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Mad to Min

Ahhh, Madison, it’s been a while, and the Dane County Regional Airport, nice to meet you. It’s a small airport, really small. I think the gates are numbered 1 through 10. Security check-in took less than 5 minutes. (Oddly enough a reporter from Madison emailed me yesterday about podcasting, hoping I was local.) I’d like to spend some time exploring Madison again this Summer, we’ll see how that goes.

The flight to Minneapolis was short and sweet. I almost think I would have preferred to drive, and it’s less waiting around and more on the move. Nonetheless, I’m now in Minneapolis at the airport borrowing an electrical outlet, which is never easy to find at an airport. Oh you can find them, but they’re either carrying 200+ volts with some funky heavy equipment outlet, or they’re located in poor locations, like right below the payphones or along a wall with no seats. This time I’m in a comfortable seat right next to an electric wheelchair that’s recharging. Power!

My co-worker is delayed. Seems the authorities had a plateful of hassle for him at the airport because of an expired vehicle registration, so he missed the flight by five minutes. (Missing the flight by 5 minutes due to vehicle related issues seems to be a trend among my co-workers.) He said he’ll be here 2 1/2 hours later. More time for me to sit around doing nothing. Actually I’ll take this time to check wireless connectivity here, since they seem to allow access to some site for free… Main screen turn on!

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i18n is Hard

If Barbie was a programmer she might say “Internationalization is hard!”

In all this much to painful research on i18n and unicode and charsets, and all that jazz, I happened across this:

Java Internationalization

Argh… Yeah, you see those ?’s in there… Is it just me on my computer, using my browser that sees that? If we dare try to validate http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/javaint/ we get the message: No Character Encoding Found!

Believe me, I am not picking on O’Reilly or Andy or David, who are all probably 10 times smarter than I am in internationalization issues (and other things.) I am merely pointing out that after beating my head against my desk trying to solve form submission and internationalization and localization problems, I’m about ready to give up on these computer things and go back to printing ink on t-shirts…

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Show & Tell

In kindergarten the kids have show & tell each week, and they have to choose a thing to show based upon the letter it starts with, so this week was x or y. (Usually it’s just one letter, but those are a bit tougher for kids.) In the interest of helping future generations, I offer up this useful computer tip:

  egrep -i '^[xy].*' /usr/share/dict/words

As long as you’ve got a whole bunch of words in /usr/share/dict/words (and I do on Mac OS X) you should get a nice list of words that start with x or y. Here are a few favorites:

Please keep in mind it may not be possible, ethical, or even legal to bring some of these things to school. Worth noting is that at least three of those words mean “yellow-hammer” and the word “youze” is not the same as the one used in the phrase “youze guys” made popular in certain parts of the US.

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R.I.P. Duane Gay

R.I.P. Duane, R.I.P… Former WISN 12 News Reporter/Anchor Duane Gay Dies.

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Connection Failure

The tech was out last week Friday, and got the cable modem installed at it’s new location (right after he installed the Moxi.) He tested the line, looked good, we talked about splitters, and avoiding them, and all was well.

I spent the next day and a half setting up 4 machines, a new Linksys WRT54G, and other various neccessary stuff, and all was well. All green lights.

So when the HandyTone 486 ATA arrived last night, I made an attempt to install it, but realized I had no connection!

I checked my logs (of course I log connection outages) and realize that I had about 10 hours of downtime yesterday, and about the same the day before! Argh! This will not do! I power cycle the modem, try multiple computers, log into the http server in the modem, reboot it, no good. I make the call…

I explain things, including when my downtime started, ended, etc, and the guy wants to know how I know when it was offline if I wasn’t home, and I explain how I log it all, to which he remained silent for a minute. I then got my connection back, just as we were scheduling a tech to come out, and then I lose it again. Frustration abounds.

Someone will be out Monday. After that, the connection is fine the rest of the night as I configure the HandyTone. In the morning the connection is fine as well. I leave the house, and a few hours later, it’s dead again. Double Plus Argh!

Either my ISP shuts off my connection everyday when I leave the house, or the cats are up to no good…