Not only do they have the nifty aerial photos and the drag-able maps (which everyone has now, but they were first), they’ve added a bunch of nifty features to their maps recently:

• Zoom with your scroll wheel. Spin your scroll wheel and the map zooms in and out to the point where your mouse is. Pretty cool. It zooms backwards form my CAD package at work, though.
• Collapse the search list. Finally! If you search the map for a business, you get pushpins and a list to the left. Until recently you couldn’t get rid of the list, now clicking the border between the map and the list and the list goes away, revealing more map. Click the left edge of the larger map and the list is back. Now, if we could only dismiss the push pins …
• Multi-stop directions. This is awesome. Enter an address for a destination and an address for the start point. Going somewhere else? Click ‘Add Destination …’ at the bottom of the written directions and put in another address. Google will show you directions form the start to destination A and then to destination B with mileage and travel times for each leg. Don’t worry about entering them in order, you can drag and drop rearrange the destinations later and the map and directions update. And if you click on a destination in your list, a small pop up map of the destination appears. And you can link to the results. For example, here’s a map of our typical Christmas tour of the Midwest visiting family and friends. How cool is that?
• Click to call. Once you’ve searched for and found a business on Google maps, if the search results has a phone number, you can have Google make the call for you. They even pick up the long distance charges! Just click the ‘Call’ link next to the phone number in the search results and enter your phone number. Google calls you first and when you answer, it calls the business. The phone number of the business appears on your caller ID so you can save it, if you’d like.

I love Googe Maps.

Remember the TP Issue? Well, thanks to Mike Cope and his comments on a book called “The Paradox of Choice: Why More Is Less” by Barry Schwartz, I now know that it’s not my fault. (I love it when other bloggers read a book and blog about it so I don’t actually have to read it.)
From the book:

Even with relatively unimportant decisions, mistakes can take a toll. When you put a lot of time and effort into choosing a restaurant or a place to go on vacation or a new item of clothing, you want that effort to be rewarded with a satisfying result. As options increase, the effort involved in making decisions increases, so mistakes hurt even more. Thus the growth of options and opportunities for choice has three, related, unfortunate effects. It means that decisions require more effort. It makes mistakes more likely. It makes the psychological consequences of mistakes more severe.

Bingo!
Lately, I’ve put a lot of thought into what turned out to be bad choices resulting in serious “psychological consequences”.

• About a year and a half ago, I spent $600 on a Weider Platinum 800 home gym. We considered treatmills, the Bowflex, the Soloflex and several other options befor settling on the Weider. That thing turned out to be an absolute lemon. From day one, it never worked right and it was a real pain to send back. I did eventually get my money back on that one, but it was painful. Real painful.
• Last fall, I came accross a ‘too good to pass up’ deal on a set of french patio doors with low-e glass. Our cheap vinyl sliding patio doors had a broken seal that made one pane fog up. These $650 special order doors were returned to Lowes and I picked them up, without the door frame (key detail), for $40. Seemed like a no-brainer. I researched options for building my own frame and ordering one from the door manufacturer. I found I could order the right frame from the door company for $180, so I did. Only after destroying my sliding doors getting them out did I discover that the frame had been made to the wrong, newer dimensional spec and was too small for my doors. I wedged the doors in the hole in our house and had Lowes order a replacement frame. Several weeks later, that frame came in, also wrong. Frame 3 was delivered in kit form, some assembly required, not what I paid for. Frame 4 was finally right, but now it was the dead of winter. So we spent the winter with the doors wedged in the wall and a 2×4 screwed accross our the inside to ‘lock’ them. The doors finally went in this spring (and that 4th frame still needed alterations), but one is permanently warped from spending the winter wedged in a frame that was too small.
• Last summer we also bought a new vacuum cleaner. I did the research on what one sucks best and settled on a Hoover Wind Tunnel, mainly based on it’s high rating in Consumer Reports. It worked pretty good at first, but I was pretty dissapointed in the design and quality of the components. We found the dirt cup a pain to empty without making a mess and after almost a year, the cord wrap had broken. Then the noises started and the beater bar stopped working and the drive mechanism refused to shut off and, of couse, was now out of warranty. Fed up, we replaced it this summer with a Dyson, which we are very happy with, but that’s fairly 2 pricey vacuums in a little over a year.
• Also last summer, we bought a shed to augment our tight 2 car garage. I again, scratched my head over which shed to buy, chaep do-it-mysef or pricey installed unit, eventually settling on a Tuff Shed from Home Depot. Pricey compared to some kit sheds, but no more so than the Lowes sheds, The Tuff Shed was much better built thant the Lowes product and I did none of the work. I did have to choose where to put it, and it turns out I had it put on an easement for a natural gas pipeline in our backyard. I had reviewed our lot survey for easements and scratched my head on where to put it, but still missed this 25′ wide easement (not well documented on the maps). Now, this spring, I’ve got to move my shed. At least my decision to buy the Tuff Shed should pay off. Because of its steel frame and solid constuction, it should be relatively easy to move.

So, dispite plenty of research & planning through the myriad of options, none of the choices worked out as planned. So, I wonder if I can get compensation for my emotional distress from all these bad choices?

(NOTE: My web host is going to be doing maintenance on the server that hosts my site Thursday evening. salguod.net will be down from 7:00 PM eastern through Midnight.)
Not much activity her of late, sorry about that. I really haven’t had much to say. Not sure why, but part of it has been distraction. Now that I’ve been browsing via RSS and Bloglines, the number of sites I read has grown exponentially. I currently have 103 feeds that I’ve subscribed to. I find that I’m not the kind of guy who can easily ignore feeds in bold indicating there is stuff to read. So I click to clear that indicator, and I get sucked in and I read stuff – a lot of stuff – and my mind swims in the ocean of information and there’s no more room for inspiration.
I miss the earlier days of my blogging when my blogroll was a dozen or so entries, all folks I either knew, I had some connection with or blogs that made me think. Now, I look at that long list over there on the left in it’s disarray and sigh. That used to be my daily walk through the web, reading sites on God and His church (and cars) and getting the inspiration to post something myself. Now, I don’t use those links much, I just read posts via RSS. I miss visiting the actual site. With RSS, I don’t get drawn into the conversation because the comments aren’t right there. Some sites have comment feeds, but I haven’t subscribed to many of them and I find that a string of unrelated comments on various entries looses something in the translation. Also, some sites only publish the intro to the post and some places I like to visit, like DJ’s, don’t have a feed at all (which he ought to fix, BTW). I’ve tried sites like ponyfish and feedyes to generate my own feeds with mixed results (feedyes seems to work much better than ponyfish).
Blogging for me initially was about community, making new relationships, feeding old ones, stimulating my mind and learning something new. Now, it seems to be much more about getting through the list, skimming the articles and moving on.
I’ve wanted to clean up the site here for a long time. Long lists of links like mine don’t do much, in my opinion. How many of you have even clicked on one of them, I wonder? It just makes for a messy page, and for me it’s taken much of the joy out of my browsing, so it’s time to clean it up. I’m going to put all the sites that it might be neat to follow into my Bloglines account and take them off that list, leaving only those that I long to visit consistently. That way I can go back to the old way of browsing, clicking the links from my own blogroll, viewing the site, reading the comments. That may be more difficult than I think, but that’s the plan. When there’s time, I can go to Bloglines and see what else is going on.
Reading via RSS to me feels like visiting your neighbors by driving the neighborhood, hanging out the window to wave at everyone. You get to see everyone in the neighborhood, but all they get is a wave and a smile. I want to go back to knocking on a select few doors, going inside where I can see the wall paper and the paintings and have a good chat. I may only get to my closest friends most of the time, but the experience will be far better.
I’m not sure how soon I’ll get to that, but that’s the plan anyway.

Keeping with my earlier theme, I thought I’d share some other geek fun I had this weekend.
I found, via the Total Choice Forums, a nifty little script called dbsender. What it does is create a dump of any MySQL database, gzip’s it and emails it to you. By setting it up as a cron job, I can now automate backups of the database that runs this blog. Now, each night at 3:00 AM, I get a backup of my site via email. Cool!
What’s even cooler is that a year ago there’s now way I could have understood that last paragraph, let alone write it!
Secondly, my Palm Treo 600 phone had developed this rather nasty buzz that had rendered it nearly unusable. I really want to replace it with a nice, new Treo 700p, but alas I have 6 months left on my Cingular contract. There was no way I was going to get through 6 months of talking through a swarm of honey bees, so I Googled “treo buzz fix“.
Link #1 on that list pointed to a simple solution that involved a T6 Torx screwdriver and a small piece of aluminum foil. It goes like this:

1. Sync your treo to back up you data.
2. Open the Treo case (that’s where the T6 driver comes in).
3. Unplug the battery wire and wrap it in foil (seriously).
4. Close the case.
5. Re-sync to restore your data.

Sounded to good to be true, but there were a bunch of comments testifying to it’s accuracy, so I dove in. I now have a buzz free Treo.
A little aluminum foil, who knew?
More substantial posts to come this week.

It’s a weekend of tech goodness & tech questions.
Google
First, I discovered that my favorite browser, Maxthon, now works with the latest version of the Google toolbar. The only thing I missed from IE and the one thing that temped me to use FF, now available in Maxthon. Sweet.
For you guys, the big thing is that the Google Toolbar has a built in spell checker, so that should mean less typos. We’ll see.
RSS
Second, I’ve discovered RSS. Since I began blogging 2.5 years ago, I thought that RSS was something that that I ought to figure out. I’ve tried a couple of times, but it never clicked with me. Now, I’ve got more blogs that I want to track than I can keep up with, so I’ve revisited RSS.
I’ve decided that I wanted to go with an online readers and I think I’ve settled on Bloglines, but I’d love to know what others are using. I like the Google Reader too, especially the cleaner interface. What are you using?
I’m still finding my way around using RSS, but I like being able to see what’s new quickly in one window. What I don’t like is seeing all the blogs in the same, simple mostly text interface. I miss seeing the layout and look of the blogs I visit. That was one of the main reasons I didn’t start using RSS earlier, I like the experience & look of each blog. The convenience of easy access to the latest posts is worth the compromise now, and the actual site is only a click away.
The other question I have is about the feeds on my site. MT generates 3 feeds out of the box, Atom, RSS 1.0 and RSS 2.0. Do I need to keep all 3? The RSS 1.0 feed seems the best to eliminate as it doesn’t show the entire posts. What do you think?
Tagging
The last thing is tagging. Huh? Can someone ‘splain this to me? I just don’t get it at all. The new version of MT I just upgraded to has tag support built in and I’m not sure what, if anything, to do with it. So what is tagging and why should I care?

I’m not a big football fan, but when you live in Columbus, you can’t avoid the Buckeyes. And if they’re #1 and playing #2? Fugetaboutit.
So, my kids are at a birthday party and I pick them up just after kickoff. As I walk up the driveway, some big play unfolds. I hear the roar of the crowd – wait, I’m in the suburbs and the game’s in Texas. That’s Columbus on game day, deal with it.
As I type it’s 14-7 Buckeys at halftime after a decisive OSU drive at the end of the half. Go Bucks!

Where is Tim Allen when you need him? [Insert manly grunts here.]
This past Wednesday, at the end of the 95+ degree temps, out AC quit. Thankfully it was at the end of Wednesday and Thursday afternoon brought thunderstorms and cooler temps. A little investigation found that the inside bits were working fine (fan blowing air) but the outside bits were not. Just a low hum.
Google to the rescue! I wrote down all the model numbers and serial numbers and started Googling. I found my way to DoItYouself.com and their forums where I asked a question. By Thursday AM, the consensus was that it was either the contactor or the capacitor. I needed more info to get the right parts, so after work I pulled the panel off the side where I found wiring diagrams and a parts list.
Friday, I called the parts place and get the parts. That night we went out to dinner and ice cream to celebrate the end of the week of Girl Scout day camp for all three. Mom was a counselor and she was especially glad it was done.
So today I opened it back up (after turning the power off at the breaker!). I actually took most of the panels off so I could hose the crud of of the coils too. I one by one I removed the wires from the old parts and placed them on the new parts. A capacitor is kinda like a battery, so I was particularly careful with those wires. Shorting it out could give me quite a jolt.
Anyway, to make a long story short (too late for that), I got it all back together and we now have AC again. Good timing too as the temps are supposed to climb again.
Gotta love the Internet.

If you haven’t checked out the National Weather Service’s web page, you should. It’s got some of the expected government quirkiness, but mostly it’s just real useful. Just go enter your zip code or city and state in the box at the top left of their main page and get complete forecast for your city.
On that page, you can tweak the forecast by clicking your exact location on the map shown. I learned that it’s going to be 2 degrees warmer at work tomorrow than at home.
The jewel of the site is the radar imagery. Click the small radar image on the forecast page and get taken to the radar page which is chock full of nifty features:

• Navigate to adjacent radars with the arrows at the upper left
• Links for two types of radar, wind velocity, rainfall totals, long range as well as looped maps on the left.
• The map itself has toggle controls for topography, radar, counties, rivers, highways, cities and warnings.
• Under the map there’s a ‘Reset’ button that allows you to set a ‘zero’ position by clicking the map. Then, rolling the mouse over the map gives you the distance from that zero point so you can tell how far away that nasty looking cell is.
• In loop mode, you can set the animation speed, zoom in and out and even set it to automatically update as new images become available. No need to refresh.

It’s very cool, go check it out.

Since my last request like this was successful, I’m here to plead for computer help again.
Anyone know about diagnosing a laptop that won’t boot? Two nights ago my 1.5 year old Compaq laptop running XP Home slows to a crawl and then I get the dreaded BSOD. It was late and the reboot was taking a while, so I just shut down and went to bed. Unfortunately, I shut it down before the memory dump was complete. I hope that I don’t regret that later.
Last night, after midweek, I fired it back up again. It was slow to boot, and it ran a check disk before I got to the log in screen. The check disk revealed some errors, but I wasn’t able to read everything before it went on to finish booting. I don’t think they were errors with the physical disk, but I don’t know. After that, it came up fine, but slowly. I was able to work for an hour or so. Then while it was just sitting there (I was watching TV at the same time), I got another BSOD. Uh-oh.
Then it would not re-boot. It tried for a while and then came up to the black screen saying that Windows failed to boot successfully and giving choices for Last Known Good, Safe Mode, etc. I tried Last Known Good, twice, but it failed each time. So I tried Safe Mode With Networking and that failed too. Since each attempt took awhile and it was now after midnight, I powered it down and went to bed.
At a two of the reboots (there were at least 3 attempts, probably more) I got a repeated text error message about the onboard NIC and to check the cable. This repeated several times and I ended up shutting it down as it seemed to be stuck in an endless loop.
I haven’t installed any new software recently, the only recent changes to the system are Windows updates. I run AVG free anti-virus which updates every day and the free version of Zone Alarm for a firewall. I’m behind one update on Zone Alarm, its been bugging me to update it for a week or two. Neither has reported anything suspicious. Based on that I’m guessing its a hardware issue.
So, tonight after I get home I’ll try again. I have a couple of theories, based on that NIC error message and on my gut (scary ’cause I don’t have any idea what I’m doing).

1. Bad fan resulting in heat buildup. That would explain why it worked for a while and then quit only after it got hot last night. If this is the case, I would expect it to boot fine tonight and run for a while. If it does, I’ll be sure to listen for the fan to kick on.
2. Bad on board NIC. This is only because of that error message I got. If it fails to boot again, I may get inside and unplug or remove the NIC and see if that helps. I rarely use it, I connect to my home network wirelessly.

Any other tips or suggestions? If those two ideas don’t pan out, I’m at a loss on what to do next.

I still have the Escort. I’ve offered it for free to anyone who needs a car here. I’ve even offered to put the clutch in and replace the brakes, if the recipient will buy the parts. I’ve had 3 folks say they were interested and then back out. There is a brother who has said if no one else wants it, he’ll take it. He’s a mechanic and plans on putting the clutch in and then being able to sell his truck and get rid of a monthly payment.
So, although I have a ‘buyer’, I haven’t actually ‘sold’ it yet, it’s sitting in my driveway. So when the nice lady at the DMV asked if I’d sold the old car so I can transfer the plates, I replied no. Well, then, no-can-do on the plate transfer. Here’s how the conversation went:

“I can’t do the transfer if you still own the car.”
“But I’m not driving it, I intend to give it away, but no one seems to want it.”
“Sorry, we can’t have the plates registered to two vehicles.”
“And transfering doesn’t un-register it from the old car?”
“Nope.”
“What if the person I sign it to doesn’t register it right away?” (A real possibility since it isn’t really drivable.)
“Doesn’t matter, as long it’s not in your name.”
“So, if I had lied and said it was sold, that would have been OK with you?” (I asked it pretty much just like that)
“Yeah, you just need to say that it’s sold.”
“[Grumble grumble] Well, I can’t lie to you, so I guess I’ll come back.”

For her part, I’ve got to respect the lady at the DMV. She doesn’t make the rules, but she’s gotta follow them. She could have said, “Well, I know you’re going to sell it and you’re not driving it, so I’ll go ahead and pretend you said that you sold it.” But she didn’t. She stood her ground on a rule that seemed to frustrate her too. She seemed to want to bend the rules for me, but didn’t.
So tonight I’ll dig up my title, sign it and get it notarized. Then I can go back in and honestly say that it’s no longer mine. It’ll still be in my driveway, but it won’t be ‘mine’. It won’t be his either as the title will still be in my possession, but I can honestly say that I’ve signed the title over.
This is one of those rare situations where, if I had lied, absolutely no harm would have been done. I would not have been cheating the system even temporarily by having two cars that I’m driving with one tag. Leaving and coming makes no real difference except that I can honestly say that the car has been signed away. If I had lied, no one would have even known, except me & God. But God said I should not lie, not that I should only lie in situations where it was clear that no harm would be done. So I do it God’s way and it costs me a little time and effort.
Anyway, I’mnot trying to toot my own horn here, just venting I guess. I’m also a little frustrated that my government has set this up so that being dis-honest, even if harmless, is so attractive and easy, but that’s another topic entirely (and shouldn’t surprise me either).