*scottstuff*

My driver’s license expired a few days ago and I’ve been meaning to go in and get it renewed, but I was dreading the experience. The last time I had to renew, I had to take time off from work so I could sit for an hour in a hot DMV building full of crabby people. I had no desire to repeat that.

I bit the bullet today and walked over to the downtown Seattle licensing office at 3rd and Union. I was expecting a wait, but the room was almost completely empty, so I was back out the door with a new license in under 5 minutes. The whole process, including the walk from my office and back again took me under 10 minutes.

I’m having a run of good customer service experiences today. First my DSL got a free speed upgrade and now my driver’s license. I don’t really know how to top that.

I’ll have to call this a personal first: I had dinner at Chinoise yesterday with a group of people that I’d never actually met in person before, all arranged at the last minute via blog trackbacks.

Besides finally meeting Boris, I got to meet Chris, Lee, Kris, Amanda, and Silas. I’d never been to Chinoise before, but I’ll be back soon–great food, wonderful presented. The conversation was enjoyably geeky; Boris and I double-teamed Lee and Chris on the “you need a Nokia N91” front while the other half of the table discussed photo management software and backup strategies. Here are a couple pictures from Boris’s Nokia 6630, uploaded directly to Flickr during dinner. I really need to get a better phone.

It looks like the US’s daylight savings time rules are going to change again. I’m not convinced that congress is aware of what’s involved in changing the DST rules. At the very least, it’ll require a software upgrade on every computer in the country. It won’t be as bad as Y2K, but there are going to be a lot of computer-controlled clocks that will be wrong during the first few days of the change.

Unfortunately, not all of the computer-driven clocks out there are upgradable. I have two of the nifty radio-driven “atomic clock” clocks at home, and at least one of them has no way to manually control DST. They’ve been great so far–they know the DST rules and flip back and forth on their own. Unfortunately that’s going to break when the rules change. Since no one upgrades firmware on $20 consumer devices, I’m going to be stuck with clocks that are wrong for 4 weeks out of the year. I’ll probably be able to work around it by manually changing the timezone on the clock 4 times per year, but I’m going to be thinking about the wonderful congresspeople who did this to me every time I climb the ladder to fix the wall clock hanging above my kitchen.

CNN isn’t saying when the change is supposed to take effect; I’d heard rumors that it was going to be this fall, but that seems unlikely.

I think the neighborhood fireworks fest went just a wee bit too far last night. We spent most of the day with friends, and didn’t get home until almost 11:00. After we put the kids to bed, we went downstairs, opened up the french doors to the patio so we could see the fireworks, and tried to finish another level of Katamari Damacy.

In retrospect, we probably should have left the doors closed–a couple minutes after we sat down, a ball of flaming fireworks (roman candle, maybe?) flew in the door, hit my wife in the leg, and then skidded around, melting a half-dozen holes in the carpet.

Amazingly enough, my wife was uninjured. We doused the carpet, just to make sure that the carpet pad wasn’t smoldering underneath the charred rug, and called it a night.

I’m still recovering from this last weekend–we ripped a 60 foot maple tree out of our back yard. One of the tree’s three main trunks was rotting, and it’d been dropping branches onto our yard and fence for years. It had to go. The problem was that the tree was less then 10 feet from our fence, only 20 feet from our garage, our neighbor’s garage, and the road, and 25 feet from our house. The hard part was getting the tree down without destroying anything.

We mostly succeeded–our garage’s gutter has two little dings, and we cracked one panel of our fence, but we managed to reduce the tree down to a 4-5 foot wide stump. We hauled 5 pickup-loads of branches to the city’s yard cleanup station, and hauled 2 dumptruck-loads of logs and firewood to friends and family. We’re left with a small mound of branches and leaves, but we’ll be able to stuff that into our yard waste can over the next few weeks.

Next up, I need to rent a stump grinder and get rid of the stump. That’ll probably take a few hours–it’s a lot of stump. Once that’s done, we’ll be ready to level things out, add a bit more topsoil, and then re-plant our back yard. It’s been ailing for years–the combination of the tree’s shade, damage from my sister-in-law’s dogs, and neglect have reduced it to a sea of moss and dandelions.

I keep forgetting how much I enjoy large-scale yard work. It’s a nice counterpoint to the week’s computer work, plus it gives me an excuse to play around with heavy equipment every now and then. How can you argue with that?

I watched the first two seasons of 24 weekly, but I just couldn’t cope with the third season–it was too slow and too irritating. Halfway through the season, we had a power outage and my TiVo missed an episode. I stopped watching it after that–I just didn’t care anymore. The general consensus is that I didn’t miss much.

I couldn’t completely give up on the series, though, so I started stockpiling the episodes for the current season when they started. I figured that I’d give it a few months and then get feedback from friends. If it was good, then I’d catch up and watch it, if it was as bad as season 3, then I’d delete them all and forget about the show.

The season’s almost done now, and everyone seems to be happy with it, so I started watching it last week. I think I screwed up–the show’s too addictive, and I’ve been burning through episodes too fast. I’ve managed to watch 17 of the 19 episodes that have aired so far; I’m going to be stuck waiting through each week’s cliffhanger for the last 4 episodes. Darn them.

On the other hand, it did give me something to do yesterday when I was home sick in bed.

In general, the show’s deeply addictive, but I’m kind of amazed by how willing the “good guys” have been to resort to torture this season. I remember it happening a couple times during the first two seasons, but it was always a shock. Now it seems to be their standard method of interrogation. I’m not sure if this is supposed to say something about our society, or if it’s just a ratings vehicle.

In a (vain) attempt to prove that I’m not that nerdy, I went against my better judgement and took one of the online “how nerdy are you” quizzes. I figured it’d say something like “you aren’t as nerdy as you think you are.”

People who know me probably aren’t surprised.

Yesterday morning, when I arrived at work, I noticed that my laptop couldn’t connect to my home email server for some reason. Attempts to ping my home web server showed 90% packet loss. That’s kind of an unusual situation for a home network–I’ve had DSL go out quite a few times over the past 5 years, and I’ve had routers crash, but this is the first time that I’ve seen crippling packet loss. My best guess was that something strange had happened with a VPN that I’d set up between home and work, and that something was flinging non-rate-limited UDP or ESP packets at an insane rate.

Since 90% packet loss effects our home VoIP service as well, I had my wife hit reset on our home router/firewall PC. That fixed the unusual 90% packet loss, replacing it with 100% packet loss. When I got home last night, I found that the system had dropped into the BIOS setup screen with a “the previous boot didn’t complete right, so you probably want to change some BIOS settings” error. Grr. I changed the boot time error settings to tell it to ignore all errors, but this will probably happen the next time I need to do an emergency reboot.

Of course, it goes without saying that yesterday was the slowest day of the month, in terms of traffic to my blog. Traffic is way up this month–my average number of visits so far this month is only slightly behind the single best day from last year. My previous high was 595 hits, followed by 524 hits in second place. This month, I’m averaging around 540 hits per day, with a high of almost 800. Yeah, except for yesterday, which was barely 350.

So, I’ve been thinking about the new Mac mini. I could definitely use a couple new computers at home, and I’d be happiest with new Macs. They’d fit in well with my Powerbook and our dying old iMac. The Mac mini is certainly cheaper then older models, but the pricing is kind of deceptive. Yeah, you can get a model for $499, but by the time you bump the hard drive up to 80 MB, add a DVD burner, and add a reasonable amount of (third-party) memory, it’s pushing $1,000 all of a sudden. More specifically:

• Mac mini, 1.43 GHz/80 GB model: $599
• upgrade to Superdrive: $100
• add keyboard: $29 (Apple total: $728)
• 1 GB of Mac mini RAM from Crucial: $226.99

I’m sure I could get the memory for a few bucks less elsewhere, but I’ve had good luck with Crucial in the past, and I’d rather not monkey around with the RAM if I can avoid it. The initial rumors were that the Mac mini’s RAM wasn’t user-upgradeable; now it looks like it’s just sort of not recommended. It doesn’t require any special tools at the very least.

So, for $1,000, I can have a Mac with around 3x the CPU power of my aging PowerBook, enough RAM to do a bit of photo editing now and then, and a bit of disk space. I’d reuse the 22” CRT sitting on my desk at home and a Logitech optical mouse that I already own.

The problem is that I can’t afford a new Mac and a new Treo 650. Fortunately, no one seems eager to sell me a GSM Treo 650 any time soon, but sooner or later, Cingular is going to announce pricing, and I’m going to have to decide what I’m going to do about it. If they’d been shipping it 3 months ago, I probably would have ordered right off the bat, but its lack of memory and WiFi makes it look less enticing every month.

Oh, well–I should really wait until taxes are done this year before ordering any new hardware anyway.

As mentioned earlier, I spent part of the long weekend cleaning up home theater stuff. Part of this involved migrating files onto my home file server, which is an old Athlon 700 with an 8-channel 3ware RAID card and 4 160 GB drives in a 450 GB RAID 5 array.

So what happens as soon as I finish copying stuff onto the array? A drive starts failing on the RAID array, and I discover that it was already running in degraded mode. Now I’m in danger of losing all 200 GB on the array. Most likely, it won’t come to that, but it’s still fantastically irritating. Of the 4 160 GB drives that I bought last year, 2 of them have now failed.

To make sure that this doesn’t happen again, I just ordered 2 more 160 GB drives from NewEgg (only $76 each), along with a 3-in-2 style drive cooler. Assuming that it all arrives tomorrow, I should be able to rebuild the array, including a spare drive this time, and hopefully I won’t have to worry about it failing again.