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!

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.

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’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.

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.

• 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.

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?