another calendar year at work complete

well that concludes the 2006 year at AOML. on wednesday starts another year (federal government closed tuesday for past president Ford)

Happy Holidays

Just saying merry Christmas to all my celebrating friends.

yes I know, being Jewish and I never posted a happy Chanukah.

I’m becoming a regular visitor

Well this make three visits to Firestone since October. Once for new tire on my truck, the second time this past Tuesday for having a screw in my tire. Today however it is Lauren's car. It is just after 7am on this Saturday and I'm sitting at Firestone getting her tires rotated and the oil changed while she is still at home sleeping. Now if I'm doing things like this before we get married, what kind of things am I going to have to do after we get married?

I’m becoming a regular visitor

Well this make three visits to Firestone since October. Once for new tire on my truck, the second time this past Tuesday for having a screw in my tire. Today however it is Lauren's car. It is just after 7am on this Saturday and I'm sitting at Firestone getting her tires rotated and the oil changed while she is still at home sleeping. Now if I'm doing things like this before we get married, what kind of things am I going to have to do after we get married?

Holiday boredom

Well for those who know me… I’m an associate employee of NOAA at AOML. Of course this
means I’m stuck at work with limited days as actual holidays. But for those who know…. this is the time of year when all the federal employees have start burning their use-or-lose vacation time. Federal employees can only carry over a certain amount of hours from one year to the next, all those extra hours are there for lost, as a result…. from about December 1st to January 8th this place is like a ghost town. At last count there are 7 people in my wing of the building which is composed of HRD. So while everyone is vacationing… I’m sitting here rather bored… don’t get me wrong, I get a lot of work done this time of year… but I like to see people every now and then. oh well back to my work……

Working on the road: SiEd for Palm OS

While sitting at the Firestone this morning (link) I had a good chance to try out an app I had just installed on my Palm Treo600. Actually last night I first tried it out with use of my external keyboard, but this morning was the great test…. I’m currently in the process of trying to complete my Master’s Thesis and this requires sitting at a computer and typing. I’m writing my thesis using LaTeX. While I have yet to find a good LaTeX editor for the Palm, I did run across SiEd. I’ve tried others including tjepWriter and SrcEdit, but while both have their merits… SiEd’s ability to work with any text file found on a memory card is the clincher for me. I was ably to keep working on my thesis while sitting at firestone with out losing time. With this ability to work on the road…. hopefully I will finish sooner than later.

PS: in the near future I plan to finally put together a “whats on my Treo 600″ post that and give a more detailed review of the above mentioned text editors.

Update to yesterday warranty post

Yesterday I posted a comment about whether to purchase the extended warramty on electronics. Well today I post about buy the warranty on tires. In the last few years, most tires have ceased to carry any kind of hazard protection from things like nail screws and such since most newer cars are requiring lower endurance softer compound performance tires. Anyways to make this story short (since I'm driving on the highway)… on Sunday I started to notice pull to the right in my truck only to discover I had a low tire due a screw in the rear right tire. Well this morning into Firestone I went. Luckily I had agreed this time to buy the extended protection plan. My tires hav e less than 3 months on them and I just a brand new spanking tire. A $100 tire for the price of a $14 extended warranty decision.

note: this not an endorsement for Firestone tires, but I have complaints about their service.

To purchase the extended warrenty or not?

Well this was pretty interesting this morning… while driving to work, I was listening to the Marketplace Morning Report a story came up about whether or not to buy the extended warranty. The funnier part is that we (Lauren and I) just bought a laptop from Circuit City and they kept trying to get us to buy their extended warranty…. and of course we didn’t. I came to the conclusion that if the biggest selling point was that is covered new batteries, it wasn’t worth it. Anyways so this morning there is this story…. (link)

MARKS: Well the most basic is to use your credit card to purchase any product you buy. And I shouldn’t say all credit cards, it’s mostly gold and platinum cards, but most credit cards actually give you extra coverage or they extend the manufacturer’s warranty for up to a year. So that’s one tip. Two: We always advise people, if you are going to get an extended warranty, do not pay more than 20 percent of the product’s replacement cost for that warranty. That’s just too high.

Well if 20 percent is the break point, lets see the laptop cost about $750 and the warranty was going to cost about $400…. I think we made the right choice.

ps… I would of posted this this morning, but not having the “blogthis” bookmarklet working with BloggerBeta….. I have to much of the work by hand

first treo 600 photo post

well I’m trying out the mobile side of blogger…. in the process I’m also testing the ability to send viewable photos from my treo…. we will see how this all goes

first mobile blog

well mobile blogging…. we will see how this goes