1. If it’s paper worth scanning, then scan it to 300dpi PDF then throw it away
2. If you are not going to use it again and can’t remember what it’s for, throw it away.
3. If it’s cheap and you can buy a better replacement, throw it away
4. If it takes more work to fix vs buy a new one, throw it away
5. If you always wanted it, but forgot about it for years, give it to Goodwill, or throw it away.
6. If it’s a comic strip Mom sent, or a greetings card,  file it away for that art idea you had.
7. If it’s an instruction manual you have for something you still own, keep it (or scan & throw away?)
8. If it’s an old cable adapter, and you have more than three, keep only two.

Fortunately, that exhibit’s ticket also granted access to the main wings of the museum. One of the most impressive things about The Tech Museum is the level of interactivity they offer with the exhibits outside their physical space through Tech-Tags. The Tech Tag is a barcode on your ticket that allows you to preserve most of your interactive experiences in a personal digital archive online. In addition to allowing you to keep track of some amazing award winning exhibits, the TechTag allows visitors to keep some digital images. One of them is this goofy panorama of Delia and me in the Virtual Test Zone:

Another incredible imaging device TheTech has in their collection is the Cyberware Model PS Head & Face Color 3D Scanner. Astoundingly the museum lets you sit in a $70,000+ machine and take as many scans of your head & neck as you want. The applications of having a high resolution laser scan of your face are pretty amazing. With this data, one could in theory generate future prosthesis in the event of a bad accident. Better yet, the genealogical benefits of having this level of detail are mind blowing; imagine if you had one of these for your great-grandparents?!

To view this 3D VRML file, please Cortona VRML Client installed. It is available for free download from Parallel Graphics

This 3D scan is alone worth the price of admission, but there was one more image that we got that TheTech decided to not archive digitally, but instead handed out on old fashioned paper. The Robot Tech exhibit of their Innovation Gallery had a one-armed Robo-Artist busy drawing images much like a Etch-a-Sketch. Delia & I sat down for a few portraits, but settled to send only one to the robot. I think it’s one of the coolest portraits I’ve ever seen

Of course, nothing is simple anymore. Apparently UPS Stores charge a one dollar ’sealing’ fee.

Yes. $1 for a piece of tape.

I did not react at first; the guy behind the counter was nice enough when he told me and I reached into my pocket without blinking.   Thing is, I did not have the cash in my pocket, I left it in the car. When he saw that I did not have it, I just got a blank stare and I turned to get it out of my cup holder.

Then it it hit me: I got out of line and hiked back to my car to hunt for $1 for a freaking piece of tape!!!!! WTF?

Suddenly mad, I walked several storefronts down to give Office Depot my money for tape.  I bought a roll of the good stuff, Scotch Packing Tape, 800 inches for $3.18, total.

I casually mentioned to the cashier my mission to avoid paying $1 for a piece of tape, when to my astonishment she replied, “It’s cheaper if you do it than buying a roll of tape”. Certainly if I were in rush she might be right, nonetheless; my heart sunk when she said that. I paid up and walked out, inspired to write this post.

This is exactly why this economy is in shambles; people don’t know the value of a dollar. No miss employee of Office Depot #0149, it is not cheaper to pay $1 for a piece of tape. Here’s why:

800 inches / 318 cents = .3975 cents/inch

I already had 3 inches, so UPS only needed to add 13 more inches to make for a secure package. But, let’s assume they did their due packing diligence and applied a full 16 inches of tape.

.3975 cents/inch * 16 inches = 6.36 cents.

Now, I’m no saint when it comes to math or saving money, but for crying out loud, this sealing fee is a rip off, this UPS store just lost a future customer, and corporate now has to deal with a negative blog post.

Update: UPS Corporate is watching.

I often check Google Analytics  to get an idea about this site’s traffic. Well apparently someone from UPS & Mailboxes Etc is reading from San Diego.

Google Analytics for 13-March-2009

Since I have your ear….The UPS Store/Mailboxes Etc is supposed to be the local face to your giant multi-national and highly profitable corporation. You are providing a service that I ultimately paid for. In this case, I paid Sony for warranty repair service, and they paid YOU for a return sticker. Within those costs, you need to include the occasional cost of providing whiney customers like me with an extra length of tape.

Since I am a small business owner, let me tell you how I’d have done things differently. If I saw that my customer didn’t have the cash in his pocket, I’d have given him the piece of tape with a wink & a smile. Better yet, after I gave him some of my free tape, I’d then offer to sell the customer a whole roll for home.  If I worked at UPS corporate, I’d make a deal with Scotch and co-brand some tape with my franchisee’s phone number & address. This way, UPS Store customers could PAY to know exactly where the UPS store is every time they use packing tape.

Thanks for listening, and you’re welcome for the ideas. If you need additional ideas, and boy am I full of them…I’m a cheap consultant

• ATK Provides Propulsion and Composite Structures for Successful Launch of IBEX Spacecraft on a Pegasus Rocket – Oct 20, 2008 –
• Website Thumbnails – artViper designstudio – create your own screenshots of websites – Apparently the better, free Website Thumbnail service out there.
• Drawter.com – DrawAble Markup Language – I wish this were a standalone program that allowed me to tweak and save a bit more than it does from the site.

As a kid, I linked my Commodore 64 to my Dad’s 386 PC clone by connecting 2400 baud modems through the 2nd pair of the home phone line. Using Kermit, I stored my video games and my original & transcribed, hand-typed BASIC programs onto my Dad’s enormous, 60 MEGAbyte hard drive: HUGE! Between this and being a frequent visitor of the 305 area code BBS’s, I learned very early on the importance of proper digital data storage and organization.

My first website site was in 1994 on UF’s Grove network, where I had a simple FTP system that relied on complicated directory tree structures and pre-formatted HTML templates. It looked very similar to a newsgroup threads, but it was boring, inefficient and required some labor to get right. Subsequent attempts were on other UF servers, an Mindspring site, a Vector.net site, and various free hosting services.  Since the early 2000’s, I’ve relied upon the generosity of my friend, Guido Garcia to host this site on PreventiveITGroup servers at Terremark’s NAP of the Americas.

I’m not bad when it comes to graphic design, but I’ve never had time to become proficient at HTML, CSS, and the other coding skills required to develop a good website. I experimented with online blogging services such as  Slashdot, Blogspot, and Wordpress.com, etc, but wanted to insure that my data was on my own machine, not somewhere in the aether.

Mike Anello’s excellent implementation of DRUPAL for the Microgravity Research and Education Center website awakened me to SQL based content management systems.  His work, plus NASA CoLab’s impressive site and module development convinced me to go with DRUPAL.  PreventiveTech hosts their websites on Windows IIS, so I quickly found myself mired in configuration problems and other issues. After two years of efforts, DRUPAL proved too immature of a platform for a simpleton like me.

Ariel Waldman re-awakened me to Wordpress when she pointed out that it could be installed locally. In my hard-headed insistence on making DRUPAL work, I failed to realize the difference between Wordpress.COM and Wordpress.ORG. (Even today Wordpress.com does not adequately inform the user of the .org alternative).  I painlessly installed & set it upand I have finally been able to focus on delivering content instead of wasting time deciphering code.

And with that, the real fun can begin!

Or not really world, but you the individual. I want to thank you for checking out what I may have to offer. You may not agree with it all, but hey…this isn’t for you now is it?

This site is the product of over 9 years worth of effort. Apparently, I’m not that good with web coding, but I am persistent (and very neurotic). After much trial and error I’ve decided to go with the WordPress platform because, well…it’s easy.

One thing you’re going to notice as the days go on is that I have written many ‘blogs’ that pre-date the existence of this site. It may seem weird, but the fact of the matter is that I’ve been writing stuff down now for, well…9 years. Chronological order is important…even if it takes me a longer time to catch back up. Remember, I’m a little neurotic.

Stay tuned, you might find something interesting.

Unlike face-to-face or even telephone conversations, text based communications obviously have fewer channels to convey emotive and non-linguistic cues. Emoticons , SHOUTING, and typefaces for example, have evolved as non-verbal modes of adding meaning to plain text. Silence and otherwise non-responsiveness conveys a confusing range of emotional states: from distraction, disinterest, or even disdain. Respectful, friendly instant textual communications requires awareness of these alternate channels and their implications. I don’t always get it right myself, but I do try.

Irrationally, I occasionally find myself annoyed when a friend innocently pops up to chat, typically when I am in the middle of reading, or dare I say–thinking.  I catch my silliness, of course:  I’d change my status or simply not log in if I wanted to avoid this non-issue.  I will invariably reply to a quick hello, answer a quick question, or gently inform the other party that I simply am not free at the moment. Honest, respectful communications are key, keeping in mind I’m just as apt to unknowingly interrupt in return.

In this case, I was trying to break the ice by expressing some curiosities to catch up on what I missed. After no real reciprocation, it was time to cut my losses and call it a night. I hadn’t put much thought into the it until I checked my Twitter stream. My friend decided to tweet about my chat with amusement, and in the process apparently mis-read my question. The most annoying part was that they expended more energy–typed more words–to their followers than in replying to me.

In the end, I want to chalk this up this up to immaturity instead of arrogance, but I fear it’s a little of both. Perhaps I’m overreacting, but I’m going to scale back efforts to be this person’s friend. That said, I’ve learned a lesson here, a reminder of the Golden Rule where I will strive to communicate better with my friends in this digital age.

• Welcome to The Florida Scrub-Jay Trail Website – Cool place to hike that Lori mentioned…
• Abandoned rocket manufacturing facility – Firepower Forums – Cool photos of the AJ-260SL-2 site.
• quantum-x | urban exploration | night photography | abandoned aerojet / NASA rocket, florida – AJ-260,
• GeoCommunicator – LSIS – Excellent Mapping tool for the PLSS, identifies Sections, Townships, Ranges….
• WordPress Themes by Sadish » Misty Look – The winner.
• Coax Connectors and Adapters – Fleeman, Anderson & Bird, Corp. – The place to get those damn reverse polarity connectors.
• Making red/cyan and amber/blue (ColorCode) anaglyphs – Tricks to make images viewable in 3D

• Mr. Tweet -> Your Personal Networking Assistant! – Interesting analysis of Twitter friends and followers that helps identify potential resources.
• Tweetree – motorbikematt’s Stream – A nested, tree-threaded like display of tweets. Interesting, though probably only moderately useful if trying to follow a conversation.
• TweetEffect- When did you lose or gain twitter followers? – associates specific tweets with net gain or loss of followers.
• TwitterCounter Stats: We Track & Analyze @motorbikematt – Another good twitter stats & visualization tool
• FriendOrFollow.com – Who’s not following you back? Who aren’t you following? – Great site to establish metric for Twitter use

I am having the exact same problem with my (Sony Vaio and Toshiba Satellites), as described in this thread, and also have a problem with the firewire 750GB WD MyBook plugged in on boot, as described here:

http://forums.microsoft.com/TechNet/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=3329616&SiteID=17

First off let me state that I do not believe that it matters what the computer hardware is. This COULD be a Western Digital problem, but the universality I’ve seen, plus among the complaints from other users indicates to me that this is a OS or Driver problem.

While I have never successfully booted any XPSP3 computer with the firewire plugged in, I have been, on more than one occasion able to access the drive on multiple XPSP3 computers, but only after a frustrating round of plugging/unplugging the firewire cable and/or power cycle. Because I find this problem to be one of the most complicated, confounding problems I’ve ever witnessed, I will provide excurciating detail for how I’m able to make it work.

I claim no awareness on what I am doing to make it work, I have just found a brute force method that with patience, produces functional results. Every instance starts by booting the computer with the firewire UNPLUGGED. In every case, I have opened “My Computer”, Device Manager & Services MMC plugins, and Safely Remove Hardware Wizard. The steps are unaffected if there are other USB devices connected or other software loaded.  Each time, I insure that the Logical Disk Administrative Service and Logical Disk Manager services and their dependants are running.

Once boot is completed, I plug in the MyBook firewire HD WDH1CS7500

In Device Manager, there will be WD MyBook IEEE SBP2 Device with the yellow exclamation point.

Under Properties>General tab the Device Status window indicates Code 10 error. Above that I see the following:

WD My Book IEEE 1394 SBP2 Device
Device Type: Disk Drives
Manufacturer: (Standard Disk drives)
Location: LUN 0

Under Properties>Policies—**I will explain further down**

Under Properties>Volumes tab there is no data displayed. Clicking the Populate button

results in the following dialog box error error after a brief pause:

“Volume information for this disk cannot be found. This may happen if the disk is a 1394 or a USB device on a Windows 2000 machine.”

Under Properties>Driver tab:
Driver Provider: Microsoft
Driver Date: 7/1/2001
Driver Version: 5.1.2535.0

Under Properties>Details tab::
Device Instance Id
SBP2\WD&MY_BOOK&LUN0\0090A9FFAE71BAB9
Hardware Ids
SBP2\WD&My_Book&CmdSetId104D8&GenDisk
SBP2\WD&My_Book&CmdSetId104D8
SBP2\WD&My_Book&LUN0
SBP2\GenDisk
GenDisk

In the Safely Remove Hardware wizard, I also see WD MyBook IEEE SBP2 Device, but there are no nested device components displayed (even with the Display device components check box checked). If connected other USB devices will show the full device component tree.

In Disk Management DISK 2 will indicate Healthy (Active) but with no drive letter assignment.

Right clicking Properties doesn’t illict a response.
Right Click and selecting “Change Drive Letter and Paths…“>”Add…“, then selecting

“Assign the following drive letter” radio button (picking G:) , then clicking OK button yields the following dialog box error:

LOGICAL DISK MANAGER
“The operation did not complete because the partition or volume is not enabled. To enable the partition or volume, restart the computer.”

From this point Going back to Device Manager>”WD MyBook IEEE SBP2 Device Properties>Volumes tab>Populate, the aforementioned error (Volume information….on a windows 2000 machine) does not occur. What DOES display is the following:

Disk: Disk 2
Type: Basic
Status: Online
Partition Style: Master Boot Record (MBR)
Capacity: 715402
Unallocated space: 0MB
Reserved Space: 0MB

In the Capacity column, I will see the drive capacity (715402MB) but under Volume I do not see a drive letter.

All other tabs behave as described prior….ESPECIALLY the Properties>Policies tab. If I click on this tab before or after fiddling with Disk Management, the window freezes, MMC freezes, and Rundll32.exe no longer responds. The only way to resolve this problem is to reboot.  Upon the next boot (FIREWIRE UNPLUGGED) I will go through a different iteration of what’s described above.

Same things happen, after boot is finished, plug in firewire, I get lights and sound from the MyBook drive, and I’ll get error “CODE 10″ from the SBP2 device in Device Manager. HOWEVER THERE IS NO DEVICE LISTING IN THE SAFELY REMOVE HARDWARE WIZARD.

From within Device Manager, I disable then re-enable the WD MyBook IEEE 1394 SBP2 device, upon renabling, the device reports under Properties>General tab>Device Status that it’s working properly. When I click on Volumes tab>Populate the drive makes an audible read indication but the “Volume information…Windows 2000 Machine” dialog box error returns. This time under General tab>Device status I get “CODE 43“.

At thispoint, I’ll unplugging the HD FIREWIRE cable. The SBP2 device disappears from Device Manager. Replugging the device produces NO further recognition of the SBP2 device, even with a Scan for Hardware Changes.

NOW: HERE’s THE TRICK: WITH THE FIREWIRE STILL PLUGGED INTO THE MACHINE, I power cycle the MyBook hard drive by removing the DC powersupply from the back of the drive, then plug it back in. The drive makes the same blinks and sounds, and the Device Manager will blink as it once again recognizes WD MyBook IEEE 1394 SBP2 device. However, after a short pause, My Computer refreshes and indicates that the hard drive is assigned a drive letter and is accessible.

When I click on Device Properties>Polices, I now can select one of the two Write Cacheing and Safe Removal options (where Optimize for Quick Removal is enabled by default) When I open the Safely Remove Hardware wizard from the systray, I see the WD My Book IEEE 1394 SBP2 device, but this time I see “Generic Volume (H: ) on Volume Manager”

Insane? Yes. Frustrating? *** Yes. A solution…technicall no, but once I get the drive to read, I TRY NOT TO TURN OFF THE COMPUTER

I hope this long, insane, description offers some additional clues to resolving the problem!