How come it took so long before I found out about Blu 102.9 here in Santa Fe? It looks like they’ve been on the air since 2003, but only recently Candice mentioned that they play “my kind of music”. And yes, they do. Thanks guys for a groovy sound (although I wish you would stream at more than 32 KBps).
Candice gave me the “George W. Bushisms” desk calendar as a present. Here’s the one for Tuesday:
The a$$-clown going through “69.50.182.154″ has been pretty persistent in trying to drop comment spam on my server over the last few days. I would almost say the behaviour is borderline ambitious. In fact:
localhost$ grep "69.50.182.154" access_log | wc -l303
localhost$
(that’s since this morning 2am). And:
localhost$ zcat access_log.1.gz| grep "69.50.182.154" | wc -l1398
localhost$
(that would be last week)
So Emil has earned himself already a permanent place in my heart for providing an open proxy to the world, but I can’t believe that nobody else is being targeted - or are you being bugged by “69.50.182.154″ as well?
We have no idea why it happened and especially why it happened now, but suddenly little human Pia has started to realize that there’s something in the sky that looks different. We’re talking Moon for those who don’t know:
She pointed up there at the disc over the clouds and I said “moon”, “Mond” and from that point on she was hooked. Every five minutes she would ask to see the “ma”, “mo”, “me” or something along those lines …
We had “Sweet & Sour Cabbage” (red cabbage) last night, which happens to be a typical German/Bavarian recipe. Pia loves the sweet and sour taste. Here’s the recipe in case you’re interested:
Melt butter in heavy large pot over medium-low heat. Add onions; saute until translucent, about 10 mins. Mix in next 7 ingredients. Add cabbage; cook until cabbage begins to wilt, stirring often, about 5 mins. Cover; simmer until cabbage is crisp-tender, stirring often, about 17 mins. Uncover; add apple and apple juice and cook until apple is crisp-tender, stirring often, about 5 mins.
Makes 8 to 10 servings.
The World Press Photo winners were announced yesterday. You can view the winner and all other photos at: worldpressphoto.org.
I’m not surprised to hear that the photo below won:
“Happy New Year” as the Chinese would say. I know we are a bit too early for the Chinese New Year, but the Rooster arrived on Saturday the 5th of Feburary with a party at our home.
We had close to 50 people at our house and enjoyed some food from “Little House” on Cerrillos Road. Judging by how late people stayed and the fact that I had to move about 25 empty bottles of Red, White and Prosecco into the recycle bin, I believe we can speak of a successful start into the New Year. Thanks everybody for coming and celebrating with us!
Take a close look at Frisco while he’s hiding behind Pia’s feet. This is the dog that gave us a little scare yesterday evening. It started with both dogs roaming around in front of the house while I was installing a new car seat for Pia. They usually stay within a few minutes of our home and a whistle brings them back in no time. When I whistled at 5pm Max did come back immediately, but Frisco was missing. We waited about 45mins for the dog to show up .. still no Frisco. This was highly unusual, because it was dinner time (5pm) for them and Frisco would not miss a full bowl of food for anything.
It was getting dark and cold and I took the flashlight and headed out to search for him. I walked for about 1 hour, but didn’t see or hear any signs of the dog. Back home Candice called some of our neighbours to let them know that we are missing a dog and whether they had seen him. Nothing!
A little while later I headed out again to scan the area where the dogs usually chase rabbits in more detail. Still nothing. However this time I thought I heard a whine between our home and our neighbour’s home.
Pictures of a wounded dog, unable to make it back home, went through my mind. I saw myself spending the rest of the night outside trying to find the poor doggie. After returning back home again, Candice and I went to the front and tried to listen for noises out there. And this time we both heard a whine coming from the direction of our neighbours home. I went there again and checked his fenced in dog run area where the whining seemed to be coming from. After 15 mins my flashlight catches the reflection of two dog eyes inside the fenced area. There’s some barbwire as well and I was afraid the dog would be slit and bleeding to death there.
I was quite surprised when I find Frisco sitting there, rolling over when I approach him and don’t find a single scratch on him. It turned out that somehow he managed to get into the fenced area, but did not find a way out. Instead of making noises when we called him, he was sitting there and whining about how cold it was, how hungry he was and how he was scared in the dark.
Thank you, Frisco dog, for giving your mommy a scare and your daddy a two-hours walking exercise ….
Update 03/31/2005: This issue has been resolved. Volvo has agreed to remove the “On Call Plus” system on a “goodwill” basis. Please see this entry for an update. Thanks guys at Volvo!
A bit over a year ago we bought a Volvo V70XC here in Santa Fe (see The safety question - answered).
We are very happy with the car and especially its performance. When we bought the car, it came with a builtin phone system and the “On Call Plus” service free-of-charge for a year. We decided to try the system for a year, because we were assured that we didn’t have to renew after the trial year if we didn’t like/need the system.
Needless to say, we don’t feel it is necessary to have the “On Call Plus” service in times where a cellphone has the same effect. So we let the service expire and did not respond to the “warning” mails that our service would expire soon.
The moment the system expired we received a little warning message in the dashboard display of the car. “On Call Plus deactivated” it said in there:
And to make sure that you know this is a “serious problem”, the little yellow warning triangle with the exclamation point comes on as well. You press a button to acknowledge the message and both, message and warning triangle, disappear.
What’s extremely annoying is the fact that they only disappear until you stop and start the car again. “On Call Plus deactivated” it screams at you the next time you start the car. I thought this would stop after a period, but it has been close to a few months now and we still get the message every time we start the car.
What makes this issue post-worthy is the fact that other more important and maybe life-threatening message are hidden behind the annoying “On Call Plus deactivated” message. You have to acknowledge the “On Call Plus deactivated” message before you see other ones. Just recently we experienced that when we got the warning that the break fluid was getting low.
We had the car in for a service at Santa Fe Mazda-Volvo-Suzuki on Cerrillos Road and I asked them to look into the problem. When I picked up the car they told me that it would cost around $200.- to remove the entire phone setup and in conjunction remove the warning message from the display.
Hmm - I have to pay $200.- to fix a problem that was introduced by the “On Call Plus” expiration? I have to pay to make my car as secure as it was when I bought it? That does not sound right to me.
If you are being offered “On Call Plus” with your vehicle and a non-strings-attached trial of the system, please do yourself a favour and ask them to remove the unit when you buy your vehicle unless you’re absolutely sure that you need the system.
Comments(9)
