Cruftbox: My Box of Cruft

I’m at work and our UPS is busted. The UPS is the big battery that protects us against power failure. The upgrade/maintenance for it failed.
There’s a guy driving to Fullerton as I type to get a replacement for what we think is the problem board. IN rush hour traffic, we are talking about a 3 hour round trip.
Until then, we are running off our generator. We have about 40 hours of fuel. It could be a long night.

I’m back home. I was happy to see the girls. Michele was tired. That’s what 48 hours of non-stop girls will do to you.
It is book fair week at Zoe’s school, so I read two of the new books to the girls before dinner. We’ve been reading stories like Cinderella and Rapunzel and so the girls want to pretend to be the heroine. They insist that we ‘be mean’ and order them around. I tell them to go scrub the floor, and they pretend to scrub the floor, giggling all the time.
Michele insisted in making dinner and refused to let me pick something up. I’m sure she was concerned with my eating habits in Vegas, because tonight’s dinner had lots of spinach in it. Michele believes that spinach will heal all that ails a person. The meatloaf she made was good and I was happy to dinner at a table where I could hear no bells ringing.
A bit later I turned on my computer and found I had 222 emails waiting for me. I was gone around 56 hours without checking email. Thanks to Spamassassin Pro 143 spam emails were automatically placed in my Junk Email folder. Only 4 spam emails survived the filtering and were still in my inbox. SpamAssassin missed less than 3% of the spam and didn’t make mistakes with false positives. Buying that software is money well spent.
For those that are truly voyeuristic, the remaining 79 emails consisted of 57 Delt mailing list emails, 3 geocaching emails, and 19 miscellaneous emails.
I have a bunch of photos from the trip, but I don’t have the energy to write them all up now. You’ll have to do with this for now:

Martell, MSN Butterfly #1, Me, MSN Butterfly #2

I’m at Comdex, sitting in the hotel waiting for breakfast. THe New York, New York hotel has broadband to the room for $10 for 24 hours. I tried wardriving, but I’m up on the 26th floor. I can see two access points, but I can’t get a steady signal to attach. I tried…
At the Keynote address, Bill Gates spoke about the Microsoft vision for the future of computing. The Tablet PC was a big thing, and they talked a little more about it. THey also showed the smart monitor. The difference is best described this way: The Table PC is like a cell phone, you can take it with you most places and it will work. The Smart Monitor is like a cordless phone in your house that works great near home, but doesn’t is you go too far away. People are going to like these things.
They also showed small devices they called SPOT. Small wirelessly connected items with personalized info. What they showed were small clocks that could recieve data from elsewhere. One of the examples was a smart alarm clock. I thought it was a dud. I did like the smart key chain. I’m the kind of guy that needs a keychain to remind me of times & places I have to be.
Gotta go, time for breafast…

I’m off to Vegas for Comdex in 20 minutes.
It’s WiFi, Tablet PCs, and strange Japanese accesories for me until Tuesday.
See ya…
Yes, I did pack the cantenna into my luggage! I’ll wardrive the casinos!
To keep you in suspense, here’s the latest part I acquired to use in my wardriving fun. Michele thnks I’ve gone off the deep end.

Tonight we were at the Diggs house for Emily’s 7th birthday. Obviously, a child’s birthday party is the right place to invent a new drink.
I present to you the newest alcoholic sensation.

Vodka + Red Licorice Soda = The Red Vine
Believe it or not, it tasted good.

OK, a quick post while the bisquits are in the oven.
A while ago, I posted a few entries about wanting to know a good method to wash my old Dodgers baseball cap. Many loyal Cruft readers sent in suggestions.
As an unexpected side effect I get hit several times a day by people looking for how to wash baseball caps via search engines. Rather than disappoint them, I thought it would be good to write up this page and answer their question clearly.
Please enjoy How to wash a baseball cap.
In other news, Michele updated her weblog. She’s on a shocking one post per month pace.

Yesterday, my package from Avon arrived.

The device was supposed to have 10 playable Atari games inside the joystick.
Believe it or not, it did.
I wrote up a short review on the Atari 10 in 1 Joystick.
In other news, I finished my book Declare last night. I really enjoyed the last half of the book. Tim Powers is quite an interesting author. The first part of the book reads like a John LeCarre spy novel, full of tradecraft and politics. The second half delves into the fantasy world of djinn and globe spanning conspiracy. Good stuff if you ask me!
Today at the office, I got my hands on a Tablet PC. Oh my. These things are going to be in high demand once the public gets a look of them. Business PDAs are doomed. These Tablets are what people are going to want with them when they are in a meeting.

So I had these great plans for my update tonight and whatnot.
Then I fell asleep on the couch after the kids went to bed and woke up around 11:30.
No quality post tonight, I’m afraid.
Until, get your dose of Zombo.com.

I was at the supermarket today and while looking for Diet Vanilla Coke, I saw this:

Of course I had to buy it. After chilling for a few hours and once the kids had gone to bed, I cracked it open.
Sure enough, it tastes exactly like Red Vines licorice. Exactly.
Admit it, you wish you had some.
On the wireless front, I need to make a correction. ‘tmobile’ is not Boingo. Here are the differences:
Boingo is a company offering wireless access in hotels, airports, and cafes. Boingo is led by Sky Dayton, founder of Earthlink. Access costs $8 for a day, $25 for 10 days of the month, and $75 for unlimited access per month.
T-Mobile Hotspot is a company offering wireless access in Starbucks and airports. T-Mobile is the combination of Voicestream and Deutche Telecom. Access costs $3 plus 25¢/minute, $30/month unlimited local access, $50/month unlimited national access.
Make sense?
BTW, here’s a picture of my antenna in the car window as I wardrive:

On another turbo-geek note, I broke down and went with the guys from work to Best Buy after lunch. I bought both Episode II (Widescreen) and Lord of the RIngs (Extended Edition). I know, I’m weak. But I have a feeble excuse… Michele had never seen Episode II and she is watching it now, as I type for the first time.
Long day. Tomorrow is longer. Time to rest.

I forgot to mention that I finally got a chance to watch the movie Legend of 1900. I had caught part of the movie on TV and wasn’t able to find the DVD for a while. Recently I noticed the netflix had it and added it to the queue.
I enjoyed the movie. It has some great moments, but felt like a bit was missing. Roger Ebert has a good review of it. It’s definitely worth a viewing.
My toying with wardriving continues. From my office I can hit 15+ WAPs with the new antenna. I also realized that Starbucks turned on a Boingo access point in the lobby of our building. I need to do a little more research to see what the BOingo system is all about. If you are wardriving and come across the SSID of ‘tmobile’, it the Boingo system.
I’m pondering songs for my next MeFi swap. I need to be original. No more leaning on my old standbys.