Korey Atterberry’s Idle Chatter

A couple of days ago, a friend and I were talking about putting extra weight in our pickup truck beds for added traction for winter driving. I’ve usually put a few hundred pounds of concrete blocks back there, but the problem is storing those blocks when not in use. I have to carry them out to the shed, which isn’t fun.

We came up with the idea of using ice, since it packs a fair amount of weight into a small space, it’s easy to load (use a hose), requires no room to store, and is even easier to unload (it just melts when it warms up).

One way that would probably work would be a use a tarp or piece of plastic sheet to trap some water in the bed and let it freeze in place. I didn’t have any handy, nor could I think of an easy way to keep it in a small space, so I used another approach.

I had a stack of 5 gallon buckets that kitty litter came in, so I filled them with water and let them sit for a couple of days. In about two days (around 10 degrees Fahrenheit outside) they were frozen solid. I turned them over and without too much trouble the ice slid out of the buckets. The picture above shows 7 buckets worth, which is around 300 pounds. Over the axle would be most effective, but the front of the bed works too, and leaves me more useful room in the bed.

In a recent post, I shared my favorite iPod Touch applications, which is a list of software that I find myself recommending to others who have an iPod Touch or an iPhone. It occurred to me that there are a number of online applications that I can’t do without, but when I mention some of them in casual conversation, I’ve found that a lot of people haven’t heard of them.

Here is a list of my favorite free online services. These services can be accessed from anywhere you have access to a web browser, and I use most of them on a daily basis. You might notice some duplication to the applications I listed in my iPod apps post, but that’s mostly because I gravitated to many of the iPod apps because of my love of the online services they worked with.

Gmail

Website

I’m sure you’ve heard of Gmail, so there’s not really any point of me telling you about it. The big selling points for me are the excellent spam filtering and the free IMAP access. Using IMAP, you can view all of your mail folders, not just the inbox, using a mail client application. It works great on my iPod. While we’re on the topic of iPods, the iPod contacts information will also sync with Gmail’s address book, which saves a lot of duplicated effort.

Google Calendar

Website

You’ll probably notice a theme with the first four items on this list, but Google Calendar is, in my opinion, a nice straightforward calendar application. My favorite feature is its ability to act like an Exchange Server, so if you have a calendar application (again, like the one on the iPod Touch) that can sync with an Exchange server, it’ll work fine with a Google calendar. Also, I recently discovered that if I invite my work email account (which uses Lotus Notes…) to a Google Calendar meeting, it will add it to my work calendar.

Google Reader

Website

Google Reader is an RSS reader and aggregator. If there are news sites, blogs, webcomics, etc. that you like to read, chances are they expose a “RSS feeds.” If you subscribe to these feeds using Google Reader (or any RSS reader for that matter), you can keep track of what entries you’ve read and which you haven’t. Likewise you only need to go to one place to read all your content. Why Google Reader specifically? Well, it’s convenient, since I use so many other Google services, and also because it works with Byline on my iPod.

Google Docs

Website

If you’ve never used an online document editor, you might be surprised how full-featured they’ve become. Using Google Docs, I store and edit a number of “Word”-type documents and spreadsheets in the web browser. I haven’t put all of my documents online, nor do I intend to. What I do put there are documents like the spreadsheet I use to track my vehicles’ gas mileage and our shopping list. The gas mileage spreadsheet I like to be able to update from anywhere, so that I can record my fill-up before I misplace the receipt. The shopping list is a document I keep on my account, and I’ve got it set up to share with my wife. We can both add and remove items (using our own accounts), and there’s no manual merging of lists.

Dropbox

Website

Among other things, Dropbox is an online service that lets you place some files online and retrieve them from a web browser. Even though there are applications for your computer and iPod to sync your files, I mostly use the online features. One of the main things I use Dropbox for is keeping my collection of batch files, scripts and other tools that I never know where I’m going to need them.

Toodledo

Website

Toodledo is a web-based task list with several integration points with other systems and services. Its a fairly new alternative to Remember The Milk (which I used for quite a while), but it has some great features. It can show your tasks on your Google Calendar on the day that they are due, notify you using SMS/email/etc., and sync with an iPod Touch app (which isn’t free, but is very cheap). One of the main reasons I like Toodledo is their concept of “contexts” for each task. For instance, if you’re sitting at your desk at work, there’s no point in seeing tasks that you need to do at home, and if you’re out running errands, it’s nice to know what tasks you need to be out of the house to perform. Context divide your tasks into group like these.

LogMeIn

Website

Last on the list, but only because I just recently discovered it, is LogMeIn. LogMeIn is a remote access tool, and it’s free for personal use. Using their service, I can access and control (for instance) my home PC from my desk at work or I can troubleshoot my family’s computers without the need to travel. You have to install a small application on the PC that you intend to control, but nothing needs to be installed on the PC that you’re controlling from. It even works, albeit not quite as smoothly, if you have ActiveX and Java disabled on the client PC. I was surprised how easy it was to set up; you don’t even have to manually open ports on your firewall or set up port forwarding on your router.

As with all online resources, there’s always a chance that these services will cease to exist, so if you use them, please be careful to keep local backups of anything that’s important to you. Each of these services does have a mechanism for making backups, but I haven’t streamlined all of them yet. That will be a topic for another day.

Over the past couple of weeks, there have a fair number of occasions where I thought someone was going to back out of a parking spot while I was approaching. Of course, I stopped to avoid get hit, but then I noticed that the driver is out of the car and walking toward the store.

Maybe I just haven’t been all that observant before, but what seems to be happening is that the clear reverse/backup lights on the rear of the vehicle are being turned on as a sort of courtesy light. My truck, for instance, leaves the headlights on for a minute after I lock the doors, which I assume is to illuminate my surroundings as I leave the vehicle. It’s a logical extension of the same principle to use the reverse lights for this purpose as well.

The problem is, reverse lights already mean something: the vehicle is in reverse. Moreover, when the reverse lights are used as courtesy lights, the brake lights and other tail lights are not on. What that means to me is: the vehicle is in reverse, AND the brakes have been released. In other words, “I’m coming back right now!”

The vehicle I can remember off the top of my head that exhibited this behavior was a Pontiac Torrent SUV. I don’t remember what the other vehicles were. Does anyone know what’s going on? This feature just seems like a really poor choice to me.

On a totally unrelated note, I’m going to wire my turn signals to flash with the beat any time my car stereo is on.

I am now officially a Wikipedia contributer. Tonight I submitted my article on popup campers on Wikipedia. I’m surprised that no one had ever written one up until now, but hopefully my submission will be deemed worthy and not deleted. I included a couple of pictures of our popup, since it’s easiest to use your own “work” (otherwise getting permission is a bit more convoluted).

This is my first real contribution to Wikipedia, and I’m neither a professional writer nor a world-wide expert on popups, so help out the article if you can!

Just a quick note for those of you who have mortgages but maybe haven’t been paying close attention: home loan rates are pretty good right now. Over the weekend, the rate for a 30 year fixed rate mortgage at our credit union dropped below 5%. That’s first time I have seen it do that, and since I’ve had an alert set up to notify me when the rate reached 4.875% for quite some time, I’m inclined to believe that this is a new low for at least as long as I’ve been a homeowner.

We have an appointment to refinance since the drop is significant and the payback period is reasonably short (since we can just do a straight loan modification). Obviously, your rates and costs may vary from mine, but now might be a good time to run the numbers and see if you’d benefit.

Tonight we drove home about 58 miles in our Mazda 5. Ours has a 2.3L engine with a 4 speed automatic transmission. The car was hauling the four of us and a fair amount of luggage, etc. We took exclusively 2 lane state route highways and had to stop twice for potty breaks. I ran the air conditioning about 10% of the time.

The result (according to our Scangauge II): 40.3 MPG.. Now, I should mention that I drove 52 MPH (or the posted speed limit in towns) the entire way, but I was still pretty happy to break that barrier in a non-hybrid 6-seater.

For those of you who can’t stomach driving below the limit, Dusty drove the same trip (but on a different day and taking a different route including 20 miles of interstate) driving the speed limit and got around 37 MPG.

On our last camping trip a lady from a local paper talked to us and took a few pictures while we were setting up camp. I didn’t hear what paper she was from, but my mom found the article in Illinois AgriNews.

P.S. The Amboy Pharmacy mentioned in the article was really neat. I had an old-fashioned phosphate made with Green River syrup. I wanted to try another made with peanut butter syrup, but the soda jerk talked me out of it. I don’t blame her.

On Tuesday we took the kids to the zoo in Indianapolis. The zoo itself was nice, and the kids had a good time, but along the way I had several random thoughts.

• We missed almost every stoplight in Speedway, IN just by a second or two. My theory: the stoplights are timed for 10mph over the speed limit. Hmm… fitting.
• We stopped for dinner at a Wendy’s on the way home, and they didn’t offer diet Coke. All they had was caffeine-free diet Coke. Thankfully the Pilot station next door offered free “flavor shots” on their soda machine. I’d only seen that once before.
• There were dozens of oversize loads on I-74. In this economy, at least the pilot car escort business is booming.
• There were a number of line jumpers at the zoo, but at least they were polite and said “excuse me” as they pushed their way to the front of the line. My passive-aggressive side enjoyed standing in their way so that they had to say it to me.
• Our Garmin GPS needs a “It’s OK, I just have to pee” button. Whenever we took a highway exit for a quick stop, the voice directions went nuts “recalculating” our route to our destination.
• By my count, there are 53 orange barrels per mile in road work zones. That’s one barrel every 100 feet. According to my research, many of those barrels use 6V lantern batteries to power the flashing light on top. Not only does that mean a lot of money, but also there must be a guy who goes out and replaces or recharges the batteries.

This morning, I got out of bed, wandered in the dark to the bathroom, and dragged myself through shaving. As I got in the shower I couldn’t believe how tired I was and wasn’t looking forward to the day. I got out of the shower and headed toward the dresser for some clothes, but something didn’t seem right. When I moved my water glass out of the way of the alarm clock…

What… the… heck…

It was 1:21am.

I normally finish my shower around 6:30, so the fact that I only got two hours of sleep explained the discord. My wife woke up as I expressed my dissatisfaction, and before long the mystery was solved. Apparently, my wife said “Please shut off the TV. You forgot to set the sleep timer.” What I heard was “Get your butt out of bed and get to work.”

Going back to bed was never so refreshing.

If my research is correct, the island in the map below is called “Treasure Island.”

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Treasure Island is an island in Mindemoya Lake. Mindemoya Lake lies on Manitoulin Island. Manitoulin Island is in Lake Huron (one of the Great Lakes). Therefore, Treasure Island is an island in a lake on an island in a lake. It’s not the only one, but it’s one of the largest.

To take things a step further, Vulcan Point is a small island in Crater Lake, which lies on Volcano Island, which is in Lake Taal, which is on the island of Luzon in the Philippines. Therefore, Vulcan Point is an island in a lake on an island in a lake on an island.

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I don’t know why I find this stuff so interesting…