Some of these ruins are in better shape than me, at the moment.
Category: Personal Page 51 of 59
On the road, exploring more of the world. Istanbul was amazing, Dubai was its usual outsized self, and Pakistan has been nothing short of wonderful. More words and pictures to come in the new year. Have a good one.
I’d had grand designs on 1000 words to go with each of these pictures, but time is not on my side. I expect to be heading offline in short order, and may not reappear before the new year. Perhaps I’ll have a few new pictures by then, and might have finished up a few of those 1000 word drafts.
Here’s to 2007.
(Photos: 1. Three Years, 2. A City, 3. JFK, 4. Still moving, 5. Outdressing the bride, 6. Traffic, Pt II, 7. Taj Mahal Reflecting Pool, 8. Fixing a Flat, 9. Easier than an elephant, 10. Zenana – window, 11. Mughal Sheraton – Agra, 12. Just missing, 13. The sun makes it in, 14. Call to prayer, 15. Welcome to the Middle East, 16. Something new, 17. Twelve Apostles, 18. Africa, 19. Port of Call, 20. I’m where?, 21. WWII Bunker, 22. Cape Town from Robben Island, 23. Soweto shantytown, 24. Regina Mundi, 25. Victoria Waterfront – Cape Town, 26. Sunset over the Black Sea, 27. Another point of reference, 28. St. Davids Lighthouse on approach to BDA, 29. Skyline, 30. National Airport at Dawn, 31. Bermuda Sunset, 32. But not entirely blue, 33. Liberty and Justice for All, 34. Can’t seem to escape the traffic, 35. Whine & Cheese, 36. Ghirardelli
Created with fd’s Flickr Toys.)
Nice. From a recent letter to select constituents:
The Muslim Representative from Minnesota was elected by the voters of that district and if American citizens don’t wake up and adopt the Virgil Goode position on immigration there will likely be many more Muslims elected to office and demanding the use of the Koran.
[ . . . ]
I fear that in the next century we will have many more Muslims in the United States if we do not adopt the strict immigration policies that I believe are necessary to preserve the values and beliefs traditional to the United States of America and to prevent our resources from being swamped.
More here.
(I’ll shortly be on my way to spend some time in a very Muslim country – Pakistan. When the discussion (inevitably) turns to politics, I’m sure that someone will say that the US is acting as it does because it fears and hates Muslims. Thanks, Virgil Goode, for putting the facts on their side. Asshole.)
This picture was taken from the top of the Zugspitze, which sits along the German/Austrian border. The trip – in addition to being a very nice revisiting of childhood places – was wonderfully cheap. In December 2001, Americans were still afraid to fly anywhere (resulting in very low airfares), and the dollar was strong against the euro. 82 cents for one euro. Flew to Germany for a week, rented a Mercedes, skiied in the Alps, and it still probably didn’t go far beyond $1k, total.
Fast forward five years. I was just pricing flights out of the UK, and I assumed that the exchange rate was somewhere in the $1.50 = £1 range that it has been for years. Except it hasn’t been, it seems. When I went to check it – wow. Nearly $2 to the £1, now.
And the euro? It’s almost flipped places with the dollar. It’ll now take you $1.32 to buy €1. Suddenly, failing to exchange back all those euros I ended the past few trips with doesn’t seem so irresponsible, anymore . . .
Just to close the loop, Apple finally did an acceptable job of repairing my Powerbook. The display is perfect, and they seem to have thrown in a new lid, as well. So they get credit for for that. However, unlike previous repairs, which were turned around in a matter of days, this one took more than a week. And if I hadn’t called them to push it along (the Apple Repair Status page falsely claimed that my laptop was still at the local store, four days after the repair facility actually received it), I imagine it would have taken a lot longer. But it’s back, it works, and that’s that.
Except one thing still bothers me. They replaced my hard drive, and didn’t send the original back. Now, when you send it in, one of the paragraphs you initial on the repair order is that you understand that there is no guarantee against the loss of your data on the hard drive. Which makes sense – they can hardly be expected to perform a full backup on every laptop that goes through there, and then go through the trouble of making sure that it’s accurately restored. This is why I made a full backup before I dropped it off. But I didn’t expect them to touch the data. In fact, they almost certainly didn’t. For whatever reason, though, they decided to give me a new hard drive, and probably threw the old one in a bin somewhere. Which is what bothers me.
Now, no one but me has my admin password for that hard drive. Further, my entire document directory was encrypted. But it still bothers me that, somewhere out there, there’s a copy of my financial records, personal files, and pictures of me at the last Britney Spears concert (kidding. I’m totally a Christina Aguilera guy). Yes, they’re encrypted, but still. When I asked the Apple guys if I could get the drive back, they told me that it was long gone. They couldn’t, however, assure me that Apple – as a matter of policy – destroys or otherwise renders such drives unreadable. Nice.
Next time, I’m deleting all user files before I ever take something with a hard drive in for service. I don’t need to get an email from some bored kid with an encryption-smashing quantum computer in 10 years, laughing at what he found on a hard drive he picked up at a junk sale . . .
Peter Boyle brought me one of my favorite musical sequences on on film, EVER.
The public comment period for the Virginia Outdoors Plan (VOP) closes this Friday, December 15th. The VOP is
“the state’s official document regarding land conservation, outdoor recreation and open space planning. It helps all levels of government and the private sector meet needs pertaining to those issues. The plan provides guidance for the protection of lands through actions of the Virginia Land Conservation Foundation (VLCF), and the plan is required in order for Virginia to take part in the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund (LWCF) program.”
I encourage anyone who uses Virginia’s parks to take a few minutes to let the VA Department of Conservation and Recreation know what you think should be priorities in your area. Read the section for the area that you use (look toward the end of the linked page for a Table of Contents), and then send an email addressed to vop@dcr.virginia.gov. Include an simple explanation of where you’re from, what you use the parks for, and what you’d like to see them make a priority. At the end of the email make sure you include your name and address.
The Northern Virginia section of the plan is here (PDF). My own comments will expand on those proposed by the Mid-atlantic Off Road Enthusiasts (MORE – an active and effective mountain biking advocacy org). If you’re interested in those MTB-related suggestions for NoVA, see here. (MORE represents interests throughout the region, so let them know if you need help putting together comments related to MTB’ing in your area).
Well, this would explain a lot:
Since June, he was told, Earthlink’s mail system has been so overloaded that some users have been missing up to 90 percent of their incoming e-mail. It isn’t bounced back to senders; it just disappears. And Earthlink hasn’t mentioned the problem to these affected customers unless they complain. The two groups affected are those who get their mail with an Earthlink-hosted domain and those with aliased e-mail addresses like my friend’s Blackberry.
I recently, after 12 years with them, decided to cancel my DSL service with Earthlink (a combination of increasingly poor service and FIOS being available in my area). I’d planned to keep an email only account so I didn’t have to set up a massive rerouting of everything. Glad I saw this. And it certain does explain my frustrations with some of my email. As Cringley (author of the linked piece) points out – what kind of business is run like this?
Were they thinking these thousands of affected customers simply wouldn’t notice? And what about those customers whose livelihood depends on e-mail communication? There are both ethical and business questions here and Earthlink doesn’t look good on either scale. Fortunately the company says it is installing new software and hopes to have the problem resolved before the end of the year. Lucky us.
Lucky them. I’ll be out of that boat in short order.