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.

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.

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.

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.

The inimitable Nyx has created a great T-shirt via CafePress: The Open Discussion of Doubt.

I’ve always assumed that over the course of a large number of generations of digital copies, data would always get lost or corrupted. I never had any scientific evidence to back up or disprove that assumption until now

Hmm, looks like the same pro-Kerry morons have changed IPs. Seems they’re attacking the old Refer script, at /refer/index.php, using some scumware app by a little fly-by-night company called StarProse.

[I’m pretty sure that one day when the two 18-year-old crank addicts that comprise StarProse were sitting in their momma’s basement, one of them decided that using that there Interwebnet thing was a great way to make some drug money, and was probably more fun than torturing cats or molesting children. Maybe. And they didn’t even have to steal from Mom again! ]

Here’s a hint, Mr. Kerry: If you want to win votes, you’ll police the assclowns at johnkerry.com to keep them from filling up my logfiles with fake referrals.

Not that you had my vote in the first place, you communist swine.

Oh, and look, it’s an AOL IP:
host 172.132.98.191
191.98.132.172.in-addr.arpa domain name pointer AC8462BF.ipt.aol.com.

Typical.

My first girlfriend mailed me a little stuffed hamster/beaver/thing. It was doused in her perfume, ‘to remember her by’, since she lived two hours away and I only got to see her every other weekend.

Twelve years later, I have no idea what became of that girl, and the beaver is now a thoroughly-masticated dog toy.

There’s a parable in there somewhere.