Tom's weblog

Tom’s occasional rambling thoughts

  • Stimulus check rebate calculator

    There are a number of calculators out there for determining the rebate one can expect from the recently passed stimulus package, of course these all require you to give your income over to some website. Couple that with the pervasive tracking going on nowadays, you just told Facebook, Google and lord knows how many others…

  • SQRL Login

    I was told that it is very easy to setup and turns out it is. Logging into this site via the SQRL protocol is now available. To find out more check out the information site at www.grc.com/sqrl. It really is quite amazing how it works and it does just work. If you have an existing…

  • Car update

    So here I am quite a bit later and finally getting an update out here. Have to get better at this. Update, the car is going quite well, crossed over 60000 miles a couple weeks ago and still showing 12 bars of capacity. I don’t expect that to last a lot longer though, when I…

  • New car

    So the Odyssey van was starting to fail, transmission was failing and cost to repair was about 4 times the value of the car in good shape, time to update. I had been considering an electric vehicle for a while, looking around I found a used 2013 Nissan Leaf on sale at the dealer, a…

  • The Force Awakens!

    Picked up the movie tonight and we are enjoying again, this is well done with a lot to pick up on subsequent viewings.

  • Crossed this threshold the other day

    Tooling along the road the other day and noticed that I had reached a milestone in my car:

  • Microsoft can’t get it right

    All these years we figure Microsoft Windows performed poorly on other hardware was because of the many permutations of that it had to deal with, well the Surface Pro 3 I recently got at work dispels that notion. It’s biggest failing is that once the device goes into hibernation it never comes back out, have…

  • The painted door

    The house is coming along well, this past weekend we got the front door painted. Inside this week the floor will get its final treatment, suppose we could start bringing some items in once that is done, need to check on that.

  • Google Chrome major fail

    I have been happily using chrome for years now but today they have seen fit to break the application and send me back to Firefox. I found that there are now some pages for which scrolling does not work correctly. Wheel scrolling can be fixed for some by adding an exception but that did not…

  • The next phase begins

    I stopped by the house site on Wednesday to find two of Cedar Crests people there, George and George. They were putting together the first wall, the outer wall for the Office and Grant’s room. They also covered all of the concrete with plastic sheeting and kraft paper to protect it. Will have some pictures…

  • Let’s get small

    I took a look at this site on my phone and about the only response was ugh. So a quick search turned up this theme, Twenty Twelve, pretty simple but most important it comes through nicely on a small screen. I have been paying more attention to this after using my wsdot small screen site…

  • Work continues

    Been too long since I updated what is happening, over the next week I will put up information about the new house and what we are up to. A quick synopsis, we are setup in a nice apartment, chosen a house plan, arranged financing, permits are issued and work has started. In the meantime, I…

  • Android frustrations

    Happens every time, whenever I start thinking android is not that bad I need to actually do something with it. Tonight it was updates. My son got a Samsung galaxy tab 2 from a friend, I was helping him get it ready for a trip. Went into the software updates in settings and clicked update,…

  • A place to lay our heads

    It has taken me a week to calm down enough to write about this, getting an apartment turned out to be far more difficult and stressful than I would have imagined. Typically the temporary housing people would take care of everything, we only need to sign the papers and wait for the furniture to be…

  • The Day of Reckoning

    The insurance inspectors show up and give their verdict.

  • I cannot believe this is happening

    A couple people from Service master came out today to assess the contents of the house. In a nutshell if it is metal, ceramic or glass then generally the item is savable. Plastic or pressboard stuff, forget about it. Important papers they can treat with ozone to neutralize the odor, or at least some of…

  • The news does not improve

    (I am writing this well after the fact but setting the publish date to when things happened.) Frst Team checked things out today and declared that all the clothes which were exposed are a loss. Of course, this is everything hanging up in the closets which is generally our better stuff. Guess I get to…

  • What a crappy to begin a week

    (I am writing this well after the fact but setting the publish date to when things happened.) So I get a call today at 1:07 from my younger boy who went home early from school because he was not feeling well. He tells me that I need to come home now because the house is…

  • Anniversary

    This is too cool, just found out this weekend that Kathleen’s and mine wedding anniversary falls on same day as the first broadcast of the radio drama of The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy. I could not think of a better thing to share that day with.

  • Who is the criminal here?

    HSBC funds drug dealers and terrorists to the tune of many billions of dollars and they are fined, what, 1.9 billion? Sure a lot to you and me but to them, but for a company with assets of 2,721 billion dollars (that is 2.721 TRILLION dollars or 2,721,000,000,000) and a market cap of 201 billion…

Got any book recommendations?

Get In Touch