zen.org Communal Weblog

Sent to David Farber’s Interesting People mailing list:

“United States officials were surprised and heartened today at the size of
turnout in South Vietnam’s presidential election despite a Vietcong
terrorist campaign to disrupt the voting. According to reports from
Saigon, 83 percent of the 5.85 million registered voters cast their
ballots yesterday. Many of them risked reprisals threatened by the
Vietcong. A successful election has long been seen as the keystone in
President Johnson’s policy of encouraging the growth of constitutional
processes in South Vietnam.”

– Peter Grose, in a page 2 New York Times article titled, ‘U.S.Encouraged by Vietnam Vote,’ September 4, 1967.

I’ve been in California now for almost a day, back in the old stomping ground after we left nearly 5 years aso. The Silicon Valley town where we lived, married, and finally decided to leave for Ireland because we didn’t think it was our final stopping point. It’s all quite the same, but only to the extent that familiar sights try to cling onto strangely-faded memories. Streets look similar, but the smaller veins running through Ireland make these roads now seem monsterous. Freeways are unimaginable, yet flying along 101 in the evening sure does feel like more fun than the crowded stumbling of the M50.

We went out to dinner in last night (out being away from the hotel), still awake after getting up in Ireland on the same day 19 hours earlier. The group of seven who came to CA for a week’s serving of meetings all sat down at a restaurant in Mountain View for dinner. Sushi Tei is a very fond memory of living here, and the source of the best sushi we’ve had anywhere. Run by a Japanese fellow named Isaka and the woman who worked with him for years at another sushi restaurant, Sushi Tei was their effort to put into reality their own idea of the perfect sushi experience.

Tonight back at the hotel, I discovered that Wi-Fi works in the bar letting me write this on my Zaurus. Hee hee. Tomorrow morning is early breakfast, then lots of meetings being introduced to hordes of names I’m not expecting to retain just yet. (Name memory in that situation: double-plus un-good.)

Went to Fry’s today (more later about that) and got a Logitech QuickCam Pro 4000 which I found is (again) supported under Linux. The big project is to make it happily communicate with E’s iSight and see/talk to both of them at home for less than a long-distance phone call. 🙂

Off to sleep, just as everyone in Ireland is waking up. How weird.

Although it was in April 2004, if you haven’t yet read the story “I fought the scammer… and I won.” it’s worth your time. A sysadmin at a Dublin Internet cafe snags a spammer with their laptop still hooked up.

Just discovered pocket-lint.co.uk in the UK, similar in idea to what you get at ThinkGeek in the US. Tons of stuff. Try not to think about the current exchange rate for the US $ or the Euro €.

I’ve been drowning myself in Quicken trying to get our records up-to-date. (I looked at GnuCash a couple of years ago but there were some things it didn’t do for me to get me off of Quicken.) Everything up til now has been fine. I’m nearly done with entering and balancing stuff, with only a couple of accounts left. The first is on hold until the credit card company sends me statements that I never downloaded (and thus cannot reach, since they only let you get the last five). Oh well.

The second account is by far the most complex of all of them, and of course I let balancing slide for months on end. The result wouldn’t be that big of a deal, just some time, except for the “original statement value” number I’m supposed to see when I next reconcile the account. It says the previous statement balance was a number that has actually never existed on any statement. Hmm. Then I looked at one part of the account, and a number was way wrong—instead of something like 1,234, it was 0.007148393. A bit more than a year ago I moved from using Quicken under WinXP to using it under Linux with Wine. It’s been really strong and good, but somewhere in the move something (and perhaps it was be copying the wrong qdata.qdf file) got messed up. I can’t revert back to a previous version, since I’ve just finished entering and balancing all of the other accounts.

Now I’ve got to go back about 2-1/2 years in statements and find where the discrepancy starts.

Fuck.

I emailed a question to someone about my car (getting a km/h odometer face to replace the mph one), and got a one-sentence reply from someone today. One sentence, their name, then this stuff stuck at the bottom. Kinda makes the old tradition of 4-line signatures burn in Hell:


****************************************************************************
The information transmitted in this email is intended for the addressee
only and may contain confidential and/or privileged material. If you
are not an intended recipient or an authorized representative of an
intended recipient, you are prohibited from any review, retransmission,
dissemination, reliance upon or other use of, the information in this
e-mail or its attachments. If you have received this e-mail in error,
please notify the sender immediately by return e-mail and delete
all copies of this message and any attachments.

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Driven by seeing our friend David, a visitor from the US, use IMAP to do his work mail, I finally decided to follow through with an idea I had a while ago. Instead of syncing my mail directory between my desktop and my laptop, which meant I had to avoid using one without knowing I’d sync’d from the other (a strange sort of handshake), I can instead leave the folders on the desktop. I’ll use the Courier IMAP server.

My choice is driven by my use of kmail for the last few years, which has resulted in most of my mail folders being in maildir format. Which in theory should be made available by the Courier server, since it (and only it, from what I can tell) fully supports maildir folders. The catch, of course, is that kmail has its own idea about how to keep things in folders and sub-folders. I ended up having to finally write my own shell script to turn an existing kmail tree into one that Courier likes to use.

So I did the script, creating a new Maildir tree with the script that copies stuff properly out of ~/mail. And now I can not only make kmail use that, but also finally play with the Mozilla Thunderbird mail client. Of course in setting it up, I discovered that I could also use Thunderbird as a Usenet news reader instead of pan, and also as an RSS feed aggregator instead of Liferea. I don’t yet know how well it’ll behave for these other services, but so far the common interface looks promising.

The only worry I have is my intent to ssh into my desktop system from outside, and use that tunnel for access to the IMAP server. (And, I guess, also our news server.) I still have to get a universal power supply for my desktop system so it’ll stay up if the power hiccups and we’re not home. But it’s seeming like it’d be cool to not worry about every single thing being on my laptop. 🙂

On the radio today, they had two different reports of someone having suffered “serious sexual assault.” Each reporter went out of their way to emphasize the word serious. So there are some examples of sexual assault not so serious? Just sorta “casual sexual assault” ? Harrumph.

A recent New York Times article (need an ID?) seems to suggest that TiVo is in some trouble. Uh oh. I guess I better get our TV Hack finished.

We got our annual renewal of the Motor Tax due when you own a car in Ireland. The envelope received today (January 17 2005) included this insert, which proves that they have a delay problem of their own:

Important Notice for Online Motor Tax Customers

Your January renewal notice has issued earlier to facilitate your application to have your online motor tax processed before January and in doing so avoid any postal delays normally experienced by customers at that time of year. We guarantee that if we receive your application by Friday December 17th your disc will be posted before Christmas.