It's that time of the year again.



I want to send cards again.



To send cards, I need a postal addresses. Yours.



So, give me your address, and I will likely send you a card.





You can email them to me at me@mark.atwood.name, or you can reply to this post. Comments are screened.

I just learned that there is pressure from the San Francisco Hippy Continent to ban container ships from the San Francisco Bay, calling them the "big ugly gas-guzzling SUVs of the seas".



I'm all for banning container ships from the San Francisco Bay.



Because then they will have to come to Portland and Seattle instead...



:)

A couple of weeks ago, when I was in San Francisco, I noticed that my banged up old Canon PowerShot A80, which I had carried around nearly everywhere, was starting to show flickering and streaking on it's LCD. I hoped that it was only an artifact of the display, and that it was still capturing good images.



It was a false hope. About one picture in three was ruined. Time for a new camera.



The one I had had my eye one was the Lumix TZ1, mainly because it had gotten a very positive review on CoolTools, (a site and blog I cannot recommend highly enough).



Turns out that the current incarnation is the TZ3. And many of the user reviews were about features I could really like. It's solid metal. Very good in low-light. Image stabilization. These are solutions to the problems I had had with the A80. Plus, it came in black, which I appreciate.



The only real downsides are that it's going to be a format change in batteries and in memory, from rechargable AAs and CF, to a proprietary pack and SD.



I found the best price, by a significant amount, at "86th Street Photo & Video". And then discovered how it was so "cheap", in that the actually call you to verify your credit card (makes sense, given the fraud rates for small high value electronics in internet sales), and at the same time, press really hard on the up-sell, especially their very overpriced "special super high speed" memory and "special super capacity" batteries, which a little research shows to be no faster than standard SanDisk memory and no larger than the one that comes with the camera.



It was waiting for me when I got home from Dallas on Saturday, wanting only for memory. I was thinking that I was going to have to make the trek to Fries or to CostCo to get SD memory, but then noticed this evening that the Walgreens around the corner has it, and for only a couple of bucks more than CostCo for the 2G size.



So now I have a new camera, for to dump more images into my own collection, and to publish onto Flickr.

I got up at way too early, packed my bag, vacated my hotel room, printed my boarding pass (as always, finding a printer was a PITA), and took at taxi from the hotel to the DFW airport. The flight from DFW to SEA was almost empty, but still uncomfortable. AA's seat pitch is about 1/2 inch shorter then the length of my upper legs. Then a taxi ride from SEA to home. (This is what expense accounts are for.)



My cats had not left too much of a mess for me to deal with.



I met up with a friend, and went to the Cirque Du Noc Dealer Bazaar. It was much fun, the selection and quality of stuff was better than years past. My date and I did much in the way of teasing and quirked eyebrows and playing with some of the stuff, much fun was had. She almost bought an amazingly affordable leather corset, but the fit and style was not quite right, and that's one of those things that really must be perfect.



Back to the house, did some more paperwork and some hacking, and then went to the MySQL holiday party, along with krow, ein_traum, and David Axmark, who was in town.



The party was at a restaurant / cooking school on the east coast of Lake Union. What this meant was that we all as a group had to cook our own restaurant meal, under the supervision of a trio of chefs. Despite my initial hesitation, I had a lot of fun, volunteering a bit more often than most of the others, and so got to do some fun stuff.



The meal itself was pretty good.



I had planned to go to the last half of the Cirque Du Noc Ball, which ran until 2am, , and had volunteered to help with cleanup after, but by 10p I was getting really really wiped out. So I sent out my apologies, and then crashed into a fitful sleep.

Apparently what T-Mobile hotspots do, is have two APs.



One broadcasts it's ESSID as "tmobile", and requires the captive portal HTTP form login thing, and when you're connected, rewrites HTML to keep it's stupid little window open.



But everywhere there is ESSID "tmobie", there is another, non-broadcast ESSID "tmobile1x", that uses 802.1X WPA2 Enterprise TTLS-PAP, that uses the same username/password as the web login. I'm trying it right now, using the Linux Gnome Network Manager "Connect to Other Network".



Huh. That didn't work. Do I want to spend the time trying to figure out who screwed up... NetworkManager, wpa_supplicant, madwifi, atheros, T-Mobile, or DFW, so many choices...



If I do manage to make it work, I wonder how hard it would be to get a patch into NetworkManager to handle this sort of thing "when you see ESSID foo, try to associate with ESSID bar...". NetworkManager intentionally decided to be extremely simple, but I think it was a serious mistake not to put hooks in it for scripting decisions like this.