LaserBlog.com

We are volunteering for a cat rescue today, driving a cat from a shelter to the rescue organization in Tampa. We just did the drop-off and are going to have dinner at a truck stop. They have internet which you have to pay for but the wifi is (on purpose or by accidnet?) free. So here I am, waiting for my steak in the truck stop, yay!

Hey WOW man!

Sympatico SayMail of Riley talking:
http://saymail.sympatico.ca/card/ihClnJTH2rgIhlDaXDYqlW
(You might have to use IE for this.)

And one of Crystal:
http://saymail.sympatico.ca/card/kMylOZLH2rglsST4fhVhba

Can you tell I’m surfing the flickr blog tonight? Another gem from the flickr blog:
http://mappr.com/
An interactive map of the U.S. based on flickr photo tags.

Take the time to check out the flickr blog. Lots of gems there. Flickr is absorbing and addicting. The forums are intersting if you want ot learn more about how to use flickr, there are flickr groups, the blog, and lots more – all leading to interesting photos and stuff.

This is also from the flickr blog:
A sunset under the clouds:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/edyson/2639263/

From the Flickr Blog, some tsunami aftermath photos:
http://www.flickr.com/photos/tho/sets/64014/

Update: I saw a very high-res photo on usenet of tsunami aftermath with tons of dead bodies floating in the water. Very… sad. I won’t post it here tho, cuz not everyone would want to see it.

Update: For more flickr tsunami aftermath photos, see the flicr blog post:
http://blog.flickr.com/flickrblog/2004/12/tsunami_missing.html

Sometimes I like to just surf photoblogs. This one is really great:
http://chromogenic.net

Too much weird sh*t has been going on tech-wise at home.

The intranet at home worked fine forever, got the new laptop, everything worked fine, switch from dsl to cable, everything worked fine.

Then one day the the network started acting up. The fujitsu xp laptop can’t see the main pc (where all my files are), the toshiba xp laptop can’t see the main pc, the old gateway 98 reliable albiet slow workhorse laptop can’t see the main computer.

For days this has been killing poor brain/programmer/sysadmin M.

Now tonight I notice that when I load ftp on toshiba xp laptop, the profile is set so that the left pane is the main pc over the network, mapped drive E. Normally if it can’t see that networked drive, it gives an error and defaults to c:\ in the left pane. But nooOOOooo, it’s SHOWING E (main pc). I can see, navigate, and move files, on the main pc, over the network, in the left window of the ftp program.

Weird.

I think it’s my aura. Half the time I have a tech problem, all I need is for M to stand near me and it fixes itself. I had a friend once who, when she was upset, electrical stuff near her would malfuntion, once during a shouting match w/ her husband, the light bulb in the room exploded and went all over the place. Mabe there is something to the aura of techies.

I’ve always believed that my aura must be plaid.

And then last night fotki.com kept giving me ’503′ errors. When they finally stopped, I uploaded 4 galleries of photos and then went in and added commentary to them.

Today half of them are gone, just white boxes where the thumbnails should be, and a ghostly grey box w/ a shadow where the images should be. Direct links to the archived images bring up an error. I had to delete all four folders, re-upload them, go back into all my blog posts here, at the family blog, and the dog blog, and change all the direct links as those change if the images are deleted and reuploaded. So I reuploaded all of them, went thru all the links to them to change them, and I’m NOT going to add comments when I don’t feel Fotki is stable right now.

I have a flickr pro account as well, and I totally love flckr, but I’m not ready to make a difinitive changeover to using flickr for all image hosting. I like the ease and customization of fotki, along with their (usually) fast help response, ftp, and more.

Here’s hopin’ tomorrow goes better.

My gosh, stop the presses! I finally took some photos that weren’t RILEY related!

Thanks to N and A for passing that wonderful lens on to me. I was inspired to bring my D60 [link | Photos] around town w/ me this weekend.

I added a batch to the gallery (and of course tons of pix to Riley’s blog) -

..::PHOTOS::..

(I’m tired, I got nothing.)

XP is better my ass.

It’s amazing how I get a brand new XP laptop and nothing works on it. It’s not the laptop, it’s the system. It won’t read card readers, it won’t read cameras, it won’t talk over the network, it won’t run Pagemaker.

So far my experience is that Win98 is better.

I really should just switch over to Linux or Mac.

I was going thru some piles last night and came across a notebook of my brother who passed away last January. [[I can't believe it's almost a year! ]] It was full of his handwriting. He was a writer, but this was notes to self re. cancer treatment and also, and this is what really killed me – handwritten emails that he never got a chance to transcribe and send.

It just hit me now that maybe he did get a chance to send them and the notes are just still in the notebook.

But last night when looking at all of them it just made me sad.

Also notes to ask the doctors, like “Q. WHY isn’t anyone taking me seriously about the swelling???! The swelling is the most painful in the left leg…” I remember thinking that the doctors didn’t always do their best. He basically died of a punctured lung. On his last visit to the doctor outpatient, before we knew about the punctured lung, both he and I intended to ask the dr. about his really bad coughing. We both forgot. But do you think the freaking doctor or nurse would have thought to listen to his chest?

Whatever.

Good article on Flickr from Salon:
http://www.salon.com/tech/feature/2004/12/20/flickr/

Sometimes I get a kick out of looking at other people’s garbage. Just like when walking or driving down the street.

Coming home today we passed a neighbor who recently had their first baby. Garbage Day and at the end of the driveway was a Graco box folded up, I guess they got a car seat or something, a broken down diaper box, huge, like from Costco, and tons of pizza boxes! LOL. I got a kick out of that, they must be so exhausted from the new baby that they are just ordering pizza for meals, hahahahah.

Amazing what garbage can reveal.

We were sittin’ around today and that frequent dns problem came up. I don’t know why, but once in a while (too often), my website SEEMS to disappear, and it’s only this one or one other. But not other sites. Just my two main ones. Strange coincidence. ? I can see the sites thru megaproxy.com and thru anonymizer.com, so it’s not a problem w/ the hosting company and the sites are NOT down. So it’s either our wifi hub/dns, or our ISP’s dns, or some dns server between our town and the rest of the U.S. (we’re on a peninula, so we have a geographical bottleneck). We are on DSL. I said to M “I wonder if we’d have the same problem on cable modem”. M jumps up and goes to the pile of mail and pulls out a flier that expires today: sign up for cable modem and it’s only $9.95 a month for the first two months, that’s a good deal if we just want to try it out!

So we headed off to the mall where the cable company has a kiosk and signed up, got the self install kit and modem, did some shopping, and tonight M set it up. It seems faster, but maybe ‘cuz I expect it to be. Our DSL was 1.5mbps down / 256 up. The cable modem service here is supposed to be 3.0mbps down / 256 up, and they said it’ll be 4.0 soon (down).

DslReports.com benchmark tests don’t show it being 3.0, but it still seems faster than DSL, but we’ll see. We still have DSL too, so we’ll probably do a test, switch over, and do another test, to really benchmark the two.

I’ll mainly be interested to see if there are any slowdowns during peak times and if that strange website-disappearing-act ceases to occur on cable. If it keeps happening then it’s either our wifi hub/dns or something out in the state somewhere.

I wasn’t really thinking about whether it’s been a good year or a bad year. M keeps mentioning what a bad year it was. I guess it was a bad year; my brother died in January, my Uncle died in November, we had so many hurricanes I can’t even remember how many, we had hurrican damage, and more.

But it was a good year because M still has a great job, money is good, the pets are good, Mom is good, the rest of the family is good, we got to go to Ireland, and more.

So, idunno. I just hope things aren’t worse next year, and that nobody else gets sick or dies.

Happy New Year