January 2005 Archives
Summary:
Buy Commercial Electric (CE) ultra mini compact fluorescent (CF) lights. They are smaller and cheaper than ever, and seem to be reliable. Don't buy Lights of America (LOA) CFs.
Just bought two six packs (a dozen) of Commercial Electric Ultra Mini Spiral Lamps. The CE bulbs I already have are holding up, including the one they mailed me after a good customer service experience.
These are very small. Smaller than a regular light bulb or the burned out LOA bulb seen in this photo. They seem to put out as much light as the larger bulbs. (In this case 60 watt equivalent.)
The ultra minis are replacing three LOA Model 2425 Bulbs that burned out very quickly. Unlike my good Commercial Electric experience, Lights of America wanted me to mail in forms with receipts etc. I just won't buy from them anymore.
Commercial Electric puts a customer service number right on the bulbs: 800-378-6998. That's a good sign. The sale price at Home Depot was $9.95 per six pack. Too good to pass up.
Specs:
Light Output (Lumens) 900
Energy Used (Watts) 14
Life (Hours) 10,000
SKU # 292-460
Model: EDXO-14
14W 200A
V#42836
Customer Service: 1-800-378-6998
Marketing:
Lasts 7 Years Guaranteed*
This Package Saves You $276.00
$46.00 in Energy Costs Per Bulb
Lasts 10 Times Longer Than Standard Bulbs
*based on 4 hours average use per day
*savings based on 10 cents per kilowatt hour
They are replacing larger Lights of America Model 2425.
The Light Log - a 7 Year Experiment
Last updated 11-23-2005
Installation Date / Fixture
- 1-3-2005 / Basement Hallway South. Died 1-23-2005
- 1-3-2005 / Basement Hallway North
- 1-3-2005 / Basement Office South
- 1-3-2005 / Basement Office South
- 1-3-2005 / Basement Office North
- 1-3-2005 / Basement Office North
- 1-3-2005 / Basement TV Room East
- 1-5-2005 / Piano
- 1-15-2005 / Upstairs hall East (Moved to basement hall south 3/6/06)
- 1-15-2005 / Master Bedroom Closet 1
- 7-10-2005 / Upstairs hall West (Moved to basement main west 3/6/06)
- 9-3-2005 / Master Bedroom Closet 2. Died 11-23-2005.
I want to try to repair the iBook Power Cable which MCC shorted with some rough handling. (When she turns 10 in a couple of weeks, she gets to use the iBook again... and shoot pool at Grandaddy's.)
I cut the cable and saw that one wire is inside the other wire. I couldn't figure out how I was going to splice that.
Good old Google:
I'm trying to figure out how to load OSX (which I have on DVD) on an older Blue and White G3 that has a tray-load CD.
Ted reports he has used Tax Act for several years. I use TurboTax.
I look forward to using TurboTax every year. I've been getting it for $10 from Intuit because we are their check vendor. They cancelled that benefit last year when our CIO (if your reading this Chris, you cost me money!) e-mailed the order form to our entire I.T. department. It was supposed to be limited to people associated with the plants producing Intuit's checks. The flood of requests had them cancel the deal because in overwhelmed the friendly lady that handles these requests manually.
I bought TurboTax for $39.95 from Costco this year. We started printing checks for Costco about the same time Intuit cancelled there offer. No connection.
I'm not sure if Tax Act supports everything I do in TurboTax. Clark Howard says if you have complex tax transactions you should use TurboTax. But I'm also addicted to how TurboTax carries forward data every year (no retyping) and maintains a 5 year historical view.
(Disclosure: I currently am holding Intuit stock, but I just realized that.)
This is one of the best sites I've found for background graphics. Every texture variation tends to come in multiple colors. (Look for colors link.)
When Mary Clarie turns 10, she gets to play pool at Gramalie and Grandad's because of the "double digit" rule. She pushed Grandad with an "I'm oh eight (08) so I can play!" Didn't work.
She also gets to use the Apple iBook again after being banned with a "two strikes and your out" rule. The first strike burned out the adapter plug with a short. ($80.) The second strike sliced (but did not break) the new replacement. The cool all-white adapter with it's orange/green glowing plug now has uncool looking black electrical tape along the middle of the slim cord.
The slim cord is a real weakness, especially the way it follows around the wireless iBook as needed. Peter says Tesla was working on wireless power.
I'm going to try to repair the shorted cable.
According to MacEroni I can wire in one from Lind Electronics. It won't have an orange/green glow, but it will give us an alternate power supply.
Several years ago, I started listening to NPR on my drive to and from work. It was difficult news to listen to, because so much of it was international and unfamiliar. At the time I was trying to understand what was going on in Yugoslavia with Croatia declaring independence and Serbs and Croats fighting in Bosnia and Herzegovina, which sounds like two places but is one. I'm not sure I ever figured it out, but I still enjoy listening to NPR to and from work.
A couple of years ago I decided to switch from Time to Newsweek. It seemed to have more challenging content than Time. One main reason was for George Will's columns. They are hard to read. George uses complex ideas, sentences, and historical references.
George also happens to love baseball. It isn't an easy read, but it is a good read about why you shouldn't break the big laws (or you end up with small ones.) Here is one for you D.C. ...
Merlin is a Domino server running at StudioPlex that routes e-mail and hosts a few website. It has been plagued with hardware and virus problems. Over the holidays I rebuilt it. Merlin is now on an IBM Netfinity 5000 full-height rack mount, and it is the biggest tank of a computer I've had to pick up.
In the attached photo, the Netfinity is propped up sideways on my workbench. That's an Apple flat panel display on top. The CD drive is tray loaded, so that's why it is standing on its side. There are dual power supplies and cooling systems. (Danny noticed it is really noisy.) There are four hot-swappable hard disks. Ted was impressed this is a vintage 1999 machine. Merlin should be worth years more of service.
The attached snapshot shows why this link does not work properly when created in Rich Text mode in Ecto:
Hand In Hand from the album "Face Value" by Phil Collins
Notice the extra "25" inserted in rich text mode. This causes the link to not work correctly.
I corrected by using pairs of single apostrophes ' instead of the %22 pairs in the iTunes template. This next insert uses that the single apostrophe format:
Make little buttons on the fly thanks to Adam Kalsey:
Button Maker :: Kalsey Consulting Group
Guided again by Scot, I installed AWStats for web traffic analysis. I already like it better than Analog (see comparison) because I got it installed quicker and because it is easier to run/access from the web.
Click on the little "AWStats" button at the bottom of mac.fiveforks.com to see stats.
The install log is attached with comments for future reference. Had a few hiccups that were cured with setting the config file, permissions, and creating a couple of directories.
A nice guide to changing file permissions. Something I do so infrequently I cannot memorize.
chmod chown chgrp File Permissions
I purchased Ecto (formerly Kung Log) to make posting easier. It is kind of like Microsoft Word for blogging. You can bold and color text and even change the background color of text.
It didn't work at first because an XML Parser was missing: /mt/extlib/XML/Parser/Lite.pm. I had just upgraded MovableType to version 3.14 from 2.6 and the new extlib did not contain this folder and file. I moved it from a back up copy and it worked. I got lucky to decipher this messy Server Error message, especially given Ecto 2 and MT 3.14 are so new there is nothing out there on Google about this:
Method metaWeblog.getRecentPosts produced a server error: Application failed during request deserialization: XML::Parser is not available and Can't locate XML/Parser/Lite.pm in @INC (@INC contains: /Library/WebServer/Documents/mt/extlib - /Library/WebServer/Documents/mt/lib - /System/Library/Perl/5.8.1/darwin-thread-multi2level - /System/Library/Perl/5.8.1 - /Library/Perl/5.8.1/darwin-thread-multi-2level - /Library/Perl/5.8.1 /Library/Perl - /Network/Library/Perl/5.8.1/darwin-thread-multi-2level - /Network/Library/Perl/5.8.1 /Network/Library/Perl . - at /Library/WebServer/Documents/mt/extlib/SOAP/Lite.pm - line 1228.
Now playing: That's Right (You're Not From Texas) by Lyle Lovett
