Lee.org

Amazon Support informed me that the Fine Print says I can only redeem 1 certificate per order. Ok… so I split my purchase into 2 orders and placed them 3 minutes apart. Duh.

And now they sell it again. So I cancelled my Amazon pre-order, got ready to check out and found out that one of the two certificates I have doesn’t work. The $50 one I told you about works… but the $30 doesn’t. I wrote to cust support. What a pain in the ass.

A couple days ago I was talking about an FM transmitter. So I go to buy it today and Amazon doesn’t sell it any more. I’ve got a $50 gift certificate that’s going to expire on the 15th and now there’s nothing I want (for under $500) on my wish-list. GRRR.

There’s a computer wholesaler in downtown Hackettstown… a -real- computer wholesaler. They’re not interested in selling systems to me for my clients… they only sell computer systems by the pallet. Nifty. GoCWI.com

I saw Shaun of the Dead with VC last night. Quite an enjoyable movie, especially with a great person to see it with. :-)

I’ve been using it for 3 days now and can definitively say that Firefox kicks Internet Explorers ass. I just started playing with extensions and… yeah. Good bye IE. (though I’ve been having a little trouble viewing some videos in Firefox. I’m sure I’ll find the right extension shortly to make that problem go away)

Get Firefox. It will make you more productive.

I’m going to have to figure out how to put myself on an RSS feed soon. I’m simply in love with the Sage RSS reader in Firefox. I can see why some of my friends have been bugging me to produce an RSS stream.

Was I right? I was right! Lee Gavin has lifted the curse! Thank you Lee!

This has been my screen saver now on and off for a few months. I’ve got to say that it was a major contributor to my pre-burn excitement. The photos are excellent… a real joy! Thank you, Burning Man Screen Saver Project!

Old way of looking up old data

• Double-click Windows Search icon
• Wait 8 seconds
• Type the text I’m looking for, IE: “xmas 04” (My Christmas shopping list)
• Wait 3 seconds
• Double-click ‘xmas 04.txt’ to start Notepad
• Wait 2 seconds
• View document

New Way

• In IE or Firefox, click on bookmark for Google Desktop
• Type the text I’m looking for
• Click the cache-link
• Wait 1/2 second
• View document

Time Saved: 12.5 seconds. I do this search 5-20 times per day.

Old way of looking up archived emails

• Open Outlook
• Wait 30 seconds
• Hit Ctrl-Shift-F.
• Type in search criterion
• Wait 45 seconds
• view results

New Way

• Click on bookmark for Google Desktop
• Type in the search criterion
• wait 1/2 second
• View email

I often leave Outlook running, so I’ll just say I’ve saved 44.5 seconds. I do this search 2-10 times per day.

This is some crazy dream I had this morning. Don’t feel you have to read it.

I woke up this morning dreaming of flying. I’ve had this kind of dream many times before. This one was especially vivid. I remember being with friends… family? by the ocean. The shoreline sloped quickly into the ocean. At one point, I threw myself down the incline (not a dangerous incline, except to fall onto the sand and ultimately the incoming waves) and I recall that my limbs remembered the hint of previous dreams. The first time, I remembered enough to be able to not fall… and in the middle of it, my toes felt uncomfortable having not landed on the ground or the surf.

I decided to practice the movements. They are a sort of gyration of each joint in appropriate succession. I recall trying to explain this to someone in the dream. I told them it was like that hand dynamo you might have played with as a kid. It’s sort of a ball inside another ball. You grasp the thing in your hand and get the inner ball spinning. Once it’s going (and making this interesting whining noise) you have to gyrate your wrist against the gyroscopic forces that the inner ball is generating (yes, this thing exists, I’ve got one in storage… See http://www.dynaflex-intl.com/gyro_info.htm) Flying is sort of like that… pushing against forces that you didn’t know were there until you tried pushing in just the write way in the right rhythm. Thinking about it, my flying experience was a bit more like the Dyna Flex in other ways. I remember the feeling like I was really doing it. It’s an uncomfortable feeling… I have to bend my limbs in ways that would have locked my joints and hurt if I were putting weight on them. As I got better at it, I started to realize that the ‘pushing’ was some combination of mental effort as well as physical… It’s possible (though I’d have to do it more to be sure) that, if I practiced, I could fly without much physical effort at all.

I recall the experience of Arthur Dent flying in Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. This might be the origination of this dream. I read the book when I was about 12 years old. Actually, I read the entire 3 book series, cover to cover in a single sitting one Christmas day. Arthur flew by “throwing yourself at the ground and missing” and there was something else about gyrating his wrists and ankles in a particular manner.

Back to the dream…. I vividly recall how it felt… Even if I lost concentration and stopped trying to fly for a few moments, I only lost a little altitude… as if I had lost just a little buoyancy or… mmmm parts of me lost their tethers to the balloons that were keeping me aloft. Yeah, I like that second analogy better because I could feel that each of my body parts were being held up separately. I didn’t start to fall… If I had tried, I probably could have fallen, but it was an experience that was as safe as say, driving a car.

The scene: it was terrific. When I got up high, I could see down to the surf maybe 500 feet below me. As I looked out along the shoreline, a slight mist limited visibility to about 2 miles. From the shore, the beach rose up at a fairly steep climb to a rolling hill. Maybe 200 yards in, the sand gave way to short grass or moss climbing the hill. The top was maybe 700 feet above sea level and 1,500 feet from the shoreline.

I don’t recall seeing the sun was and can’t tell which way was north. Let’s say the shoreline went east-west with the water to the south. About 3/4 of a mile east of my original spot on the beach, the shoreline abruptly turns south. The mountain/hill also follows the shoreline to the south.

Once I had flown about, above the water for a while, I found my way to the perch in the drawing to the right. I’m standing on top of a hill to the east and south of my original position, which is pretty much in the center of the drawing.

I recall the smell. The scent of fresh air above 100 feet or so was so refreshing. I recall thinking how I’d remember the smell. The scent perched on the mountain was fresh as well. But it was different once I landed. The difference might have been in my mind though. Sort of the difference between what a land lubber smells in the ocean air and what someone who knows the ocean well smells.

Starting from the spot in the drawing, if I were to draw what was behind me… over my right shoulder, you’d see… strange as it is, a few tennis courts. The courts were fenced in as is normal for courts. What was strange was there were bums sitting around and in them. And they didn’t like me. As I write this, my memory of this part of the dream is fading. I recall that they started running toward me, unhappy with me though I don’t know why they were mad. I decided to take off again. I looked down, took two steps and was off the ground again. (wow, I was really flying of my own accord! How amazing and crazy was that?!) I got a little ways into the bay… maybe 30 yards from my starting point and one of the bums picked up and threw a broken model airplane at me. I was pretty surprised when his toss got the thing to hit me in the back a few seconds later. So I reached behind me and grabbed the plane. I recall thinking a few times that it would be good if I brought back evidence of this most amazing feat of flying and, though I wished I could bring back something a little more convincing, a model airplane wasn’t the worst thing I could bring back (and yes, I realized that a model airplane is a crazy thing to show as proof of flight, but it was all I had readily available… and I’d be able to do this again anyway… so what the hey, the thing got thrown at me). Strangely (I found a small, thick bodied doll in my left hand… I don’t recall how it got there. It was stiff.. maybe made out of hard plastic. I didn’t get a good look at the face but it was probably a man or… some benign troll-like thing with crazyish hair.

So there I was, coasting back to the beach above the water, starting to smell the water again, with a doll in my left hand and a model airplane in my right… that had been thrown at me by some angry bums from some tennis courts on the hill. I was starting to really get the hang of flying. As I started to wake up, I tried very hard to remember how to work my muscles so I could fly. Maybe I have. I just need a nice slope and some big sky to try it out on.