We’re on the road again … well, more the plane again.

For the past week we’ve been vacationing in Hawaii … first stop: Kauai.

We’ve been to Kauai in the past … only for a short time, and it was kind of a screwed up vacation.  I got a sinus infection the first day.  On that trip Kauai had been kind of cool … even cold at night.

Well this trip is somewhat better … no sinus infection, but it wasn’t much warmer.  Mid 70’s during the day, low 60’s at night.

Although we’ve done some fun stuff this trip … I’m not sure I’m all that interested in returning.

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In recent months the credit card companies (Chase & Discover, mostly) have ramped up their efforts to get me to use “Convenience Checks”.  Almost every statement includes a batch of them.

I’ve never liked the fact that they send them … first, and foremost, because I never use them.  Secondly, I consider them a serious security risk.  If someone rifles through my mailbox (which has no security) and grabs my statement, they could easily cash the checks.  Yes, I know I probably wouldn’t be liable for the amount … but it would be a major pain to figure out what was going on.

I finally got around to calling both Chase and Discover to request that my account be flagged so I never get Convenience Checks again.

In both cases, the customer service person I talked to understood my concerns … and updated my account appropriately.  I was warned that there might be one ore two more mailings sent out, as the convenience checks are setup in advance … but I can deal with that.

Hmmm … now that I think about it a bit … that doesn’t really make sense … at least in the case of Discover … because the checks are attached to my statement, which is clearly custom printed on demand at the end of my billing cycle.

Oh well, as long as they don’t send me more than 1 or 2 more batches, I’ll be happy.

Thursday, I had a very disturbing experience with Tivo customer service.

In the past, on the rare instances where I had to call Tivo’s customer service department, I’ve always had a very pleasent experience … my problem or question was cleared up right away with minimum of fuss & bother.

Last  Thursday, however, that trend was broken … not once, but twice.

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We had dinner at the new Ti Amo restaurant, in Hoffman Estates, tonight.

It took the place of Babaluci, which we liked a lot. We were very disappointed when we saw they had closed.

Unfortunately, I was not especially impressed with the replacement.

I ordered Gnocchi with a side dish of Pasta Fagioul soup.

The soup was kind of bland, and looked like someone had used a stick blender to mix it up. There was almost no pasta in it.

The Gnocchi was mushy, with bland-tasting sauce. When I ordered the same dish at Babaluci, the Gnocchi had nice texture and the sauce was chunky, with nice pieces of tomato.

Ginny had a duck & pasta dish with a minestrone soup. Her soup also looked like it had been mixed with a stick blender. The duck was a bit gamier than she was expecting, and the noodles were too wide to be eaten easily.

The atmosphere, while OK, wasn’t anything to write home about. We liked the homey feel that Babaluci had. Of course, we were fairly regular and were always greeted warmly.

I noticed a distinct lack of seafood dishes on the menu..which is a big disappointment for me.

Price wise they seem to be a bit higher than I would expect, but not overly so. Ginny and I spent about $40 for dinner with tea to drink.

Ti Amo is probably worth another shot, but we’ll wait a few months for them to find their legs.

For quite some time I haven’t been happy with the level of data protection on my servers … a while ago I ran mirrored (RAID 1) IDE (PATA) drives on my system using a Arco Duplidisk adapter.  It seemed adequate, but after I upgraded my servers to the Dell PowerEdge systems, it didn’t seem to work quite right.  It was reporting failed drives when there were none.

So, after a fair bit of research, I decided to get a NAS (Network Attached Storage) device.  My criteria were a) had to support various RAID levels (1 & 5 at least), have hot swappable drives, and support NFS (the linux network file system).

The device I decided on is a Netgear ReadyNAS NV+.  The model I got came with 2 x 500gb drives, with bays for two more.  It wasn’t cheap, but I think it will be worth it in the long run.

It supports various RAID levels … RAID 1 (mirroring, where the data on one drive is completely duplicated on the other), RAID 5 (where data is stored on two drives with a parity bit on the 3rd … if any one of the drives fails, the data can be reconstructed on the fly using two of the drives), and it’s own RAID X … which is an eXpandable and adaptive RAID variation … which will use RAID 1 if you only have two drives, and RAID 5 when you add more.

Although there were a few hiccups, I’m not displeased.

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Jason Kottke pointed out that the whitehouse.gov robots.txt file was changed almost immediately after the inauguration …

It went from this …

User-agent: *
Disallow: /cgi-bin
Disallow: /search
Disallow: /query.html
Disallow: /omb/search
Disallow: /omb/query.html
Disallow: /expectmore/search
Disallow: /expectmore/query.html
Disallow: /results/search
Disallow: /results/query.html
Disallow: /earmarks/search
Disallow: /earmarks/query.html
Disallow: /help
Disallow: /360pics/text
Disallow: /911/911day/text
Disallow: /911/heroes/text

… to this …

User-agent: *
Disallow: /includes/

Web site owners use the /robots.txt file to give instructions about their site to web robots; this is called The Robots Exclusion Protocol.

One small step towards the new attitude of openness and transparency.

I was just reading Obama’s Inaugural address and one of the phrases he used jumped out at me …

To those who cling to power through corruption and deceit and the silencing of dissent, know that you are on the wrong side of history; but that we will extend a hand if you are willing to unclench your fist.

… which reminded me of a line from the David Roth’s (the folk singer) song “Dragon to Butterfly” which has the line …

A man can move mountains, a world can be turned, and the greatest of distances easily spanned, When the strength that’s invested in making a fist is transformed into shaking a hand.

I like the symbolism in both.

I was listening to WBEZ this morning and the traffic report came on … The reporter indicated that a particular road was very icy, but the city was sending out a salt truck to “make it better”.

Immediately the Beatles song “Hey Jude” popped into my head with slightly altered lyrics …

“… take a salt truck … and make it better …”

OK, yeah, I am easily amused.

For some reason, Tivo has been recording a lot of old SF shows recently.

A lot of these shows I’ve been fans of in the past … Star Trek: The Next Generation, Highlander, Seven Days, etc.

As I watch these shows I’m amazed at how bad they are.  I’m truly amazed that I considered these shows good at one point.  I was actually a fan of many of them.

Now I find the acting wooden, the special effects primitive, and the plots flat.

Of course some of the shows I thought were bad initially are still just as bad … like Star Trek Voyager (then why do I still watch it on occasion?).

Maybe it’s old age?  I wonder if, as time goes by, I’ll start considering some of the shows I like now to be just as bad?

As I mentioned a few days ago in twitter, the outflow pipe of our sump pump froze.

I had gone down stairs to get something from the utility room and found that the sump pump was running … and didn’t stop.  The pump sounded OK, but no water was draining from the pit.  I turned the power to the pump off and triggered the backup pump … which ran but didn’t remove any water.   This meant that the pumps themselves weren’t the problem.  I went outside and discovered that the outflow pipe was frozen solid.  Clearly not a good situation.

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