Greg In The Desert

I am setting at PDX (Portland International Airport) near my gate for a flight that leaves later today. I arrived this morning for quick work related business. Somewhere at the security checkpoint at Phoenix International Airport and boarding the plane to PDX I lost my ID.

I didn’t find this out until I was in my Rental car getting everything ready to drive off. It turned out to be a very stressful day. Obviously rental car companies will not allow you to drive off without a drivers license. I have to thank my good friend Mustafa for coming down to the airport to get me and take me to where I needed to do my official business.

He brought me back and I approached the TSA officer and told them I lost my ID at Phoenix. They took me aside, teased that the rubber hoses were over there, and asked to look at what I did have.

I pulled out everything in my wallet with my name on it, he looked it over and then I found my Costco card that had a picture on it. A crappy picture but it was something. That was it. No further pat down, not special baggage checks. I supposed bad guys don’t walk around with worn out credit cards, Costco cards, voter and library cards. He also quizzed me on some items in my checkbook.Despite the bad reputation TSA gets, I have never had a bad experience with any of the officers.

If they didn’t find my drivers license in PHX, I have a real pain to go through to get a replacement. That’s a story for another blog post.

If your like me and are a Quicken fanatic and are like me a Mac user, then you have most likely been anticipating the latest version of Quicken that was due to be released summer of 2009.

I have bad news for you. An Intuit Quicken blog post says that the next version of Quicken for Mac (Quicken Financial Life For Mac, or whatever they call it) is now slated for February of 2010. It was first supposed to come out in 2008, then 2009 and now 2010.

Intuit will release a new version of Quicken for the Mac platform in February 2010.

I don’t know why I’m having a hard time believing Intuit. They must have one programmer who is new to Mac programming working on Quicken for Mac.

The one killer feature that keeps me using Quicken 2007 is the integration with financial institutions. I can write checks and schedule transactions with all of the banks and credit cards I use and have all of my information in Quicken up to date. I almost never have to visit the individual website of any of these banks and rarely write a paper check.

There are a number of better application than Quicken for the Mac but none of them have this integration with banks that is a huge time saver.

I have attempted to sign up with Intuit to be a beta tester for years and have never been selected. They have a new program called Quicken Inner Circle that might get me closer.

There’s been talk about a Montatna’s Judge rulling that lets law officals sort through someone’s trash, who also says that he fears 1984 is upon us. To you fearful internet reader, I make this recommendation: Get a shredder.

This case was about the cops finding residue of meth making chemicals in the trash of a person. It seems that the fact that these were in his trash couldn’t have been enough evidence alone to convict him, and that the cops wouldn’t have gone looking in his trash if they didn’t have some suspicions or other evidence to begin with. It seems unlikely that the cops have the man power to do “random trash checks” or that it would be highly sought out job.

I think the cops digging through your trash is the least of your worries. Thieves digging through your trash is probably more of a problem, where they will take information about you. Your social security number, Address, name, those credit card applications (and guess what, the don’t care about the legality of it). All of that can be used to steal your identity. Get yourself a shredder and destroy all that information before you put it in your trash, and you wont have to worry about the cops or the thieves getting into your business.

Is putting evidence of your illegal activities in the trash any different than having the blinds open so people can see you doing it in your house? I say no. If your trying to hide your illegal activities in your trash, your pretty stupid. You have bigger problems and your going to get what’s coming to you anyways.

I’ve been using iCal to log various things related to my Home Automation stuff. I’ve since written a few more use full scripts to do something useful with them. I’m using a much updates iCal script then the one I originally posted, so I don’t know how well it works with that. You may need to make some modification depending on your set up.

Getting info on devices:

• AllDeviceStats: This is just a general purpose script that gets the count of events and the average duration and puts them in a variable. It can take several seconds to run so I have this set to run every night when there is no activity in the house.
• GetDeviceStats(DeviceName): This gets the average duration of events for a particular device logged in iCal. You would use it like this: set x to GetDeviceStatus("My Device"). I use this in conjunction with a auto on/auto off script to determine how long to leave a device on.
• GetNonDeviceStats(CalName, EventName): This works the same as GetDeviceStats but works for non device items. For example I have my garage door opening and closing logged in iCal but it’s set up via a security device (DS10A) which doesn’t have a device type.

Calculating average event time is not really good enough for accurate determination of how long to leave something on. Future versions will be more targeted to time of day, day of week along with other statistical calculations.

Maintenance Scripts:

These scripts can take up a lot of CPU and many seconds to run. So I suggest running them when you think there will be very little activity in the house.

• AdjustDeviceTypes: This goes through each and every event and makes sure they belong to the right "device type" calendar. This is handy to have if you change the type of device your using. For example I recently changed a lamp on a regular Lamp Module to a LM14 2-way Lamp Module. This ensures I get accurate readings from my “get” scripts.
• AdjustCalEvents: This goes through each device logged in iCal and checks the events before and after. If they are within 2 minutes (adjustable) then I consider them the same event and adjust one and delete the other. This way the actual calculated on time is more reflective of how long the light needs to be on.

You can download this script here.