I started to hack on something like this a while ago, but got distracted by something shiny.
Fortunately, someone else made a Mail.app plugin that appears to do exactly what I want it to do.
Normally, I put the snow tires on the cars right around Thanksgiving (a little earlier if it starts snowing earlier, but often it's on the Friday after...)
I just put the snows on the IS300, they look like they'll be through the good multicell compound after this season, though. I'll probably end up purchasing a similar set (Bridgestone Blizzak WS60) next fall to replace them. The Pirelli p-zeros look really good (and don't appear to have as extreme wear on the inside because of the alignment I had done when they were mounted). I'll be looking forward to having them back on the car in the spring.
I need to swap the tires on the Matrix, but it'll be dark outside before Anne gets back with it, so I'll probably do it tomorrow (or this weekend). It's not as urgent as the 'summer' tires are still the OEM all-season ones.
Normally putting the snow tires on means that it'll be another week or two of really sunny weather, but the forecast still says 1"-2" of accumulation in the next couple of days.
[Good thing I already took care of the leaves in the yard].
"Legislation approved Tuesday would no longer make it a crime to engage in a duel with an enemy"
Mich. panel votes to take archaic crimes off books - Lansing State Journal
If you have an old (first generation) AirPort Base station that you need to reset, there are instructions on Apple's support site.
However, you'll also need a copy of the AirPort Admin Utility for Graphite and Snow.
Of course, this ends up not being enough, as there appears to be an endian issue when running the reset procedure on Intel Macs. A workaround would be to force the application to run under Rosetta, but the checkbox to do that in the 'Get Info' window was disabled when I looked. Fortunately one can use the command line program 'arch' to force execution of the ppc version of the application.
`arch -ppc /Applications/Utilities/AirPort\ Admin\ Utility\ for\ Graphite\ and\ Snow.app/Contents/MacOS/AirPort\ Admin\ Utility\ for\ Graphite\ and\ Snow`
Since there are plenty of cheap base stations available (often with significantly better features and faster wireless and wired support), there are probably very few people who are even bothering to use these old base stations anymore. However, there are a few cases where they are still useful, and that beats sending them to the recycler (or throwing them away).
I own a house.
In order to make this possible, I have a mortgage.
Banks like to sell mortgages. So, through no choice of my own, my mortgage is owned by Chase Bank [aside: Chase probably only owns the contract to service the loan, but that's not really important in this case].
Since I have an 'existing business relationship' with them, they can call me (via phone numbers that are on the National Do Not Call List). Additionally, it's very unlikely that they have all of the 'opt out of offers' paperwork I signed when I first got my mortgage.
Which is all just setup for something stupid.
Yesterday, I get a call from a local number that I don't recognize. The caller leaves a message saying that there is an "urgent, but not critical" issue with my account at Chase, and that I need to call back at the local number.
First, I do some looking, and with a little effort, I am able to verify that the number is indeed a number for Chase bank (for a local branch, though, not for the mortgage division, and importantly not the number that is on my mortgage statements). If the bank actually cared about my not being vulnerable to scams, they would have asked me to call a number that I already knew was them (i.e. the number that is printed on the mortgage statement).
Since Chase has been sending me junk mail for a while trying to get me to open a checking account with them (no thanks), I was somewhat suspicious that there wasn't an issue with my account as much as they were trying to sell me something.
With some hope that this wasn't the case (and because if there really is an issue with my mortgage, I need to know about it), I called the number today. I was put on hold for about a minute while the person I spoke to "looked up the details of my account". When the person came back to the line, she tried to schedule me for an in person meeting with an account rep. for tomorrow morning (i.e. she tried to get me to come in to the bank where someone would hard-sell their checking account). I asked if she could remove me from further 'offer' calls, and she said she would (while throwing in a "but you are missing out because since you have a mortgage with us, you are eligible for $100 if you open a new checking account with us").
I can appreciate them wanting me to open a new account (or accounts) with them, and I don't find it entirely unreasonable that they called me about it. I have two problems with what happened, though:
1. Chase should stop conditioning customers to accept that a person calling them is "from the bank" just because the caller says so.
2. Leaving a message saying that there is an "issue" with an existing account is not an acceptable way to generate sales leads.
This Paul Krugman blog post finally answers the question I had about current Fed policy (that I didn't know who to ask):
"What comes down to is this: once you've pushed the short-term interest rate down to zero, money becomes a perfect substitute for short-term debt. And any further increase in the money supply therefore displaces an equal amount of debt, with no effect on anything. Period, end of story."
I hadn't thought of money becoming a perfect substitute for short-term debt, so missed this idea (and was wondering why the Fed wasn't just increasing M).
I picked up a Tivo HD and a big disk to upgrade it to attach to TVsa.
Some notes:
mfstools (both the linux version and the version I cajoled into compiling on Mac OS X) crapped out on the 10th partition of the drive (when trying to read from the original drive or trying to work with the image of the original drive I copied to the new drive with dd).
winmfs beta 9.3 worked fine, though. (It was also significantly faster as the backup image is only ~400MB instead of ~150GB). I used my handy usb<->every kind of HD adaptor with VMware (connect original drive and image it, then connect new drive. Restore the image onto the new drive and say "yes" when winmfs asks to expand it to fill the drive).
Comcast should arrive Friday morning with the cablecard(s) ($24 install fee - they don't offer a self-install option).
UPDATE: Comcast tech said it was the easiest cablecard install he has done (it worked on the first M card he tried - he said it usually takes a couple of tries with different cards to get things to work). Most of the time was spent with him waiting on hold to the same number that normal people call and then him waiting for the TiVo to download/process updated guide data because he wanted to make sure that the dual-tuner worked.
And because I'll forget unless I put it somewhere:
To make the 'return to live' button do 30 second skip instead -
Select -> Play -> Select -> 3 -> 0 -> Select
The article mentions the Milgram experiment (which has had a lasting effect on how I think about things ever since I first heard about it), and also links to the very interesting Implicit Associations Tests.
I'm sure David already knows about them, but if not, I'm sure at least he will find them interesting.
I would encourage anyone who has a few minutes to take at least one of those tests.
