Twelve Black Code Monkeys

It’s been way too long! A few things culminated in conspiring to prevent me from posting anything here for a couple of weeks, which I will explain below. I thought for once I could post some stuff that was a bit more personal instead of what I’ve gotten into the habit of posting - more tech-news-like stuff.

I decided to finally buy a laptop. I bought a Dell Inspiron 8500 and have been busy transferring my stuff from my old system. But now that I am much more mobile, the theory is that I should be able to post more often. Hah! At least that was one of the rationalizations I used to help me get over the sticker shock! This laptop is meant as a desktop replacement, so it is not small! The screen is wider than the normal computer screen, more like the newer Apple iBooks with a 16:9 aspect ratio. Although you don’t get the same impression as with the iBooks which you immediately can tell are very different. With this, the lid where the lcd is has space above and below, so the dimensions of the latop itself are not that much different from one that has a normal aspect ratio. Although if the screen did cover the entire space available it would be at least 17″! It is indeed 15.4″, which is still mighty big for a laptop.

I went to see the family in New York City for the Fourth. Actually we left last Wednesday and spend the night in St. Michaels where we are getting married in October. We ended up firming up what we are going to be doing the day before the wedding - we are having people come for the weekend and wanted to arrange some excursions and so forth. The trip to NYC was nice but we were out and about doing stuff every day which didn’t leave a whole lot of time for blogging, and hey, I was on vacation, right? Although I did take the laptop and was successfully able to connect to the wifi network at the Borders near my mom’s place a couple of times. Which brings me to a concern I started having. I’m just wondering about the security involved in doing this, especially on a network which doesn’t use encryption, which it appears Tmobile’s doesn’t. When I was shutting down once it warned me that someone was connected to my system! Mcaffey antivirus came with the laptop, but apparently it only included the virus checker and none of the other security utilities like the firewall, intrusion detection, etc. When I was in my mom’s apartment, it kept finding some wireless network. I tried hooking onto it for a connection since my mom doesn’t have dsl or anything like that. But when I tried going anywhere I couldn’t. It didn’t tell me it was encrypted, so I’m not sure what it was. But what I did notice was that I kept getting popup messages, some of which warned me there was a security hole in my system which allowed them to appear. But I’m not sure whether these were coming from the wireless network or the fact that I was connecting to AOL via a phone line. I will have to do some more testing now that I’m home…

Getting back to the wedding, it looks like most of the lose ends finally seem to be coming together. We signed up for a place to have coffee and desert the night before the wedding, and figured out a bunch of excursions for earlier in the day, so we just have to poll the invitees and get some folks who want to volunteer to be the point people for some of these. At this point the major things that still need to get done are: the men’s attire (I’ve picked out a tux, but need to decide what the other guys are wearing); the food (We have the basics figured out, but I need to decide what custom dishes we want); the invitation (the friend who is doing them needs to show us comps of the design, but he’s been swamped and sick, so we’re not sure when we will get to see them - hopefully tonight!), and finally the band (the band we hired is having difficulty contracting supplementary members and staying within budget, so we are toying with the thought of going with a DJ for the dancing and then having only a small band for the coctail hour and maybe some of dinner before the actual dancing.

Finally, I took a good number of photos during the weekend, but haven’t really posted them. I need to figure out the best way to make them available on this blog, although you can of course look at them at the usual repository, pbase: www.pbase.com/dvdmon.