These are my links for March 10 through March 16th:

• Macworld: Review: How to buy: DSLR cameras, Page 1 – An interesting article by Ben Long about how to purchase a digital SLR camera.
• Apple Learning Interchange 2007 – The Apple Learning Interchange (ALI) is a free online resource for educators. This online community provides a wealth of content ranging from simple lesson ideas to in-depth curriculum units, rich with digital media.
• OER Commons – OER Commons is a teaching and learning network of shared materials, from K through college, from algebra to zoology, open to all to use.
• AUTOMATOR.TV – A cool website that has video examples of how to use Automator in Mac OS X 10.4 to automate your daily world.

Do you use a web based bookmarking system? What??!?? You don’t? Why not? They are AWESOME!!

I currently use a service called del.icio.us, which can be found by click here. When I find an interesting web site or web page during my daily surfing, I will bookmark it with del.icio.us and assign tags to it, so they are easily located again as my list gets big. If you are interested in seeing what items I have bookmarked, go to http://del.icio.us/pmarkham. If you know my tags, you can also use them as part of the URL. For example, when I find interesting articles about Apple Remote Desktop, I tag them with the keyword ard. To see all of my bookmarked web pages about ARD in del.icio.us, you would go to this URL: http://del.icio.us/pmarkham/ard. del.icio.us is even able to make RSS feeds out of any of those keywords if you want to subscribe to them via any RSS news reader.

Just recently I ran across a WordPress plugin called Postalicious that will log in to your del.icio.us account and make a post in your blog automatically with the bookmarks you created that day in del.icio.us. That sounds pretty cool, so I’m going to try that for a while here. Let me know what you think.

–Pete

My wife and I have had the same mattress for almost 10 years and we’ve been thinking for quite a while that is was time for a change. The question was: What was the change? Water bed? Sleep number bed? Sealy Posturepedic? Swedish Tempur-Pedic? Today we decided: The change would be a memory foam mattress — a “generic” version of the Swedish Tempurpedic.

What clinched it?  A good discounted price.  We were out in Hutchinson, MN this afternoon and found that Pam’s Furniture Store, a huge discount furniture store, is having a going out of business sale. One of the things on sale was memory foam mattresses — almost $200 off the original price. In fact, since it was their “house brand”, it was about half as much as the Swedish Tempur-Pedic we’ve looked at previously. After lounging on one for 15 minutes in the store, we decided we couldn’t resist. We bought one. I think it’ll be great. As I write this, my wife is already sound asleep on it, as is Emmet the Labrador. I’ll be next. Here’s to hoping for some blissful sleep on a memory foam bed.

–Pete

I’m sure if you’ve be living at all in the last two years you’ve heard this excellent song by Five for Fighting. I love the lyrics. It is amazing, and scary, how he manages to capture a life in so short of a song. The video is excellent too. Check it out here.

100 years

I’m 15 for a moment
Caught in between 10 and 20
And I’m just dreaming
Counting the ways to where you are

I’m 22 for a moment
And she feels better than ever
And we’re on fire
Making our way back from Mars

15 there’s still time for you
Time to buy and time to lose
15 there’s never a wish better than this
When you’ve only got 100 years to live…

I’m 33 for a moment
I’m still “the man,” but you see I’m a “they”
A kid on the way, babe
A family on my mind

I’m 45 for a moment
The sea is high
And I’m heading into a crisis
Chasing the years of my life

15 there’s still time for you
Time to buy and time to lose yourself
Within a morning star
15 I’m alright with you
15 there’s never a wish better than this
When you’ve only got a 100 years to live…

Halftime goes by
Suddenly you’re wise
Another blink of an eye
67 is gone
The sun is getting high
We’re moving on…

I’m 99 for a moment
I’m dying for just another moment
And I’m just dreaming
Counting the ways to where you are

15 there’s still time for you
22 I feel her too
33 you’re on your way
Every day’s a new day

15 there’s still time for you
Time to buy and time to choose
Hey 15 there’s never a wish better than this
When you’ve only got 100 years to live…

Over the last four months I have to fly to Chicago for business trips. For some reason, every trip has ended up being screwed up. I’m beginning to think I’m cursed or something. What do you think of this:

Two days before Christmas week (on a Thursday), I needed to fly in to Chicago for a short meeting. Fly in early in the morning and fly home late that afternoon. Sounds simple, right? Well the trip didn’t start off so well. I ended up being late to the meeting because my flight from Minneapolis ended up being late. This wasn’t a big deal as I ended up only being an hour late. I knew the weather in Minneapolis was supposed to deteriote in the late afternoon, so at around 1PM, I checked with NWA.com and found that my return flight, which was supposed to leave at 5PM had been cancelled already. No big deal, I thought — as I had lots of time yet before my departure and Chicago has two airports. I called my company’s corporate travel department and explained what had happened, and they began the process of trying to rebook me on something else. After several minutes, I was stunned to hear her say that the next available flight was at 4PM in the afternoon, two days later!! Needless to say, that wasn’t going to work for me, and one of my coworkers volunteered to rent a car and drive home with me. Seven long hours later I was home.

A couple of weeks ago, I needed to return to Chicago again for a meeting. This time, the plan was for a two day trip. I’d fly to Chicago early in the morning on Thursday, with the meeting starting at 1:30 PM. My flight was supposed to leave at 10:00AM. It started when I got the gate for my flight — it was delayed because the inbound aircraft was late coming in. It was only an hour late, however, so I would still make it in plenty of time. The plane arrived, we quickly boarded and everything seemed good. We pushed out from the gate and the engines spooled up, and then a minute later spooled back down. Apparently, when the pilot cranked up the engines, they got a warning light indicating a plugged fuel filter on one of the engines. They pulled us back into the gate and we waited for a mechanic to come and fix it. Fourty minutes later, they determined it couldn’t be fixed at the gate, and since there wasn’t another aircraft available, they cancelled the flight. By the time they got us all re-booked, I ended up not getting to Chicago until almost 6PM.

This last trip was more of the same. I was supposed to be in Chicago by 9:30 AM on a Wednesday. I had a 7AM departure and moments after I got to the gate, they announced that the flight would be delayed because Chicago-Midway was fogged in. Thirty minutes later, they cancelled that flight. I ended up finally getting to Chicago around 2 PM instead of 9AM.

The final straw was two days later, for my return trip. I was supposed to leave Chicago for home at 5:30PM. The weather forcasters for Minneapolis was predicting a major winter storm that would hit in the late afternoon. After talking it over with my boss, we decided it would be best if I re-booked my flight for the noon flight (at a cost of $120) and then get out of Chicago before the weather made it impossible for me to get home. I cut out of my training early (which was a bummer because it was a great class) and made a beeline for the airport. Everything was going smoothly, until I got the gate. Then the comedy of errors began.

To start, the inbound aircraft was late, so we ended up not being able to depart on time. Once the plane got there, the captain for our flight discovered that one of the gyros (a crucial component of the navigation system for the plane) had failed and we couldn’t depart until that got fixed. Unfortunately, Northwest didn’t have a mechnanic at Midway Airport who could fix it, so they needed to send one over from Chicago-Ohare airport, which is about 30 miles by road. They told us it was take about 45 minutes to an hour for the mechanic to arrive. After an hour of sitting around waiting, they announced that the mechanic was now on his way, and that it would take — wait for it — another 45 minutes to an hour before he arrived. After another hour of waiting, the mechanic arrived and he began his work. He worked on the airplane for over an hour when they finally annouced that the original problem was fixed. Unfortunately, they also announced that there was another problem that wasn’t fixed. The low-level wind shear alert system wasn’t working, and they couldn’t fly this airplane into Minneapolis, which was very windy as the storm approached. They were going to try and find a different airplane, but they might still have to cancel the flight. Now I was getting frustrated. We waited. After another half hour they told us they thought they had everything fixed, and we should board the airplane. We all got on, and even this was screwed up. With all the shuffling around of people, a bunch of us now had boarding passes for the same seats. After getting back off of the airplane, they straightened that out and we got settled in again….and waited. And waited. And waited. Finally the captain came on the intercom and told us that there was some problem with the paperwork for the repair and they were working on getting that straightened out — and it needed to be straightened out in the next 10 minutes or the crew would be over their 14 hour work day limit that is imposed on them by the FAA. I just shook my head. Thankfully, they got it taken care of before the 14 hour rule hit, and we were FINALLY on our way home.

So — the company I work for paid $120 to get me home early, and I ended up getting home later than if I had just stayed with my original flight. Nice, huh?

The only good that has come out of this is a letter from NWA that arrived today. It contained an apology for the last flight and all the delays. In addition, they are giving me 2500 additional bonus miles for my WorldPerks account. That *almost* makes up for the hassle.

I’ve got another trip on NWA coming up in a couple of weeks, but this time to California. We’ll see how it goes. Hopefully I’ll break my streak of screwed up air travel.

–Pete

Have you ever been typing on your keyboard and discovered that one or more keys is covered with disgusting dirt? No? Hmmmm…. OK. Maybe I’m just a slob. If you ever *do* find yourself in that situation — and you are a Mac user — I highly recommend downloading a copy of Keyboard Cleaner. This little app’s sole purpose is to lock your keyboard so you can clean the keys and not type a bunch of gobbledygook while you are doing it. This is so simple that I can’t believe that it wasn’t thought of sooner.

You can download this Keyboard Cleaner by clicking here.

–Pete

I haven’t written much lately. I know. The four of you that read this are probably concerned that I dropped off the face of the Earth. Don’t worry. I haven’t. I’ve got some additional posts in the works. Look for them soon. I’m figuring if I post the titles (or at least the working titles) of my upcoming posts, that it will make more likely to finish them and post them. Here they are, in no particular order:

1. Finally — A couple of good Winter Storms!
2. Travel Woes
3. Did you know I’ve been Skydiving?
4. A look back at the excellent teachers in my life.

How do those sound? What else do you want to hear about?

I also realize that I haven’t done much tech related stuff recently. I’m actually considering doing a tech tips blog of some sort as part of my work, but I’m still working out the details on that. I don’t want to step on any toes or put my foot in my mouth on any of that.

Lastly, I do have a couple of new episodes of the Minnesota Geek Animals stories ready to go. I should get those posted this week. If I don’t, feel free to pester me until I do.

–Pete

Rascal Flatts is not the usual style of music that I listen to, but they have some really nice songs. One of the things that attracts me to their music is their syrupy, sappy lyrics. Yeah. I’m a sucker for those types of lyrics. My Wish is a great example. See what I mean:

My wish, for you, is that this life becomes all that you want it to,
your dreams stay big, your worries stay small,
You never need to carry more than you can hold,
and while you’re out there getting where you’re getting to,
I hope you know somebody loves you, and wants the same things too,
Yeah, this, is my wish.

Pretty thick and syrupy, right? They hit the mark though. This is my wish for all of you. Thanks Rascal Flatts for helping me say it.

–Pete

Today I went with my wife and our friend Steve to the St. Croix Horse and Carriage Sleigh Festival. We’ve gone to this event now for several years, although this is the first year that they held it at the Washington County Fairgrounds. In years past, it was held as an event at the St. Paul Winter Carnival.

It was quite a cold day. I don’t know what the high was, but I know that it was less than 10 degrees. When we left the farm this morning it was below zero. BRRR!! I think I had on every piece of cold weather gear that I owned.

I tried to take photos of it again this year, but I’m kinda disappointed in how they turned out. I think this was a combination of it being cold, having a new camera, having it be bright and sunny with lots of white snow and lots of dark sleighs, and a bunch of other stuff. At any rate the pictures that I like are already posted here.

One new thing I saw this year was two runaway horses. Anytime you have horse drawn vehicles, there is always a danger of a runaway. In the first case, the sleigh tipped over, the driver spilled out, and the horse immediately spooked and took off. Unfortunately, this is not that unusual when pulling a sleigh of the type they were using — a Portland Cutter. Portland Cutters sit pretty high and don’t turn particularly well, so they are prone to tip. The odd part of this story is that I was the guy who ended up getting the horse stopped. That’s right. Me. The guy with almost no experience around horses compared to all the other people that were at this event. Here’s the story:

As the horse took off, I watched a whole group of people take off after it to try and get it stopped. For whatever reason, I decided that I might be able to help too and started running. I was watching where the horse was headed, which wasn’t far from me, so rather than try to chase the horse, I ran towards where I thought it might end up. As I ran between two trailers, I saw the horse, still pulling the sleigh (which was on its side) running towards me, although it was starting to slow down. I did what I’d been taught to do. I waved my arms and yelled, “Whoa” and much to my surpise, the horse slowed down, and then stopped. I quickly stepped over to it and grabbed it by its reins where they attach to the bit and waited for everyone else who was chasing the horse to catch up and get him unhitched. The best of part of the story is that there were no major injuries to the horse, the driver, or the sleigh — so it had a happy ending. Not bad for amateur, huh?

The second runaway was even scarier. I didn’t see it happen, but once again the horse and the driver were uninjured. Unfortunately, the sleigh was badly bent. Even worse, the horse managed to crash into three cars while it was running and caused pretty significant damage to them. Yikes! No one I talked to had a good idea of what spooked the horse either.

Steve ended up getting an award again this year for “Best Costume – Male” for his impressive Racoon skin hat and coat. The idea here is to where clothing that would have been accurate for the vehicle being driven as well as the time period — and once again, his ensemble fit the bill extremely well. The funny part is that he bought the vintage fur coat on eBay of all places. It’s amazing what you can find there, huh?

–Pete

I was certainly surprised at Christmas time when Steve presented my wife with a G. G. the Goat for her Christmas present. This time I wasn’t surprised. 🙂

After doing some reading on goats, one common theme that came up (as comes up with most animals), is that goats do best when they are around other animals — preferably other goats. So, we decided to get another goat for G. G. to hang out with. I actually think that she would have been fine just hanging out with the llamas, as she gets along with them very well. The bad part is that she can’t be in the same part of the pasture as they are during the day, due to the limitations of the pasture fence at the farm. G. G.’s pen is next to the pasture, but if the llamas wander to the opposite side of the pasture, she wouldn’t be able to see them. That meant for her to have some constant companionship, she needed someone to be in the same pen that she was. What would make a better penmate than another goat?
So, without further ado, I’d like you all to meet Casey the Goat. She is several months younger, and quite a bit smaller than G. G., but equally cute, don’t you think?

-Pete

One of the older songs that Barenaked Ladies sing is a tune called When I Fall. This is another cool song from a lyrics standpoint. It is a song about a guy who washes windows on tall buildings. What a weird thing to sing about, but the lyrics are fascinating. I particularly like this part:

I look straight in the mirror, watch it come clearer
I look like a painter, behind all the grease
But painting’s creating, and I’m just erasing
A crystal-clear canvas is my masterpiece

What is your masterpiece?

-Pete

Recently I found a message on my voicemail from a company that I pay monthly for a service they provide me. The company, which is located in a different state from me, called LONG DISTANCE to leave me this message:

“Hello Mr. Markham. This is so-and-so from Company ABC. Thank you for your recent payment. There is one problem, however. You seem to have to have inadvertently written the check for an amount that was two cents short of the total amount due. Please contact us at 1-800-xxx-xxxx so we can arrange payment for this shortage.” They also sent me a letter via FIRST CLASS MAIL that said the same thing.

I wasn’t a math or accounting major, but clearly these people weren’t either. Why would you spent at least a buck on a long distance phone call and ask me to call them back TOLL FREE for this? Why would you spend $0.39 on First Class Mail postage — plus the cost of the paper, the envelope, and the printing — to tell me that I owed them two cents? Anyone else see the problem here? Why in the world would they spend several dollars to try and collect two cents, when they could just add it to next month’s bill or even simpler — write it off. Come on! We’re talking two cents here! Why are they so wound up about two cents? Are they that short on cash flow?

My wife had a good idea for the response. Rather than write them a check for two cents, we taped two pennies to the letter and mailed it to them.

Good grief!

-Pete

I don’t know about you, but I’m always downloading stuff and saving stuff to my Desktop. The net result is that by the end of the day/week/month, my Desktop is always littered with files. This is a problem for obvious reasons — especially when I need to do a presentation or a demonstration of something with my laptop. It doesn’t look terribly professional to plug into a projector, and greet my audience with a bunch of random crap on my desktop.

The solution for me has been an amazing little application called Hazel. From their website: “Hazel is your personal housekeeper. Set up rules for any folder that could use some organizing and cleaning. Hazel does its work automatically and quietly in the background letting you focus on the your real tasks.”

In my case, I wanted to have Hazel help me organize my Desktop folder, as I already mentioned. It regularly checks that folder and moves files from my desktop to other folders to keep things neat and tidy. In my case, when Hazel checks my Desktop, if it finds any files that have been on my Desktop for more than a day, it automatically moves them into a folder titled “Yesterday”. Any files that are in my “Yesterday” folder for more than 1 day are automatically moved from there into a folder called “This Week”. Any files that end up in my “This Week” Folder for more than 7 days are moved into my “This Month” Folder, where they live indefinitely. (Yeah — I know — I need to rename that “This Month” Folder. There are quite a few things in there that are older than one month!)

The net result is that my desktop is kept neat and tidy for presenations, and my files end up in logical places that I can go through from time to time to organize into more meaningful stuff.

Sorry folks, but Hazel is a Mac only application and I’m not sure if there is something similar in the Windows world. As of this writing you can purchase Hazel for a mere $16 — a bargain.

–Pete

I knew today that iTunes had become an integral part of our society when I was reading this daily devotional from my chuch and they referenced a song by Chris Tomlin called Indescribable. The next line blew me away. It said, “If you are interested in listening to this song today, considering purchasing a downloadable copy through an online service such as iTunes.” and it has a hyperlink to download iTunes.

How cool is that?

-Pete

Over the past two days I’ve learned about the loss of two dogs that have had a significant impact on my life. The first is Bishop, a Schipperke that originally belonged to my in-laws and later became a hearing dog for another individual. Bishop was quite a dog. I think the Wikipedia article about Schipperke’s sums him up perfectly: “They are small in size, but big in character.” That totally describes Bishop. Why did he impact my life? Simple. He lived with my wife and me for more than 18 months during a break in his career as a hearing dog. That story itself is another blog entry, or maybe even a podcast episode. Bishop died this weekend at the age of 14.

The other dog was a Labrador Retriever named Eva, who was the mother of Holly, the dog that my wife and I were training to be a service dog, that ultimately ended up living on our friend’s farm. Eva apparently died suddenly of something like a ruptured brain aneurysm. She died within a matter of minutes. She was young — five or six years old if I recall correctly. She left us way to early.

I have pictures of both Eva and Bishop on print film somewhere. I’m going to try and scan them and put them up in my gallery or in the blog here sometime this week.

–Pete

I’m just curious. Who actually reads my blog? Anyone? I know that a few people stop by now and then because I get an occassional comment and my webstats show a few visitors.

If you wouldn’t mind — I’d appreciate it if you are a reader of my blog, please leave a comment to this post. You can say whatever you want and you can choose to put your real name or not — it doesn’t matter to me. I’m just wondering if I’m writing to a vacuum or if people actually read any of the stuff I post. Not that it really matters. I’ll probably still write this even if it is a vacuum. 🙂

–Pete

You may or may not know that I’m an identical twin. I have been all my life. 🙂

What is currently scary is that Matt and I have chosen polar opposite hair styles and facial hair styles that make us not look so identical right at the moment.

Weird huh?

-Pete

Merlin Mann run’s an interesting website called 43folders.com, where he writes about “lifehacks”. What is a lifehack? One definition, from Wikipedia, is this: “anything that solves an everyday problem in a clever or non-obvious way might be called a life hack.” I think that sums it up pretty well. If you are looking for ways to streamline your workflow and be more efficient about things, Merlin has lots of interesting tips to share.

Another thing about Merlin is that he is Mac user and many of the things he writes about, particularly cool pieces of software, are specifically for Mac users.

I have found Merlin’s website to be extremely interesting, extremely informative, and worth reading on a regular basis. Merlin is also part of the team that puts on MacBreak, a video podcast about all things Macintosh (including lots of great tips!), and MacBreak Weekly, a weekly audio podcast that all folks that are interested in Macintosh and Apple news should be listening too.

–Pete

I wrote about this quite a while ago, but it is worth mentioning again. I often get asked by my wife, friends, family, co-workers, etc. about whether or not a particular photo they saw on the web or an email story they read is real or not. The latest round came from my wife, who received a disturbing email from a co-worker with a warning about washing your new bras before you wear them. According to the email, failure to do so leaves you at risk for an infestation of worms in your breasts. The email included a VERY disturbing picture that showed someone supposedly suffering from this awful affliction. My wife called me in a panic asking if I could find out if this was real or not.

The solution to questions like these is usually to visit Snopes, a website that specializes in debunking urban legends and myths. A quick trip through their site and I was able to verify that this disturbing email and picture were, in fact, a hoax. The photo was a creation of Photoshop and some twisted person’s imagination. YUCK!

–Pete

My wife got an unexpected Christmas gift this year from our friend Steve. (Steve is the guy who owns the farm we keep our other large animals at.) The gift — a pygmy (miniature) goat. That’s right. A goat. My wife is thrilled. I’m still trying to figure out what you do with a pygmy goat. I have to admit it is cute and I love the little goat noises it makes, but…..

A goat.

Hmmmm….

–Pete