The coldest winter I ever spent
Archive for 2011
From a frenzied evening of studying Medical Terminology and then going out with friends…
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Please apply suction to my midventral subpelvic acral epidermis.
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Here, let me give you a dorsal view of my third distal phalanx.
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I just got a set of personal cards (as opposed to business cards) made at Vistaprint.com. I must say that they look totally sharp. $10 for 500 high quality cards, delivered.
Do you like the Fleur-de-Lee?
The font is Aetna JY Newstyle
SWARM is presenting at California Academy NightLife this Thursday night. They gave us a stack of free tickets to the event. Email me by Wednesday afternoon and I’ll get you on the guest list!
Their aquarium is completely amazing!
The day D and I brought home my new '98 Sebring!
With Charlotte in Seattle, I’m tightening up my expenditures and dumping my car & garage. It’s startling how expensive my car is… $7320 per year! Of course, I need a car to get around, I can’t just say something like, “food is too expensive, I’m not going to eat any more.” So I’m getting a Zip Car membership.
car costs per month
$200 garage – it also doubles as storage, now squished into the apartment
$90 insurance – $1,000/year
$120 gas – 10,000 miles/year, $4/gallon, 27MPG
$120 depreciation – $20,000 new in Sept 1998, worth $1,000 now, that’s 13 years
$50 maintenance – car repairs, oil
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$610/month… $7320 per year!
Zip Car by comparison
if I don’t change my driving habits:
10,000 miles/year if driven at an average speed of 20MPH is 500 hours. * $9/hour = $4,500/year
If I drive less:
6,000 miles/year = $2,700/year
Update 1-26-12: the above isn’t correct because it doesn’t account for the hours and days that a car sits. With Zipcar I am paying whether the car is moving or not. So I’m not sure what Zipcar really costs.
I can rent a truck or a Mini Cooper when need be, it’s always clean, it’s always new, never any fuss, and it’s parked directly across the street. Ask me again in 6 months if I still love it.
How much does your car cost?
I just had a hard drive go bad on me so I had to buy a new drive and reinstall Windows. Here’s the software I put back on my computer immediately, the essential software that makes Windows XP useable for me:
WizMouse – lets you scroll a window without you having to give it focus. Brilliantly simple and useful.
Crashplan – I would have lost data if not for this online backup tool.
EditPad Pro – my text editor of choice. It also comes in a free version that’s fine.
Autohotkey – giving me keyboard controls like Ctrl-Alt-C for Calculator and “..4” to automatically type my phone number.
Google Chrome – the best, fastest, easiest to use, prettiest browser.
CCCP – the Combined Community Codec Pack lets Windows Media Player play most every video format automatically
Freecalc – by Moffsoft, a better calculator than the built-in Windows one. Easy, clean.
Picasa – the best home picture viewer
Teracopy – replaces windows file copy… the best feature being if a copy fails, I see what happened and can recover, unlike Windows copy
Rename-It! – lets me rename files en-mass
PureText – strips text formatting when pasting.
Put Windows Explorer in the Quicklaunch toolbar and change the startup options target to “%SystemRoot%\explorer.exe /e,c:\aaa”. More examples.
Set Gmail to be the default email client in Chrome
Disable Windows Search When Searching Windows Explorer
Truecrypt – keeps my passwords safe on my computer.
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The second round of essential software
KFC – Kill Flash Cookies
Filezilla
UltraVNC
The Sysinternals tools are amazing. Filemon to see what is slowing down my hard drive, Pagedefrag to defrag your pagefile.sys. Several tools to help find malware
DVD Decrypter (local archive)
Cleartype – absolutely essential for good text quality on Windows XP! You’ll have to run the page using Internet Explorer to install it.
Symphony of Science – Onward to the Edge!
local version:
Darn if this isn’t good music.
This will work for you if you have Windows XP. For Windows 7 and a bunch of other ways to do it, refer to his page. (one easy way is to use the Send from Gmail extension.
Ever wanted to send an email directly from Gmail when you click a “contact” or “mailto” link in Google Chrome only to have your desktop email client pop open? Firefox has a quick fix for this already baked in its options, but unfortunately for us Chrome users, Google has yet to officially implement this feature. Fortunately, there are few ways to fix this and set Gmail as the default email in Chrome.
Change the “File Type” Settings
This one’s fairly straightforward. Open a Windows Explorer window, then:
Went to Come Out And Play SF today. Great fun!
Sunday (tomorrow!) is the last day. I highly recommend you go out to play!
A Plea for Legible Flight Reservations
Grrrr!
We’ve been at this whole commercial flight thing for about a hundred years. You would think that the airlines could create a simple, clear flight plan for me. EVERY trip I have made for the last 20 years I have had to translate their gobbly-gook flight reservation into something legible. The relevant data is always the same. Could someone in the airline industry please recognize this? Give me a calendar item that I can copy and paste into my life!
Here is what I put in my calendar. Short. Readable. Useful.
Flight Ref: XXXX
Monday November 21st
depart SFO at 10:35am on AA flight 556
arrive Chicago ORD at 4:55pm
depart Chicago ORD 8:30pm on AA flight 4308
arrive Nashville 10:00pmFriday November 25th
depart Nashville 4:30pm on AA flight 661
arrive Dallas DFW at 6:40pm
depart Dallas DFW at 9:20pm on AA flight 1575
arrive SFO at 11:05pm
and here is what American Airlines sent me. It is freaking impossible to read. Sure it contains all the relevant data but I challenge you to understand my flight info in less than 5 minutes!
It doesn’t need to be like this. Make it simple. Make it say what it needs to say. Then put the nitty gritty details at the bottom or something. Bonus points awarded if they put a “Add to Google Calendar” icon next to the reservation so I don’t even have to copy-paste. But hey…
I originally posted this in 2011 and it burns my buns every time I fly that flight reservations are still universally impossible to read. I use parts of this blog post as a template before I fly.