Author Archives: Peter

Terminal

You’ve probably heard of, and may have already seen the new movie starring Tom Hanks: ***The Terminal|http://www.theterminal-themovie.com/***. (I haven’t seen it yet, but Becky and I hope to do so soon.) What you may not know is that the movie is loosely based around a real person: Merhan Kerimi Nasser.

Nasseri has been trapped at Paris’ ***Charles de Gaulle|http://gallery.prwdot.org/cdg*** airport since 1988. Expelled from Iran in 1977 because of his political beliefs, he sought political assylum through the United Nations. When he finally received it in 1981, he searched for a country in which he could apply for citizenship. He decided on the United Kingdom, and finally set out for the UK in 1988. But his refugee documents were stolen in Paris. He flew to the UK anyway, but was sent back to Paris, and has been living at the airport ever since.

Nasseri’s bizarre situation has already been chronicled in the 1993 French film, ***Tombés du ciel|http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0108359/***.

You can read the rest of his fascinating story ***here|http://www.snopes.com/travel/airline/airport.htm***.

Bonanza Part II

What do I do with six hours in the city and a camera? Take photos of course!

The original ***Boston Photo Bonanza|http://gallery.prwdot.org/boston_20030824***, happened in August last year with a total of 84 photos kept. This year, I ended up keeping exactly two more than last year. You can see all 86 photos at ***Boston Photo Bonanza II|http://gallery.prwdot.org/boston_20040619***! This time around, I tried not to duplicate too many of the locations I visited last time. Highlights from this trip include the Zakim Bridge, the New Charles River Basin, Paul Revere Park, Charlestown Navy Yard, Bunker Hill Monument, and the Christian Science Plaza.

Here are some previews to whet your appetite…

ppp|  |ppp

Enjoy!

Big Box Brouhaha

All of this recent chatter about ***Gmail|http://gmail.google.com/gmail/help/about.html*** and ***Yahoo! Mail|http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail*** has got me thinking about my own email storage situation. Rather than re-post my thoughts here, I’ll just point you to my recent comment on Slashdot’s article about Yahoo! Mail’s new 100 MB email storage limit:

***”Why do you have so much email?”|http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=111126&cid=9429218***

It’s got a moderation score of +3 (+1 of those being my own Karma bonus), so I think it’s worth reading. πŸ™‚

More Movable Type License Changes

Six Apart has once again altered their Movable Type pricing and licensing schemes: Six Log: Announcing Pricing & Licensing Changes to Movable Type

I think the changes may appease some people, for whom the Personal Edition may not have been quite worth the price. These people were willing and able to pay $69.95-$99.95 to run a Movable Type installation, but didn’t feel that they were getting enough for their money. Now, for $69.95, you can run a blog with up to five authors and unlimited weblogs. For thirty dollars more, you can have unlimited authors.

I think it may be a good deal for some, but not for me. Here is what I would get if I paid for a license:

  1. The ability to upgrade to the latest version of Movable Type, version 3.0
  2. The ability to have up to five weblog authors, and unlimited weblogs
  3. Official technical support from Six Apart
  4. Extra online resources and help documentation
  5. Optional weblog promotion
  6. Access to custom consulting services
  7. Discounts on future upgrades

Only benefits 1 and 2 would be of any use to me. The rest are unnecessary in my case. I can understand the need to charge for those additional services. But I think Six Apart should separate the first two logically from the rest of the benefits – we should be able to download the software, install it, and run it for free, with as many authors and weblogs as we want. But Six Apart is a business, and they care about their bottom line. While there is no logical reason for them to roll benefits 1 and 2 in with the rest (you can debate whether loss of “potential” profit is a logical reason), doing so will undoubtedly increase their profits and help improve their business by banking on the fact that many users will pay for 1 and 2, even if they don’t need the rest. But I would argue that their business model wouldn’t suffer too much if they restructured pricing to a simple paid support model, which companies like Sun and Oracle use for their software.

In the end, I will still be sticking with our current Movable Type 2.661 installation until such time as I have a reason to switch to something else. It’s working well for us now, and Six Apart is not forcing us to switch, so it’s really up to me as to when and if we will upgrade.

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Firefox 0.9

This is day-old news, but I wanted to give it a mention here: Mozilla Firefox 0.9 Released.

Firefox is a great alternative to Internet Explorer. I have been following the various Mozilla-based browsers for a few years now, and Firefox has made great strides in cross-platform standardization, speed and efficiency, and features. If you’re sick of Internet Explorer, or just want to try something new for a change, give ***Firefox|http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/*** a try. Loads of people are already in love with its speed, tabbed browsing, small memory footprint, and standards-compliant rendering.

I use Firefox as my main browser at work on Windows XP Professional, and only test on Internet Explorer before launching major changes. At home, I use a mix of Apple’s ***Safari|http://www.apple.com/safari/*** and Firefox.

Let the festivities continue!

Today, there are even more special occasions to celebrate! Join with us as we wish our family members happy anniversaries…

ppp|
Happy Third Anniversary, Mark and Kirsten!|ppp

ppp|Ken and Dianne
Happy 30th Anniversary, Ken and Dianne!|ppp

June sure is a month to celebrate! I just hope we don’t miss anybody! πŸ™‚

Plethora

First, the general-interest stuff:

Item: Becky and I were in New Jersey this past weekend to visit ***Jenn|http://junefourteenth.blogspot.com/***. We came to watch her in the ***Ridgewood G&S|http://www.ridgewoodgands.com/*** production of ***Patience|http://www.dancaster.com/RidgewoodGandS/currentshow_home.htm***. She did a lovely job as one of the “Rapturous Maidens”. πŸ™‚ We also made a side trip to ***IKEA|http://www.ikea.com/***. This was my first visit to one, and I must say that I was quite impressed! The store was absolutely enormous! Becky and I ended up getting a brand new coffee table, regularly priced at $99, for only $9.99. What a bargain! You can see the photos from IKEA and the musical ***here|http://gallery.prwdot.org/visiting_jenn***.

Item: Becky started work at the ***Otis House Museum|http://www.historicnewengland.org/visit/homes/otis.htm*** on Friday! The organization was previously known as “The Society for the Preservation of New England Activities” (SPNEA), but between the time she was hired and her start date, they changed their name to “Historic New England”. Perhaps she will provide more details to our readers at a later time… today is just her second day of work so far. πŸ™‚

Now for more geeky matters…

Item: As ***Will|http://pulchersentio.prwdot.org/*** ***mentioned|http://pulchersentio.prwdot.org/001822.html***, ***Apple|http://www.apple.com/*** has just released a nifty toy called the ***AirPort Express|http://www.apple.com/airportexpress/***. This is basically a scaled down version of their AirPort Extreme Base Station, which connects to your cable or dsl line, local network, or modem, and provides wireless internet access to anyone in the vicinity. The AirPort Express is much smaller (fits in the palm of your hand), and has an extra added feature called ***AirTunes|http://www.apple.com/airportexpress/airtunes.html***. This lets you send music over your network to the AirPort Express from another computer running iTunes. The APE can then plug directly into a stereo system or speakers via an audio jack. Pretty nifty. At $129, it’s almost half the price of its larger bretheren, so it is quite a good deal.

Item: Apple has also just released some new ***PowerMacs|http://www.apple.com/powermac/***. The high end is now a dual 2.5 GHz G5 with a new ***liquid cooling|http://www.apple.com/powermac/design.html*** system. Steve Jobs had previously promised 3.0 GHz machines by the end of this summer, so it still remains to be seen if he will deliver on that promise. The liquid cooling may be the first step in making that happen.

Item: I don’t know when this happened, but the iTunes Music Store now has Radio Charts. Just bring up the iTMS, click on Radio Charts on the left side of the homepage, and then browse by city and then station. You can hear the latest music, as charted by your local stations. I know that Columbus, OH and Boston, MA are on there.

Item: My current fascination is parsing weather data with ***Perl|http://www.perl.org/***. With a little help from Dirk-Jan Koopman’s ***Geo::TAF|http://search.cpan.org/~djk/Geo-TAF-1.04/TAF.pm*** Perl module, I can now grab ***METAR|http://weather.noaa.gov/weather/metar.shtml*** and ***TAF|http://weather.noaa.gov/weather/taf.shtml*** reports from the ***NOAA|http://www.noaa.gov/***. METAR and TAF are short, coded strings used by weather reporting stations around the world to communicate weather reports in a concise format. For example, a string like this:

ccc|KCMH 091551Z 16008KT 8SM FEW032 SCT250 29/21 A3015
RMK AO2 SLP201 MDT CU W AND VC NW T02940211|ccc

…translates, roughly, to:

qqq|Observed at Columbus, on the 9th at 15:51 Zulu time. Wind is coming from 160 degrees at 8 knots. Visibility is 8 miles. There are few clouds at 3200 feet, and scattered clouds at 25000 feet. The current temperature is 29C, and the current dewpoint is 21C. Altimeter pressure is currently 30.15 inches. Remarks: This is an automated station with a precipitation descriminator. Sea-level pressure is 1020.1 hPa, and there are moderate cumulus clouds to the west and the vicinity of the northwest. The temperature is 29.4C and the dewpoint is 21.1C|qqq

Yowser!

These reports are automatically generated once per hour, or more often if there are notable condition changes.

Eventually I hope to make this into a useful service on the prwdot.org site, but for now, you can check out a couple of links below to see how this works. Keep in mind that I’m still in the experimental stages, so the information may not make a lot of sense. Scroll down to the bottom of the reports to see the information in its most “readable” form:

***METAR for KBVY|http://prwdot.org/cgi-bin/WeatherParser.pl?type=METAR&station=KBVY*** (Current weather conditions for Beverly, MA)
***METAR for KCMH|http://prwdot.org/cgi-bin/WeatherParser.pl?type=METAR&station=KCMH*** (Current weather conditions for Columbus, OH)

I have also done a bit of my own work on the TAF.pm module itself, to allow it to translate measurements into something an American like myself is more comfortable with. TAF.pm’s capacity for processing “remarks” is also somewhat limited, so I am fleshing that out a bit, with some help from ***Jim Metzger|http://hub.kivlin.net/***’s METAR documentation.

Beverly Harbor

I’ve lived in Beverly for over a year and a half now, but I had yet to visit our fair city’s marina. Today I was home sick from work, but felt well enough by late afternoon to go for a walk. It was a beautiful day, so I walked down to the marina and shot some photos. It’s actually quite a nice little place!

***Enjoy!|http://gallery.prwdot.org/beverly_harbor***

Taco Bell

Inspired by Will’s recent announcement that he’ll be working at ***Taco Bell|http://pulchersentio.prwdot.org/001815.html*** for the summer, I’ve been thinking a lot about Taco Bell today.

Now Becky and I consider ourselves to be pretty big Taco Bell nuts. Consider the fact that Taco Bell was, in a way, the ***common bond|http://prwdot.org/?p=archives/001762*** by which our relationship was first formed. Consider the fact that we regularly went to Taco Bell during college even though the closest one (that we knew of at the time) was 30 minutes away. Consider the fact that we’ll choose it over any fast food restaurant, if one is convenient.

But I had no idea there were so many people who could be more nuts (or beans?) about TB than us.

Today I Googled for “taco bell road trip” to see if I could find a way to get a list of the Taco Bells on our driving route to Ohio this summer. I didn’t end up finding such a thing, but I *did* find the ***Taco Bell Road Trip|http://www.tbroadtrip.com/***. Holy moley. These guys are my new heroes. Because of them, I’m now considering plans for our own Taco Bell-based road trip for later this year.

From their site, I found numerous other ***links|http://www.tbroadtrip.com/Links.htm***, including ***Talko Taco Bell|http://www.marshalls.net/tacobell/***, a user-maintained database of Taco Bell restaurant ratings, and ***Crazy Gorditas|http://www.angelfire.com/extreme3/tacobell/***, a compilation of all past and present Taco Bell menu items, including the famed Steak Burrito Bellgrande (one of my favorites of years gone by):

Steak Burrito Belgrande
Description: This discontinued burrito had steak, green sauce, cheddar cheese, fiesta salsa, sour cream and get this…tater tots!
This burrito retired years ago. However, we have someone who can turn back the clock for us and tell us how it was!!
Kevin’s Opinion: This was GODLIKE. The Steak Burrito Belgrande was what I ordered every time I went to Taco Bell for the entire time they were available. Everything else on the menu paled in comparison. There was tons of steak in the burrito, the cheese blend was perfect, had plenty of the tomatoes/onions/cilantro blend, the perfect amount of sour cream, and the tater tots were surprisingly good. The result was a mix that was so uniqe and flavorful that it shouldve been illegal. Overall, this was the best burrto that Taco Bell ever had…and is only rivaled by the Chicken Grilled Stuft. God I wish the Steak Burrito Belgrande was back. It was almost holy.

I agree on all counts. It was an amazing burrito while it lasted.

Hm. It’s 11:37 pm. Taco Bell’s still open. Should I stay or should I go?