whole experience it’s that I don’t much like McDonald’s any more. Too filling, fatty and flavorless. Two hours later, I still feel bloated even though I didn’t finish my fries or shake.

Let’s hope I get out of this without too much expenditure…

This is part of a letter I wrote to an acquaintance a few months ago

>As for my MST3K stuff, what shows are you missing from your collection?

I never tried collecting MST3K shows. But there is always one sitting on Tivo ready for me to spend two hours on! I went kooky taping Babylon 5 and that was enough for me. So now I’ve got some 116 hours or so of B5 on SVHS and I don’t know what to do with it. It was that experience that convinced me just a few years ago that I should watch/experience/read stuff and then let them go. I used to keep most everything I thought was important. But then I just sold or gave most of it away… and surprise, I didn’t explode or wither away! Of course, I still seem to have too much “stuff”, it’s ongoing… but at least it’s now eminently manageable.

For the past few months I’ve been tivoing The Screen Savers and Call For Help on TechTV. These shows are both excellent if you’re a computer nerd or plan to be one, you’ll know what we mean! I find it important to Tivo them because it’s an hour long and, although I love Leo, watching him for an hour straight gives me the twitchies.. No, not really, just just that sometimes they talk about stuff I already know and I just skip past that segment. But they are real hackers with real good advice for geeks and non-geeks alike. And they have cute AND smart supporting members too. How many times have I had that dream where Cat Swartz is configuring my router…. ahhhhh. :-)

PPG and I were in the city this weekend. On our way out of the city at 5pm, we got stuck in really bad traffic. On our way to the Holland Tunnel, we’d often only advance a single car-length at each change of the light. It was a little aggravating. We had been sitting in traffic for 45 minutes when I started playing with the seat. I cranked my seat back into a recline to relax. PPG was driving.

Lee: Lean your seat back. It’s not like we’re going anywhere.
PPG: No, I can’t. I’m driving.
Lee: Well put the car in Park.
PPG: No.
Lee: OK, well at least take your hands off the wheel.
[she does]
Lee: Now, wave them in the air like this. [Lee flaps his hands around furiously in front of him]
[she starts waving her hands around in front of her, smiling at the distraction]
Lee: You’re driving like a crazy person! Now put the car in Park!

:-))

Friday: I was trying to fix poor Vickie C’s computer all day and all night. There is a lesson in my attempted fixing. She has a 333Mhz, 64meg RAM laptop. This computer should NOT have XP on it.

Her computer has been dying unexpectedly. I tried a bunch of things to fix it to no avail so I reinstalled the BIOS and did a fresh install of XP in the hopes that would do it. Well, it did but nothing ran right under XP. After hours of “push the button, wait 20 minutes. Push the other button, wait…” I dumped XP and reinstalled Win98. I was up til 4 pushing the button.

Saturday: I brought Vickie’s computer to her. It works. :-) I tutored her on all sorts of fun computer things and then rushed back home to drive my mom to the airport. We left at 2. That leaves me with the house all to myself. Woo hoo, let’s par-tay! I got back and started making an apple pie for PPG. I was a bit nervous because I had tried making one several years ago with Julie and the crust was a total disaster. Julie and I had fun playing with the dough but… total disaster. :-)

I followed the directions in Cook’s Illustrated’s The Best Recipe to the letter. (PPG gave me a copy as a present!!) And you know what? It came out great. I’m very happy. Just as it was finishing, PPG called from her wedding in Long Valley. Oh did she get lost! She must think that I live on the moon! Her cell phone service kept bopping out every 5 minutes, she almost hit a deer while trying to read a map on the dark road… She got lost several distinct times… oh poor PPG! The worst for me was when she was about 4 miles away: just as I was going to tell her when to make her last important turn, her phone went out AGAIN. I envisioned her driving right past the road while cursing at her phone and wondering where the hell she was! Her service returned as she got to rt. 80 and I had her write down directions to my place. But she got lost AGAIN just a mile from the house! AHH! I drove out and got her, brought her home and gave her a big warm hug & kiss!

I was thinking we’d go out to Jenny Jump Observatory to see the lunar eclipse with all the other star-nerds. And then go to The Lodge at Mountain Lake. But we decided to stay home and pop outside a few times to look at it. Brrrrr, it was cold out! We watched Spenser Tunick’s show on HBO, Naked States. But we only got half way through the 1:20 presentation. It’s a really good, pretty intense program. We’ll finish it sometime. (image from Sky & Telescope Magazine)

We ate, we talked, we nuzzled. It was good!

Sunday: We took a fabulously long time getting up, had Apple pie and other things for breakfast and then went off to the city. When she was at that Spenser Tunick event on Oct 27th, an artist had asked her to pose. So we were off to Brooklyn for the session. I think the artist’s name is Jessica. She’s doing this photo with lots of people sitting on this super long (digitally created) couch. It was a fine shoot. After, we went into Manhattan to get glitter. The lady at the counter was a characteristically uncaring New Yorker. PPG asked for glitter and the lady pointed and said, “Here, this is all we have.” We didn’t like any of the glitter in the rack and were sad. But then while we were browsing, we found what could only be described as the glitter department. They had hundreds of kinds of glitter in the glitter department, and even more in a few other spots in the store. We played with the glitter and she picked out the exact color she wanted. It was good. We went shopping for a vase-thing in Crate and Barrel. We didn’t find what she was looking for, but just as well because when she got home she decided that it would be better to unpack all her stuff and make an evaluation before buying more stuff. A quick stop in Pottery Barn discovered the world’s most expensive firewood kindling. $20 for the cutest little bundle of “scented winter twigs”. We started back after that. See the Holland Tunnel mention above.

We went looking for Luigi’s restaurant in Dover. They said they were moving from Ledgewood to Dover in September… But we couldn’t find their phone number via 411. So we went to Dover in search of the restaurant. But by the time we got there, we were both so grumpy-hungry that we stopped at the very first restaurant we found, Giovanni’s in Dover. You can’t miss it… get off Rt 80 toward Dover. At rt 46, look left and there’s the sign. The place really didn’t look open but we were so hungry. Even as we got to the inner door, I tried the door thinking that it would be locked. Low and behold, it opened! There were only 5 folks at the bar and 2 people dining in a place that could fit 150… and here it was Sunday at 7pm… We sat down anyway.

Wow. Everything was perfect. I had Strachatelli (spelling?) it’s a fresh spinach and egg soup… well, this was “perfect”. Really. I didn’t try PPG’s soup but she said it was good. Dinner was linguini marinara. I was expecting “pasta”. But what I got was magic. I honestly believe that the chef crushed the tomatoes for my sauce just for my dish. And PPG’s eggplant rollatini….. let me say again, “perfect”. Now, I will say that they kept the temperature in the restaurant a bit chilly, which wasn’t very inviting. But hey, the place was literally empty. I’m going back. You should too. I’ll still go back to Luigi’s if I can find the place. Luigi’s food is also fantastic; they take the standard dishes and give them a little face-lift. Both of these restaurants, one strictly classic and one with a slight flair for new-school, both of these restaurants have a place in my heart.

I’ve been all nervous for the past several hours because I thought I had a Trojan horse that was busy offloading the contents of my computer to Kazaa or somesuch. It turns out that the recent firmware upgrade I did to my D-Link DI-624 wireless router gave it Plug and Play (UPnP) capability. It seems that someone thought it would be a good idea if every device on a network make a shout out to it’s homies every 20 friggin seconds. I was watching my network idiot-light and got really nervous seeing this regular, low-key traffic. Here’s what I found out about it:

• D-Link made an announcement that they are working with Microsoft on making UPnP happen.
• It looks like explorer.exe on my side is what answers the call from the router EVEN IF I HAVEN’T ENABLED UPnP ON MY XP BOX.
• You can theoretically disable or enable UPnP at Control Panel | Add/Remove Programs | Add/Remove Windows Components | Networking Services | Universal Plug and Play. But it LIES. But When disabled, your machine still responds (or broadcasts… I’m not sure which b/c the sniffer software I got doesn’t seem to log all outgoing packets (NetworkActiv PIAFCTM 1.5))
• One of the 10 or so packets in the bunch looks like this:

from:192.168.0.1 (router) to: 239.255.255.250, from port 1900 to port 1900, format:UDP:

HOST:239.255.255.250:1900
CACHE-CONTROL:max-age=120
LOCATION:http://192.168.0.1:5678/igd.xml
NT:upnp:rootdevice
NTS:ssdp:alive
SERVER:Embedded UPnP/1.0
USN:uuid:upnp-InternetGatewayDevice-1_0-12345678900001::upnp:rootdevice

• The packets travel on port 1900. They are broadcast to IP address 239.255.255.250, which is intended to be a local broadcast
• When enabled, my router shows up as a device in My Network Places. Big woop, the router told the client it’s IP address and what kind of box it is… That’s all.

• I disabled “SSDP Discovery Service” and “Universal Plug and Play Device Host”. It didn’t stop the network traffic but made me feel better.

I found the most useful info about this at these sites:
http://www.pcplus.co.uk/media/pcplus/pdf/181/181.helpdesk.pdf
http://grc.com/

I’ve used Audiocatalyst to rip lots of CDs. Unfortunately, it doesn’t run under XP. :-( Goodbye Audiocatalyst. I hardly knew ya.

I’m trying CDex from Sourceforge. It’s working darn nicely. And it’s free! I’m already starting to forget about that Catalitic program, what’s it called?