GPSDrive (http://www.gpsdrive.de/) is nifty software for Linux that turns a laptop and a cheap GPS receiver into a vehicle navigation system. It displays maps, records tracks, logs speed traps, and all the other little features you'd expect in a system trying to divert your eyes from the road.

It also sports a built-in system for networking with other GPSDrive enabled systems on the road to mutually plot one another's locations. The system, called friendsd, uses a simple UDP server to record and report the position, speed, and heading of other reporting systems on the same server. Of course, this reporting only works if the laptop has access to the Internet but with the various cellular and wi-fi systems available that's not so much a stretch.

...or your own silly Condo board. For the second time I've run for and been shot down running for the association board for my condominium development.

The board determines the budget, handles rules infractions, and controls the contract with our management company. The current board, though well meaning, has made a lot of choices I haven't understood and they haven't felt it necessary to explain.

The first time I ran, two years ago, I ran offering a "do nothing" board. I wanted the board to do as little as possible with as little as possible and feared things wouldn't go that way without my involvement. I didn't make the board then and we have had a very... hands on board.

For the last five or so years I've been trying to imagine what it would have been like growing up with easy computing, and I don't think it would have been good for me. Back in 1988 when I first started seriously playing with computers they were hard to use. You had to learn a lot of obscure text commands, and most everything you tried to do required that you know how something worked that could reasonably have been abstracted away from you.

For the last three years Cari, Bridget, Joe and I have co-hosted a Halloween party at Cari's and my place. Every year I man the bar because I enjoy doing so and like the chance to talk to everyone periodically over the course of the night. This year I decided to turn the role into my costume and dressed as Moe Szyslak, the bartender from The Simpsons.

In one particularly good third season episode, titled "Flaming Moe" (http://www.snpp.com/episodes/8F08.html), Moe finds great success serving a drink whose recipe was stolen from Homer. The drink, which Moe calls the Flaming Moe, includes as its secret ingredient Krusty Brand non-narkotik cough syrup and erupts into quickly retreating pillar of flame when lit. I figured if I was gonna do Moe I had to make that drink.

Three days ago I posted a rather lengthy entry wherein I decried the current state of open, collaborative calendaring. In it I listed six requirements for calendaring software and settled on the option available to me that met the most of them. Now I'm changing my mind.

At the time I needed a new calendaring solution fast and had checked out all the candidates before. The software package Remind had a nice interface, an expressive configuration language, web-visibility, local-storage, and was open source. It met four of the six requirements and would have served admirably for a few years. So why did I find myself laying awake worrying about my choice? (Seriously, I'm that big of a loser.)

I'm happy with my email client, text editor, compilers, IRC client, news reader, web browser, and just about every other tool I use in the process of my daily computing. The only consistent source of displeasure has been my calendaring (when the hell did that become a word?) application. I have a hideously over-scheduled life and need some sort of scheduling solution be it computerized or otherwise to keep things straight, but I've never found anything that really suits me needs.

Being a telecommuter, the closest thing I have to an office is an IRC channel. IRC (Internet Relay Chat) is like a chat room minus the emoticons and pedophiles. While normally the office IRC channel is the very embodiment of maturity, there are two silly things about it that have always annoyed me. The first being that everyone gets to pick their own name, and the second being they can change their names at will.

On Thursday, October 23rd, 2003 I'm hosting another PGP key signing event. For those not familiar with the concept here's a four paragraph primer on public key cryptography:

Each person in the system has two matched "keys": a public key and a private key. A message encrypted with a public key can only be decrypted the complementary private key. Thus public keys are distributed far and wide while private keys are carefully guarded. When someone wants to send me a secret message they need only grab my public key from one of many freely accessible public repositories, use that key to encrypt their message, and then send the newly encrypted message to me.

There's a program on freshmeat called email2sms (http://freshmeat.net/projects/email2sms/) that runs emails through a series of filters until they're short enough to be sent to a cell phone as a SMS message -- which typically have a maximum length of 150 characters. The script is mostly just a wrapper around the nifty Lingua::EN::Squeeze Perl module.

Squeeze takes English text and shortens it aggressively using all manner of abbreviations. It leaves the text remarkably readable for being about half its original length.

I try to lead a very uncluttered life whether one's talking about hard drive layout, personal responsibilities, or physical clutter in my condo. Three years ago I got my first TV and DVD player. Each came with its own remote control. Not wanting to deal with two remotes on my coffee table (which at the time was a cardboard box) I went out and bought a nice $20 universal remote that was very programmable and easily handled the functions of both the TV and the DVD player.