Ted's Blog – Page 104 – Can't tell you more than I told you already?

TrueCrypt

For a while I’ve been carrying around a flash drive on my keychain. It helps if I ever need to transfer files from work or pictures from Susan’s house, or whatever. One of the things I put on there is paystubs that I download from work and then bring home. And sometimes I want some spreadsheet from home to be available when I’m at work, so I’ve been carrying around some other financial stuff too. I realized I don’t want just anyone to be able to get all of this if I ever lose the drive or my keys.

I looked around for some kind of flash drive vault software and soon found a free one called TrueCrypt. Like a lot of really good SourceForge collaborations, it has a huge feature set as people make recommendations for improvements. That has also made it kind of complicated: it has a 119 page user manual. I had to follow the first 23 pages of instructions just to store my first file (and this is the abbreviated quick start).

TrueCrypt’s approach is kind of neat. You create an encrypted file on the flash drive (I chose to make my 300 MB out of a 2 GB drive) that can be any name (so I chose katie.avi and figured people would just think it was a video of my dog that they couldn’t open with Windows Media Player for some reason). You open the TrueCrypt software (stored in unprotected space on the drive), open the archive file, enter your password, and it mounts a new drive letter where you can see all of your files and also drag and drop files just like another flash drive (for instance, my flash drive might be drive J:, but the TrueCrypt archive will show up as drive M:).

I still don’t have the hang of it yet, but the level of protection is really impressive. They recommend a 20-letter password and they generate some kind of random key to use by having you move the mouse around for 30 seconds. There are other options like different security algorithms and you can hide the archive file if you want, but I just started on this last night.

Decaf

Last year I started making iced coffee at home. I was using Folger individual serving “tea bags” to make the coffee, then adding sugar, cooling it down, then adding milk and pouring it over ice. When Publix had bricks of coffee as their mystery penny item (mystery solved), I got one. That savings meant I then had to go buy a coffee maker (a tiny Mr. Coffee) plus filters. So I did that for a while and Jeb even gave me some Starbucks coffee for my birthday.

It’s not like I was drinking coffee every day, though when it got cold I did start drinking it hot. And I wasn’t drinking that much, but I would still wind up with some headaches that I attributed to the coffee (could also be related to sleep apnea).

So this last time when the Publix mystery item was a brick of coffee in either regular or decaf, I decided to try decaf. Even after reading about the various processes to decaffeinate coffee, I’m still not sure how it works, but Publix says it uses only water to decaffeinate the beans (instead of stronger solvents) before grinding them.

So far, so good. I don’t notice much difference in the taste and I don’t think I’m getting headaches. When Mom comes home I can give her an unopened penny brick of Publix coffee I’ve had in my freezer.

Taxes Done

This week I got the last of my 1099’s and although I had done a rough draft of my taxes a couple of weeks ago, I was able to finish everything last night. I think last year I lowered my number of withholding allowances at work, plus I had tons of stock market losses, plus my salary was frozen by the state budget crisis, so I wound up getting $2500 back federal and $700 back on state. I really don’t like getting that much back, so at work last month I bumped my withholding allowances up a bunch. That is nice because it is giving me an extra $300 per month in my paycheck (the only way to get a raise). Actually I may have overdone it because that will actually give me too much money back and I will end up owing taxes, which I’m not crazy about either (ideally I’d like to get a refund of about $200 which seems like a suitable reward for doing my taxes).

Continue reading “Taxes Done”

Philip Glass and Akhnaten

I’ve been a fan of Philip Glass for probably fifteen years or so. One of the CD’s of his that I own is called Songs From the Trilogy, with the Trilogy being three operas he wrote during the 70’s and 80’s, the first called Einstein on the Beach and the last called Akhnaten about an Egyptian pharaoh (I guess that’s the only kind). Einstein on the Beach is probably the most famous because it was whole different take on opera and classical music in general. However, of the songs on the Trilogy CD, the ones from Akhnaten are probably my favorites. When Susan and I were considering buying season tickets to the opera, one thing I liked was that they were going to do an optional fifth show at Emory University and it would be Akhnaten. I still hadn’t heard the whole opera, just the four songs that made the CD.

Continue reading “Philip Glass and Akhnaten”

Danny Immortalized

In November 1999 I went on a day trip one Sunday up to see some covered bridges and take pictures for the web page at work. Jeb checked with Danny to see if he wanted to go and he was up for it, so Danny and I went to go look at bridges. At a bridge near Colbert, east of Athens, we went underneath the bridge so I could get a picture of the rock abutment that the end of the bridge rested on. Danny was wandering around under there too and got into one of the pictures. Most of the pictures on the website were kind of small but you could click on them and see a bigger version of the picture. So for fun I used the picture without Danny for the small picture, but if you clicked on it you saw a bigger picture of the abutment, only with Danny. Several years later our website was revamped and I didn’t want to have to re-write all of the covered bridge web pages, so our IT department took over the pages and rewrote them. Then, last year, we got another makeover, only this time they got rid of all of the pictures. My boss complained to IT that the whole point of the covered bridge website was to see pictures and get maps to the sites and those had been eliminated (and he has to field all of the public’s inquiries about covered bridges). I guess they agreed with this because just recently some of the pictures reappeared along with redrawn maps that look a lot better than the ones that had been done in Paint. The pictures now are small and can’t be clicked on to see bigger ones, but guess who has survived all of the edits and changes of ownership?

Howards Bridge