November 25, 2007 by Joel.

Spent the late afternoon sitting up a tree stand waiting for a deer to come by. I borrowed my dad’s break-block .30-40 Krag (has a scope, unlike my .30-.30). A really nice time, but didn’t see a deer. My neighbor has arranged hunting privileges at a local farm, and has some tree stands there. I was in one of those. Heard and saw lots of squirrels. Heard one deer at 5:20, just before dark, but it was moving along a ridge about 75 yards away in some dense timber, and I never saw it. Likely a buck, with one deer alone…left the stand at 5:35. Saw 3 does cross the road on the short drive home. Will try to go back next weekend.

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November 22, 2007 by Joel.

I’m in Winterville, NC, visiting my folks for the Thanksgiving holiday…got in Wednesday evening, and had steamed oysters at Wimpies. Got in early enough to go to the rifle range and shoot a bit. My neighbor has arranged a place to go deer hunting, and I hope to get out there later this weekend. I fired a few shots with my .30-.30 to make sure I could hit what I was shooting at. I can still roll a tin can at 50 yards, shooting offhand ;-). My dad is also going to let me borrow a .30-40 Krag he has (with a scope, better for low light conditions). Who knows, I may get a deer.

We’ll probably go to the range again this afternoon to shoot. It’s supposed to rain today and turn much colder, so we’ll try to get out before then. It’s very warm right now, upper 70’s and sunny, but quite windy. I doubt we try to shoot any clay pigeons, as the wind would really put some “junk” on them…

Hope all y’all that celebrate Thanksgiving have a chance to visit family this weekend.

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November 14, 2007 by Joel.

Before this post, I noticed that 3 of the last 4 items I posted started with “So, ….”

I think I’m in a rut

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November 14, 2007 by Joel.

So, I’ve been running Mac OS X 10.5 (aka Leopard) on my work MacBook and my home iMac for over a week now…I’m pleased. A very smooth transition. I like the new features, like Time Machine, the Mail.app notes/to do’s, Spaces, and iChat enhancements. I have had one crash (the Mac equivalent of BSOD) on my MacBook, but it’s had maybe 2 or 3 of those crashes in the 7 months I’ve used that MacBook. I don’t think my iMac has ever crashed (I’ve had this one about 8 months).

I didn’t do a Leopard upgrade on my Intel-based Mini (den media center PC) nor my wife’s PowerPC PowerBook. I’d recommend that all my Mac buddies that have new generation Intel Macs give it a go!

My Apple stock will be happy if you do ;-).

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November 9, 2007 by Joel.

So, decided to get my wife to drive on the college visit trip (see previous post), so I could work some on a strategic planning document I need to get some traction on…

While I was riding, I thought I’d check my email, since I’ve got my blackberry 8830 configured as a tethered modem with my MacBook. However, it would not connect. I was reduced to paying $9.95 for connectivity at the hotel

However, with my “fine” ethernet connectivity (packet loss, jitter, etc.), I decided to see if I could figure out the problem with my bluetooth modem. It would connect and immediately drop. I’d just last weekend upgraded to Leopard, and figured that must be the problem. Did some web searches and didn’t find anything relevant. So, I changed the modem settings to something that shouldn’t have worked, and it didn’t. Then, changed back to the original settings. Damn thing works perfectly now. Go figure.

Posted in UNC-G, Technology | No Comments »

November 9, 2007 by Joel.

Off today on some college visits. My youngest son, Jeff, is considering Guilford College and UNC-Asheville. Visited Guilford this morning. I was very impressed. A small school, but beautiful, spacious campus (over 300 acres). Things got off to a good start when we drove up in front of the admissions building and they had a parking space reserved with a sign with Jeff’s name on it. Nice touch! I was very impressed with the programs and the facilities. They have about 1400 traditional students and 1000 “non-traditional” older part-time students. Spent about two hours there. Jan and Jeff did an open house at Guilford in June, but I’d never been there, though I work not 5 miles away at UNCG.

I’m writing this from Asheville, NC, where we’re staying for the night. The UNCA open house starts first thing in the morning. We decided to splurge and stay in downtown Asheville in the Mariott Renaissance hotel. It’s just across the street from the Thomas Wolfe memorial, and just a block from the Asheville downtown area. Asheville seems to have a very vibrant downtown, lots of restaurants, theaters, bars, etc. Had some great pizza at Mellow Mushroom. They must have had 50 or 60 beers on tap, including about 20 from local microbreweries. I had a couple (or 3) from the Highland Brewing company, their Oatmeal Porter and the Gaelic Ale. Two of the Gaelic Ales, in fact ;-). Looking forward to visiting the UNCA campus in the morning. That’s all for now!

Posted in UNC-A, Family | 2 Comments »

November 4, 2007 by Joel.

So, Google now supports IMAP for Gmail! Fantastic! I’m testing it right now with mail.app on my Mac running Leopard (I’ll do a blog post on Leopard later). It seems to work well. Because of the nature of Gmail, it does some things differently. Here’s a chart that describes common IMAP actions and what happens in Gmail. There is one thing that it does that doesn’t seem to be described in the Gmail documentation. It’s not a problem, just undocumented. When you delete a message from the IMAP Inbox, it removes it from the Gmail inbox, which you expect…it leaves it in any other labels where the message may appear. However, it also creates a new Gmail label “deleted messages” and puts the message there, as well. It’s not really deleted (in the Gmail trash), apparently just flagged.

I’ll keep on using it a bit. I’ve gotten really used to the Gmail web interface, however. The one thing that this does, though, is reenable use of X.509 certificates for digital signatures/encryption, as that’s handled in the client.

Posted in Technology | 2 Comments »

November 1, 2007 by Joel.

Last night, as has become a tradition in the Gibbon Drive cul-de-sac, we set up tables, chairs and a portable fire pit at the street. Each house contributed bottles of wine, we ordered pizza, and brought our collective candy for trick or treaters. We also had “give away” cups for the adults ;-). It was a great, warm night, and we had a good number of kids coming by. Also, a increasing number of parents came by, and many brought their empty wine glasses to be filled for their “treat”. A lot more fun than simply waiting at the door, plus my dogs don’t have to put up with the doorbell!

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