Early Morning Airport Adventures

Yet another exciting trip to LaGuardia. Arose at 4:40a and left the house at 5:15a for a 7:21a flight. rain was quite heavy so I knew it would be a challenging drive. Go up to and on the Driscoll Bridge on the Garden State when there was a Jeep Cherokee or whatever facing the wrong direction in the right lane, silly SUV driver. They do seem to forget that physics does still apply to them, and the ability to "go" doesn't always equate with the ability to turn and stop. Well at least they have taken away the title of arrogant overly aggressive driver from us BMW owners. Anyway, I migrated left to avoid the pretty lights, and got so tied up in traffic I missed the offramp for the outerbridge crossing. No worries, jump on NJ Turnpike up to the Goethals. Zipped across as traffic wasn't too bad over to Staten Island or onto Verrazzano into Brooklyn, then I heard the traffic report - overturned garbage truck on BQE by the Brooklyn Bridge - aaaahhhhhh. In fact it was quite bad, and I'm not too sure about othe routes so I stuck it out, fortunately the truck was going the other way so we mostly had rubber necking and residual back-ups from people exiting and finding other routes. At about 6:40 I called home to say I was likely going to miss my plane. Then once we cleared the accident traffic which subsided shortly after passing the scene - the Koskiosko Bridge (aka the vortex of driving retardation) was clear sailing and there was virtually no more traffic the rest of the way to LaGuardia. I pulled into the parking lot according to the time stamp on the parking ticket at 6:55am - 26 minutes before flight time - still an outside chance. I made a mad dash for the security line expecting the worst and hoping I could ask to be moved to the front. Not necessary - due to the no fluids, gels, pastes or other such substance rule, the lines at security are quite reduced as people are now checking more luggage. My wait time (unlike last week in Philadelphia) was zero - only the time it took to show my "papers" and clear security. I walked onto the plane at 7:02 according to my phone, seven minutes from car to plane, that has to be a record at LaGuardia. Again thanks to more luggage in the belly of the plane, I easily found overhead space for both my laptop bag and suitcase. I normally would not place both in the overhead but the plane was nearly full, and I doubted anyone else would be seeking space so I took the opportunity to have a bit more leg room.

This is about the 5th or 6th time I've flown out of LaGuardia and been seriously doubting my ability to catch my plane midway through my drive, only to have things turn around in the end and make it. Add to it the fact that I even squeezed in a bit of excercise - I'd say it was at least a 400 yard run from parking to security carrying 2x25lb bags, that had my heart pumping. All in all an interesting morning.

New Computer - A Mac Mini

Last weekend I finally went out and made the move. The home computer was a P3-900 HP. It worked but it was very slow. As with many Windows machines, quite a lot of cruft had snuck in over the years, it didn't have USB 2.0, and it just needed to go. It may ultimately turn into a linux machine but then again, maybe not.

Now to the Mac. Much like the ads it just works. We picked it up on Saturday evening, and plugged it in. Plugged in my wireless mouse and keyboard, monitor and external 160GB drive off of the PC and fired it up. Worked great, and the USB2.0 external drive was smoking fast when connected to a USB2.0 capable machine. Her iPod needed to be re-initialized and updated to work with the Mac, but after that was done, the movement of files between the iPod and the Mac was smoking fast, again USB2.0 wins. I moved all of our pictures and music over in rather short order. My younger daughter pulled in the video from her first gym meet, picked out only the pieces she wanted and burned it to DVD. It took a while to actually render and create the DVD but it worked just fine. She also took a batch of pictures of the dog and created a video of his various stages of hair.

Yesterday I burned all my old data to DVD for safe keeping. There was a slight problem copying data direct from the external drive and burning it to DVD, so I had to copy it to the internal drive before going to DVD. I didn't investigate the problem very much since when I copied to internal and burned it worked just fine. The interesting thing that surprised me a little bit was that I was able to snap the DVD into my office laptop and it worked just fine, not sure why I thought it wouldn't work but I was a bit suspicious.

One other problem it has was in setting up quicken the setup just didn't want to import the data from my old PC, and instead insisted on breaking my link to the bank for synchronization. Ultimately I had to call the bank and have them mail me a new pin. I did some reading about the Mac version of Quicken, so downloaded the PC version onto my laptop and migrated to that. Still need to wait until the new pin comes in to synchronize, but I think that will ultimately be a better solution anyway.

I took all of my mp3 files, converted them to m4a files and saved about 50MB of space. The ripping of CDs through iTunes could not be simpler. I was always a MusicMatch user, until I started using iTunes - far superior interface. I followed the directions for creating a shared folder for keeping all of the iTunes data so that I don't end up with multiple copies of the same thing and needlessly waste disk space.

As for iPhoto - (Apple likes the i) - I've done a bit of reading and the sharing of photos between users doesn't seem to be quite seemless, but that will be the next thing that I tackle.

Network file sharing seems to just work. I turned it on so that I could move files between the two machines and was again impressed that I didn't need to do anything fancy to make it work. Somewhere along the line, some security patch or somethign prevented me from mounting drives from my home machine on my laptop. Happily, I can once again save my personal files from my laptop, quickly and easily to my home machine. I need to investigate encryption, but haven't had the chance to do so yet.

A few times I've clicked the terminal application to get a window into the underlying Unix type OS. Seems to look like the real deal, but I haven't really investigated all of the details yet. All in all I am quite pleased - I'd give it 8 out of 10, the shared iPhoto, and problems with Quicken knock it down a few pegs.

New York Mets - Hope I don't jinx it

Well it is starting to look like it just might be a reality. 14 Games ahead with 41 to play. MLB Standings show the Magic Number as 28 vs. the Phillies. With all of that a comparison to the cross town rivals would put them only 1/2 game ahead. Mets @ 73-48, dreaded Yankess @ 72-48. As most who know me know I've been travelling extensively to Detroit. It would certainly be interesting if it turned out to be a Mets-Tigers series. I haven't been watching closely following the personnel movements or which facets of the team are working or not, I'm just enjoying catching the results and watching the highlights. It's been 20 years since we won the big one. The season feels a lot like 1986 - commanding lead for most of the season. Everybody talking about the team, etc. In 1986 I was in Pittsburgh and didn't get to fully enjoy it, except for the playoffs and series. This is a lot more fun this time. Let's just hope they keep it up and stay on track and keep the key guys healthy.

Spyware and other malware

I was speaking with the team this weak and once again I'm puzzled. Why is it that spyware is such an ongoing problem, and to quote some, "why do we have to load additional software simply to protect us from the inability of operating system developers to create decent software." I had to guide my mom into removing 20+ high impact nasty bits from her system. This was identified by Microsoft's Defender. Point One - To me it seems that spyware should be as simple to alleviate from our systems as viruses. Symantec, CA and McAfee along with some other niche players all do a very good job at protecting us from viruses - including from mail and web sites. There continue to be new viruses, trojans and such, and in general they respond to these fairly quickly. Much of the Spyware that I have encountered does load files onto my system, it should be rather easy to develop signatures that detect this spyware, tag it and alert when it attempts to save. If there is a financial reason for buying new elements of protection, that I can at least understand, then simply charge a fee for enabling the spyware protection, it shouldn't require different software. Point Two - There seems to be an explosion of this nasty stuff and the load that it places on the system is rather high. I am still curious as to what this software 'spies' upon, what information it collects and what is the value to the producers. Many of the warnings about this stuff warn of personal information being stolen and abused, but I for one have never read or heard of a report of this happening. All are accused to collect marketing information - what they are collecting is obviously what web sites are browsed and such which I suppose could be used by marketeers, but I don't see reputable companies looking to the likes of comet cursor for marketing data. Then again sleaze associates with sleaze and I suppose all of them simply share data amongst themselves.