Hasta la vista Michigan. We’re off to Canada for a long weekend of backpacking along a couple stretches of the Lake Superior Coastal Trail. We hope you too are doing something enjoyable this weekend.
Noah arrives!
Congratulations to Jen & Eric on the safe arrival of Noah.
Noah is a healthy 8 lbs, 4.5 oz. Both Noah and Jen are doing well. Visiting hours today are 8-8 and they’ll be home tomorrow.
NicTool announcement
NicTool is a project I’ve been slightly involved with for a few years. I happened upon it while searching for a DNS management application while working for HostPro in Bellevue, back in 2001. We liked it more than the commercial DNS management suites and purchased a license for it, essentially funding development of some features we needed. After that, the founders went their seperate ways and development ceased.
I approached them earlier this year, petitioning them to allow me to Open Source the code and give away NicTool under GPL terms. They agreed so I built the new NicTool web site, made some minor enhancements to the code, and have spent a fair bit of time writing documentation for it. The initial effort is complete. The code is available, documentation exists, and NicTool now has a future.
Cell Phone Conundrum
I need a cell phone and service, and getting the right deal has proven suprisingly difficult. Maybe you can help?
My reprieve from being married to a cell phone is nearing it’s end and I have a choice to make. Because of my personality, I have already done some research to determine what’s available that will suite my needs the best. I have found exactly what I want, I just can’t get it. My ideal service plan is as follows:
AT&T Shared GSM National, two lines with 900 shared anytime minutes (from anywhere, to anywhere), two bluetooth equipped phones (Nokia 6820, Motorola T616), unlimited nights and weekends, nights begin at 7pm, unlimited mobile to mobile, $0 setup, and $80 per month.
For my needs, this is absolutely perfect. We already have unlimited free long distance with our IP phone so it’s highly unlikely that we’d ever exceed the 900 minute plan and AT&T has fantastic coverage all over the country. The only problem with this plan is that I can’t buy it. AT&T doesn’t offer “local” coverage in Northern Michigan and willl not sell a service plan for use here.
I have exactly the same problem with T-mobile. They too offer a very similar package but once again, do not offer service here. I’ve checked with the regional cell phone providers in the area (Cellular One, Alltel) and neither offer a calling plan that I want to be limited by for a year. Cingular doesn’t offer service here, so the only option I see is Sprint.
I dislike Sprint for several reasons. The coverage up here is very spotty, I don’t like the phones they offer, their data service is expensive, and I’d have to pay a fair amount more to activate service and buy the phone. With AT&T and T-Mobile, I can get a cheap data plan, free phone & activation, and a good service plan.
Ideas for a solution anyone? Ideally I could get an AT&T plan but as far as I know, I cannot do so without crossing ethical boundaries.
Compact Flash – Finally!
My single biggest annoyance with my Nikon D70 camera has been swapping flash cards. I shoot in JPEG Fine so I can fit about 75 photos on a 256MB flash card. I have two of these and am quite adept at swapping them as soon as I’ve filled up the first. Having two 256MB flash cards just isn’t enough. When I shoot panoramas, I burn through 10-20 shots each. Shooting just a few of those will leave me in want of space.
On our Alaska trip I toted along my PowerBook to offload the photos as I filled the flash cards. I also took it to have a full darkroom at my disposal but there are occasions like our Isle Royale trip where it’s impractical to take the PowerBook, or even an iPod with Griffin’s media reader.
Until recently, the options for solving this problem have been: a) pay through the nose for a big (1GB +) flash card, buy an iPod mini or Nomad 4GB mp3 player for $250 and rip the 4GB flash card out of it, or just wait for the prices to become reasonable. Now that fast 1GB cards can be had for under $100, there’s no reason not to upgrade. Pick a fast card from Rob Gilbraith’s site and then use PriceGrabber to find it cheap.
I picked up a SanDisk Ultra II 1.0GB for $89 shipped to my door. That’s a far better deal than buying more 256MB flash cards locally for $60 each.
An itty bitty possum
After arriving home from our trip to Isle Royale I noticed that some items that had been stored on the shelves in my garage were on the floor. This is quite atypical and left me wondering. I placed everything back onto the shelves and resumed normal life, making sure to close the garage service door.
Last night after returning from Persnickety I noticed that once again, several items had been knocked off the shelves. This was quite odd indeed. I placed the items back on the shelves, pulled the car in, and then paused to look around. Lo and behold, I spotted this up in the rafters:
He was fairly docile and seemingly unthreatened by me because he didn’t put on his catatonic act. I took a couple pictures and he didn’t enjoy the camera flash much. I then picked him up and carried him into the house to show Jen. We made him a plate of salad and left him on the back deck, with the garage door closed. If he’s a wise possum, I won’t catch him in my garage again.
Isle Royale Article & Photos
I have finished composing our trip log for Isle Royale. I have also completed processing all the photos and have published an Isle Royale photo album.
Isle Royale
Tomorrow evening (Thursday) Jen and I pull out of Cadillac bound for the end of the earth. Some twelve hours later we’ll pull into Copper Harbor, Michigan at the Northern most tip of the Keeweenaw Peninsula. There we park the litte Jetta and board ourselves and backpacks onto a ferry and sail off into the frigid waters of Lake Superior.
Four and a half hours later we’ll arrive in Rock Harbor on Isle Royale. From there we’ll depart on foot for parts unknown. We expect to hear the howls of wolves at night and maybe even see a moose or two. We’ll return to civilization on Monday and be home sometime late on Tuesday.
My site gets a fresh look
I have new become much more familiar with CSS, and boy is it nice. The new design is more attractive, easier to read, and contains far less code to accomplish the same purpose. On average, each page now contains 30% less code.
I had a few problems with the old site design, the most troublesome being code maintenance. Editing pages wasn’t terribly hard, but since I was using tables extensively for the layout, it wasn’t exactly simple either. I would often find mis-typed tags since the majority of the code maintenance is via a text editor (vi).
Continue reading “My site gets a fresh look”
Labor Day
Rather than taking a vacation, we lived up to the name of the holiday weekend. On Saturday we helped Mike & Deb load a bunch of furniture into their truck and a trailer to haul back home to Marshall. That took all day.
Sunday afternoon I tore out my old garage door opener and installed a new Genie opener. The trusty old Craftsman had finally given up the ghost. The new opener works quite well, despite the abused condition of the door. I also cleaned up the garage while I was out there.
Monday was a car care day. Jen vacuumed all the carpet and cleaned the other surfaces with Armor All while I washed, scrubbed, and finally waxed the exterior and treated the windows with Rain-X. The Jetta is looking mighty fine right now. So fine, I had to post a picture of it on the Jetta page.
After finishing up the Jetta, I cruised over to Home Depot and purchased a few boards that I needed to trim out the windows and closet door frames in our new master bedroom. The new master bedroom is nearly completed. We’ve moved all our furniture in already. The only things left to do is paint the closet and install doors.