Katrina
Posted on August 31, 2005
Filed Under Life | Leave a Comment
Words can’t describe. I’m not even sure I want to try.
I used to live in Georgia. I got out right before Andrew in 1992, but I remember the boarded up windows from other storms. Yesterday, I was listening to CNN on the radio and a reporter was interviewing a man, heavy southern accent, who was on his roof with his wife waiting for rescue. Their house didn’t survive. “It split in half!” the man cried, “I was o’the half of the house that stood. I was holding my wife’s hand and she was on the half that didn’t and she’s gone!” Tore my heart out. How on earth will these people rebuild? Can’t even imagine being in the dark, hot Superdome with the roof raining on you and knowing that you’ll be there for days. When I first read the National Weather Service hurricane warning with words such as “will be destroyed…” I didn’t believe it. Weather forecasts are usually not that definitive…and bleak. I thought it was a joke. Along the lines of what you’d do in a nuclear attack: Get under your desk, put your head between your knees…and kiss your ass goodbye.
I want to help. If I still lived in Georgia I would probably be helping in person but I can’t do that now. So here’s what I will do… Back in January, I participated in [BlogAid](http://www.blogaid.org.uk) and donated one month’s Adsense income to Tsunami relief efforts. I ended up donating $200. Was a great idea then, it’s a great idea now. I don’t know if anyone’s doing anything organized. If so, I’ll join in but in the meantime **I am pledging my September ad income to Katrina relief efforts…*and* I’ll match whatever I earn with my own money.** Back in January, I added a little bit of my own money but what I donated was pretty close to what I earned so this time with my match, I’m hoping for a meaningful donation. I don’t know if that means sending a check or buying supplies to send to the area. Relief is rushing in now…in early October when these people’s devastated lives are yesterday’s news may be when they need the help the most.
Who’s with me?
Maxtor drives
Posted on August 30, 2005
Filed Under Internet & Technology | Leave a Comment
A little harsh, but I can’t say I [disagree with the sentiment:](http://nowhere.2entwine.com/archives/000558.html)
>Maxtor Harddrives Dear Maxtor, your products are absolute crap. Yes, it’s embarrassingly simple to buy your 3rd rate products from my local computer emporium. The number of dead Maxtor drives on my desk is getting awfully close to the number of fingers on one hand. Some of the drives died a sudden death while others slowly faded into the light teasing me with Windows Write Failures. To summarize, you suck!
I’ve got a doorstop, I mean a non-functional Maxtor drive sitting on the corner of my desk too. I know I should just throw it in the garbage, but it seems like such a shame. It was only a few months old. Ironically, it was my backup drive for the PC. The PC survived the move from CT to NJ, the backup didn’t. I don’t care about restoring the data now. It’s outside of the initial warranty, of course. I emailed Maxtor about the problem I was having with the drive. I plugged it in, it wouldn’t mount. Couldn’t recover it. Couldn’t “see” it with any tool l threw at it. This was their response:
>Is the drive recognized in Disk Management on your PC, or in the Disk Utility on the Mac? If it is seen in Disk Management, then your data should still be present on the drive. In order to access the data, you will probably need to use data recovery software, or send the drive to a data recovery service. Once the data has been recovered (or if you choose not to recover the data), you can repartition and reformat the drive using the Disk Management utility. More information on Disk Management is available from Microsoft at http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=309000. If the drive is not detected in either Disk Management or the Disk Utility, that would indicate that the drive has failed.
Gee, that was helpful. Not. Meanwhile, the Western Digital drive I bought to replace it (and spent less on it for more capacity, I might add) has been rock solid. I’ll never purchase Maxtor again. It may have been just one bad drive, but I saw no reason to give them a second chance to waste my money. Once was enough.
Good news for my drug of choice
Posted on August 29, 2005
Filed Under Life | 1 Comment
I gave up drinking when I graduated college (now smelling rum cake is enough to bring on a buzz) I had my last cigarette in 1993, giving up (at its worst) a 1.5 pack a day habit. I’ve kept off most of the weight I lost 5 years ago. Never did enough of any other drug to remember the last time, but it was certainly double digit years ago at least. My one remaining vice is caffeine. Yes, I’m addicted. Yes, I get a bit of a headache if I don’t have my first cup o’joe by 10 am. I just love the stuff.
Now [this is the best news I've heard all week](http://www.physorg.com/news6067.html) and it’s only Monday:
> “Americans get more of their antioxidants from coffee than any other dietary source. Nothing else comes close,” says study leader Joe Vinson, Ph.D., a chemistry professor at the university. Although fruits and vegetables are generally promoted as good sources of antioxidants, the new finding is surprising because it represents the first time that coffee has been shown to be the primary source from which most Americans get their antioxidants, Vinson says. Both caffeinated and decaf versions appear to provide similar antioxidant levels, he adds.
I think it’s time to go downstairs and pour another cup… 
Disclaimer: Yes, I realize that the negatives of caffeine probably outweigh the positives. It’s like all those folks who justified smoking because it helped speed up metabolism. All it meant was that when you died of lung cancer, you’d have a thinner corpse.
Bye Bye Google Desktop Search 2
Posted on August 28, 2005
Filed Under Uncategorized | 2 Comments
I was going to simply [update the old entry](http://www.momathome.com/viewfromhome/2005/08/google_desktop_search_2.php) but I have enough to say on the subject that it warrants its own space (and now that MovableType lets you send trackbacks to internal entries, I can say what I want and still update that entry with a trackback).
In short, I nuked it.
I put back [X1](http://www.x1.com) a few days ago. Still not in love with X1’s interface, but it does the job like no other. Here’s the thing…if I’m on the phone with a lawyer, client, vendor, etc. and I have to pull something up from an email as part of the conversation (which I do **often**) I need to be able to click a few keys and find that email. With X1, nine times out of ten I can get that email without skipping a beat. “nancy quotation widgets” and a click on the Attachments button instantly gives me the email I sent to Nancy with the quote from the printer about the widgets we wanted to order. The other person thinks I had that email sitting on my lap the entire conversation. X1 also indexes PSTs that aren’t part of the active profile. That’s big. Bigger than I gave it credit for. I try not to let my current PST archive file get larger than around 700MB. When it approaches that size, I start a new data file for it and save the old PST file to a backup location. Then I tell X1 to index the PST from the backup location while it’s going forward with the fresh email. That way I’ve got 2 years of email at my fingertips but only the last few months or so active. When I want to search something older, X1 doesn’t care if it’s active in Outlook or not. It finds it. That was worth the $75 I paid for the software alone and I’m good to remember that the next time something new & flashy comes along.
Suffice to say, Google Desktop Search couldn’t find that old saved email. It had enough trouble with the new saved email. Yes, it’s faster. I’ll give it that. But if it pulls up the **wrong** information, who cares if it got there first? “nancy quotation widgets” was just as likely to give me a web page on how to write an essay about widgets as it did that email. It certainly didn’t know I was looking for a PDF file that was attached to an email and not the email itself (which only says “Your quote is attached”).
When I say to someone on the phone, “I have that in an email, let me pull it up and see…” if there’s anything more than 3 seconds of silence while I go find it I’m using the wrong search tool. With GDS, it was quite literally, “um, one second…let me see…oh, no, that’s not it…I know it’s here somewhere…can I look that up in a bit and get back to you?” Nope, won’t work.
So once X1 was indexing my email again GDS 2 lost a lot of its appeal. I thought I would use it for file searching. But it was lackluster there too. I couldn’t get specific enough with boolean terms **and** what I knew about the file (location, size, etc.) to make it worthwhile.Google Talk? Eh. I’m happy with Trillian and I can add Google folks through the Jabber plug-in. Google’s sidebar is nice…but there wasn’t anything in there that I wasn’t already getting in Firefox extensions (Adsense monitoring, weather) or FeedDemon (RSS/news) or OneNote (ScratchPad).
Worse, my system was slowing down. A little at first but then more noticeable. Quitting GDS 2 brought things back to normal, and that’s when I ran Add/Remove and said goodbye. Maybe version 3.
Petting the produce
Posted on August 25, 2005
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When Eric and I first started dating and became engaged (it happened around the same time), we enjoyed visiting a friend of mine and going with her to the [Dutchess County fair](http://www.dutchessfair.com/html/dutchess_county_fair.html) in Rhinebeck, NY. Eric and I, metropolitan that we were, would laugh at the booths selling hand-painted power tools and it’s always fun to go “pet the produce” as we used to say.
Today, I took the girls to the [Hunterdon County 4H & Agriculture Fair](http://www.co.hunterdon.nj.us/4hagfair.htm) in Ringoes, NJ. Only a 40 minute drive from here. Free admission, easy parking for $5. This fair made the Dutchess County fair look like it happened in downtown Manhattan. I can now say that I stood one foot away from a goat being milked, and I pet a cow. The girls loved it, and I had to practically drag them out of the petting zoo after nearly an hour. The animals all had names and awards and now Laini is begging to join a [4H club](http://www.nj4h.rutgers.edu/default.asp). She says she’ll bring our guinea pig. There does appear to be a [4H group in Mercer County](http://www.mgofmc.org/rutgers.html) and as Eric says, “well, there’s a lot of corn here.”
