4th of July at the farm

07/01/07 9:20PM - Fourth of July week up here at the farm. Arrived yesterday at 2 pm. Saw a deer in the field and a bull moose in the river. Alex is eating Grandmom out of house and home. Happy as ever, I took some video footage of him laughing away. Grandmom and Granddad have a new electric four wheeler. I thought Aaron would be too young to ride it very well at just shy of 3 yrs old, but had very few troubles. I also have some video footage of him hitting a rock at about .001 mph.


Didn't really get much work done today, weather was crazy, rain clouds kept rolling in and in between beautiful sunshine. When it rained it rained sheets, Aaron and I were trapped in the barn as bee-bee sized hail came down.


We had Grandmom's famous Masardis ribs for dinner, hmmm good. Put the kids to bed, watched law and order and now I'm blogging in bed as Amy tries to catch some sleep early in hopes to get enough sleep to compensate for the cats keeping her up again tonight....Lucy is scrathing at the door right now...Amy has her ear plugs in, hopefully they do not give out before Lucy does. I'll be asleep in 5 minutes, barring any earthquakes that might make me stir.


07/04/07 - Weather turned out to be great. Better than yesterday which was supposed to be the better day. Speaking of yesterday, yesterday we took a picnic lunch up to the north branch forks. Aaron caught his first fish. It was all fun until the 5 inch "chub" came within 3 feet of the shore and Aaron started screaming. He declared he doesn't like fishing and wanted to throw rocks into the water instead. Anyway, we ate lunch with a nice man we met at the forks named "Peter". It started to down pour on my last few bites of steak and so the s'mores would have to wait until another day.


next day; today; the fourth of july. Lazy morning, then we headed up to a "fair grounds" in Portage. It was 4 creepy guys and a young kid running dinky little rides. I thought rather pricey, but Aaron only made it thru 3 rides so we bailed out of there rather fast. Went to portage lake and played on the playground, met a nice set of kids there, then came back here for lunch. Worked on ripping the old wall down on the hen house then relaxed with momma and a beer until Aaron got up. We went for a truck ride to fish in the river. Caught 4 chub and a pumpkinseed. Aaron seemed to like fishing much better. The whole time I was watching a moose was bathing 1000 yards down the stream.


Came back for burgers, dogs, fire and s'mores. Bath time and off to bed with the kids.

07/08/07 - Back home in Tewksbury. Weather is good, although momma is feeling under it. Yesterday (07/07/07) we went to the Ashland parade. Aaron rode with granddad on his old John Deer "L". It has a crank start and is really old. I took lot's of pictures, it was pretty cute. I had to walk alongside in case Aaron didn't last entire parade and sure enough, at two thirds of the way thru he wanted to get off and stay with mommy.

Storyland '07

Here we are in Conway, New Hampshire. we rented a house about 2000 yards north of Storyland. Cute little 4 bedroom chalet. We spent couple hours at storyland today but will hit there tomorrow again for another run. Whale ride with dadda, fish ride with momma, tractor ride with granddad and raft ride with Granddad and dadda, and aaron goes to sleep with a smile on his face, despite the little fever he's developed earlier today.

Alex is doing great, wanted daddy to play with back at the chalet. Both went to sleep by 7:15 and adults setteled down for lasagna.

Charlie and Noah are supposed to be in an hour, maybe I'll find the nintendo 64 and get some play time before Noah dominates it.

oh, and margaritas taste just as good in New Hampshire

Memorial Day at the Farm

Great long weekend at the Franklin Farm in Ashland, ME. Whole family was there including Charlie, Noah, Ed and Laurel. Bob bought a new DR brush http://www.drpower.com, worked great clearing the new growth that has come back bewteen the pine tree I've been clearing the last few years. Man am I soar.

Aaron had a ball on the electric gator http://www.rbflett.co.uk/acatalog/MCE40933X000.JPG, figured out the gas pedal, but not the steering, luckily Noah was there to help avoid too much damage sans the rhubarb patch and a small yew.

Speaking of rhubarb, Alex has a taste this weekend, he ate it along with anything else he could get his hands on.

Came back and only chore I was able to get done was to replace my router replaced. Last week my Linksys WRT54GL running OpenWRT was going in and out, so I got a Linksys BEFSR41 to replace it. I have a netgear access point was wasn't using so I was covered. I suspect the WRT is still ok, but I figured if I'm going to run experimental software on it, I should have a backup

Off to bed, long day driving back.

Leaving Pingtel ...

Just 2 more days at Pingtel. I decided to leave after 4 years at Pingtel. I started this long blog about why and what the next job offer has, but I quickly realized all the material was for my benefit that I'll never go back and read it, so I decided to spare you from a long and boring email about open source and standard corporate blah blah blah. I convinced myself 2 weeks ago and so that leads me to just 2 days left at Pingtel.

I plan to have withdrawls from the project I helped run called sipXconfig and my partner in crime Damian over the next few months. Working at Pingtel was quite a ride and working with Damian was spetacular. I have no doubt I made a life-long friend, I just wonder if he'll let me make a video call to him at the top of every hour to discuss topics such as: why bird watching is just like fishing, open source is the quintessential example agile programming and how mini vans really do drive like cars.

Traveling w/Nokia n800

Couple things of note when traveling w/n800.
- I need to have hotel in google maps so I can easily map directions from there to other places.
- I need to figure out Points of Interest in maemo-mapper because having a text file with addresses is too inconvienent. http://www.portsmouthnh.com was really helpful.
Some pre-mapped points of interest to:
o ice cream
o wifi hotspots
o coffee shops
o liquer/package/convienence stores.
o breakfast places
o movie theaters
o electronic stores.
- Sitting the sun might be warm, but I can't see squat on the screen.
- I need to have it more readily accessable. pulling in/out of backpack doesn't work
- wikipedia can be convenient place to start looking for info about a place.
- set of hyperlinks bookmarked
- menus to potential resturants
- local newspapers

Portsmouth '07

so after "Me and Ollie's" we came back to the hotel and started watching "Blood Diamond". Intense movie, we had to stop it half way so Momma could get her massage. I escaped to look for pearl earings because the ones I got her for her birthday have yellow gold instead of white gold. I found some but decided to spill the beans and have Momma take at look with me, luckily I did she wasn't convinced.

We stopped t Gary's Package store and I picked up 2 40ozers, Samual Smith's Outmeal Stout and Shipyard Export. We had Amy's Conundrum wine chilling back at the hotel. We drank, finished our movie and got ready for dinner at the Dolphin.

We arrived at the Dolphin and had a great meai. Arugala salad w/goat cheese, I had duck w/artichoke and Momma had lobster pie. Then we had some cheese (european's have cheese after the meal) some sort of brie and sheep cheese.

It was 8:30 and Amy was yawning, so we walked to Starbucks, got some coffee and came back to the hotel to settle in where I sit typing away on my Nokia n800.

Me and Ollies

Momma and I ...or maybe I should say Me and Momma are at a little lunch place called "Me and Ollie's" in Portsmouth, NH. Little shopping and walking around. Amy said I had to talk to her at lunch, she should just email me

Alex was wide awake tonight

He started crying soon after he was put down. I took 2 turns, Amy took 2 turns, finally he stayed asleep. He would stop crying as long as he could see or touch mommy or daddy.

Aaron has had some bad reports from daycare. Apparently he has been ganging up with a classmate to pick on a kid in the big kids room. I re-enacted play time with him during breakfast this am. I used a salt shaker has aaron and a stuffed seahorse has joeseph

seahorse: hey aaron, want to play blocks?
salt: yeah!

seahorse: hey aaron, want to fight with Nicki?
salt: YEAH!
daddy: NO!!!! Aaron, you shouldn't fight, that would make nicki very sad
seahorse: hey aaron, let go play blocks with nicki.
salt: ok.

Blogging from N800

I got my Sierra Stowaway Keyboard. It does the job. When setuuo, it looks like something is missing, just looks goofy but who cares.

Blogging is definitely something i wanted to be able to do from my n800. I had a hell of a time logging in, I finally had to go to http://www.blogger.com/login.g and tried that twice before i could get in. Main blogger page wouldn't show login widget, some ajax thing i suppose.

Nokia N800 - SSH port forwarding and Cingular setup

I got a new toy, Nokia N800 Internet Tablet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nokia_N800
Now I can have the cumbersome, hour draining, joy of on linux on the go. I couldn't be happier!

Setting up access to my corporate email:
Company email setup : My company has IMAP and SMTP access but not available outside the firewall. They do have a ssh server though to get terminal login access, but required key based login, no passwords. (/etc/ssh_config PasswordAuthentication: no)
N800 setup :
Step 1: I installed dropbear ssh client and server on N800
Step 2: got root by logging w/root password "rootme".
Step 3: Immediately set root password to **** and user password to **** ('user' is the name of the default user on the N800 and you have to set it by typing passwd user as root)
Step 4: Create dropbear private/public key pair

  dropbearkey -t rsa -f ~/.ssh/id_rsa.db

NOTE: I tried to convert my existing openssh key to dropbear, but dropbearconvert didn't
understand encrypted private keys and so i decided to create a new private key. In hindsight, i actually think this is a better idea in case my N800 is compromised/lost.

Step 5: Copy public key to ~/.ssh/authorized_keys on company ssh server. Public key was sent to
stdout drop key creation

Step 6: Write a script using vi on N800 to tunnel IMAP and SMTP ports by writing ~/mailports script on N800
#!/bin/sh
echo "Opening ports 14300 for IMAP and 2500 for SMTP..."
ssh -i ~/.ssh/id_rsa.db -l dhubler -L 14300:localhost:143 -L 2500:localhost:25 mail.pingtel.com cat -

run "chmod +x ~/mailports" and run script

Step 7: Configure default email client on N800 ossoemail
Type localhost for IMAP4 and SMTP servers, then last page of email account wizard, hit advanced button and change IMAP and SMTP ports to 14300 and 2500 respectively

Step 8: From ossoemail menu run "Message/Send & receive"

Getting unlimited wireless access through your cellphone from cingular for $39.95/month
I think it's a deal, momma not happy about it. So far, speed ain't great.
No matter how much you think upgrading you MEdia package on cingular is going to let you use for phone as a bluetooth modem, it won't. My Nokia 6102i kept giving "Subscribe to GPRS first" each time I tried to connect from my Nokia N800. You need to get the PDA Connect plane from cingular. The N800 is not a "authorized device", so don't tell them you have that. Find out what ones the support and say you have one of those. Don't ask me how I got around this :). The following connection parameters for me worked, I need to find out which ones are effective, but I hesitate to alter them to find out as it took me so long to get this working

6102i settings
Configuration/Personal configuration settings/ISP.CINGULAR
Account name: ISP.CINGULAR
Data bearer: Packet data
Packet data access point: internet
Auth Type: Normal
Username: ISP@CINGULARGPRS.COM
Password: CINGULAR1 (i think)

n800 settings
Connection type: Packet data
Access point name: WAP.CINGULAR
Dial-up number: *99***1#
Username: WAP@CINGULARGPRS.COM
Password: CINGULAR1 (i think)

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I had to give both kids a bath and Alex's little plastic bath fit across the bathtub nicely. Aaron had fun filling up Alex's bath with cups of water.

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My 2nd most favorite snack in the world, a glob of cottage cheese scooped by

exactly 2 Pringles chips (one breaks and gets overwhelmed by cottage cheese favor).

My first is a wheat cracker, with a slice of havarti dill cheese, half a large green olive, and a wedge of pineapple. Dirty Sanchez we call it, and yes, the alternate meaning makes us chuckle. Any and I reserve this snack for vacations only!

Aj (Alex) holding his bottle already?

Aj drinkin bottle of milk/formula. He was holding it on his own for a few seconds.

Xmas toys glee

dem, larie and jens present a hit.

Polar Express

Family(minus Amy who is on girls night out) sits down to watch Polar Express and eat pizza!

Aaron gets a haircut w/o tears

snip-its is a hair salon made for kids. It passes Aaron's test with flying colors. Here he's blowing bubbles while stylist puts on the finishing touches.

Family back from Beverly Hills, FL

back in boston at Logan Airport. Does't Aaron look pleased. Alex came through baggage claim just fine, little chilly, Amy had her doubts about my plan to save a few bucks not buying him a seat.

Aaron visits Dr. in Beverly Hills, FL

wouldn't be vacation w/o visit to drs. Aaron had 105 temp. Amy's out getting meds now

Family Visits Beverly Hills, FL

safe in beverly hills (post was moved from another blog)