Snowblower

It’s actually snowing here in the mid-atlantic, although I’m predicting another non-event similar to so many others we’ve had in the past 3 winters.  I think that when all is said and done, we’ll end up with maybe an inch and a half of snow, not quite enough to cover the grass, topped with a light glaze of ice – A typical Maryland “wintry mix”.  Of course, the local news media has been in high gear since last night, leading off their 11pm broadcasts with radar maps, reporters standing in front of salt trucks, and dire predictions of rush-hour road catastrophes.  But for the most part, snowstorms in these parts rarely live up to the hype.

I have a snowblower that I bought back in late 2002, just in time for the big blizzard of 2003 (one of the rare storms that did live up to the hype).  It last saw action in February 2006, and since then it’s sat in my garage collecting dust.  I used to store it with the gas tank empty, but it would be an absolute bear to start that way..  so a couple years ago I started storing it with a full tank and a healthy dose of gas stabilizer.  That seems to keep it happy, providing I drain and replace the gas at least once a year.   Twice a year or so I’ll start it up to make sure it still runs.  I hadn’t done it for awhile, so I figured I’d fire it up this morning in case this latest round of wintry weather actually yields any “blow”able amount of snow.  And indeed, the snowblower started up pretty easily on its 9-month-old tank of stabilized gas.  The winning formula seems to be:

  1. Insert starter key.
  2. Check spark plug.
  3. Plug in electric starter.
  4. Close choke.
  5. Set throttle to full.
  6. Pump primer bulb 10-15 times.
  7. Crank electric starter until engine fires.
  8. Unplug starter.
  9. Slowly open choke as engine warms up.

I always feel sad starting up the snowblower, only to shut it off after 5 minutes or so of idling and return it to its resting place to collect more dust.  This morning, we had a slight powdering of snow on the driveway, just enough that the blower was able to pick a bit of it up and eject it through the chute.  So, I spent a minute or so blowing the powder off the driveway near the garage, which I could just as easily have done with a broom (or probably my mouth for that matter).  It was the first time the snowblower actually touched snow in almost 3 years.

Can’t wait to drive home this evening, when the roads will undoubtedly look like salt mines and the talking heads will be crowing about how we “dodged that bullet” yet again.

Welcome to Winter in Maryland..

The Joys of Winter Biking

Took my first fall of 2009 yesterday.  We were coming off two straight days of rain, it was 7:45am and the temperature was right around freezing.  All of that adds up to (you guessed it) ice on the road.  Most of the roads were treated and in pretty good shape, but in my infinite wisdom I decided to extend the ride with a lap through the State Park.  And in the park, the roads were..  not good.  Long story short, I was coming down a hill, braking a bit, hit a previously-unseen patch of black ice, and the bike promptly came out from under me.

Falls happen so quickly and suddenly that it’s often hard to tell right away what happened and if there’s been any damage.  Sometimes it doesn’t become apparent until you try to get back on the bike and resume the ride.  In my case, I ended up completely undamaged (yay for slippery ice and multiple layers of winter clothing) but my front wheel was knocked out of true.  Turned out to be a loose spoke.  A quick twist with a spoke wrench got me back on the road.  I also had to re-position my front fender, which I did after the ride.  So apparently my front wheel must have taken some kind of impact, although the fall was so smooth that it’s hard to picture how it could have happened.

I guess I should count myself lucky that this was such an easy fall and it happened in the park where there’s no traffic.  It’s been north of 20 years since I last did any regular riding in the winter, but this was enough to remind me of the perils of icy roads..

Fenders on a Road Bike, Part 2

This is part 2 of my story about how I put fenders on my road bike.  Read about my motivation for doing this in the first installment.

There are a couple types of fenders made for road bikes.   “Full” fenders cover the back wheel all the way down to the bottom bracket, and the front wheel from below the cranks to just past the front brake.  There are also “clip-on” quick-release fenders made specifically for road bikes.  An example of these is the SKS “Race Blade.”  These work, but they are smaller and provide less wheel coverage than full fenders. I knew that full fenders would be a bigger job to mount on my bike, but I figured if I absolutely could not get them to fit, I could always fall back on the clip-ons.  With that in mind, I went shopping for a set of full fenders.  The two biggest names in inexpensive road bike fenders seem to be SKS and Planet Bike. I read up on both, and eventually decided to go with a set of Planet Bike “Cascadia” fenders, which I ordered from Niagra Cycle Works.  The fenders arrived after a few days and I went to work putting them on.

Full fenders typically attach to the bike in two places.  The top of the fender attaches to the front fork or rear brake bridge, and the back of the fender is supported by struts that attach to threaded holes in the bike frame near the hubs.  The rear fender is usually also attached to the “seat stay bridge,” a short horizontal piece between the bottom bracket and the rear wheel.  On a road bike with caliper brakes, the fender goes between the brake caliper and the tire, and typically shares the same mounting hole with the brake.  So, to accommodate fenders, the bike needs:

  • Adequate vertical clearance underneath the front fork and between the brake calipers and the tire
  • Threaded holes on the front fork and rear seat/chainstays, near the hubs
  • Some way to attach the tops of the fenders to the front fork / rear brake bridge (possibly sharing the brake mounting hole)
  • A seat stay bridge piece to attach the front end of the rear fender

My bike met some of the criteria.  All of the clearances were adequate, and it had a seat stay bridge and the necessary mounting holes for the rear fender (although I was currently using them for my rack).  The problems:  It had no mounting holes on the front fork, and no easy way to attach the tops of the fenders to the brake mounts.  So I would need to work around these limitations somehow.

I began by mounting the rear fender.  I unbolted my rack and attached the fender struts underneath the rack supports.  Conveniently, the rack’s mounting bolt was long enough to accommodate both the fender struts and the rack supports, so I bolted them both to the same hole.  The front of the fender attached easily to the chain stay bridge using a zip tie.  For the top, Planet Bike uses a snap-on plastic clip.  The clip has a bolt slot that’s intended to mount behind the rear brake, but as mentioned above, there’s nowhere there I can bolt it; the rear brake is attached with a recessed hex nut that does not have threads to accept a fender bolt.  However, I was able to use zip ties to attach the mounting clip to the seat stays (this is covered in Planet Bike’s instructions), so problem solved there.  This mounting method does slightly reduce the fender’s clearance underneath the brake, though, so it may not be usable on a bike with extremely limited clearance.  Once the fender was mounted, I adjusted the struts until it didn’t rub the tire, and I was done.  That was pretty easy.

The front fender was more of a challenge.  My fork doesn’t have holes to mount the struts, so I had to improvise.  A couple of web sites recommended using metal or nylon p-clamps, but I can’t use these on my fork because its arms are not round enough.  Instead, I opted to just zip-tie the struts to the fork.  This is not an ideal solution, but it works well enough.  the quick-release skewer caps keep the ties from slipping off the fork, and the ties seem to stay in place otherwise.  But I’d still like to come up with something more elegant.  On to the top.  The front fender has a permanently-attached metal bracket instead of a plastic clip.  The front brake uses the same type of recessed nut as the rear brake, so there’s nowhere to attach the bracket behind the fork.  But unlike the rear, there’s nowhere on the fork to zip-tie the bracket either.  So my only option was to remove the front brake and mount the bracket between the brake and the fork (actually behind the lock nut that retains the brake spring — otherwise the bracket didn’t clear the steering tube).  I did this, and wasn’t happy with the results.  It made it impossible to adjust the fender’s position without also affecting the brake, and it also made it impossible to easily remove the fender.  I needed a better solution, so I went web surfing again, and found out about Problem Solvers Sheldon Fender Nuts.

Sheldon Fender Nuts replace the recessed nuts that hold the brake calipers in place.  The difference is, the Sheldon nuts are slightly longer, so they protrude outside the brake mounting hole, and they have a thread to accept a fender mounting bolt.  The front fender can then mount behind the fork as intended, and the fenders can be adjusted independently of the brakes.  The nuts come in sets of 2 (one for back and one for front).  I ordered a set from Jenson USA.  The front nut was an extremely tight fit in my fork.  Initially, I had to tap it with a hammer to seat it enough to mate with the threads on the brake, but eventually it “broke in” enough that I could thread it on and off the brake without too much trouble.  I was worried I’d torque it apart or otherwise destroy it, but it turned out to be pretty sturdy.  The mounting bolts that came with the Cascadia fenders did not fit the thread on the Sheldon nut — I had to scrounge up some matching bolts and washers from my parts drawer.  After that, though, the fender went on easily and was a snap to adjust.  So far I’ve only used the Sheldon nut on the front fender.  Eventually I’ll take the zip ties off the back fender and remount it with the Sheldon nut, but the nuts were worth the price just for the front.

Initially, I couldn’t get the front wheel to stop rubbing the fender.  No amount of fiddling with the fender seemed to help.  Finally I figured out that my wheel was not properly centered in the fork.  I undid the quick release and centered the wheel, and suddenly the fender no longer rubbed.  There’s not a whole lot of side-to-side tolerance with these fenders, so buyer beware.  I’m a little worried at what might happen if I break a spoke..

After the fenders were on, I didn’t have to wait long to test them out.  I took the bike out shortly after a storm, and the fenders worked like a champ.  I hit my first puddle and watched all the water squirt out the front of the fender, instead of up on the bike, my clothes, etc.  In normal riding conditions, I don’t really notice the fenders except for maybe a rattle here or there when I hit a bump.  The fenders don’t get in my way at all.  The instructions warn that my foot might touch the front fender during slow turns, but I haven’t had that problem.  All in all, even if the installation was a bit of a pain, the fenders were well worth it and I highly recommend them for all-weather commuting.

Fenders on a Road Bike, Part 1

I’ve been an occasional bike commuter for a little over three years.  My commuter bike is a 2001 Giant OCR-1, a road bike with an aluminum frame and a carbon fork.  Back in the big 1980s, I spent my teen years delivering newspapers, and went through a seemingly-endless string of cheap 10-speed beater bikes.  I rode the bikes year-round in all kinds of weather conditions.  Every one of them had fenders – the big, heavy, metal kind that start to rust after a couple days in the elements.  The fenders may not have been stylish, but they did their job, keeping mud and grime off the bike and its rider.  Of course, back then I didn’t appreciate them.

Flash forward to the 1990s.  At some point, bike manufacturers stopped putting fenders on bikes.  I bought a mountain bike in 1994 – no fenders.  Ditto for my road bike, bought in 2002.  Nowadays, most bikes in the U.S. are sold for recreation.  Road bikes, in particular, now seem to be mostly geared towards racing and weekend club rides.  And indeed, when I bought my bikes in the 90s and 00s, I first used them for recreation.  I took the mountain bike out on trails, and used the road bike for weekend club rides.  I only rode the bikes in good weather, so I never missed the fenders from my old bikes.  Somewhere along the way, I forgot about the more utilitarian uses for bikes – commuting, errand-running, etc.  I had a college degree and a desk job, and no longer needed a bike for work, or so I thought.

Flash forward another few years.  With young kids, I no longer had as much time for leisure riding.  I wasn’t in quite the shape I was a few years before.  I wanted to find a way to do some more riding, so I decided to try riding my bike to work.  Gas prices were high at the time, so I figured I could save some money on gas and improve my fitness at the same time.  My ride to work is only about 8 miles, which is long enough to get a decent workout, yet short enough that it doesn’t take too long (with small children and a busy family life, time is at a premium).  I tried commuting by bike a few times and discovered that I enjoyed it, so I kept it up for 3 years.  At first I rode only in the summer, and then only when it was sunny and dry out.  It wasn’t until 2008 that I took the plunge into all-season bike commuting, and it wasn’t until then that I missed fenders.  Summers here on the east coast tend to be pretty dry, with occasional thunderstorms providing most of the precipitation.  That all changes in the Fall, when we have lots of damp, misty, drizzly weather.  After my first couple of wet rides, my fender-less bike (and most of its cargo) was completely covered in mud and other junk that splashed up from the road.  Not only was this bad for the bike (bottom brackets don’t like road grit), I had to spend an hour or so after each ride hosing the bike down, wiping off the grime, and re-lubing everything.  It was a major hassle, and I quickly reached the conclusion that cold-season commuting wasn’t going to happen regularly if I couldn’t come up with a better alternative.  That’s when I remembered fenders.  If I could somehow retrofit fenders onto my bike, they should solve most of my problems.

My next post will describe the process I went through to research, choose, and mount a set of fenders on my road bike.  It was a tricky and occasionally frustrating exercise, but the end result was well worth the effort.

New road bike tires

Last Friday I broke a spoke on the back wheel of my road bike.  Murphy’s Law #1 of broken spokes says that they will always happen on the back wheel, so you have the extra fun of removing the gear cassette to replace the spoke.  But that’s not really my point..  Since I had to take the tire off the wheel, I seized the opportunity to install a new pair of Vredestein Fortezza SE road tires that I picked up at Performance Bike a couple months ago.  The tires had a lot of good reviews, and the price was right, and my old tires were pretty badly worn down, so I couldn’t resist.

Mounting the tires was a mixed bag.  The back tire went on easily, but I had to use my “Quick Stick” plastic tire lever to help get the last bit on the front.  Never had to do that before, but it could just be that the tire was new and still needs to stretch out a bit.

My old tires were a mismatched set.  A Hutchinson on the front and a Specialized “Armadillo” on the back.  I ran the Hutchinson at 110psi and the Specialized at 120psi.  The Vredesteins are rated at 160psi max, which is considerably higher than my old ones.  I decided to try the rear at 140 and the front at 125.  So I pumped them up and headed out for my first ride, a short 8 mile commute to work.

During the ride, it seemed apparent that the new tires had a lot less rolling resistance than the old ones.  It seemed like I was going faster on straightaways and not getting out of the saddle as often.  I didn’t really turn it loose on the downhill sections..  new tires and all that, I need to give them a couple rides before I fully trust them.  At the end of the ride, I checked my computer and I couldn’t believe it..  I was almost full 1mph over my usual average speed.

This is my first set of new tires on this bike.  The old ones have been on the bike since 2002, but the bike has seen only occasional use (under 500 miles/year) up till this year.  But I really had no idea a new set of tires would make that much difference in overall speed.  We’ll see how well they wear, etc., but they certainly seem nice after one ride.

Sony Universal Remotes

I just bought a pair of Sony Model RM-VL600 universal remote controls (or “remote commanders” as Sony likes to call them), and figured I’d post my first impressions.

First, a little bit of background.  All of our TV comes over the air — no cable, sattelite, or FiOS.  Upstairs we have an old analog TV with an Apex DTV converter box.  Downstairs we have an LCD flat panel with a surround sound system.  We have 2 directional dipole-type antennas in the attic, and there are two antenna feeds to each TV.  To switch between antennas, each TV has a Radio Shack model 15-1968 remote control antenna switch.  All this gear, plus the requisite DVD players, VCRs etc, means lots and lots of remote controls.  Downstairs, we have never had a universal remote before, and have been juggling 4+ remotes for pretty much forever.  Upstairs, we started out with a cheapie preprogrammed universal remote made by Philips.  It worked great, until we added the DTV converter box.  The problem here is that DTV converters are still relatively new, and most of the preprogrammed universal remotes have not yet caught up with them.  I was able to get the Philips remote to “sort of” work with the Apex converter box, using the code for a Hughes cable box.  But certain essential buttons did not work, for example, the period button used for tuning ATSC “sub channels.”  Also, the preprogrammed remote didn’t have any codes that worked with the Radio Shack A/B switch.  So sadly, I had to retire the Philips remote (I did really like its layout and ergonomics).

What I really wanted was a remote that works similarly to the Philips, but includes a “learning” feature.  The Sony fit the bill perfectly.  It’s preprogrammed with a lot of codes, and buttons can be remapped arbitrarily using the learning feature.  And unlike many other learning remotes, it’s reasonably priced.  That’s important, because our house, with its two young children, is not what you would call the friendliest environment for remotes.  My youngest son broke our DVD remote in half.  Our old TV remote was dropped enough times that the battery door broke and we had to use tape to hold the batteries in.  Others have been lost, dropped, kicked, stepped on, had stuff spilled on them, etc.  The point is, I have no interest in spending megabucks on a fancy remote.  The Sony weighs in at just under $25, which is not a terrible loss should it meet some kind of untimely demise.  So, I figured I’d give it a shot.

I set the first remote up to work with our downstairs equipment.  The general trick to setting these remotes up is to first find the preprogrammed codes that work best with the equipment, then use the learning feature to fine-tune buttons until everything works the way you want.  As shipped, the remotes are configured to work with Sony equipment.  Our downstairs TV and DVD player are both made by Sony, and sure enough, the remote worked with them out of the box.  I also found codes that worked with my 10-year old Denon A/V Receiver and 12-year old Toshiba VCR.  The Receiver required a bit of “teaching” for individual buttons, as the preprogrammed code only worked with volume and a few of the inputs.  I finished up by programming two buttons to work the A/B antenna switch.  The entire process only took around 10 minutes.  We’ll see how things go after a couple weeks of regular use, but so far, I’m impressed.

Next up was the upstairs gear, including the DTV converter.  Similar to the Philips remote, the DTV box worked with a Hughes code, and certain buttons like the period didn’t work.  With this remote, though, I was able to use the learning feature to program all the missing buttons.  I found codes that worked with all the other (rather old) upstairs equipment, including a Mitsubishi TV and a GE VCR.  The remote also includes a “macro” feature, which I took advantage of by programming a button to turn the TV and DTV converter on and off at the same time.  Very nice.

As you’ve probably figured out, I’m impressed with these remotes.  They’re extremely versatile at an exceptionally reasonable price.  So what’s wrong with them?  Just a couple things that I’ve found so far.  I’m not crazy about the ergonomics.  The remotes are wider at the bottom than at the top, which seems kind of unnatural to me.  The remotes feel a little too big in my hands.  This may be something I get used to over time; we’ll have to see.  The only other thing (and this is really nitpicking) is a problem that I’ve seen with just about every universal remote I’ve tried:  button labels.  There are two opposing forces at work here.  On one hand, we want one remote to control as much equipment as possible.  On the other hand, we want the remote to have as few buttons as possible.  No one likes a cluttered remote with a zillion buttons, but at the same time we need to be able to access all the features of a given piece of equipment.  That means that, depending on the equipment, a single button on the remote might end up doing 3 or 4 completely different things.  So how do we accurately label the button?  The answer is we can’t, unless we use fancy LCD displays, or messy stickers, or overlays, or whatever.  So instead, we compromise.  In my case that means (among other things) I have to press the “twin view” button to turn closed captioning on on my DTV converter box.  It’s confusing at first, but you get used to it.  It’s just the way things are with inexpensive universal remotes.  All told though, these are among the best inexpensive universal remotes I’ve tried.

More fun with digital TV

The great digital TV antenna project continues.  I found out that the cheapie UHF antennas I built are known as “4 bay bowtie dipoles,” and they are very similar to the Model 4221 by Channel Master.   Based on my reading, I’ve decided not to try using a combiner to join the antenna signals.  Instead I picked up a remote control A/B switch at Radio Shack, model 15-1968, and it seems to work great.  I’m going to buy a second one for our other TV.  Providing most of your stations are in 1 of 2 different directions (as mine are), this switch is a great alternative to a rotator.  In particular, multiple TVs can watch signals from different antennas simultaneously, which is not possible with a rotor.  The down side, of course, is that you need to run two separate antenna cables to each TV.  But that only needs to be done once.  I’ve also ordered a couple of Sony model RM-VL600 universal remotes, based on all the positive reviews.  My hope is that I can use these to work the A/B switches.  We’ll see how they work out once they get here.

I may need to move my Baltimore antenna.  It’s aimed NNE directly at TV hill, but there are a lot of tall trees blocking its path.  It seems to pick up most of the Baltimore stations just fine..  WMAR-2, WBAL-11 and WBFF-45 all come in perfectly with 95%+ signal strength consistently and no dropouts.  WJZ-13 is my problem child, though.  I was watching it this afternoon and it started dropping out as soon as the wind kicked up.  Wondering if the frequency WJZ-DT is currently using has something to do with it — WMAR, WBAL and WBFF are all currently at the higher end of the UHF spectrum, while WJZ is lower at 38.  Dunno, but I’m going to try moving the antenna to the other end of the house, where it can hopefully get a clear shot through the foliage.  Just need a longer length of RG-6.

All bets are going to be off come February 2009, when a lot of these stations will be shifting back to the VHF band.  At that point, I may need to add a VHF antenna to my setup.  Looks like all of my local stations will end up on the high VHF band (channels 7-13), so I should be able to get by with a smaller VHF antenna.  I’m going to hold off before I do anything, though.  My current antennas seem to pick up the analog channels in the VHF-hi band pretty well, so they may do the job with the digital channels.

Stay tuned..  (no pun intended)

Mortgage Escrow Follies

A year or so back, the mortgage on our primary house was sold to CitiMortgage.  Prior to this happening, I was aware of quite a number of horror stories about CitiMortgage, so when the sale was announced, I was a little apprehensive.  However, one thing I’ve learned over the years is to always look at the big picture.  The nature of these things is that people who have problems tend to complain the loudest, so for every one person complaining about CitiMortgage on the Internet, there are probably hundreds who are not having problems.  Still, there are disproportionately more horror stories floating around about CitiMortgage than about other mortgage companies, which is a little troubling.  All the same, I gave them the benefit of the doubt.

After a year, the verdict on CitiMortgage is neutral.  The loan transfer went off without a hitch, with no mistakes on the principal, interest, and amortization side of things (kind of hard to screw up a simple 15 year fixed-rate loan, I would think).  They also made two interest credits to the escrow account, which was a pleasant surprise, although I’m assuming they were one-time credits as there have been none since (Maryland does not require lenders to pay interest on escrow balances, so I’m wondering if this was one of the terms of the loan sale or something — haven’t bothered to investigate).  To date, all of our escrow transactions (property tax and hazard insurance bills) have been processed correctly and on time.

There’s been one little hiccup to the whole CitiMortgage experience, related to the annual escrow analysis process.  First, some background.  Our property taxes come due semiannually, as is the case in many municipalities.  However, they’re not billed in equal installments — the first installment (due in July) is always several hundred dollars more than the second (due in December).  I’m not sure how common this practice is.  But in any case, most mortgage companies I’ve dealt with take a full year’s worth of past tax payments into account when running an escrow analysis.  CitiMortgage, however, assumes that the tax is billed in equal installments, and only looks at the most recent tax payment during the escrow analysis.  They then use this amount to project both semiannual tax payments for the coming 12 months, and as a result, their numbers are always wrong.

Depending on what time of year they run the escrow analysis, this can be good or bad.  CitiMortgage ran our first escrow analysis in January 2008, right after they paid the (lower) December property tax installment out of escrow.  They then used the lower December amount to project both the July 2008 and December 2008 payments.  The result was a lower-than-expected monthly escrow payment, which is great (as long as there’s still enough in the escrow account to cover the bills — you never, ever want your escrow balance to go negative).  However, CitiMortgage caught onto this in July, when the tax payment was much higher than they had projected.  This triggered another escrow analysis in July.  This time, they used the July amount to project payments in December 2008 and July 2009, which resulted in a monthly escrow payment that was too high.

Now, it’s nothing personal, but if CitiMortgage underestimates my monthly escrow payment, and there’s still enough in the account to pay the bills, I’m certainly not going to call it to their attention.  In the opposite situation, though, I’m always going to call them on it, because I don’t want to pay more than necessary into a non-interest-bearing escrow account.  So, when we got the second escrow analysis statement, we got on the phone with them.  They told us to fax them a copy of our property tax bill, showing the correct amount due for December, which we did.  This didn’t produce any action for two weeks, though, so my wife called them again.  This time she reached a supervisor who acknowledged receipt of the fax, re-computed the escrow, and adjusted our monthly payment on the spot.  So the two weeks of inaction was a little questionable, but the followup call produced an immediate resolution.

I was recently reading some of the FAQs on CitiMortgage’s web site (I’d provide a link, but it appears you need to be signed in to get at the FAQs) and it turns out this process is documented there.  Here’s an excerpt, with the relevant bit in bold:

We automatically adjust your escrow payment one time a year to reflect changes in your escrow related items. If you would like us to complete an interim adjustment, please send official documentation of the new tax amount to our Tax Department at:

CitiMortgage, Inc.
Attn: Tax Dept.
PO Box 23689
Rochester, NY 14692
Please write your account number on the documentation.

If this happens again (and I’m assuming it will) I may try sending my request to them via certified mail, with the thinking that it’ll be more effective than a fax.  Either way, though, it seems we should be able to get it rectified with a letter/fax and possibly a single follow-up phone call.  Time will tell.

If this little snafu unfolds the same way every year, it will result in a lower average escrow balance over time, because our escrow payment will be lower than it should be for the first half of the year.  The price of this is the hassle of getting the payment corrected after it’s overestimated in July.  Yet another reason to try and pay off the mortgage early, I guess 🙂

And finally, some parting advice:

  • Stay on top of things.  Monitor your escrow balance and activity at least monthly.  Make sure there is always enough in it to cover the bills.  Ensure that the mortgage company is paying the bills in a timely fashion.
  • Understand how mortgage companies compute escrow payments.  It’s a simple formula, and every mortgage company uses it. If you know it, you can double-check the mortgage company’s numbers and call them on any errors.

Laptop Travel Essentials

Being an intrepid occasional business traveler, I’ve come to rely on my trusty MacBook as sort of an office-away-from-home. Working while away from the office presents an interesting set of challenges. Internet access (particularly Wi-Fi) is becoming ever more ubiquitous, so getting connected is easy, but there’s no guarantee that a given Internet access point is secure — in fact, it’s most likely not. Working remotely often requires access to potentially sensitive data and resources that are protected behind firewalls and the like. It’s best to keep sensitive data off laptops, as laptops are easily stolen, and a data breech could land you on the 11:00 news, or worse.

This is a collection of tips, tools, etc. that I use to work securely with my laptop while on travel. It’s geared towards Macs, but much of it is applicable to other operating systems as well. Comments, suggestions, corrections, etc. are welcome.

SSH Tunnel Manager

A lot of organizations use VPNs to facilitate off-site access to private intranets, and ours is no exception.  I’ve never been a big fan of VPNs, because they all seem to rely on OS-specific drivers (or weird Java applets) that inevitably fail to work properly with my OS or web browser.  So, I avoid our VPN and use SSH tunnels instead.  All this requires is SSH access to a host with access to the intranet resource(s) I need.  With several well-crafted SSH tunnels, I’ve never found a need to use our VPN.

There’s one catch with SSH tunnels where laptops are concerned.  Setting up an SSH tunnel often requires feeding the SSH command a complex set of options.  When I’m on travel, I’m constantly moving from place to place, and bringing my laptop in and out of sleep mode.  This causes the SSH connections to time out, and I end up having to re-initialize all my tunnels every time I want to work on something — a big pain.  This is where a good SSH tunnel manager helps.  A tunnel manager maintains a list of tunnels and lets you start and stop them with a mouse click.  There’s a decent app for OS X called (surprise) “SSH Tunnel Manager,” and PuTTY does a nice job on Windows.  For Linux, I like gSTM.  With the SSH Tunnel manager, I’m up and running in seconds after starting up the laptop, and I don’t have to remember complex SSH command-line options.

Firefox Proxy-switching Extension

Secure web-browsing is a primary concern when traveling.  As such, I do all my browsing through SSH tunnels, which ensures that all my browser traffic is encrypted.  For general purpose browsing, I use a tunnel to an ad-filtering proxy running on a server in my office.  For work related stuff, as well as online banking and related things, I use a SOCKS proxy.  There are a couple other configurations I use as well.  Each of these requires a different proxy configuration in Firefox.  As shipped, Firefox only allows you to define a single proxy configuration.  There’s no support for multiple proxy configurations; if you want to change your proxy, you need to go in and manually update the settings each time.  Proxy-switching extensions allow you to define as many proxy configurations as you want, and switch between them quickly and conveniently.  I’ve found them to be indispensable.  There are a bunch of proxy-switching extensions out there, but my favorite is SwitchProxy, because it seems to be the best balance between simplicity and functionality (note that the stock version of SwitchProxy doesn’t run on Firefox 3, but I found a modified version that works nicely here).

Foxmarks

Foxmarks is a Firefox extension that synchronizes bookmarks between different instances of Firefox.  With Foxmarks, I now have the same set of bookmarks at work, at home, and on my laptop, and when I change my bookmarks in one place, all the others stay in sync automatically.  I’ve been running separate Firefox installations on different computers forever now, and I only recently discovered Foxmarks.  It’s one of those things where once you have it, you wonder how you got along without it.

VNC

VNC, or Virtual Network Computing, is a remote desktop-sharing technology.  It’s similar to Microsoft’s Remote Desktop service, but it’s an open standard and is platform-independent.  It allows me to pull up a virtual desktop and access data on a remote server as if I were physically sitting at the server.  This is a great way to keep sensitive data off my laptop — I just manipulate it remotely.  All of the connections are made through SSH tunnels. (what else?)

VNC is one of those things that I keep finding more and more uses for as time goes on.  I use it to access various GUI-based apps on my home and work PCs while traveling.  It’s particularly useful for running the occasional Windows or Linux-based app that I don’t have available on my Mac.  For example, I use GnuCash to track all of our household finances.  It’s installed on my Linux server at home.  With VNC, I can connect to my home server, run GnuCash remotely, and keep up with the finances while I’m away from home.  No need to run it locally on the Mac and worry about the data getting out of sync.

My favorite VNC client for the Mac is Chicken of the VNC.

FileVault

FileVault is a file-encryption system that ships with OS X.  It will transparently encrypt and decrypt files on the fly, using the user’s account password as a key.  I haven’t used it before, but I am going to give it a go with my new laptop.  It seems like an easy way to protect sensitive data that inadvertently finds its way onto the laptop.  In the event the laptop is stolen, the thieves will at least have to work harder to get at the data.

And there you have it.  I’m sure I’m leaving something out that will become apparent the next time I travel.  One thing I’d like to have is some sort of theft recovery software.  Haven’t yet looked into what’s available in that department.

They warned me

Everyone warned me the time would fly by, and they were right.

Today was my oldest son’s first day of kindergarten.  In what seems like the blink of an eye, he’s gone from infant, to toddler, to preschooler, to kindergartener.  Kind of scary how the time flies.  Next thing I know he’ll be in high school, then college.  I’m doing my best to enjoy his childhood while I can.  One of the rewards of age and wisdom is the ability to recognize life’s significant moments while they’re still happening.  Nothing drives this home like parenthood.  Our own childhoods are gone, but we can relive them vicariously through our children.

There’s an awful lot of advice about parenting floating around out there.  But I think a happy childhood is the single greatest gift a parent can give a child.  Hopefully my own kids will grow up to be well adjusted adults with happy memories of childhood.

And with that bit of late-summer sentimentality, we now return you to our regular bevy of posts about geeky stuff and swimming pool maintenance 🙂