Category Archives: Personal

Life updates, reflections, and everything that doesn’t fit neatly into another category.

Driving on the Left

Personal, Travel

We’ve been driving all around the Dublin area, through Slane, Dunleek, Dowth, New Grange, and finally Drogheda and becoming accustomed to driving on the left has been an interesting experience. First in the rental car there are no fewer than 4 stickers throughout the driver area reminding you to be on the left, and there also seem to be signs to remind you about it around all the tourist areas. What I found difficult wasn’t driving on the left side, which was fairly easy to remember, but rather I found myself aligning myself as the driver with the part of the lane I would be in if I was driving on the right side. Needless to say, this can put you dangerously close to anything to the left of you. So my new mantra (oft-repeated by my sister) has become “Guide to the left.” Thank goodness for collapsible mirrors. On the bright side, left turns are easy.

Last Meals

Personal

Dead Man Eating is a weblog dedicated to documenting the last meals of death row inmates. Morbidly fascinating. There seems to be a lot of fried chicken. The weblog also includes things people have sent in as what they would have as their last meal, which generally seems to be enough food to feed a small village.

New Blackberry

Personal,

I talked Ryan into getting the new Blackberry 8700c, and he shares his thoughts. I got mine last week and I can honestly say it’s the (second) best phone I’ve ever used, and the best PDA. This is coming from the guy who founded the Houston PalmOS Users Group. Great screen, battery life, SMS and email support, and very intuitive UI. I also have a Blackberry 7520 (the one with GPS) and it’s a real clunker compared to the 8700. I’ve been recommending the 8700c to everyone I know. Now I just need to get SSH running on this thing…

Imposter

Personal

There is some joker wannabe hacker pretending to me and asking others for sensitive information. Here are some tell-tale signs: IMing from a misspelled version of my IM addresses, like “saxmat02”; emailing from a gmail account with my name; using bad English (more than I normally do); asking for passwords, etc. These are all things I’d never do. If you ever have any doubt that the person you’re talking to might not be me, just call me on my cell or use one of the other contact methods here.