ClubJuggler

It’s the name of the game!

Originally published at clubjuggler.com. You can comment here or there.

So as I’m driving in to work this morning I hear on the that the Cash for Clunkers program I recently posted about is now basically bankrupt!  I guess a lot of people thought it was a good deal. I wonder if this means that auto dealers and companies will be reporting record profits soon….

Originally published at clubjuggler.com. You can comment here or there.

Subaru not qualified

So, apparently today the government has  a program that will let you get a cash rebate if you trade in an old car for one that is newer and gets better gas mileage, up to $4,500 in some cases.  A free $4,500 towards the purchase of a new car is nothing to sneeze at so I went to the website to see if my car qualified for a trade in.  Apparently your car needs to be made within the last 25 years (since 1984) and its combined fuel economy needs to be 18 mpg or less.  My car passes the first test, it is a 1998 model, however, it just barely fails the second test.  My combined fuel economy is listed as 21 mpg (this is the average between city and highway).  So, basically, if I want to get a car with better fuel economy, I’m on my own.  Oh well, it was a nice idea.

Originally published at clubjuggler.com. You can comment here or there.

Hubble Telescope © Photon John

Generally, when I work I have streaming radio on in the background.  I generally listen to either my local NPR station or Pandora. Today, however, instead of radio, I’ve had NASA TV up in a little corner of my window watching the space shuttle astronauts in their first of several spacewalks to repair and rejuvenate the Hubble Space Telescope.  While the endless hours of it (the spacewalk itself was over seven hours) could be a bit boring, it was pretty cool to be able to glance over every now and then and get the same view the astronaut in space was getting (since they were feeding directly from his helmet camera).  In addition, NASA TV provided commentary that explained what each step the astronaut was doing which really helped to make sense of things.

The NASA astronauts will be doing several more spacewalks over the next few days as they continue working on Hubble.  Since this will be the last time anyone from earth visits Hubble,  they definitely want to make any and all repairs possible right now.  If you’ve got a good internet connection and are intersted in the space program, you might also find it interesting to throw up one of NASA TV’s video stream to listen to and glance over at during the day.

Originally published at clubjuggler.com. You can comment here or there.

I filled up my car’s gas tank this morning at the Circle K at Hwy 55 and Cornwallis Road. When I was taking my son to school they had the best gas price at $1.989/gallon but by the time I got there it had gone up to $1.999/gallon, matching the other two gas stations at that corner. While I was filling up, though, I had the pump automatically stop a couple of times at the highest pump level (when the tank was obviously not full) so I put the pump on the lowest pump level. My mistake was then to walk around the car to get my logbook. A UPS driver who was on the opposite side of the pump came out a few minutes ago and got my attention. It was a good thing too since the pump was overflowing out of my gas tank! It looked like I lost about a good 2-4 gallons on the ground!

So, if you’re pumping your gas, it’s probably not a good idea to leave the pump unattended.

Originally published at Southern Kind of Life. You can comment here or there.

For the last three years I’ve had a lot of fun attending and presenting at BarCampRDU. BarCamp is what’s known as an “unconference” where the entire content of the conference is organized the day of the event. Imagine, if you will, a conference crossed with a wiki and you’ve basically got BarCamp. The first two years of BarCampRDU I taught Juggling. Last year I simply attended. This year I’m not sure what I’ll do, but I’d like to present something. We’ll see. I’ve got three months to think about it. If you might be interested in attending BarCampRDU 2009, go register here. Unlike previous years, registration this year is not on the wiki. Instead, we’re using EventBrite this year. Registration is still free, but make sure to get in early before all 200 spots are gone!

Originally published at clubjuggler.com. You can comment here or there.

So, after getting my laptop hard drive replaced last week, today I have an appointment at the Genius Bar to see about getting my top case and hopefully my battery replaced. This is the same repair jklGoDuke had done on her laptop last week. The Apple store at Crabtree Mall in Raleigh was able to perform the repair the same afternoon that we dropped off her laptop, so hopefully it will be able to do the same for me today. I’m definitely glad to be getting it repaired as my Applecare runs out this coming June. I’m starting to wonder just how much I might be able to get for my laptop if I were to sell it and put the money towards a new laptop. Of course, what I’d like to have is a 15 inch MacBook Pro but the $2000 price tag is fairly daunting. Still, it might be worth looking into. But, the first step is to get the cracks in the top case repaired and the battery replaced.

Originally published at clubjuggler.com. You can comment here or there.

My replacement laptop drive arrived this evening. I went ahead and stopped DiskWarrior. It had been running for about 94 hours without finishing and, in fact, I had to shut down the computer to stop it. Installing the new drive went quickly but in the process I noticed that my battery is just starting to bulge! J’s battery was bulging a lot more when she got it replaced on Tuesday but I’m thinking I don’t want to let this progress very far. I already wanted to take the MacBook in to fix cracks in the top case near the keyboard so I’ll try to take care of both problems at once.

In any case, the laptop is currently restoring from Time Machine backup and it looks like it’s going to take 10-12 hours. Apparently my last backup was on March 30 so I’ll lose a little over 2 weeks of data. Also since I didn’t get my iPhone until April 2 I’ll have to set that up again (and I’ll probably need to recreate my custom ringtones). Hopefully that won’t be too much of a problem.

Originally published at clubjuggler.com. You can comment here or there.

The latest release of Ubuntu, Jaunty Jackalope, has been released as of today and it looks like there’s a release party happening in my area.

So, if you’re in the Triangle Area of North Carolina this evening, come down to the Flying Saucer between 6 and 9pm. More information at this link.

Originally published at clubjuggler.com. You can comment here or there.

This morning as I was taking Big-B to school my odometer rolled over to hit 234567 miles. I pulled off the road and snapped this photo. My car is a 1998 Subaru Legacy GT station wagon. I bought it in 2000 with about 20k miles on it already. My goal is to make it to at least 300,000 miles before I consider replacing it.

Originally published at clubjuggler.com. You can comment here or there.

Every now and then when I run a lot of programs, or maybe just Firefox with a lot of tabs, and then leave my laptop for a long time, when I come back to it it takes a while to get going again. I generally figure it’s because it has to swap things back into memory from disk. Every now and then, though, it takes what seems like forever and I sometimes give up and just reboot the laptop because that can be quicker. This past Sunday morning I went through that and finally rebooted my MacBook. I then went upstairs to finish getting dressed. When I came back down about 5-10 minutes later I was surprised to see that my laptop was continuously rebooting! Not having any time to deal with it, I shut it down and left it off for the day. Later that evening, I booted the MacBook in verbose mode (hold down Cmd+V when booting) and discovered that there was an “I/O error” on my hard drive! I booted up using an install disk and tried to run Disk Utility on it. That completely failed so realizing the drive was probably toast I went ahead and ordered a new drive. Since the drive wouldn’t be here until Thursday (today), though, I borrowed a DiskWarrior CD from a friend and applied it towards trying to reconstruct the disk (since I’d heard that DW was about the best there is for reconstructing Mac disks). Well, as of this morning, DiskWarrior is still going. I realize it’s a 500GB drive, but really, 4 days and the last 3.5 of them it’s been on what appears to be the very last step.

Anyway, the new drive arrives today. If DiskWarrior isn’t done by tonight I’ll stop it and consider the drive a lost cause. I have a Time Machine backup but unfortunately I had not plugged in my TM drive in about 3-4 weeks, so I’m sure there’s things I’ve lost. Oh well, I’ll know better next time (hopefully)!

After I get this fixed I really need to take the laptop into Apple to get the top casing replaced as it’s cracking on the sides. jklGoDuke just took her computer in this past Tuesday and got both her top case replaced and her battery (which was apparently bulging and had damaged the trackpad!). Then, finally, in what is hopefully the last computer thing that needs to be repaired in a while, I need to take my iPhone in and have Apple look at it since my mic doesn’t seem to be working. Right now I have to use the headphones microphone in order to have a phone conversation. Ah well, such is the life when one has lots of electronic gadgets, eh?

Originally published at clubjuggler.com. You can comment here or there.

John Stewart applies his usual deconstruction to just how good CNBC has performed over the last year.

Originally published at clubjuggler.com. You can comment here or there.

There really isn’t any point to this post except to verify that I have the iPod touch wordpress application setup.

The day isn’t over yet but it’s already gone better than I thought it could have done. Here’s hoping the rest of the day goes well too. I have to pick up the little boy right after work while J is at choir rehearsal. We then normally go eat at Elmo’s in Durham. Also tonight I want to stop by the pet store on the way home. Our fish filter died last night. I looked at some replacements at lunch but decided to go to the store near our home to see if I could find something a little closer to what we had. Hopefully I can do that and still get the little boy to bed on time.

Originally published at clubjuggler.com. You can comment here or there.

Prairie Home Companion at the Town Hall Theater in NYC - December 12, 2008
©Arthur

If you haven’t been to the DPAC yet, you might want to consider going on May 9th.  It was just announced that in association with WUNC radio, Garrison Keillor and A Prairie Home Companion will be coming to the DPAC.    Tickets won’t go on sale until March 2nd but when they do you can get them at the DPAC tickets page.

I had heard rumors of this a few months ago, but had thought they fell through.  It’s nice to see they were correct.  A Prairie Home Companion is my son’s favorite show and he just picked up two books by Garrison Keillor at the Book Exchange in their going out of business sale.

Originally published at Southern Kind of Life. You can comment here or there.

Yesterday was the first day for One Stop Early Voting in North Carolina and it was immediately evident that people really want to vote.  The previous record for number of voters voting in a single day during early voting in Durham was 4,476, set on October 29, 2004.  Yesterday, Durham county had 6,264 people vote.  Durham Board of Elections Director Mike Ashe has been quoted that he thinks this new record will be broken!  You can keep track of each day’s totals at this link (note: pdf file).

Early voting is especially convenient in North Carolina due to the fact that you can register, or update your registration, and vote on the same day.  With that in mind, it’s useful to review who is eligible to register to vote in NC.  Anyone in NC may register to vote provided they sign a voter decleration attesting that:

• They are a U.S. citizen.
• They have been a resident of North Carolina and the county they are registering in for 30 days before the election.
• They will be at least 18 years old by the next general election.
• They are not registered to vote, nor will they vote in any other county or state.
• If they have been convicted of a felony, their rights of citizenship have been restored.

Note that untruthful answers on any of these questions on your registration form is considered a felony, so make sure you answer truthfully!  In addition, the person registering to vote must provide proof of residency by showing the elections official an appropriate form of identification with the citizen’s current name and current address. Note that if you are registering at a One Stop Early Voting location you are only allowed to vote at the early voting election and not in the next general election. I’m not sure why you’d want to leave and then come back to vote, but since you can’t, it doesn’t matter. In any case an “appropriate form of identification” is defined to be:

• A North Carolina driver’s license with current address
• A utility bill with name and current address
  • A telephone or mobile phone bill
  • An electric or gas bill
  • A cable television bill
  • A water or sewage bill
• A document with name and current address from a local, state, or U.S. government agency, such as:
  • A passport
  • A government-issued photo ID
  • U.S. military ID
  • A license to hunt, fish, own a gun, etc.
  • A property or other tax bill
  • Automotive or vehicle registration
  • Certified documentation of naturalization
  • A public housing or Social Service Agency document
  • A check, invoice, or letter from a government agency
  • A birth certificate
• A student photo ID along with a document from the school showing the student’s name and current address
• A paycheck or paycheck stub from an employer or a W-2 statement
• A bank statement or bank-issued credit card statement

You can find out much more about registering to vote at the State Board of Elections website.  In addition, you can look up your own voting information and get both your polling location and a sample ballot for your district.  So, if you want to vote but are not yet registered, go register and vote!  Or, if you don’t want to fight the crowds on election day (although, apparently 25% of all voters in the U.S. voted early in the 2006 election and that number will almost certainly grow for this election), go vote early.  But, whatever you do, please go vote!

Originally published at Southern Kind of Life. You can comment here or there.

The Duke University String School will be having the first of their 4 yearly concerts this weekend.  On Saturday, 11 October 2008 in the Baldwin Auditorium in the Biddle Music Building on Duke’s East Campus there will be a concert of the beginner 1 and 2 and intermediate 1 groups at 3pm.  Then, at 4pm there will be a Memorial Concert for Wei-Lee Kuo. Finally at 7pm, there will be a concert of the intermediate 2 group and the DUSS Youth Symphony Orchestra.

My son has been taking violin with the string school this fall and will be performing with the beginner 1 group at 3pm.  In addition, when my son started, I mentioned to his ensemble’s group instructor, Stephanie Swisher, that I played double bass and asked if she needed any help.  While they didn’t need anything with the beginner group, she asked if I’d be willing to help with the intermediate 2 group, so I’ll be playing bass with that group at 7pm.

Anyway, if you’re in Durham tomorrow afternoon and are interested in some classical music, consider stopping by!

Update: When posting late at night, double check all your facts. Baldwin Auditorium, of course, is not in Biddle Music Building.  Oh well, here’s hoping I get it right next time. Their next concert will be December 6.

Originally published at Southern Kind of Life. You can comment here or there.

If you want to vote in the November presidential (and local, of course) election you need to make sure you are registered to vote before the deadline this Friday.  After Friday, the only way for you to be able to vote in NC will be to go through One Stop Early Voting where you can register & vote at the same time.  However, even if you think you are registered, you should double check to make sure you haven’t accidentally been purged from the voter rolls.  While I definitely think Durham BOE Director Mike Ashe would not knowingly purge valid voters from the rolls, mistakes are possible.  That’s why it is important for everyone to check their voter registration status.  You can check your own registration status at the Durham County Board of Elections website.  Besides that, a group called Project Vote 2008 has lists of voters recently purged from voting rolls around the country including Durham County.  You can check their online Google spreadsheet for a list of voters recently purged from the Durham County voter rolls and if you see yourself you can fix things.  Or, if you see a friend on the list let them know to go check their registration.  This is something you definitely want to do soon since if you show up on election day and are not registered you won’t be able to vote normally.  You can almost certainly vote provisionally, however, if you aren’t registered the chances that vote will be counted are slim.  So, act now before time runs out.

Again, the deadline for registering to vote is this Friday, October 10, 2008.  Information on how to register can be found here.

Update: As my friend Lisa mentions, my voter registration lookup link only works in Durham County.  You can look up your NC voter registration information for any county in North Carolina at the State Board of Elections website.

Originally published at Southern Kind of Life. You can comment here or there.

October 4 is this year’s IMBA International Take a Kid Mountain Biking Day.  We had a lot of fun at this last year (my attempting to learn how to “pedal surge” to make it over large logs and instead flipping my bike over and landing on my back notwithstanding) when the local event was held down at Harris Lake park.  This year the local event will be held at Lake Crabtree County Park in conjuction with the Triangle Fat Tire Festival.  It is being put on by TORC and Trips For Kids Triangle.  I’m not sure yet if I’ll be helping out as a member of the mountain bike patrol but at the very least my son and I plan to be there for the event and if you have kids too I’d recommend you bring them out!

Here’s pictures from last year’s festival:

Originally published at Southern Kind of Life. You can comment here or there.

For those of you who think the United States has a huge problem with the size of the federal debt (and I do) there is a movie tonight being shown in select theaters around the country called I.O.U.S.A. From the trailer, it looks good.  I’d love to go see it but I’ve unfortunately already got plans tonight.  It’s at the North Hills Stadium 14 in Raleigh, NC at 8pm and after the movie there will apparently be a live panel discussion with Warren Buffett and other financial leaders.  The movie in the theaters is apparently a one night only thing (update: apparently it has a limited 12 city run starting Friday, but the premiere tonight will be in 358 theaters, so your best chance to see it in the theaters is tonight) but the movie will hopefully be on regular TV in a few months.

See the trailer below:

Originally published at Southern Kind of Life. You can comment here or there.

I finally got my car back yesterday morning and it’s running very well.  Thanks much to Wasp Automotive for the good work, even if it did take a bit longer than expected.  Unfortunately, because I had to return the rental car Wednesday morning, I was left Wednesday night with no car and no cable or Internet.  The cable technicians finally came out on Wednesday.  They were supposed to be there between 3 and 5pm.  They arrived at 6:15pm and promptly found that the line had problems and that I needed line maintenance to come out.  They said they’d try to be out that evening, but of course that didn’t happen.  Then, to top things off, just after the cable techs left, a storm blew through and my power went out.  So, there I was with no car, no cable, no internet, and no power.  I’m very thankful that we have a gas stove so I could cook my supper.

Anyway, I got the car back the next morning and then when I came home Thursday evening the cable and Internet were working.  My DVR box, though, seems to still have a few problems.  There are several channels that won’t tune at all, or tune but with a messed up picture.  I need to get through all the stuff saved on the box, though, before taking it in to get a new one.

This weekend, I’m going to be at the RTP Startup Weekend.  The goal there is to basically get a bunch of people together for one weekend and start a company together.  I went to the previous one about 8 months ago and had a good time, even though our company didn’t get past the weekend.  This weekend, I think, that we’ll actually be starting multiple companies, so we’ll see how that goes.  If you’re at all morbidly curious, they will apparently be streaming live video all weekend and you can see it here:http://www.ustream.tv/channel/rtp-startup-weekend

Originally published at Southern Kind of Life. You can comment here or there.