Donna’s youngest brother Scott and fam­ily live near Seat­tle and we have vis­ited them there a cou­ple times now and we both have come to enjoy the north­west. We didn’t visit them in 2008, instead opted to remodel our bath­rooms, but this year we are plan­ning a visit. As much as we like the north­west there is one part of the coun­try we enjoy more, the south­west, which we last vis­ited 20 years ago and now we have a chance to kill two birds with one stone. Scott’s wife Beth annu­ally helps out at a cat­tle auc­tion in New Mex­ico in April so we are sketch­ing out plans for a visit to that area down where poor ol’ Bug Bunny keeps mak­ing wrong turns in, Albuquerque.

Do we drive or do we fly?

Fly­ing nowa­days is such a has­sle and that is after you have wres­tled with mys­ti­cal flight plan­ning. We can fly from Char­lotte (our pre­ferred air­port) on Delta, but not non-stop. We would have to go through Atlanta (sur­prise.) So why don’t we fly from Atlanta, it is only a lit­tle fur­ther away than Char­lotte? Yahoo Travel doesn’t offer that option. So I went to the Delta web site and found that I could do that, but it costs $200 more per per­son to fly fly 250 fewer miles.

Dri­ving is our pre­ferred method of travel, but from here to there the most direct way is 1,600 miles of mind numb­ing inter­state. That trans­lates into roughly four 8 hour days with more of the same in store for the way back, so we would prob­a­bly rent a car (because the Miata is not really opti­mal for that sort of travel.) Even though we would have to rent a car in New Mex­ico if we flew, dri­ving would prob­a­bly mean a 2 week vaca­tion instead of just a week for flying.

Fly­ing and it’s shorter trip would mean the hotel and meals would be half the cost of dri­ving, but 2 weeks and dri­ving would mean we could do sight­see­ing on the way out and back.

What to do? What to do?

Last year some­time they stopped mak­ing instant Polaroid film, but don’t despair, now thanks to the magic of soft­ware you can recre­ate those “thrilling” green tinged soft focused images from your crys­tal clear per­fectly color bal­anced 10 megapixel images your dig­i­tal SLR pro­duces. They have even recre­ated the ago­niz­ing wait while your photo devel­ops, the only thing lack­ing is the abil­ity to pick up your mon­i­tor and wave it around to help speed the process — Poladroid Project.

Maybe the rea­son I think this is so cool is because my very first cam­era at about 10 or 11 years-old was a Polaroid Swinger…

Thanks Mark.

1. Take the William & Mary Region 2 DVD in PAL for­mat and run it through DVD Decrypter to copy it to your hard drive.
2. Run it through Vob­Blanker to change it to from PAL to NTSC and save it to a new directory.
3. Run those files through DVD Shrink 3.2, squish­ing the files (so they will fit on a sin­gle layer DVD) and save those to another directory.
4. Finally burn this last direc­tory to a blank DVD +r using Image­Burn.

Two hours in front of the com­puter and the DVD doesn’t play in the liv­ing room, the Region Code is still intact. I’ve got to delve into the process and find out where I strip the region code…tomorrow.

A coworker’s dad got a new lap­top and they can’t get it to print on their home net­work. They have pretty much same set up as I do: broad­band modem, wire­less router for the lap­top, desk­top PC wired to router with attached printer. The big dif­fer­ence is dad’s lap­top has Vista. I tried to talk her through a few things to check, but no progress was made. She’s no dummy, except, like me, in mat­ters of Vista.

On Thurs­day, I printed out a bunch of stuff I found on the net about Vista and net­work print­ing and after work we headed over to visit dad. I thought I asked, but maybe not in a way that was clear, but the two PCs were not net­worked at all. The lap­top did have access to the inter­web through the router though. The domain names were the same on both PCs, we turned off the fire­walls, I ran the net­work­ing wiz­ard on the XP desk­top and I think I got every­thing right on the Vista lap­top, but there was no con­nec­tion made.

I came home and hit the back alleys of the net to find a copy of Vista so I could try load­ing it on my lap­top and see if I could net­work it. It took until late last night get the full tor­rent down­loaded (I guess there is not a lot of folks out there that want a copy.)

Today I installed Vista onto the recently vacated par­ti­tion where the Win­dows 7 Beta resided. I con­nected to the wire­less router, changed a few net­work­ing set­tings on Vista and I was in. My only snafu was set­ting up the printer, but only because Vista didn’t have a native dri­ver for it. A sim­ple down­load later and I could print.

I won­der what it would take to start over with the whole net­work­ing thing on Dad’s machine?

I’m so excited about this com­ing week, but I’m not sure what about more:

1. A new episode of House on Monday,
2. the swear­ing in of 44,
3. sea­son five of LOST on Wednesday,
4. or Fri­day after­noon off.

Today was a rainy day, just right for recov­er­ing from the flu and watch­ing movies. First we watched Burn After Read­ing (or was it Burn Before Read­ing?) and some­how A-List writer/directors with an A-List cast some­how man­aged to pro­duce a B-List movie. It was not bad, it was good, but it was not inspired like Fargo or The Big Lebowski.

The sec­ond movie was Henry Poole Is Here and I’m not really sure of what to make of this movie. I absolutely can’t think of any­one I could pos­si­bly rec­om­mend this movie to, but not because it was an awful movie, it was actu­ally pretty good. It starts quirky, runs to ques­tions of reli­gion and faith, then some­how turns into a happy end­ing romance.

The Miss Amer­ica pageant (or is it the Miss USA pageant?) is on TLC (The Learn­ing Chan­nel?) this evening and some­how 20-odd nicely pro­por­tioned, finely tanned women in black biki­nis wear­ing high heels came off as unattractive.

The fine folks at Tax­Cut mailed me a CD again this year. I almost installed it.

I have used a com­puter pro­gram to do my taxes (Tax­Cut and Tur­b­o­Tax before it) for at least a dozen years. In the begin­ning they were sort of crude and it was more a nov­elty and a math check than any­thing. As each year went by they got bet­ter, they asked ques­tions in plain Eng­lish, you no longer had to read the form, read the expla­na­tion in the instruc­tions, scratch your head, guess. It was almost fun to do your taxes.

I don’t remem­ber what Tax­Cut cost last year, but this year they wanted $50 for the one that includes Fed­eral & State and that appar­ently was my tip­ping point because I didn’t want to spend that much. I down­loaded the 1040 form and instruc­tions off the IRS site and then because we were out and about yes­ter­day I ducked in the library and picked up a paper copies too (it is so much eas­ier for me to read the instruc­tions while fill­ing out the form instead of flip­ping win­dows back and forth.)

Today I inves­ti­gated the pos­si­bil­ity of fill­ing them out online for free, but they were lim­ited to peo­ple mak­ing less than $53k which left us out. Then I found that both of the major play­ers offered free online soft­ware and e-file for fed­eral (will charge for doing the state though ~$30.) I picked Tur­b­o­Tax Free and in less than an hour I was done.

Admit­tedly ours is a piece of cake, we can’t even item­ize any­more because our home mort­gage inter­est is so low now, but I’m sure it will take longer to do the state on paper tomorrow.

We popped in the first disc of Sea­son 1 of The West Wing tonight and watched a cou­ple episodes. in the very first one Deputy Com­mu­ni­ca­tions Direc­tor Sam Seaborn (Rob Lowe) picks up a woman in bar and ends up spend­ing the night with her. In the morn­ing they acci­den­tally swap pagers. Later that day “Sam’s” pager goes off and dis­cov­ers the swap along with that he also finds out the woman works for an escort ser­vice! She looks vaguely famil­iar, I think I have an idea, but dis­miss it as too far fetched.

Donna has the same idea, but is sure who it is, so she says it, “She’s from House.” Now when she speaks I can tell it is her, it is Lisa Edel­stein, just 10 years younger than we’re used to.