Road Trip 2008: Day 3

More driving today, as we crossed 5 more states/districts: Virginia, Maryland, D.C., Delaware, and Pennsylvania.

We left Wilson, NC around 9ish and found our first Starbucks since leaving Tampa about 50 miles north on I-95 … finally! 😉 Continuing north into Virginia, we decided take the Jamestown-Scotland Ferry across to Williamsburg. This entailed leaving I-95 and taking some back roads through the Virginia countryside, which was a nice change from the monotony of the interstate system. The ferry ride across the James River was pretty cool.

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Once in Williamsburg, we made a bee-line to The Cheese Shop in Merchants’ Square for lunch, making sure to pick up some bread ends and house dressing for later. After lunch we briefly strolled the grounds of the colonial settlement, taking some photos of the courthouse, armory, and Governor’s palace before jumping back into the car.

Many hours later, we took a detour through Washington, D.C., driving through the national mall to catch glimpses of the White House, Capitol building, and the Supreme Court. Then it was back to the interstate.

Finally around 7:30 we reached my brother-in-law and sister-in-law’s place in Cheyney, PA. Tomorrow we’ll probably take in the sites of Philadelphia.

Road Trip 2008: Day 2

Today was a driving day. We left Orlando bright and early shortly after 8am and took I-4 the rest of the way to I-95. From there we turned northward bound …

We crossed into Georgia around 11:30am and then headed over to Savannah for lunch. We ended up at The Shrimp Factory on the river walk … excellent Caesar salad and really good fried shrimp! On the way back to the car, we popped into the Savannah Candy Kitchen to pick up some sweets for the road.

Back on I-95, we made it to South Carolina around 3:30pm and then into North Carolina about three hours later. Would you believe we couldn’t find a single Starbucks off of I-95 between Jacksonville and Wilson? There’s a serious market opening there.

We finally made it to our hotel in Wilson, NC about 8:30pm. Whew. Tomorrow: more driving .

Road Trip 2008: Day 1

We spent today mostly around International Drive near the Orange County Convention Center. After breakfast at the hotel and a little time spent over at Downtown Disney, we headed over to the Peabody Hotel to watch the famous Peabody Ducks parade out of the elevator, down the red carpet into the fountain in the center of the lobby.

I love spotting technology breakthroughs (when the behind-the-scenes technology “breaks through” and is visible to the public). I found this Windows XP breakthrough on a plasma screen in the Renaissance Resort’s lobby:

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We went to evening mass at the National Shrine of Mary, Queen of the Universe. The 2,000 seat building is not a local parish church but a shrine that exists solely to minister to the millions of tourists that come to the area every year.

Tomorrow is a driving day … we head north.

Road Trip 2008: Day 0

This week we’re on vacation: a road trip that will take us 3,000 miles up the east coast of the United States, over to Ohio, and back to Florida in the next 10 days. I’ll be blogging the “highlights” when I can via my Eee.

We left the Tampa area right after work this evening and headed over to Orlando since my in-laws were there for the 2008 Kiwanis Convention. Check out the sweet “ghetto blaster” we found in our hotel room!

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Too bad I didn’t have any tracks from “Breakin’ 2: Electric Boogaloo” on my iPod. 😀

Wow, it’s really quiet when the power is out

We had a quiet, relaxing, electricity-free evening last night thanks to a 5 and a half hour power outage in our neighborhood.

It was remarkable how quiet it was in the house without all the white noise we are used to: the bubbling of the aquarium, the hum of the refrigerator and the air conditioning, etc. My daughter found the whole thing entertaining and proposed the idea that we should have one electricity-free evening every month (candles, flashlights, no TV, etc.). I think we’re actually going to try that.

From the tech side of outage: I run NUT on my Ubuntu server that hosts windracer.net so I know the UPS switched over to battery at 4:52pm yesterday afternoon when the outage started because upsmon sent me an e-mail. At the same time, Nagios started reporting (also via e-mail) that my office printer, my TiVo HD, and wireless bridge were down. Those are in a different room so I knew it was the entire house without power and not just the circuit to the computer closet. 15 minutes later, NUT gracefully shut down my NAS (a Buffalo LinkStation 250 running the OpenLink firmware), and then the server itself as the UPS reached a low-battery state. I’m using a 750VA UPS in the closet to power the modem, router, NAS, and server, and NUT reports only a 40% load for a 14 minute battery run-time. That seems a little low so I might need to look into replacing that unit. Everything booted up normally when the power came back on at 10:18pm.

Before upgrading the server to Hardy Heron two weeks ago, my uptime record was 135 days. So much for my own personal five 9s of uptime. 😀

Tethering the Treo 680 and Eee PC

Next week I’ll be taking a road trip vacation up the east coast which means a lot of time in the car. I thought it would be cool to be able to use my Eee PC in conjunction with my Treo 680’s data connection to get on the ‘net while (literally) on the road (instead of having to stop and find an open wireless access point). And no, I wouldn’t be doing this while driving. 🙂

Normally mobile broadband would involve some sort of cellular modem for your laptop in conjunction with an expensive data plan (like AT&T’s solution). Most of those products don’t take Linux into account, however, and I already have an unlimited data plan on my Treo.

I came across a thread on the eeeuser forums that got me started: using Mobile Stream’s USBModem utility on the Palm allows the Eee to see it as a normal modem when connected via its USB sync cable. Then I created a new dial-up networking connection on the Eee, fired it up, and wallah! Internet access through my cell phone.

Granted, the Treo is not a 3G device, which means Edge speeds (see the screenshot below) but I’m not expecting to stream video off of YouTube, just check my mail and browse the internet.

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It didn’t work right away, though. I had to do some tinkering to get the settings just right. You can find the details in my reply to that thread on the eeeuser forums.

Vista search broken after SP1

I ran into another Vista SP1 problem this evening.

Whenever I used Start-Search, or the Win+F shortcut, I got the following error:

search: This file does not have a program associated with it for performing this action. Create an association in the Set Associations control panel.

Google to the rescue again! Apparently something in SP1 can cause registry permission errors on certain keys, which breaks Vista’s search feature. Wonderful.

Using the instructions in this post from the Winhelponline blog, though, I was able to fix the problem!