In response to Tara’s PDA question.

I agree with Warren: get a Bluetooth-enabled phone, such as the Sony Ericsson T610. It’s excellent.

I use a tiered ‘mobility’ system:

Tier 1 is the base station, which is my G4. I use iCal and Address Book.app on it. All data entry and long-term calendaring /corrections/should be done here. The data stored here should be held as “true”, over all systems.

Tier 2 is the work station, which is my iBook. I use iCal and Address Book.app on it. I do almost all of my data entry here, and clean it up on the base station. The iBook is a mobile workstation, so I can lug it anywhere, change or create stuff, and eventually sync that data with the base station.

Tier 3 is the T610 cellphone. This is the most mobile device, and as such, it should be the smallest of the three devices, so that I can carry with me virtually everywhere. It stores a current copy of my calendar, address book, and notes. It acts as a reminder via its alarm feature. In a crunch, I can add phone numbers to its address book, or appointments to the calendar, and they’ll be synced all the way back to the base station. However, adding these entries is a lot slower than entering them at either Tier 1 or Tier 2. That’s ok because I enter data on this device significantly less frequently than on the other two devices.

Really, there is a deeper layer to this, a Tier 0: an Internet-based storage site. In my case, it would be my .Mac account, which stores the address book and calendar info remotely, where it is accessible from both Tier 1 and Tier 2.

Tier 3 was once a PDA. For a while, it was even my iPod. However, by getting the T610, I could eliminate one device that I had to carry around everywhere.

Given the VIN of an ordered MINI Cooper, you can paste it into the Wallenius Wilhelmsen cargo tracking page and locate the name of the ship that carries said MINI, as well as estimated departure and arrival dates.

It shows that the vessel containing my MINI, the Curitiba, has sailed, and is due to arrive in Charleston, SC on 3-30. This could change, because the shipping terminal info is a little hedgy until the ship proves to be underway.

Here’s a photo of the Curitiba.

You can search the Coast Guard PSIX page for information on the ship, as shown here.

Once you get the ship’s call sign, and after the ship’s been out to sea for a few days, you can check the Ocean Weather site for the ship’s exact location by checking the Marine Observation Tables, or just looking for the call-sign on one of the maps.

I’ve had some fun playing with the most recent Knoppix Live-CD. It’s a “live” Linux installation on a bootable CD-Rom.

I download the image, burned it to disc, and booted off of it. It autodetected all my hardware and network settings, so within a few minutes I had a very useable desktop, including Mozilla, Gaim, and OpenOffice.

To be fair, my Knoppix session crashed/hung after a few hours, but since it’s all on CD, there’s not much chance for damage.

This is a nice way to “show someone Linux”, and it’s also useful as a recovery CD, or as an emergency “must get online to download fixes for this broken/infected WinXP machine” CD.

If you’ve not used Linux and you’re interested, this is a good way to try it out. The LiveCD method puts you in a nice “sandbox”, so you can’t break your existing OS/installation unless you try very hard.

The new 3.2 supposedly supports “persistent home directories”, which lets you save your Knoppix config info on some mounted volume, but I haven’t tried this yet.

Perfect for Monday: Twenty-Five Ways To Suppress Truth: The Rules of Disinformation.

Just in case you aren’t paranoid enough.

After years(!) of drooling, I ordered a MINI Cooper S from Global Imports. I would’ve gone to Hank Aaron Mini, but the sales weasels tried to rob me. Luckily, I know Excel and wouldn’t put up with them trying to charge interest on the total amount, without counting the down payment.

It’s Chili Red with black stripes, roof, and mirrors, similar to this one. It should arrive sometime in May.

MINI Links
• Mini2 has great forums.
• MotoringFile is an excellent MINI weblog.
• Eric Longman’s weblog. He helped out with some of my MINI questions.