Thank you Mom for everything you’ve done for me over the years. With your love and guidence I have become the man that I am today. It is so nice to know that I can come to you and talk with you about anything. Your love and caring show through in more ways than you know.
I know that I may not express it with words often, but always know that I Love You!
May 17th will be the next meeting of the Ubuntu-Maryland LoCo Team. I’ve posted the agenda over at the forums for your reading pleasure.
Well after last nights Columbia Area LUG meeting I’ve gotten the fire stoked up again to set up a VoIP server at home to bring in real phone numbers again. Thanks to Terry Dunlap and The Other Guy for their great presentations. If your LUG or other computer club wants a presentation on VoIP for the home user, get in touch with them.
This was the second week that Peg and I walked down to get ice cream from Cold Stone Creamery. It’s a nice ~3.75 mile round trip walk with the bonus of some delicious ice cream in the middle of the trip. We have a nice time just chatting about whatever without any distractions other than the avoiding the occasional branches their devious plans…
So recently I’ve been looking into the benefits of OpenID. After doing the research, it seemed like a good idea. Why use various logins throughout the web. I can just use, and trust, one site with my password to log into many different places. If I lose trust in that site, I can move my OpenID to another provider.
The best part is that with just a little bit of code, such as:
link rel=”openid.server” href=”http://www.livejournal.com/openid/server.bml”
link rel=”openid.delegate” href=”http://yourblog.livejournal.com/”
On your personal blog, since you control the code, you can use your site’s address as a delegate to log into any OpenID enabled site via your OpenID.
So now I can log into an OpenID enabled site as http://chuckfrain.net and I get prompted to log in (if not already) to Livejournal and then asked to approve the site requesting information. Initally I hacked on the theme to include the links. Then it dawned on me that if the technique was blogged about late last year, WordPress was bound to have a plugin to do the heavy lifting. Turns out I was right, thanks to Eran Sandler for his delegate plugin. Fill in the boxes and you’re good to go. If your blog caches, you will have to (or wait for) that to clear before it works. You can then check your OpenID at Openidenabled.com.
This is really much easier that I just explained, but it’s a bit late. I do want to take a moment to thank Aq for putting the link to Simon Willison’s blog that really explains the topic well.
I finally had a chance to confirm that my VPN works! I was able to connect into my home network from outside via OpenVPN. Having a library with open WiFi is a good thing!
I also announced in the forums that the Planet is about ready for business. I’ll have the agenda for the meeting on the 17th up in the next day or two.
Wednesday I’ll be at the Columbia Area Lug meeting for the Embedded Asterisk project. VoIP is one of those topics that really brings out the geek in me.
Over the weekend when not working on the porch and yard, I kind of geeked out a bit. It started Friday night finally getting my Knoppmyth box running with the DirecTV satellite box. I’ll be posting a page in the near future with the details on the little tricks I needed to use to get that running properly.
Then on Saturday I was walking by Peg and saw on her laptop that it was in the process of upgrading her Edgy install to Feisty. She got a prompt when she booted up and just followed the instructions. She wasn’t sure about replacing a few config files but outside of that she took care of it on her own and had a working system afterwards! For someone who is not a Linux person I think that was a job well done, and goes to show how far Ubuntu has come.
Then today I set up a Planet for the Ubuntu-Maryland team. As it is late and I still have some details to work out I’m keeping it in ‘beta’ phase at the moment. Once I’m more confident that it’s working properly, I’ll be posting the announcement in the forum. Thanks to the PATeam guys for the idea!
Saturday morning started with my Dad coming over. He, Peg, and myself went down to BJ Pumpernickel’s for a nice breakfast before getting to work. The back steps on the house have been kind of loose for the last couple month. So my dad agreed to come down and help fix them up. Since he enjoys doing woodworking projects I knew he’d be more than happy to help.
As we were doing the work it really hit me how much things have changed with us. Growing up I always looked at these projects as things that had to get done. Now I see that it was time that I got to spend with my Dad. And then in the time that I was renting a place I didn’t have ‘projects around the house’ to work on with him. Now that I’m living with Peg in the house, I have projects that need to be done. Amazingly I can do many of them on my own, but thinking on this it’s all because of the time I worked with my Dad growing up.
So now that I have the ‘projects around the house’ it’s nice to have Dad come over and work with me on them. We get time together and I get to really understand what I’m doing and learn what’s happening.
Thanks Dad!
Uncle Leonard, you will be missed. It’s hard for me to write about him as I’m worried that my words are not adequate. He was always such a big man to me.
He was one of those guys who grew up in town and became part of it. His daughters and family were the most important things to him. When he called you a friend, he was there for you. His friends responded in kind. He spent his adult life involved in his passion, that of the Volunteer Fire Department. While not always an active member, he was there for them as they needed him in any way they required. From running calls in his younger days to supporting the firefighters on extended calls. Working the food stand at the fair to renovating all the horses on the carousel.
In his final days he took care to plan out how he wanted his family and friends to say goodbye. Overseeing the details so it was all taken care of. What he wanted in the ceremonies and what his family and friends should do so when the time came there was time to mourn. It was the most impressive and moving funeral I have been to for with all the ceremony, it was tastefully done.
Among the many memorable things that happened that day one of the things that will stay with me is something that my nephew Jimmy noticed. After seeing the firetruck that took Leonard to his final resting place, he was talking about Leonard’s gear on the back of it. He was fascinated by the size of his boots. Hearing Jimmy talk about how big they were took me back to when I was a kid and looking up to the big man with his pipe at the ready. Always smiling and I don’t recall him ever talking bad about anyone.
I’ll miss you Uncle Leonard.
The Maryland Ubuntu Loco Team had our first meeting. It went better than I was hoping for. An excellent turnout and lots of good ideas came of it. I can’t wait for the next meeting.
It’s amazing how time marches on. The last few years I haven’t been to the Maryland HamFest on a Saturday. I’ve made it there on Sunday afternoon the couple times I made it at all. I had noticed a drop in attendance but thought nothing of it due to the time and weather.
This year I went on Saturday, and in the morning. I was shocked. there was plenty of parking at 9am. Thinking back to my first experiences with the event the parking lot was solid from about 7 til noon. After wandering around the two, down from three, buildings of exhibitors and the parking lot it was amazing. First there was room to move in the wide aisles. Back in the mid 90’s to early 00’s it was wall to wall people down narrow aisles. Vendors were cutting prices and no time to talk to customers due to the number of people. Now it was price as marked and idle time to chat.
I’m not sure why it caught me so off guard. I guess it just shows how consumers have changed with their computer and gear buying habits. In additon the deals that used to be there were not. Sure, if you’re looking for the DIY bits and bobs they were there and great prices, if you need quantity and ignored the gate charge. I was looking at the prices for computer gear and the vendors would not negotiate, and what they offered was off brand items for the same price that I could get at the online places for name brand things.
One thing that remained the same, thankfully, was the Hamboree Special sandwiches. Well worth it in addion to a good day of wandering the show.
Painful. That’s the best word to describe the order that I just put in with the BarnesandNoble.com site.
It started out simple enough. I selected a few items that I wanted. Went to the checkout and could not remember the email/password combonation that I had given them. So I poked around for a way to enter my membership number in to get a reset email sent to me. It doesn’t seem to exist. So I had to call customer service. After navigating the menuing system and getting to a customer service person I get asked all my details. After about five minutes I finally finish up with him and have the reset email.
Then I have to figure out what credit card I had previously used with them or lose out on the history that I had built into my account. I got lucky and figured that out. So I go to chose my payment method, gift cards. Oh my, if I want to use more than one at a time, I have to call and speak to customer service.
I chose the pay by phone option and complete my order. I then call the number and navigate through the menu again. I input the order number and am told by the computer voice it wasn’t recognized and I can retry or speak to a person. So I get transfered to a real live woman. In order to place the order I have to give order number, my name, address, an item on the order, and read off the gift card numbers (Two fifteen digit numbers, plus the four digit code for each, a grand total of 38 digits for those playing at home).
She said that the order was placed and that I would be getting an email to confirm. I left her with one message to pass on on my behalf. If the website does not, within 60 days, accept more than one gift card at a time I would not renew my membership nor would I purchase from them again until that happens.
It’s a shame too. I like going into the Barnes and Nobel stores. It’s always a nice experience to shop there. I’ve never had any real problem with their employees. Yet in this day and age restricting to only one gift card per order online is absurd. I can understand a limit of less than five for security reasons but a single card? I know that for me, last Christmas I got more gift cards than ‘tradional’ gifts. And many of them were for the same places, as I asked for.
So we’ll see what happens. I figure if I can have avoided shopping at a Wal-Mart for over five years now, a book store won’t be that difficult.