Last Saturday Krissy was driving into the alley behind our house when she saw a moving lump in the road. When she realized that it was a turtle she called me. I was making dinner, so she grabbed a bucket and saved its life. She took it over to a pet store and asked if they knew what kind of turtle it was and how we should take care of it. After the employee took the turtle in the back for a second opinion, she identified it as a Desert Tortoise. As it turns out, it is illegal to harass or touch a wild Desert Tortoise, because they are considered a threatened species in the wild. In order to keep one as a pet you have to have a permit, and once they have lived with people, they won’t survive in the wild.

Over the weekend Krissy took good care of our new friend. She started calling the turtle Buddy. We had no idea whether it was a male or a female, but since the name Buddy stuck, we started calling it a him. She placed him in the bottom of a large, empty plastic storage container. She set out water and some small pieces of cabbage and lettuce in the enclosure. Buddy did not like being cooped up in such a small space and spent a good hour trying to climb out. The turtle was completely unsuccessful and would come down with a thud over and over with his nails scratching the plastic walls as he fell. He seemed scared for the first day or so, but by Sunday evening he was willing to stay out of his shell and just sit there.

Early today Krissy contacted Arizona Fish and Game to ask what we should do with the turtle. She drove out to the site, nearly an hour away, and they identified the turtle as a female Desert Tortoise. They said she was in very good health, which lead them to believe that she is someone’s pet. Since Krissy had to leave the turtle with them, we won’t see her again, but Krissy and I will be putting up signs around the neighborhood with the wildlife shelter’s number in case the turtle belongs to anyone nearby. We are going to leave the signs intentionally vague so they have to identify their turtle in order to get it back. Krissy and I were sad to see Buddy go. She was a good turtle. Now we are considering possibly getting licensed and adopting a captive Desert Tortoise. All you really need is a basic shelter, a 6×6 foot plot of land, and an understanding of what the turtle needs to eat to be healthy. Make sure its shelter doesn’t flood, and you’re there!

Desert Tortoises are adapted to living in the desert and can, therefore live outdoors with minimal human interaction for 80 to 100 years! This would be the perfect pet for people who work and can’t spend a lot of time interacting with their animals.

Take care, Buddy, and I hope everything works out for you!

For the last couple of weeks I have been listening to the 7th Harry Potter book on an MP3 player in the car. I am using an FM modulator to get the signal from the MP3 player to the car’s speakers. I can choose to have the modulator broadcast on any frequency in the FM band, but it works best if it doesn’t have to compete with other, possibly stronger, signals. The default for an unset preset on the car radio is 87.9 FM, the very low end of the FM band. It just so happens that no local stations use this frequency, so I figured I’d use it.

While driving around, I would experience interference and static sometimes. After a few days of the commute I determined that it wasn’t in any particular location; the static seemed to happen whenever it wanted to. During on of the times when there was static, I tuned my transmitter to another frequency, just to rule out that it wasn’t part of the recording or a defect with the MP3 player. When I tuned my transmitter away I was blown away by crystal clear &em; and very loud &em; heavy metal music. I thought this was an isolated event at first.

I started turning off the transmitter any time I heard static, and in every single case, there was another signal coming from another car! I was astonished. I know there are FM modulators available that work with iPods, but I was amazed by how many people were doing the same thing I was. I wouldn’t think it would be very popular. After a while I deduced that most of the signals came from satellite radio. I guess the little boxes for cars that receive satellite radio come with FM transmitters to make car installation easier. I’m guessing that most of them default to using 87.9 FM.

If you want to try this yourself but don’t want to listen to minutes of noise in between hits (the whooshing sound makes me sleepy) try just switching over to 87.9 FM at intersections. The more cars you can get close together, the greater your chances of picking up on a signal will be. If you get lucky, then the signal will be coming from one of the cars traveling the same direction as you, then you can listen to it until you get too far apart. It can be fun trying to figure out which car is listening to the Howard Stern show. I’m usually wrong, though. I think I know which car it is, then the actual car will turn off the road and the signal fades away.

Have fun, but be safe. Don’t let the random transmissions distract you from your primary driving responsibility.

I ran into this problem for the first time when I tried to configure a laptop running Windows XP to print to my Samsung ML-1710 printer connected to a Linux box on the network. I wanted to set this up without the added headache of using samba since I don’t need any of samba’s advanced functionality. I turned on error reporting and found that after I had added the networked printer in Windows XP the CUPS server was rejecting jobs based on my user name. This was the error message:

Denying user "sedowler" access to printer

Everything I found online said to edit printers.conf and explicitly add the denied user to the list with AllowUser sedowler. I didn’t like that solution. I tried adding AllowUser All, but that didn’t work. I commented out all of the lines that began with AllowUser and restarted CUPS, and now it works as expected allow anyone to print no matter their user name.

I think there used to be a directive AllowUser All, but maybe it’s been removed, or is a bug. I didn’t ever explicitly add any of the AllowUser lines, I think the CUPS server automatically added users from Linux machines on the network when they tried to print, but for some reason didn’t do that when printing from the Windows XP machine. That’s the only explanation that I can come up with.

If you need more step by step instructions for configuring a Windows machine to print to a CUPS networked printer, try these instructions.

Today I was going to get a stationary exercise bike. Everything was all set. A woman named Julie said she would be picking one up from her mother-in-law today and that she would contact me about it. I didn’t check my email until 6:30pm. She had already got the bike and tried to contact me to get me to come and get it. Unfortunately, when I called the bike had already been given to someone else. That’s the thing about freecycling. You have to be fast.

I have never ever gotten anything through freecycling, because I’m never fast enough. Whenever I contact people they say that the item is already gone. It’s a great concept if you are looking to get something for nothing, but it’s even better for the one who is trying to give their items away. You can generally expect someone to be by in less than 24 hours to pick up whatever you might have to give away.

I must admit that I was more than a little bummed that I didn’t get the bike I had been waiting for, but at least it didn’t cost me anything anyway.

Update: We’re not starting for another couple of weeks. More info to come.

Krissy is becoming a vegetarian. Here’s how it happened:

One of Krissy’s coworkers wants to quit smoking. This same coworker is a vegetarian. Krissy wants to help support her friend in quitting smoking, but since Krissy doesn’t smoke, her coworker and she came up with an idea. Krissy promised that she would not eat meat for an entire month if her coworker would abstain from smoking for the same time period. When she came home and told me, she thought I would be excited. I wasn’t.

I don’t want to be a vegetarian, and I don’t like changes. It took me a while to accept the idea, even though she told me that I wouldn’t have to participate with her. I don’t want to buy food for and have to prepare two separate meals every night, so I plan on participating with her in this experiment. But that doesn’t mean that we are easing ourselves into the transition.

For Krissy’s birthday we went to Applebee’s because they always make their steak just how she likes it. Tonight krissy wanted a Wendy’s frosty, and I was going to get a hamburger for dinner. At the drive-thru menu there was a huge advertisement for the newest burger creation: the Baconator! A quarter-pound of beef and six slices of bacon all smothered in cheese were my last hurrah before consigning myself to a month of vegetarian bliss.

Something in me feels like it would be unethical to recommend the Baconator to anyone, because it is so unhealthy. That said, it is one of the best hamburgers I have ever had from a Wendy’s restaurant.

On my way home from work today I was sitting at a stop light when something in a parking lot distracted me for a few seconds. While I was looking over my left shoulder a thunderous crunch tore through the car. It was horribly jarring and it took me a few seconds to piece together what was happening. The light had turned green and the car in front of me was just starting to pull away. Looking through my rear-view mirror revealed a silver car about the size of my own Honda Civic, but it was literally touching my bumper! I had been rear-ended.

I stared intently at the front bumper of the car through the mirror until I remembered that Arizona doesn’t require (or, possibly, even allow) cars to have license plates on the front of their cars. I signaled that I was going to pull over, and they did the same. As we both approached the side of the road, I came to a stop, and the other driver sped off at full speed. I didn’t have time to get any of the info from their rear license plate, and I was positioned in such a way that it was difficult for me to quickly get into traffic and make chase.

I pulled into the nearest parking lot and got out of the car. There was almost no visible damage to the car. A minor scratch was visible, but it looked better than what I’d have expected had a shopping cart tapped into the back of me. I was very upset that the other driver was so amoral that they wouldn’t stop. I likely wouldn’t have even done anything with their insurance information, it’s just the principle of the thing that got me.

When I got back into the car and pulled back onto the road I noticed the absence of the familiar rhythmic clicking sound associated with turn indicator usage. All the way home I had to manually blink the turn indicators on and off because, although the light would come on, it wouldn’t blink. The hazard lights didn’t work right either.

After playing with the hazard lights and the turn indicators for about an hour they are working again. It really doesn’t make any sense. I didn’t really do anything to make them work, so I am guessing that they will stop working as suddenly as they started. As Davis’s Dictum states: Problems that go away by themselves, come back by themselves.

I don’t know who has to approve decisions for scheduled maintenance on the LDS Church Website, but it just went down for scheduled maintenance according to the error page that the site is currently serving. My wife and I are speaking in Church tomorrow, and we are still working on our talks. We know that we should have finished preparing our talks sooner, but this is seriously not a good time for the site to go down for maintenance. I’m thinking maybe a Tuesday morning might be a good time. I would pick Monday, but then you have all the people scrambling to get something together for family home evening lessons that would be out of luck.

I guess it’s time to do our research for our talks the old-fashioned way — use Google.

I have been using Firefox for my normal browsing at work, but found it useless for browsing the company intranet because it asked me repeatedly for my network user name and password. There were other annoyances, as well. Many sites using SSL certificates made Firefox flash multiple warning messages because our proxy issues certificates instead of passing them through unchanged. I decided today was the day to fix these annoyances. The Single Sign-on fix only works with the Windows version of Firefox, unfortunately.

To fix the Single Sign-on problem:

• Type about:config in the Navigation Bar.
• Type ntlm in the Filter box.
• Right-click on network.automatic-ntlm-auth.trusted-uris and choose Modify.
• Type in the domains you want to have access to without typing in your password over and over again. This could include a list like the following: home,portal,service,hr. The format of this list is each domain is seperated by a comma without a space.
• Click OK.

These changes take effect immediately, so go ahead and navigate to another web site and test out your intranet. If the site asks for your user name and password enter it and try to keep navigating. If any more pages start asking for your user name and password and they are part of your intranet, note the domains and add them to the list using the directions above.

To fix the SSL certificates problem you need to export the certificate your intranet uses with SSL encrypted traffic. To export the certificate in Internet Explorer:

• Open IE, go to Tools -> Internet Options.
• Click the Content tab.
• Click Certificates.
• Click the Trusted Root Certification Authorities tab.
• Select the certificate issued by your intranet (look for your company name).
• Click Export.
• Click Next, Next.
• Save the file somewhere and give it a good name.
• Click Yes, Next, and OK until you get back to the main IE window.

To import the certificate into Firefox:

• Open Firefox, go to Tools -> Options.
• Click the Advanced tab.
• Click the Encryption tab within the Advanced section.
• Click View Certificates.
• Click the Authorities tab.
• Click Import.
• Choose the file you exported above.

If all goes well you should be able to use your intranet and browse the Internet using Firefox as long as your intranet doesn’t use ActiveX controls.

Krissy found a smokin’ clearance deal on some garage counters and cabinets, and couldn’t pass them up. We bought them without considering how me might get them home. After 15 minutes of deliberation, we finally decided we had better just rent a truck and take them home. After all, the trucks were only $20 for 75 minutes and we only live about two miles away from the home improvement store. I went inside to rent the truck, but they needed proof of insurance, which was back at the car. I was a little miffed when I heard Krissy calling my name. She was running up to tell me that someone in a white truck pulled up next to us in the parking lot and offered to truck our stuff home for us.

When we got to our place, we wanted to do something for him, but he wouldn’t let us. He just told us to pass it forward. I don’t even know what his name was. I am really grateful that there are still people out there willing to do things like that for people. Now I really need to be on the lookout for opportunities to help others.

Krissy dropped her well-used Palm Tungsten E PDA on concrete a couple of weeks ago, and the thing hasn’t turned on since. When I told some friends about it one of them said he was looking to sell a Palm Tungsten C which is faster and has a built in keyboard, something I knew Krissy would probably like. I asked him what he was selling it for, but he told me he would think about it and get back to me. I looked it up on eBay and concluded that it was probably worth between $100 and $120. When he brought it to me I asked him how much he had decided on. He wouldn’t take my money, though. He said that the only amounts he was comfortable asking for weren’t worth taking anyway, so I could just have it! I tried to write him a check of $100, but he wasn’t having it. He caught me before I was done writing it and said, “I hope that’s not for me, because if it is, you can just stop right now.”

I took it home to show Krissy. I restored her data from a backup on the computer, and everything looks great! She is excited to have her life back in the palm of her hand.