Monthly Archives: March 2007

Saint Barths

We realized that the one bottle of Dayquil wasn’t going to last long enough, with both of us not feeling great, so we wandered around town a bit looking for a drug store & grocery store, maybe the beach.

Found the stores, never got to the beach. The drug store was interesting, as they carried absolutely no American or British products. No Nyquil or Dayquil. We spoke to a pharmacist, who only spoke marginal English, and she gave us some cold medicine. Not sure it worked very well. We’ll have to pick up some more familiar stuff tomorrow in Tortola.

Almost went on the island tour, but decided we weren’t feeling up to it. We went back to the boat to relax.

Saint Martin

Work up around 6am still feeling lousy. We decided to go ashore to find some cold medicine.

Had a very light breakfast of some honeydew melon and toast I’m sure that anything heavier would screw me up something fierce.

Turns out that every morning the captain hosts a ‘Story Time’ where he tells us what’s going on for the day and any other bits of info. I did my best to give a hearty “Good Morning Captain Sir , but my head & throat rebelled so I only croaked a it. Ginny was able to belt it out I suspect she’s going to regret it later.

The captains’ name is “Fernando he introduced the crew including Debra, the ‘Activities Mate’, and Laurie, the Purser. He also covered important stuff, like safety guidelines, etc.

We had lunch at a little French place called Antoine’s. Ginny had some good gazpacho soup, I had a chicken sandwich. I would have liked the soup, but wasn’t feeling very adventurous in a food way.

We wandered back into town to find a drugs store and found one. They didn’t have a lot of stuff, but they carried Nyquil & Dayquil, so we bought one of each. Not sure if that will last us, but it should get us past the next few days.

Ahoy Mate

We’re on our way … wake up at 4am, cab arrives at 5am, flight is at 7am. OMG am I tired.

Arrive at San Juan, find a place for lunch. Nothing special, but ok.

Fly to St. Martin in a puddle jumper. We sat right next to the prop.

After clearing customs, we went to the main lobby of the airport and found the windjammer rep. We had to wait a bit to get on the bus because they had to wait for some other people. Bus ride was ‘interesting’, as the roads were very narrow. Everyone joked about inhaling a bit to squeeze by.

Bus stopped a few blocks away from the dock, so we had to hike down to where the launch for the boat was.

Check went fairly smoothly, although we had to go through the safety briefing twice. Were taken to our cabin, which was VERY VERY small.

Around this time I noticed a slight cough and dryness in my throat.

We went to bed around 10pm, after having dinner and wandering around on the deck.

I woke up around 3am feeling lousy. Head ache, sinus congestion, scratchy throat. Oh crap, now I have a sinus infection.

Preparing to leave

We’re off on another vacation … this time to the Caribbean for a Windjammer cruise and some time on the British Virgin Island of Tortola.

Riley has figured it out he’s seen the duffel bags and knows we’re going away. He’s not in a good mood.

Ginny has a cough that hasn’t gotten any better probably caught it from some of her co-workers. She thought it was gone a week or so ago, but it came back. I was quite surprised that I hadn’t caught anything. I’ve been taking Echinacea and 1000mg vitamin C tablets for the past 8 weeks to avoid getting sick.

I aimed the web cam at the chair Riley likes to snooze in, so we might be able to watch him when we get to Fort Recovery.

Ginny realized that we forgot to get more dry food for Riley so she left a note for Pat, our pet sitter, and a ten dollar bill, in case she need to get a small bag.

Sea Fever

I must go down to the seas again,
   to the lonely sea and the sky,
And all I ask is a tall ship
   and a star to steer her by,
And the wheel's kick and the wind's song
   and the white sail's shaking,
And a grey mist on the sea's face
   and a grey dawn breaking.

I must go down to the seas again,
   for the call of the running tide
Is a wild call and a clear call
   that may not be denied;
And all I ask is a windy day
   with the white clouds flying,
And the flung spray and the blown spume,
   and the sea-gulls crying.

I must go down to the seas again
   to the vagrant gypsy life,
To the gull's way and the whale's way
   where the wind's like a whetted knife;
And all I ask is a merry yarn
   from a laughing fellow rover,
And quiet sleep and a sweet dream
   when the long trick's over.

— John Masefield

More on this later.

Clean up /tmp

Recently I noticed that there’s a lot of temporary files in the /tmp directory on my mail server … all the files have spamassassin in the file name. I figured that in some cases, SpamAssassin (or programs it calls) isn’t cleaning up properly.

I whipped up this script that will clean up any spamassassin files & directories that are older than a set number of minutes (60 in my case)…

#!/bin/sh

AGE=60

if [ "$1" == "--test" ]
then
        CMD="-exec echo"
        echo "$0: test mode"
else
        CMD="-exec"
fi

/usr/bin/find /tmp \
        -mmin +$AGE \
        -name spamassassin.ocr* \
        $CMD /bin/rm -f '{}' \;

/usr/bin/find /tmp \
        -maxdepth 1 \
        -mmin +$AGE \
        -type d \
        -name .spamassassin\* \
        $CMD /bin/rm -rf '{}' \;

If you run the script with a parameter of ‘–test’, it will just show the commands it would have executed.

I put the script in /etc/cron.hourly directory so it gets executed every hour.

Illinois Got it Right

I gotta hand it to the Illinois Department of Revenue … they got the online tax filing system right.

The system to file your taxes online is simple, straight forward, and fast. Although I did use TurboTax to calculate the taxes, I entered the information directly into the states web site and was done in about 10 minutes. At the end I was able to download and/or print a PDF of my completed tax form with the confirmation number noted at the bottom.

There were no convenience fees (which I think are bogus anyways, why should I pay to save YOU money), and the refund (all $182 of it) will be deposited into our checking account.

The ONLY thing I would say they could do to improve it would be to make the form jump to the correct position when you ask it to do a calculation. Perhaps some AJAX technology would help in that respect.