East of the Sun, West of the Moon

That was so completely worth it. After nearly two years of putting up with an overly warm/hot laptop even after using the Fan Control software that lets the fans kick in faster/earlier than Apple would do by default, I gave in and bought what Belkin calls a CushTop.

During the cooler months when I wear jeans it’s less of a problem but during the warmer summer months when it makes sense to wander around the house in shorts made of thinner fabric, skin would often feel like it was sunburned. No longer!

And now we’re back. Unpacked. And resting. More later, or at least that’s my intention.

The last time I visited the Netherlands was when I went back to clean out my apartment, cancelled the rent, and stuffed all the important things like clothes, CDs, books and computers into a few suitcases to take with me to the US. So that would’ve been, oh, Fall of 2002.

Ouch.

In the years since then my parents have visited us here twice but because I kept postponing a visit back home because I really wanted to do that with all 4 of us. That wasn’t as easy as it could be, with no time of the year really being very convenient to go except the summer, and several summers in a row other events took the time needed either because they were more important or were planned before there was a chance to do otherwise.

This year my parents celebrate their 40th wedding anniversary and for the past 12 months we’ve basically been telling everybody, friends and family, not to try and plan anything for us or the boys until we bloody well had our tickets and we would know when we would leave and return.

That seems to have worked, although now the summer vacation feels extra double packed with activities for the boys and we’ll have to fight to make sure they get some down-time in it as well.

So tomorrow we drive to a hotel near the airport, Saturday we fly, with only one layover (I thought the extra money was worth it) to Amsterdam where we’ll arrive on Sunday morning. Three and a half weeks later we do the same in reverse order, so to speak.

I’ve made myself a promise not to wait another (almost) 6 years until the next return visit, even if that means that (for financial or practical reasons) I’ll be making that visit by myself or only with M.

Wish us luck, we’re going to need it.

• Google announces Project Virgle. Be sure to walk through the entire thing, answer the 15 questions, etc.
• LiveJournal announces a new team member.
• TUAW passes on that iPhone Dev Team canceled pwnage and instead sold their IP to an unnamed third party.
• TechCrunch tells us they are suing Facebook for $25 million in damages because of a context-ad.
• Google Australia launched gDay, allowing you to search tomorrow’s web, today.
• GMail added a new feature called Custom Time.
• Google Calendar introduces theWake Up Kit
• The Register reports that Jimmy Wales resigned from Wikipedia.
• They also report that wireless technologies are significantly more hazardous than previously reported.
• Due to changes in Swedish copyright laws The Pirate Bay was forced to move to Egypt.
• A patent has been granted regarding shielding customer support from customers?
• Another rename for thedailywtf.com?
• Times Online reveals a new Facebook tool.

Adding more as I run into them. Certainly The Register has enough today, more than I’m going to link.
Updated: Added entries for GMail, Google Calendar, The Register, The Pirate Bay, The Daily WTF/WTH and Times Online.

I couldn’t resist. The more people see this, the better.

When upgrading the kernel to a newer or different version, be sure to also get the appropriate version of the ivtv kernel modules, otherwise MythTV will cheerfully start up and pretend nothing is wrong, but meanwhile it’ll be running with 0 capture cards and no recordings will be scheduled!

I’m glad ABC will repeat tonight’s Lost episode, otherwise I would’ve missed that and would have had to resort to bittorrents or something, and that’s just a PITA.

Dee Snider of Twisted Sister:

If we go, ‘This one’s from our new album!’ you see hundreds of people standing up and walking out of the room.

From RollingStone.com.

Is a Thunderbird extension called Nostalgy which gives me back a couple of things that I’d been missing ever since I switched away from Mutt, a host of keyboard shortcuts:

• To change folder, move or copy messages, with folder name auto-completion.
• To change focus to the folder, thread, or message panes.
• To hide/show the folder pane.

And there is more, like user definable rulesets depending on what sub-folder is in focus and what text matches the sender, recipient or subject of the current message(s).

If you used to use pine or mutt then you will probably appreciate these features.

A bit embarrassing that the first update of the year is in February, but so be it.

Since the last post I’ve had my share of fun. Aside from the usual social obligations around the holidays we were also kept busy for a week in early December by the fall-out after an ice storm that caused power outages and broke the cable used for the television signal and internet connectivity. The chopped up bits of broken off branches are still at the side of street in most of the city because they held off actually dealing with it until they had funding (from state and federal resources) which meant that people had to come in and inspect how much damage was done, etc.

The cable outage took longer to fix because the cable repair crew didn’t want to touch it while it was hanging near the electricity cable and the electricity company repair crew was waiting for us to deal with the tree that was snapped in two. Naturally the electricity company did not share this fact with us, which was a bit frustrating.

The past few weeks had also been unusual, with my MacBook Pro being shipped to the nearest Apple repair location twice within two weeks. First it was shipped there and the repair was put on hold because of a part that they needed. When it returned they had only replaced the hard drive so I assume that was the part. I received the repaired notebook on Tuesday, and on Friday evening, when I had slowly but surely gotten settled on it and I was doing the initial Time Machine run, it stopped working. The next morning I got on the phone with Apple, spent an hour talking and being on hold and another repair was initiated. While I thought the guy on the phone had told me I should receive the empty box on Monday (in which to ship the MBP to them), I didn’t get it until Tuesday, and the tracking indicated that it hadn’t even left its origin until Monday. Hrm. Then after it was repaired on Wednesday, this apparently didn’t happen in time for it to be picked up by DHL that same day. Fine, if that at least meant that it would arrive on Friday, but after a day of checking the tracking site and seeing that the box was still somewhere in or near Ohio, it didn’t arrive until Saturday!

In those three weeks I worked on M’s MacBook and were both happy to no longer have to share it after I had (again) moved and reinstalled everything on the repaired machine.

Crossing my fingers, I think the machine (and yet another new hard drive, and also new cables this time) is in better shape. This was the third and fourth repair so far, I think it’s starting to get in Apple’s own interest to just get me a new machine and get it over with. I paid for the extended AppleCare so it is covered by warranty for another year and a half at least. I’m afraid to think about how many more repairs that is going to be, all on their dime (and my time). The price you pay for using a first-generation product, eh?