Author: Tim Jarrett

Getting started

First day at work. I’m a little nervous. Needless to say, expect very little if any blogging today.

Quick house update (couldn’t let the opportunity pass): the floor guys are just about done and the plumbers are starting this morning in our second bathroom (we’re ripping out paneling, fixing a hole in the wall, and replacing the senior citizen-unfriendly clawfoot tub with something a little easier to get into and out of). Unpacking is going well so far except for one broken dish–which unfortunately was a piece of porcelain we hand carried back from Capri and never got a chance to use. We might be able to glue it back together.

We got stuff

I was very excited to be actually mowing my own lawn with my own lawnmower this morning, while our floor guys were laying down the final coat of finish on our new floors. I had just finished showering and changing when I heard a big truck outside. Yes, our stuff had shown up with no warning at all!

Fortunately, we had enough room in the rest of the house and garage to hold all the stuff. Our living room is basically set up and Lisa is thrilled to have TV. I think this might conclude the hardcore “houseblogging” I’ve been doing for a while. Thanks to all of you for putting up with me as I go through this transition.

iRock or not iRock

Doc Searls sez that the iRock should let you select any channel on the FM band. I have one of those. It cost about $20 at Best Buy, and is called the SoundFeeder.

As always, though there’s a trade off between features and ease of use. This thing has a four position switch, to let you select between four ranges of FM frequencies, and a dial to let you tune precisely within that range. Or sort of precisely—it’s not really precision engineered or anything, and sometimes the signal drifts a little.

Driving on a long trip can be an exercise in patience. As you drive in and out of range of different stations, the frequency you chose on the SoundFeeder will inevitably get interference. Then you have to find an empty spot on your tuner and fiddle with the SoundFeeder again until the signal comes in—using the two controls without taking your eyes off the road is pretty tricky.
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Convergence on metaweblogs…

UserLand just released an implementation of the MetaWeblog API for Manila. This is pretty cool—this API is more robust than the Blogger API and is supported by both Manila and Radio.

Coincidentally, I’ve just been playing around with the API for some of my existing scripts. Updates as I go. It’s a faster learning path than the Manila API, since I have a local server in which I can investigate the code and problems as they arise.

Happy birthday

The 226th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence, also known as Independence Day. Did the Founding Fathers really know what they were getting into? Today should be a day of quiet reflection as well as celebration, especially after everything that’s happened in the last year.

The Broadband Fairy came!

…and it only took a couple of hours to get everything working!!! 🙂

After failing to get Lisa’s computer configured owing to some obscure binding problems and a firewall conflict, we tried to install the broadband software on my machine, to learn that there was a flaw in the script that tried to redirect my browser to finish the registration and it was pointing to the wrong URL. Plus my proxy server settings had to be set manually to finish. Once I got that straightened out, it was a piece of cake.
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Why are the Dodgers, Ikea, and CNA all criminals?

… because, according to the Wall Street Journal, they violated the Trading with the Enemy act. We’re just now finding out about this thanks to a FOIA lawsuit filed by Public Citizen and the Corporate Crime Reporter. According to the Journal, “Treasury is planning to make such settlements public on a regular basis.”

Unusually for the Journal, they also point out who’s not been charged: Dick Cheney.

The Treasury’s latest list didn’t include Halliburton Co., Dallas, the oil-services company formerly run by Vice President Dick Cheney. Halliburton opened an office in Tehran in 2000, when Mr. Cheney was chief executive officer. When the news became public last year, the company denied its office violated the U.S. law.

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Back from the pilgrimage

My sister Esta has returned from her pilgrimage. Apparently there were some eventful things: bad connection, super late arrival, cows in the road, “Bagging the Rush,” etc. Good things, too: sounds like there was lots of spiritual growth happenin’. Her leadership experience on this trip makes most of my business experience look tame.

The CIO of Utah gets it

Surprisingly cool find: the weblog of the CIO of Utah, Phil Windley. Seems sharp and generally clueful, as evidenced by Blogs for System Status Communications:

My organization operates hundreds of servers in several data centers and a network that connects over 250 separate locations. One of the problems we have is status communication to various interested parties. Tonight I decided we should have a system status blog that uses categories with separate RSS feeds for various severity levels and systems. For the low price of $40/year we could have:

  • One easy spot to post status announcements, which would be ordered in exactly the right way.
  • A web-based record of status.
  • Multiple RSS feeds of the various systems and severity levels.
  • Easy integration into the personalization feature of our intranet; RSS feeds would show up as gadget boxes for people who want them.
  • The ability to easily subscribe to RSS feeds and digest them in various ways for people with special needs.

How could you not like that?

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Starting to look like a house

Boy, I need to get a new icon for Seattle news stories. Anyway, I was up until 11:30 last night finishing the painting in our great room. This morning the masking tape is coming up and the drop cloths are being folded away, while in the next room our flooring guys are masking the mess that was the old floor. The Broadband Fairy comes later today too. Far too much fun for one day.

Sorry I doubted you, Great-Uncle Landon

My cousin Aubrey’s genealogical research indicates that my great-uncle Landon, who died institutionalized, had patented “a method for transmitting mail by electricity.” When I saw the research a few years ago, I was Intrigued by the description but wasn’t able to find out anything about it. Last time I was back in North Carolina, I told my Dad I wondered if the patent had been issued or just applied for.

Today, with nothing much to do except “supervise” the refinishing and replacing of our floor, I looked up the patent in the PTO’s database, and found it: Number 847076, “Mail-Transportation System,” issued March 12, 1907. No on-line text, but there are six TIFF images of the patent drawings and claims. Pretty cool—he had an idea for an engine that would deliver mail to a series of regular stops, propelling itself by unspecified means along a suspended wire. Not as far fetched as shooting mail through a vast network of underground tubes using compressed air, which actually happened.