Just over one week ago, August 6th 2009, we packed the family into our van and made the four hour drive to Washington D.C.

Gareth repeatedly asked to see the White House, elephants, and pandas. How could we deny him the excitement of seeing all three? In order to streamline our trip, we decided we would pay for the vacation with our American Express card, which had no credit limit. All our expenses would go on it so that we could easily track everything we had done and could pay our expenses all in one place.

Imagine my surprise, then, when our card was denied on the second day of our visit to Washington. I called American Express customer service to find out what was going on and found that they had reduced my credit limit to below the balance on our card just two days before we left for our trip. They did this with no advance notice whatsoever! In fact, the day after we returned home, we received a letter from American Express telling us of the change they were making, effective “immediately”.

Knowing better than to place all my eggs in one basket, I brought along a second card and used it for the remainder of our stay in Washington. Gare saw the elephants and pandas at the National Zoological Park, and he made us visit the White House three times during a four day trip. But what I really remember is that a credit card issuer very nearly ruined that trip for us.

I am glad that the credit card bill of rights was successfully signed into law, but there is still room for improvement. If I had been notified 30 days in advance that a change was going to be made to my credit line, I would have known what to expect. As it was, I was caught by surprise at the worst possible time. If we were experiencing a health emergency (not unlikely) or were simply broken down on the side of the road and had to pay for repairs, we would have been stranded by the practices of, in this case, American Express.

Here’s hoping that the credit card bill of rights does not represent the final word on consumer protections from credit issuers.

Back when I thought I’d spend the rest of my life paddling around in a kayak, my biggest frustration was that there was nothing locally geared towards bringing like-minded paddlers together to keep each other company and teach one another.

As is usual, I toyed with the idea of starting a web site to foster such a community. It was one of the few times when I decided not to take on a new web endeavor.

Now, well over a year later, somebody else has thankfully gone and done the thing I had wanted to do. The Canoe Club of Centre County held its first meeting last month and has as its mission to bring together paddlers of all skill and interest levels.

Had this been in place back then, I might not have migrated to bikes quite so quickly. While I do like being alone on my trips, I don’t want to be alone all the time. It was difficult to get out for a paddle with Brandy - in fact, I think we did that only once and that was only because my mother was along to watch Gareth while we took a quick spin around the Kettle Creek reservoir.

This is not to say there weren’t any groups. The Penn Kayak group was in full swing at that time, but most of the trips ended up being more distant than I desired or on higher classes of creek and river than I was ready for.

I sincerely hope the CCCC does well. I might even have to stop in for a meeting and see what the group is like. No, I’m not planning to buy another boat.

Yet.

I did, after all, keep my PFD, shoes, bilge pump, and watertight containers.

I’ve been tasked with translating some letters from a father to his son. Written in 1944. In Germany. It’s interesting to go through the translation and then match things up with history. I figured somebody else might be interested, so here is the first letter I’ve completed.

November 14, 1944

My dear Manfred:

We have still not received a letter from you and are therefore very worried, as you can imagine. I am consoling myself with the thought that you’ve left Westwall and that there is no post to reach us.

For two days, we listened day and night to the booms of the cannons in the west; there must, therefore, be hard artillery battles under way. If only we knew where you were currently located. Maybe we have been too quiet? Or not, who knows!?

Wolfgang left quickly yesterday evening. He had to get back to his unit. He has written down your address so he can write. I hope you will send him heartfelt greetings in the meantime, Manfred.

Mother has once again been driven to sleep just after Degerloch. Walter is with me still. That’s our life, it’s actually not fun anymore.

Last Sunday, I was sworn in for the Volkssturm. It was an impressive crowd in Spitalhof. I belong to a company lead by Mr. Muller (Bookbinder). My conductor is Mayor Neunhoffer and I drove the group this time. Tomorrow evening, we have our training and I can easily say that these evenings are always very interesting.

Hado was here this afternoon as well, he is currently on leave. He brought mother an extra four eggs, so she can bake you something for your Christmas package. That is really lovely of him.

I have already written you that your certificate of maturity came yesterday. You can see, Manfred, what you have yet to accomplish. So, you have at least a degree. You will see it again one day. The most important thing now is that you come back, and for that we wish wholeheartedly. Everything else is incidental.

Dearest Manfred! I wish you all the best from the heart, and quite a bit of luck. Don’t make us worry, dear boy.

Sending you heartfelt greetings,

Your Father

Mother and Walter also leave you heartfelt greetings. Walter is already in bed. He still oversleeps.

Brandy and I sat down last night to watch a movie, something we do with decreasing frequency due to the demands of a two child household that is also inhabited by an adult dependent. It’s tough to find time to squeeze in two hours for passive entertainment.

But last night, we did it. We found the time. And we used it to watch Rachel Getting Married.  At 1:53 in length, it was going to run right up until Gareth’s nurse arrived, so time was precious if we hoped to finish the movie before having our evening interrupted by yet another outside influence. With that in mind, we loaded in the Blu-Ray disc.

And waited for the progress bar.

And saw it start to play BD promos.

And discovered we couldn’t stop the promos. Or open the menus. In fact, my attempts to do so inexplicably resulted in us being dumped out to the PS3 crossbar interface. We went through this process four times before I relented and decided we were just going to have to sit through the promo.

Once the promo ended, the trailers started. In the immortal words of Will Smith in all of his action films, “Oh HELL naw!”

Menu still wouldn’t work. Stop didn’t work. So I tried Next. That worked! It… skipped to the next trailer. I had to do this several more times to get through the trailers and finally get to the damn menu!

Once there, everything was fine, but I turned to Brandy and said, “You know who made us go through all that crap? Somebody in marketing.”

The lesson here, folks, is that you aren’t going to sell stuff by annoying your consumer. So stop annoying them.

Bonus tip for marketing folks: If your customer is already in the process of consuming your product, you don’t need to remind them how great it is. Putting an ad for Blu-Ray at the start of a Blu-Ray disc is relatively pointless. The viewer had a choice to watch a standard DVD, but chose not to - you have them, they don’t need to be beat over the head with it.

I was having some trouble with RokBox and RokNewsRotator. On the CRBC site, we use RokBox to display inset thumbnails for expansion directly from our Section and Category pages, but since we do the inset first in the content, RokNewsRotator was stripping out the tags and leaving the image path in plain text, including it in the RNR teaser.

The solution was to strip out RokBox and everything between the RB tags first by making the following change in helper.php:

Original

function prepareContent( $text, $length=300 ) {
        // strips tags won't remove the actual jscript
        $text = preg_replace( "'<script[^>]*>.*?</script>'si", "", $text );
        $text = preg_replace( '/{.+?}/', '', $text);

Modified

function prepareContent( $text, $length=300 ) {
        // remove rokbox references
        $regex = "#{rokbox\s(.*?){/rokbox}#s";
        $text = preg_replace( $regex, "", $text );
        // strips tags won't remove the actual jscript
        $text = preg_replace( "'<script[^>]*>.*?</script>'si", "", $text );
        $text = preg_replace( '/{.+?}/', '', $text);

Works great so far!

Somebody recently asked me if I was insane because I’m doing too much webmaster stuff.  I’m co-webmaster of the site at work.  I’m webmaster for RBR.  I’ve got all my own sites (this, Prebble Family, BikeAble, A Bike For Gareth). And now I’m working on the CRBC web site.

Well, if you take a look around at all those things, you’ll find that most are suffering from inattention.

The RBR site, for which I am now being paid, gets regular updates. I try to post new blog entries there once a week if not more frequently, and there are usually product updates to post as the 2009 prices roll in.

The Prebble Family site is a ghost town. Nothing is getting posted there these days. Part of that, I’m sure, is that at the end of a day playing and fighting with the kids, the last thing on my mind is writing about the kids. This is a bit of a disservice to the family, since good things are happening all the time (like Gareth’s continued use of his IntelliKeys system), but I just never think to update the blog.

A Bike For Gareth is only as active as my rides with Gareth, so that blog essentially goes offline for entire seasons. Eventually, I will collapse that site altogether and roll the informational pieces into BikeAble.

And as for BikeAble, the site that has not seen a content update since last May, I have ideas for lots of stories that never get written. I even have a guy in California interested in coming on board. For right now, though, that site continues to suffer my unwillingness to sit down and write structured articles.

The CRBC site is a new project. Fortunately, I’m just the technologist for that one. I’m helping them get set up with a CMS, set down the rules and structure, but once it’s up and running, other folks will be responsible for content. So that’s an easy one.

Unfortunately, the site at work is the one that most discourages me while at the same time being the one I have to devote my entire day to managing. My day job drives me to work on sites for other people so I can work on sites that are intended to be engaging. What a shame.

Speaking of, got to get back to it. But at least I managed to update this site in the meantime.

Had an enjoyable birthday over the weekend.  Got some good gifts - new Carrie Fisher book, Tomb Raider: Underworld, MiB Blu-Ray, Sarah Silverman Program Season 1.  Got some bad gifts - several hundred dollars charged against my Visa debit card by someone who stole my card info.

What’s sort of sad is that the only thing that tipped off my bank is that a credit card company in Israel faxed my bank looking for authorization for a charge.  Whoever has my number tried to get a virtual Visa at WWWCard.  WWWCard thought it was fishy and sent the fax.  

With that, I sat down with a rep at the bank and went through my weekend transactions.  Two meals and groceries were valid, but multiple charges for $124, $170, $90, and $55.55 at Home Depot in Bend, OR were invalid.

The tip-off was instant - almost all the invalid charges had 0 cents.  Who buys anything anywhere and doesn’t have a few cents tacked on for tax or shipping or psychological pricing (9.99 isn’t 10)?

For now, we’ve nuked the initial $124 charge, had me sign the legal docs, and shredded my debit card.  I’ll see tomorrow whether or not all the other fraudulent charges go through.  If they do, I’ll have a whole lot more paperwork to fill.

That’s it for me, though.  No more using debit cards online.  This is the second time in a year that I’ve had to replace my debit card, and it’s a pain.

Interesting note: they used my cell phone number as part of the transaction and got it wrong by one digit.  I’m pretty sure that the only place I’ve ever used that number for orders has been Nashbar (at least, that’s what my e-mail history would suggest).  I have to wonder if they’ve been compromised.

An old Rob Hubbard tune just came up on my Zune - Crazy Comets - and it reminded me of the old (1986) Thrust Concert demo on the C=64 as they used Hubbard’s song in it.

That prompted me to search for info on Thrust Concert, which ultimately took me to Press Play On Tape.  I’m gonna have to check this out later.

Truly, my wife will miss David Tennant.  I never imagined her becoming a Doctor Who fan, but Tennant pulled her in and kept her there long enough for her to get hooked.

But he is bowing out, soon to be replaced by Matt Smith.  If you’ve not heard of Matt Smith, no worries, looks like he hasn’t done much TV work just yet, though he does have a bit of a stage career.  Coincidentally, he appeared on Secret Diary of a Call Girl.  Perhaps an encounter with Billie Piper led him to helm the TARDIS.

Knowing nothing of his work, I can’t speculate on how he’ll be as the Doctor.  Guess we’ll find out in 2010.

We are getting closer to seeing how they’re going to get around the 12 regenerations limit, though circumventing it seems a mere plot point.

Joel on Software posted a nice little CSS tip yesterday about how to get IE to do image scaling that doesn’t look like 8-bit interpretive art.

I instantly started hitting the sheets of my various sites to add this in.  So far, so good!