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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…
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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…
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Gorilla Glue Test
We have an automatic cleaner for our swimming pool. It’s the kind that runs on water pressure and uses a booster pump. I have kind of a love-hate relationship with it. When it works, it works great, but when it doesn’t, I’m constantly swearing at it. It’s got a lot of moving parts (belts, gears,…
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Blog administrivia
OK.. figured out a somewhat better solution for links to blog posts. Use relative URLs, and use named permalinks. Then, I should be able to move the blog in the future without breaking self-referential links (providing that the new blog either runs WordPress or can support WordPress-style permalinks). I still need to go through and…
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Blogging again…
Hopefully I’ll pick up the blogging pace a bit now that I’ve moved everything over to wordpress.com. In preparation for un-password-protecting the blog, I’m going through all of my old posts, and the only thing I’ve noticed is that all of my links to other blog entries are broken. Nothing unexpected, but I wonder if…
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That was easy…
Searching for a new home for my blog (and didn’t want to pay for web hosting, at least not yet), and it came down to wordpress.com vs blogger.com. Blogger.com had the early edge because it works with my existing Google account, and offers free domain name mapping. WordPress.com charges a nominal annual fee for domain…
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Latest Ubuntu Upgrade
I just upgraded my Ubuntu box from 7.04 (Feisty Fawn) to 7.10 (Gutsy Gibbon), and after 3 upgrades (I started out with Dapper Drake) I remain impressed with how easy and painless it is. This time there was a hiccup, though. But, it’s not something that I’d expect an average user to encounter. First, a…
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Ubuntu hard drive upgrade
I just finished upgrading the hard drive on my Ubuntu machine, and it wasn’t as easy or straightforward as I was expecting. So I figured I’d write up some notes for the next time I do it. First I backed everything up. Then I shut down the computer, put the new drive in, and booted…
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Tax planning 101…
OK, so our 2007 taxes are done. Up till now, taxes were always something I did after the end of the tax year. At that point, all the forms are available from the relevant taxing authorities; tax software is available; I know exactly how much we made, how much we paid in taxes; etc. So…
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Server shuffle again
My server shuffling is finished, and went off (almost) without a hitch. Slight hiccup installing my new Zonet USB 2.0 PCI card. When I first popped it in, it worked fine. But for some reason, after I finished all the hardware shuffling and booted back up, the Linux kernel no longer recognized the USB 2.0…