Changes

Changes are in the air this month.
Maria and I signed up with our doctor for his weight loss program. At the end of three weeks last Wednesday, I'd lost about 15 pounds and Maria was down about 8 or 9. And we're feeling better already. Taking Phentermine, chromium and vitamin B12 every morning, paying closer attention to what and how much we eat and aiming for 10,000 steps/day with pedometers we wear on our belts.
We've also had our initial meeting with the contractor for our new garage/studio. The plan calls for the razing of our two ramshackle garages. They'll be replaced by a heated two-car, two-motorcycle garage with an upstairs photo studio/office. Plumbing would add $10k to the cost, so we're skipping that amenity, but it should be a great addition to the property. We're also planning to pave the area between the garage and house and put up a privacy fence for entertaining and hot tubbing. The hot tub desperately needs something to block the wind. As it is now, any wind over about 10 mph makes getting in, and especially out, of the tub a bone-chilling experience.
I need to remember to call Galen Perry, who runs a BMW motorcycle parts operation up near Delphi, and have him pick up what's left of my old '91 K100RS. I've parted out most of it on Ebay and am down to the frame, forks, front wheel, engine and drive train. We have a lot of stuff to dispose of or, at least move before the garage goes into the dumpster.
Anybody want a Franklin stove that runs on gas? I'll probably offer it on Ebay with local pickup only. No way I'm going to ship that beast.
And I went under the knife last Tuesday to have a cyst removed from my back. No big deal, but the incision is starting to itch as it heals and I can't use the hot tub until the stitches come out in another week.
Maria fired her night copy editor, so she and I have been working together at her paper evenings since last Monday. It's fun to be back in the newspaper harness and paycheck is nice too. Sure beats flipping channels all evening.
We're shooting a wedding next weekend for the son of a couple of Maria's longtime friends. The kids are extremely short on money, so Maria offered to do it for $300. I was willing to come down to $500 as a charity case, but $300 is downright painful, considering the post-shoot production work I have to do to edit the images and burn them onto CDs. This is essentially the same package for which we just raised our rates to $1,000. I told her this is the only semi-freebie she can give away this year. And we need to get these kids to swear they will never tell anyone how cheaply we worked on their wedding.
As I write this, the mercury is down to 15 degrees (F), heading for an overnight low of 10 or 11. It's the closest snap of the winter so far, so I guess I shouldn't complaing. But I've been cold all day and it's got me thinking of a tropical escape.

Shins album

Amazing. Simply amazing.
The new Shins album, that is. I bought a copy this evening, mainly just to see my son's name in the liner notes, but it turns out to be the sweetest piece of ear candy I've found in a long long time.
I'm sitting at a computer at my wife's newspaper office, writing obits and editing copy while listening through earphones.
The second thing I do when I get home tonight, after letting the dogs out, will be to rip this CD to my iPod.
Good work, Sean!

Another low mileage year

I turned in my 2006 mileage for the Indianapolis BMW Club's mileage awards this afternoon. It was an embarrassingly low total - 6,093 miles.
I suppose some casual riders would consider that pretty good, but for a BMW rider it's pathetic.
For more than a decade, I was a regular recipient of the club's 10,000-mile award at the annual awards dinner, but this will be the second consecutive year when I've failed to make 10k.
And it looks like 2007 won't be a high mileage year either, because our wedding photography business is picking up. I like the money, but I miss riding.

Right on, Sean!

I got this e-mail the other day from my son Sean Flora, who is a recording engineer/producer in Portland, Ore.:

The new record by the Shins, Wincing the Night Away, comes out next Tuesday. They will be appearing on the David Letterman Show (whatever it’s called) that night. They were on SNL this past weekend. This is my first engineering credit on a major release of this magnitude.

Needless to say, I'm enormously impressed and proud. I've watched him work with musicians in the studio and am impressed with his ability to tweak things and to guide in a friendly way, so as not to bruise egos. He has excellent people skills and is damned good at what he does.
Check out his MySpace page.

No thanks, Mr. Jobs

Okay, maybe I don't want an iPhone after all.
After listening to various podcasts in the wake of Steve Jobs' introduction of Apple's new cell phone, I'm a bit less awed.
Yes, it is a spectacular design. No moving parts or keys, just a big gorgeous touch-screen. That means Apple can update your iPhone with tweaks and new features - maybe even completely change the user interface when you synch your iPhone with your internet-linked computer. That's freaking revolutionary.
But when I start thinking about how I use a cell phone and what the iPhone supposedly will do and won't do, I find myself having to give up too much.
The word is that the touch-screen keyboard makes typing e-mails really difficult, compared with the thumb typing and accessory fold-out keyboard for my Treo 700p.
At present there is no provision for third-party software additions, so I'd have to give up Pocket Quicken that synchs with my PC Quicken, my various Palm weather programs, my Palm document reader, and on and on.
And, like the iPod, the iPhone does not have a user-replacable battery. Plus, the presumed battery life is only about 5 hours.
And that gorgeous big screen looks like it can be easily scrathed and marred in normal day-to-day use.
And the mp3 player capacity is pretty piddly, compared with my 60GB iPod.
The idea of rolling an iPod and cell phone into one package is alluring. I find myself carrying both whenever I leave home. But somehow the iPhone doesn't quite get me there. It's kind of a cell phone and kind of an iPod and kind of an internet device, but it doesn't compare with the power and versatility of a regular iPod and a Treo.
Plus, I'm locked into contracts with Sprint for the rest of my natural life and have no desire to switch to Cingular.
So I think I'll pass on the iPhone and stick with my Treo.

iPhone

The new iPhone unveiled yesterday is excruciatingly cool.
But they forgot to build a camera into it.

Added later: I was watching Steve Jobs' keynote address at Mac World online today and discovered I'd missed the reference to a 2 megapixel camera. So the iPhone is perfect, after all.

Sad duty

I covered another soldier's funeral today - this one a hometown boy. I can see the cemetery from my bedroom window. Here's his mother with the flag from the casket.

Life without the Internet

I lost my internet connection a week ago this morning. I was looking at movie previews on the Netflix site when the connection failed. I tried all of the usual tricks - power cycling DSL modem, wireless router and computer, poking the reset buttons on the modem and router and snugging up the cable connections on modem and router. None of it worked.
So I called the tech service people at my ISP - Frontiernet. The friendly techie ran me through his diagnostic flow chart and concluded that my DSL modem was hosed. Well, he avoided that term, preferring to say it needed "a rest." So he transferred me to customer service where the friendly lady tried to talk me into a DSL modem/wireless router combo, which would add $4 and change a month to my phone/DSL bill for equipment rental. I declined and asked for a simple DSL modem, since I have no complaints with my D-Link wireless router.
"How soon can you get it to me?" I asked.
"Jan. 2," she replied.
This was on Dec. 27, mind you.
"Is there any way to expedite that?"
"No."
So I sat and stewed for a day.
On Friday, I decided to go to my local Frontier office on the off chance that they would have a DSL modem I could borrow until my new one came from afar.
But the door was locked and bore a sign announcing that the office was closed for the New Year holiday.
Seriously Jonesing for an internet fix, I took my laptop to the local public library and used their Wi-Fi to check my e-mail and surf a bit.
The one glimmer of hope in my disconnected despair was the realization that, although the U.S. Postal Service wouldn't resume deliveries until today (Wednesday) because of President Ford's funeral services, UPS might be working on Tuesday and my modem was coming via UPS.
Nevertheless, I went back to the local Frontier office yesterday (Tuesday) to let them know I was without service.
(The last time I lost my DSL connection, the Frontiernet techies said my router was at fault, but it turned out that the problem was at the local switch where one of the guys had snipped some wires and a tiny piece of wire fell into contact with the wires associated with my connection. Consequently, I have learned that the distant techies are pretty much always wrong.)
So the woman at the local office took down my information and said she'd ask their only tech guy - who was handling problems in a nearby town - to get on it when he got back.
In the meantime, the UPS guy delivered a brand new Speed Stream DSL modem/wireless router combo to my house. Remember that I said I declined the combo? Well, here it was.
So I hooked it up and, sure enough, I still had no internet connection.
The DSL indicator light shone a happy bright green, but no data was coming through the connection.
Once, again, the Frontiernet techies misdiagnosed the problem, pointing the finger at my equipment when the fault was on their side of the connection.
Naturally, the local tech guy didn't get back in town in time to fix my problem last night and I'm still waiting at 9:15 a.m. today.
So how am I connecting to post this?
I'm piggybacking onto my next-door neighbor's unsecured Wi-Fi signal.

Lunch

I'm having lunch at the Mandarin House, a Chinese restaurant next door to where my newspaper office used to be. We had a hillbilly secretary who called it the "Medarin House."
My cookie fortune: "Generosity and perfection are your everlasting goals."
Well, to a point...

They're crazy and they're not going to back down

From Reuters:
TEHRAN - Iran condemned a U.N. sanctions resolution as “a piece of torn paper” that would not scare Tehran and vowed on Sunday to accelerate uranium enrichment work immediately.

The U.N. Security Council voted unanimously on Saturday to impose sanctions on Iran’s trade in sensitive nuclear materials and technology, in an attempt to stop uranium enrichment work that could produce material to be used in bombs.

President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad said those who backed the U.N. resolution, drawn up by Britain, France and Germany but supported unanimously by the Security Council, would soon regret their “superficial act.”

This is disturbingly close to the League of Nations' feeble attempts to curb the Axis powers in the years leading up to World War II. Will we elect a Neville Chamberlain in '08 or will we have the good sense to choose a Winston Churchill?

Tying up loose ends

I am now officially caught up with obligations to photo clients.
I delivered a 100-page album this afternoon to a couple whose wedding we shot Sept. 23. We were concerned that we wouldn't be able to get it to them before they left town for Christmas, but MyPublisher.com came through brilliantly.
We placed the order on Sunday afternoon and the FedEx guy delivered it to our front door on Wednesday afternoon. And it was perfectly printed.
The temperature hit 53 degrees (F) today (that's 11.6666666 for my friends in Canada and elsewhere in the Metric world), which is sort of an early Christmas gift - especially considering the hammering our friends in Colorado got this week.
I was tempted to get one of the bikes out, but I had too much to do and I didn't want to upset the balance of fuel stabilizer to gas in the tank. So it appears my 2006 riding season is over and I can record and report my BMW miles to Harold Patterson, who succeeded Martha Thomas as the keeper of mileage records for the Indianapolis BMW Club. I think I only rode about 6,000-some miles this year, which means I'll fall short of earning one of the club's 10,000-mile awards for the second consecutive year.
One of my New Year's resolutions will be to make the 10k and not let work interfere with my riding.

Wicked fast

I delivered the CDs today to last Saturday's wedding client and finished the CDs for the Sunday portrait shoot yesterday. This is absolutely incredible!
The fastest I've ever been able to turn around a wedding shoot is four weeks. What a spectacular machine this is.
I finally got my Treo synched with the new machine today. That's the last major thing I had to do to settle in on the new computer.

Computer Hog Heaven

Good God!
This Dell XPS computer is freaking amazing!
The Core 2 Duo processor and 2 GB of RAM give me enough computing power to do two or three tasks – any one of which would have choked my old machine – simultaneously.
I was able to organize and burn a couple of CDs for the client who hired us to shoot her grandson's high school senior photos and also edit and post a 454-photo gallery from the 1,800 wedding images we shot last Saturday. This is nothing short of astonishing – that I could get both projects done in a few hours of work, in the same day. I have never been able to turn projects around that quickly with the old machine. Whatever anxiety I had about the cost of this setup is evaporating in the light of the time it will save. If our business continues to grow in 2007, there is no way I could keep up with the photo editing and album building with my old machine. (Incredible how much improvement there's been in the less than five years since I bought the old one.)
And this fabulous 24” LCD monitor is like having a billboard-size screen in front of me. Our scenic photos displayed full-screen are so huge, yet so vivid, that it feels like I could walk right into the scene.
I'm running a 1920 x 1200 screen resolution. Everything looks gorgeous and I finally have enough screen real estate to run Photoshop CS with the tool pallets off to the outside of the workspace and still have an enormous view of the image being edited.
I discovered to my chagrin yesterday that the hard drives in my old computer were IDE drives and the new Dell is set up to take SATA drives (no, I don't know what the difference is, other than that they take completely different data and power plugs).
So how to get the data I need to rescue from my old machine without putting the drives back in and dragging the box and big CRT monitor back into the office and stringing a bunch of cables?
I found a couple of solutions yesterday afternoon at Best Buy.
Solution 1 is to get a card that adapts the IDE drives to work in the new machine. That involves getting back into the new XPS box, popping in the card, the two drives and the appropriate ribbon cable.
Solution 2 is to buy a USB external hard drive enclosure – basically a small aluminum box that contains a circuit board upon which you mount the hard drive. Poke it back into the aluminum box, screw on the end piece with its on/off switch and power and USB connections, connect to the XPS and turn on the power.
I opted for Solution 2 because it made it possible for me to use one of the old hard drives as an external storage device for photo files and I was charmed by its elegance. And it only cost $49.
So last night I transferred my iTunes library from the old drive to my new C: drive. But when I synched my iPod, I suddenly discovered that none of my purchased music from the iTunes Store would work because the XPS is not an “authorized” computer. After a moment of panic, I found I could easily go to the iTunes site and authorize my new computer. Phew! Problem solved.
Next, I transferred all of my image files from the old drive to my C: drive. Oops. Now my 300 GB new hard drive is down to 133GB of free space. Maybe it's time to start archiving to DVDs...
Today's work involves putting my other drive – the former C: drive of my old machine – into the aluminum box and retrieving my Treo/Palm desktop and its database. I've misplaced my original installation disk that came with the Treo 700p and, of course, it has stuff on it that I can't download from the Palm website, so I need to continue accessing the old one. I hope I can just copy the Palm folder and program over to the new machine, but I fear it may not be that simple and there may need to be changes made to the Windows registry or elsewhere that only the installation disk can make. That means I may have to keep using my old C: drive as an external H: drive with the XPS, at least until I find the Treo installation disk.
Eventually, I plan to wipe the old machine's second hard drive – the one that had my pictures and iTunes on it – and install the Ubuntu version of Linux that I downloaded last night for free. If I don't like Ubuntu, I can always go back to the Windows XP that's on the old C: drive, if and when I no longer need it hooked up to the new machine. Stick a WiFi card in the old box and voila, we've got an extra work station or another machine in the house to surf the 'net.

Not a pup anymore

Yesterday began Pete the Aussie's second year with us.
He was only six weeks old when we brought him home from the farm where he was born on Dec. 17, 2005.
So, at the risk of seeming to perform the doggy version of one of those hideous annual personnel evaluations that a generation of micro-managers forced upon us, maybe it's time to reflect on how that first year has gone.
Pete has grown into a fine, funny, affectionate dog who charms everyone he meets with his friendly, playful personality.
His toilet training has been a bit, uh, spotty, if you know what I mean. We gave himt he run of the house much too early and, as a consequence, he developed some favorite places to relieve himself when we weren't looking. Like on the stairway landing and at the top of the stairs. So we quarantined him and Ruthie, a golden retriever mix, in the kitchen with only supervised visits to the rest of the house.
But with our encouragement, he has figured out that the back yard is the proper place for his bathroom activities. The only problem was that he wasn't very good at letting us know when he needed to go out.
So about two months ago, Maria hung some decorative holiday bells on the back door doorknob and showed Pete that we would open the door for him if he'd ring the bells by poking them with his nose. To our amazement, he picked it up right away. Like, in one day.
Of course, now he does it whenever the mood strikes him to go outside whether he needs to do doggy business or not.
But that's alright. The accidents on the kitchen floor are much less frequent and pretty much only happen when we don't hear the bells.
But he also has a shy and fearful side and at least one bizarre behavior.
As I write this, Pete is pacing back and forth on the rear deck, looking nervously up at the sky.
He's the only dog I've ever know who took any interest at all in the sky.
I think it's because he thinks the sky tried to kill him a couple of times.
The first time was back in the spring when a fierce thunderstorm hit. Maria and I were away from home and Maria's daughter Morgan was at home with the dogs. They were in the back yard when the storm blew up, but Morgan was unaware of it because she was organizing stuff in the attic and had her boombox cranked up.
It was Pete's first close encounter with lightning and thunder and he fled in terror. A neighbor said he saw Pete streaking down the street illuminated by the flashes of lightning. We caught up with him two days later after a woman who works for the local veterninarian recognized him and called to say we'd find him about a mile north of town.
Pete's second traumatic sky experience was around the Fourth of July when a neighbor's errant bottle rocket crossed into our airspace and exploded over his head. Even though Morgan was standing nearby, Pete bolted and was gone for three days.
So Pete worries about the sky and notices details that might even escape human observers.
Clear, sunny mornings are the worst, because he has an unobstructed view of the southern sky and frets over the criss-crossing jet contrails tracing the paths of east-west airline traffic.
Conversely, he's relatively worry-free on overcast days when there's nothing up there but a blanket of gray.
I'd love to get Cesar Milan's take on it. I'm sure the Dog Whisperer could cure Pete's sky anxiety in short order.
So, on balance, Pete is turning out to be the Christmas gift that keeps on giving love and entertainment.

Real soldiers respond

Love that open source freeware!

When I decided to stop using a copy of Microsoft Office 2000 that wasn't exactly licensed to me and opted, instead, for the free open source OpenOffice suite, I was forced to stop using Outlook, the Microsoft e-mail client.
So I installed Thunderbird, the e-mail client that comes with the Firefox browser and is also free.
It lacks the scheduling and calendar bells and whistles that Outlook has, but I don't need them because I keep track of that stuff with the Palm Desktop, synched with my Treo 700w smartphone.
But it does have a pretty good spam filter that is more efficient than the spam filter than comes with my Norton Internet Security package.
And, by the way, I'm going to dump Norton when the new computer arrives, in favor of Nod32, which is recommended by Leo Laporte and other people I trust as being superior to Norton and McAffee.
Maria's Norton software expired a couple of weeks ago and I replaced it with Nod32 for $39.
The big problem with Norton and McAffee is that they are "bloatware" - big, cumbersome programs that slow a computer down, yet provide less antivirus protection than the smaller, more nimble Nod32. Maria's machine is running a tad faster since I yanked out the Norton stuff.
Nod32 has a package price for two computers for something like $64, so I think I'll take advantage of that deal to protect my new machine and add Nod32 to our Sony VAIO notebook computer.
FYI, the Windows firewall is unnecessary if you're using a router, since the router serves as an even more effective firewall against unwanted internet intruders. Laporte says the Windows firewall should, however, be turned on if you're using your laptop on an open WiFi network away from home, like at Starbuck's or a hotel/motel.

Dell+UPS=Damn Fast Service

The UPS tracking system says the three Dell packages - computer, monitor and speakers - arrived in Indianapolis at 4:02 a.m. today, which means they may show up on my porch today instead of the projected Monday delivery date. Amazing, considering that the order was placed Sunday afternoon. And it wasn't an off-the-shelf order in that I made some custom tweaks.

In the UPS pipeline to Indiana...

Dell says I should expect the new computer and monitor on Monday.
UPS says it left Mesquite, Texas before dawn this morning.

Bring it, Moonbats!

I was stunned this morning to discover that there is talk of a Clinton-Obama ticket in 2008.
There are web sites selling t-shirts for what they're calling the Democratic "Dream Team."
Astonishingly naive.
It's actually the dream team opposition the Republicans would love to face - a ticket that would be completely incapable of attracting crossover red state votes.