Ken has a brief mention about all the gadgets and tools that he carts around. I was reminded of an incident at ApacheCon, during the closing shindig. I don’t know exactly what was going on, but someone asked Ken “Do you have a screwdriver?” To which Ken answered indignantly, “Do I have a screwdriver? What the hell kind of question is that?”

In the last few months, I’ve had to start lugging a bag around to carry all my technology. Palm Tungsten e. Magellan SporTrak Pro GPSr. Screwdrivers. Pocket watch. And now, a mini-cassette recorder, since I’m tired of losing story ideas because it’s not convenient to stop and write at the moment.

And of course my wallet, checkbook and phone.

And my SwissCard. And my micro flashlight and compass. And a knife.

Geez, I’m turning into Ken!

It’s a wonder I can ever get onto an airplane.

I am looking at getting a Roomba on the general theory that it will vacuum more often than I will.

Then, wouldn’t you know it, turns out that there are weirdos out there that actually hack on the Roomba to make it do strange and wonderful different things.

People are funnier than anybody.

I’m using Safari on my iMac to access a java client on a Linux machine which runs Citrix on a Windows machine on which I’m running Internet Explorer to connect to a web-based app running on another Windows machine. On the way, I’m going through my Linux firewall/router, and a Cisco firewall on the other end. I don’t even know what all is between here and there.

I wonder if packets have an OS preference. I can just picture the packets sitting around arguing about what OS treats them best.

I’m using my new iMac.

I plugged it in, turned it on, and it Just Worked. It found my wireless network, and connected. At the time, I was worring about where I could set it, so that I could run cables. Apparently I didn’t need to be concerned about that.

I still have a few confusions, but I expect I’ll figure them out.

Why do I have an iMac? Well, I’m doing a training in May for Big Nerd Ranch and the training machines will be Macs. So they sent me one to practice with, and so that all of my class material will be *sure* to work on Macs. I don’t anticipate any problems, but it sure was nice of them.

I really don’t have anywhere to put it, but since it does wireless, that makes it a little easier to find a place. At the moment it is on the dining room table, which is less than ideal, but works for now.

The Palm Tungsten calendar “agenda” view has a display option to show background image. Unfortunately, the “background image” is light blue. That’s the only option. I wanted a background image.

So, after poking around a little, I found T3AgendaBG that lets you change the image, and a website that lets you create backgrounds from your own images. So, now I have a background image of St Benedict’s, near Ferdinand, IN. The picture is somewhere in my pictures from my geocaching trip.

The trick is making the image pale enough that you can still read the text on top of it, but not so pale that it is invisible.

I recently started doing my banking online. You’d think, since I’ve been wired longer than almost any of my friends or family, that I’d be the first to do online banking. Well, I’ve done enough bank security assessments to feel more than a little trepidation at the prospect.

So, anyways, I’m doing my banking online. And were these online banking interfaces written by monkeys? Managing accounts, payees, and pending bills, is an amazingly complex process. If I don’t have a payee already in my list, why don’t you add it automatically, like every banking software on the planet? Or at least provide a link so that I can add one, rather than making me go through 4 menus to get there.

And here’s the one that I really like. When add a “business payee” it asks for the account number. What account number you might ask? Mine, or theirs? Well, that’s not clear. But if you go into the list where you can select a business payee from all the business payees that other customers have created, it appears that many of them thought it meant their account number. ’nuff said.

But, of course, the annoyances don’t end there. There’s no register view (ie, the list of payments that I’ve made that haven’t cleard yet) which means that I’m actually *more* prone to overdrawing than I was before, not less. This was one of the major motivators of doing this, so this is the one that annoys me the most.

The fact that everything is Java servlets and runs the speed of molasses uphill in the winter only serves to intensify my annoyance.

However, from talking with other folks, it seems clear that *most* online banking solutions are no better. *sigh*.