Envormential troubles come crashing into my little life

Big things affect little people, I’m learning. Today Charlottesville goes into phase 2 water restrictions. This directly effects me it that one of Laura’s jobs is at a plant nursery, and if I understand her right, they will be asked not to water their plants any more. The business at the nursery has already been slowing down, some because it’s the end of planting season, but a lot because no one is allowed to water their gardens. They do a lot of business landscaping as well, and that has compeletely dropped off.

While some say this is the worst in 50 years, it’s hard to say that this is caused by us puny humans. But if it is our descendants are not going to like us.

Missing zooko

I’m missing updates from zooko on his blog. He’s being a good dad and making money, rather than entertaining his crazy friends on the internet with his insights, he’s making money (much like I need to be a good husband and MAKE $$$ FAST). But since his blog audience includes his mom, we have some Irby updates. In the last picture on the page Irby looks much like my littlest brother, Henry (aka Henrymonkey).

Musicbrainz Library updated with new TRM code

The guys behind musicbrainz now have Relatable’s new sound signaturing code. The last version was very good at recongizing a WAV, mp3, and ogg of the same song where the same, so hopefully they’ve improved this. I’m enthused.

Did I say Scottish?

Heck yeah. I’m something like a whole 5% scottish… at least I think… I need to do some more poking around in the family records to find out all the detail. I do know we are from the Clan Galbraith (my 2nd youngest brother, Will has Galbraith in his name, not that it’s proof, just that I’m jealous). Some poking around the net finds the clan tartan, and a wee bit of history.

Wireless technology doesn't like me (part 2)

My next problem is my cell phone. I have a Samsung SCH-3500, and the speaker sometimes doesn’t work. I had the handset insurance for it ($4 a month), but it still cost $35 to get a replacement, which is the going rate for the same model on ebay, but this way they wave the activation fee (I don’t know how much that is, but I bet it’s not cheap).

Problem is I have all kinds of phone numbers programmed in the phone. I had always assumed it would be easy to copy them out of the phone in the future. It would be a very looong process to do it by hand. So I found a cable on ebay that would probably go for $15 thinking that I could write a program to copy the phone book for me. Then I started poking around for docs on the internal phonebook: NO GO. That interface is not documented. I might be able to hack it somehow, but not wanted to waste time I found that FoneSync would do this for me. It’s not offered by the maker anymore, but it goes for $50 or so. Relying on my Scottish blood, I determind that it could be had for less and set up a sniper on an ebay auction.