I Am Grateful for Intelligence

The Best.Jeep.Ever. has needed some TLC lately. It was time for an oil change, a couple lightbulbs needed replacing, new tires, a nice bath… I'm never upset about spending money on the Godly Automotive Wonder that takes me everywhere I want to go exploring. I love my Jeep even with its big 'ole feet. You know what they say about a large carbon footprint... oh wait...

I admit I've never changed my own oil or a flat tire though. Some things are better left to the boys to get dirty with, or the experts that have all the right tools to keep an easy 10-minute job from being a 5-hour headache. However, I'm not one of those girls that's completely helpless in the garage either. I own REAL tools. They are not pink or sparkly - they are SnapOn silver, Dewalt yellow, Home Depot orange, Makita blue, or Ryobi green with black dirt accents. (And none of them are diminutive! ;) I've replaced my own headlights, battery, wipers, and tail lights in the past. I've installed iPod adapters (which required taking apart the dash to get to the back of the stereo head unit) in both the Camaro and the Jeep all by myself. Once I even changed my own idle air control (IAC) valve after a brilliant mechanic broke it (and zip-tied it as a fix! WTF?!), then wanted to charge me $183 for a replacement! I did it myself for less than $70. Go me!

Obviously, I am not afraid or ignorant of my vehicles.

So I found myself at the local auto parts store the other day. It happened to be a day when I chose to wear nicer clothes because the boyfriend was with me and I like to look my best when we present ourselves together in public. We are each other's arm candy. :) My outfit that day included a beautiful cotton sweater, designer jeans, high heeled boots, appropriate jewelry, and my expensive (not!) sunglasses (THOSE have sparkles on the sides!) pushed to the top of my head. My flashiest name-brand purse (under $100 people, so hush up) hung from my shoulder. To be fair, I suppose this look does give off a certain impression, especially to men found under a car more often than in it.

Looks can be so deceiving tho, can't they? This is why I don't judge books by their cover (except for the new teen novel Tiger's Curse by Colleen Houck - I totally bought that solely because the cover was cool and it turned out to be an awesome story! SCORE! Her next book, Tiger's Quest, is coming out in June. Preorder now!).

I was looking for the lightbulb that goes over the license plate, assumably so my next victim of Texting While Driving can see who ran them over in the dark and report me to the police.

(I'm KIDDING.)

(Ok, not completely.)

Having never replaced this particular bulb before, and knowing there are usually several to choose from, I walked up to the register to ask the I-Just-Graduated-College-And-This-Is-My-Chosen-Career clerk to retrieve the correct part number.

"Hello, I need the lightbulb that goes over the license plate of my 2005 Jeep Liberty."

"Lightbulbs are in Aisle 5."

"Thank you, but do you mind looking up the number for me? It's much faster than going through the book." (You'd think the fact that I KNOW there is a number - or a book over there to look in for that matter - would be his first clue, but it went right over his head.)

"Oh sure… you said it's an Oh Five Jeep Liberty?"

I nod.

Not that he looked up to confirm.

(Tap tap tap.) "Okaaaayy… number 168…"

"Thank you." I turned to walk away.

A dirty, plump finger shoots out rather close to my ear. "It's down Aisle 5 there… on the right… here, I'll just get it for you."

I'm sorry, did the back of my head look confused? Even tho I'm already walking in the proper direction, Mr. Helpful whips past me like Dale Earnhardt Junior at Talladega.

"Thanks but really, I can find… umm, ok," I say pointlessly into the backdraft. Thanks for providing great customer service?

The clerk was already scanning the rows so I had no choice but to shut up and follow him. I'm sure he's looked at these things many times more than I, so a nanosecond after I arrive he dives for the correct item and starts heading back to the register. Again, I follow. About halfway there he turns around, shakes the package in my direction, and says as if speaking to a child:

"Now make sure you tell whoever is installing this not to touch the bulb…"

Wait... what? Whoever is installing this? What am I? Chopped liver? Why would the person installing it not be me, the same one asking for the part?

The boyfriend comes up behind me just then, at which point I apparently disappear in a chauvinistic puff of smoke. Relieved there is a penis in the vicinity, Mr. Helpful redirects his comment to my appropriately-gendered partner: "Hey, make sure you use a rag to hold the bulb when you put this in…"

Make sure you use a rag to hold what's left of your ego, pal, cuz mine is rearing up to its entire righteous five-foot-three height.

"I will be the one installing this, thank you," I say as I take the package from his outstretched hand. "And I know not to touch the bulbs because they are halogen and the oils on your fingers will ruin them," I add as I stalk to the register with an unladylike semi-snort of laughter while the two men stand there looking at each other, one with embarrassment and the other with a smirk.

Hello Auto Zone? The 50s called… they'd like their counter boy back.

"Ummm…" Mr. Helpful says, gesturing toward Automotive Genius No. 2, "… he'll ring you up." He wouldn't even look at me as he slunk behind the checkout and disappeared between the stacks of thingamabobs* and whoseywhatsits. I notice the other cashiers trying not to crack up. Whether it's at me or him I have no idea since my nose is so far up in the air at this point, I would drown if it started to rain.


So what have we learned today, kids?

For those of you who are curious, as I was, having never taken the time (until now) to actually find out WHY you shouldn't touch halogen bulbs, The Straight Dope (fighting ignorance since 1973!) has the answer here. If you don't have time to read all the technical explanations offered, the short version is "because it's baaad...m'kay?" Ok, not really. :) It's because your oily fingerprints leave enough residue to impede the infrared component of a halogen's light spectrum from exiting the glass, thereby collecting heat and creating a weak spot, which eventually can cause the glass to explode from stress (much like the heads of chauvinistic males when coming into contact with my ego), shortening the life of the bulb. (In which case I'd say the lifespan of the bulb is the least of your problems.)

Whew... good thing Mr. Helpful mentioned that rag! I thought they were only for dusting!

Ladies (and gentlemen), you now know how to completely disassemble a snarky cashier the next time they condescend to you about halogens. Word.

Happy Jeep having a day at the spa. :)

*You know how I know Macs are the smarter machines? Because they know how to spell thingamabobs!

We Should All Have Careware

Today I reformatted the Mac (finally!) and upgraded my operating system to Leopard v10.5. (I CANNOT believe this has been sitting on my desk unopened since March - WHAT was I thinking?!). In the past, there has always been something missing at the end of the day - kind of like when you move, there is invariably one item that falls down the Black Hole of Residence Change forever (I suspect the dryer and socks are involved). So far, so good tho - nothing has been irretrievable, which is awesome. Having a 1.5TB drive to copy my entire previous configuration to most likely helped. Back in the days when 200mHz was "lightning speed" and entire backups fit on a CD, who woulda thunk in a few short years we'd need terabytes to assure ourselves a pain-free transition? But I digress...

As most old school geeks know, when you reformat like Mother Nature doing spring cleaning (take it down to the sectors and start over) it is required that you reinstall each application from scratch. Oh sure, there are tons of programs out there making a living by replicating your information and offering the ability to reinstate such an impeccable copy of what you had that you end up with the same pile of poo on your "new" drive, including all the flaws you think you have safely disposed of. No thanks. I'll do my own legwork to make sure the stinky stuff ends up in the dump.

Being as OCD as I am (thanks Mark!), I feel the Complete Corporate Reorganization is the only way I can be confident that no malware has transferred itself to my freshly scrubbed platters (Macs RARELY have trouble with viruses but spyware is still a problem). The good part about performing this task properly is sometimes you find upgrades that greatly improve performance, or in the case prompting this blog post, you find an awesome alternative to what you were using. Happy day!

My experience in particular was with an HTML editor. When I originally found Taco it was a freeware program (or at least I'm pretty sure it was since it worked fine but I can't locate a license in my paperwork or email). Apparently they've gone feral (read: commercial) since then, and I was not willing to cough up $25 to reinstall it. Not only is it a very thin program with few useful features, I don't like paying for something I don't need that often anymore.

I have Dreamweaver, but it's like my kitchen - it's only there because it came with the house (i.e., Adobe CS4). Using Dreamweaver is like putting a Corvette engine in a gocart - WAY complicated and WAY too much when really all you need is a mountain bike. Sometimes more is NOT better. Not to mention you might as well have a nap while waiting for it to launch (read: takes more than 5 seconds to open... slothly in our present nanosecond world. Hmm... I may have just offended sloths around the globe).

Wistfully, my brain turned to memories of programs past. Hot Dog was the app I learned to code on (I think version 3 was my jumping-in point). It was the number one editor used by webmasters (at least the ones I knew at the time) until the guys at Sausage Software got too lazy and rich (I'm assuming) to make proper updates. I hung in there way after everyone else moved on to greater programming, but ultimately had to bail when Hot Dog Pro 7 (which is still the version they're touting almost a decade later!) would no longer work properly with Windows XP. (Yes, I know... it's awful, isn't it? I was once forced to endure "that other OS." ::shudder:: I'm still recovering.)

In Hot Dog's dying days there was Home Site, which was a blatant rip off, but at least it worked with Windows XcrementProgram (funny how Vista makes XP look like something brilliant... you poor, poor PC people). Unfortunately Home Site got swallowed up by Macromedia, which got eaten by Adobe and subsequently smashed into Dreamweaver, never to be its own entity again. Ah, corporate merger. Thou dost suck.

I was thinking how beautiful it would be if some knight in shining Perl armor had decided to resurrect either program, having the same frustrations I do (or perhaps a lot of time on his hands). I tried searching Google for keywords such as "just like Hot Dog" or "looks like Home Site" but the results were not what I was looking for.

Defeated, I dragged myself over to versiontracker.com to find a different free HTML editor and, hearing a chorus of angels, I found Arachnophilia. To my great joy, the screen shots looked remarkably similar to my departed favorites, and it was FREE. Oh wait - not really free. It was labeled "Careware." Say what?

I've heard of freeware (all free, all the time), and shareware (the abused marketing term for "try before you buy"), but I'd never heard of Careware. I figured it must work on the PayPal donation principle like ClamX (a fantastic bit of anti-virus for Macs, and yes, I have donated twice!). However, I learned Careware is even better. As I read the developer's description, I found myself nodding emphatically in agreement to every word. Here was the Sir Lancelot of Binary.

Careware is as old school as it gets - "they just don't build 'em like that anymore." Which is a grand shame. The basic principle of Careware as described by Paul Lutus, is NO WHINING. Lutus puts it succinctly thus:

...the basic premise of CareWare (people should stop whining) is so idealistic and out-of-date now that I will eventually have to remove all references to CareWare from my programs. Telling modern Internet users to stop whining is like telling them to stop breathing — it seems unrealistic and inhumane.

Too true. We are so blessed with this thing we call The Internet. The amount of collective knowledge at our fingertips is incredible and humbling. I have yet to ask a question that Google can't provide 10,000,000 responses for, from physics to music to OMG-How-Do-I-Get-Every Picture-I've-Taken-In-The-Last-Eight-Years-Back-Because-Yes-I-Just-Wiped-Out-The-Entire-Folder. The limits are as vast as our global population.

The sad part rests in the frivolous, foolish, narcissistic, or just plain ignorant stuff being posted in spades. Yeah, yeah, even I participate in frivolous and narcissistic once in awhile because it is part of blogging; however, I gladly risk sounding like my grandparents when I say, "I weep for the next generation." They make it challenging to find the intelligent, witty, spiritual, or just plain funny bright spots in cyberspace, but they're worth their weight in Planck time.

Anyway, my original point was that I am grateful and thrilled to have found Arachnophilia for my occasional HTML editing, and it looks like I've also located a substitute for MSMoney in the same site - PLCash (thank goodness because I've been depending on the bank to tell me my balance since I acquired the MacBook two years ago). The "No Whining" financing will be a cinch to pay forward as I have stock in that already.

You should absolutely take a look at everything Arachnoid has to offer; there are so many useful tools and well-written articles there I might never get to sleep tonight! What a treasure!