Blowout party in St. Croix

Gerald is planning a huge party for my 30th birthday.  He's got space reserved at the Cormorant Beach Club in St. Croix for hors d'ouevres and drinks.  And, he's reserved B & the Buzz, a phenomenal high-energy jazz band!  The party is scheduled for 8pm-12am January 15, 2006.  Guests can arrive around 7pm.  If you'd like to come, send me an email, and I'll send more details!

Crucian Baby

Well I really ought to be writing in here more often.  You'd think that we're having a nice quiet life down here.  On the contrary, it's been an exciting rollercoaster ride!

We recently hired Brien Wheeler as the Vice President of Engineering at NormSoft.  We're very excited to have him on board, and we're sure he'll do a great job managing our engineering resources.

We decided to fly him down to St. Croix for his orientation two weeks ago.  His wife Susan was seven months pregnant at the time but decided to come along as well to get some good relaxation in before the baby was born.

Everything started out great, and we were having a great time coming up to speed on business and relaxing in our spare time.  Then on Tuesday night, we went shopping to make dinner.  When we returned home, Susan was not feeling well.  After a call to her doctor, they decided that they'd better go to the hospital to have her checked out.  So I drove them a few miles down the road, and they spent an hour in the ER.  They hooked up a baby monitor and everything looked fine with the baby, so they told her to go home.

A few hours later, Susan was not feeling any better.  They finally asked me once again to take them back to the hospital.  Nervous and concerned, I drove as safely and quickly as I could.  Upon arriving at the hospital, Brien put Susan in a wheelchair and whisked her away.  I parked the car and waited in the ER for 20 minutes, worrying about what was happening.  Finally, someone there told me that they didn't know Susan's status because they had taken her to Labor & Delivery.

At this point, I was still in disbelief that Susan was having her baby.  One of the security guards showed me over to the main hospital entrance.  I said to him, "I can't believe she's having her baby now!"  He responded simply in his Crucian accent, "Believe it."

When I saw Brien a few minutes later, his face was red with mixed concern and joy.  He said, "We're having our baby!  You'd better go home; we'll call you."  I was dumbstruck and walked out of the hospital like a zombie.  I don't remember the drive home, but I do remember that I didn't get much sleep.  Finally, Brien called me shortly after midnight to say they'd had a baby girl, and they'd named her Greer.  Everyone was doing well.  He would call me in the morning.  I finally caught a few winks.

As it turns out, the neonatal intensive care unit at the hospital on St. Croix is top notch.  Greer had excellent care, and the nurses were warm, friendly, and knowledgeable.  Greer is fully expected to make a full recovery.  However, Susan was having a few complications, so they kept her in the hospital for a few days' observation.

Susan's parents quickly made plans to fly down to visit.  Dan and Dianne were excellent guests and were relieved to finally see Susan and the baby doing well.  Feeling a bit helpless, Gerald and I did the best we could to make everyone feel at home.  We knew that Brien and Susan were likely to be here 6-8 weeks until Greer was ready to fly, so we started making long-term arrangements.

Things progressed for several tense days, and then Susan was told she could go home.  Greer would be kept in an isolette in the hospital until she could breathe and eat on her own.  Everyone took turns joining Susan going to see the baby over the next several days.  Susan was still feeling ill, and eveeryone was concerned, including the insurance company.

Amazingly, a representative from Tufts Health Care called Susan and asked if she'd like to be medflighted back to Boston, fully covered by the insurance.  After some discussion, they agreed that would be the best option so that they could be with their family and regular doctors.  They started working on the arrangements, and Susan, Brien, and Greer were finally flown back to Boston on Thanksgiving day.

We're now without guests and without excitement.  We feel enormously relieved that Greer is back home with family and doctors that they know.  But we can't help but feel a bit saddened that our Crucian baby has left us.  Brien and Susan proclaimed us Uncle Tim & Gerald, not honorary, but real uncles.

Brien and Susan have since let us know that Greer and Susan are both doing wonderfully, and Susan was released from the hospital in Boston with a clean bill of health.  Greer will be going home in a few weeks as well.

We've had lots of other excitement as well, but I'll leave that for another post.

 

We woke up this morning to find this over-sized hermit crab drowned in our pool. Poor thing...



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Driving down the main street of Christiansted on St. Croix, we passed a boat being hauled on a trailor. It's name? Marine Juanna.

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My Bike Arrived!

I shipped my bicycle through the US Postal Service parcel post on Friday 8/5.  It just arrived yesterday, 19 days later!  I am eager to go for a ride.

I spoke with Jamie at the bike shop, who is the mechanic there and apparently does really well in the local races.  The biking on St. Croix is supposedly very good.  There are lots of local road races and triathalons.  The terrain is mountainous in areas and flat in others.  I went for a quick spin near my house and found that the hills are quite steep.  I should get back into shape pretty quick!  I'm hoping to start riding every morning before it gets warm and before the traffic gets bad.

Shipping warning

If you ship something to us down here, go way overboard on the packing protection, please.  USPS Priority mail is the fastest way to get stuff here, but they are exceptionally rough with the packages.

We just received a gift today that included very well-wrapped and packed margarita glasses.  Unfortunately, 6 out of the 8 had broken stems, and a heavy duty 3-4mm thick plastic serving tray was completely smashed.  Amazing!

Cheap cigarettes

Without taxes, cigarettes are amazingly cheap in St. Croix.  At Cost-U-Less, the local warehouse store, a carton (10-pack) of Marlboro's is $16.  A carton of Pall Mall's is $7!  When we were in Massachusetts, a carton costs around $50 or $60 because of state taxes.  Unfortunately, this doesn't help people who want to quit...

And no, we're not taking orders!

Electricity is fun

So we're in the midst of our first power outage on the island.  Supposedly these are fairly frequent, but luckily our house came equipped with a 21kW generator powerful enough to run the whole house.  It's got a 500 gallon oil tank, good for a month or more.  It's a bit noisy, but it's nice to have the power on!

Visit us in St. Croix

We'd love to have our friends and family visit us in St. Croix.  I've set up a web-based calendar where you can book your time.  Email me for the web address and login info.

The Conclusion

Everyone's been emailing me, asking how the story ends.  Sorry for keeping you in suspense.

The next morning, I drove down to the service station, and they had a receipt hanging by the cash register.  "Oh yeah, here it is," he said.  And I gave him my credit card, and we were good.  Simple!

So how did we get money?  Well, the ATMs were still not working, so we went over to the Cormorant Beach Club hotel, where we've stayed on both trips to St. Croix.  We had been eating there almost every day this time because we hadn't gotten any food in our house yet.  So the lovely manager of the hotel told us she acts as "banker" for a lot of the local regular diners, and she'd be happy to cash a check.  So there you go!  We still haven't been to an ATM that works!

We had dinner with our realtor Honnie (www.honnie.com) a few nights ago.  She planned a dinner with some of her staff and 3 couples who had recently purchased homes on St. Croix.  We had a lovely dinner and made some good friends.  We took one couple to our favorite island restaurant, Savant, last night.  Its cuisine is a mixture of Thai (coconut-based curries), Mexican (fajitas, etc.), and Caribbean (fresh fish, Caribbean spices, etc.).  It's always fantastic, and their bartender Cheryl makes incredible rumritas.  The yellowfin tuna is fresh off the boat, same day, from local waters and is perfect ordered rare.

Speaking of rum, it's cheap here!  The Cruzan rum distillery is on the island, and there is no duty charged on any alcohol.  All the grocery stores have the Cruzan dark and light rum for about $4 a bottle (750ml), and I've heard you can often get it for as cheap as $2.  They also have a great selection of flavored rums that are really tasty, and a key component in the raspberry or pineapple rumrita.  Since Coca-Cola is sometimes over $2 per bottle and some imported juices are really expensive, you can imagine that the bartenders here tend to overpour the liquor in the mixed drinks!

I'm working on putting up a calendar web page so friends and family can reserve the guest house.  I'll send out an email when it's ready.

Island Living

Everyone is so laid back on the island that it's sometimes quite surprising!

A few days ago we spent our last cash, thinking that we'd just go to the ATM to get some more.  Well, 4 ATMs later, and 2 of them were out of service, and the other 2 said, "Could not process transaction.  Temporary error.  Try again later."  So okay we'll use our credit cards.

On the way home from dinner, we stopped to buy some gas.  "Do you take credit cards?"  "Nope."  Hmm, okay.  Next station.  No credit cards.  Next station, "No, but go down the road to Everybody's Service Station.  They take cards."  Woo hoo!

So out of the car to fill up the tank and get some cigarettes for Gerald.  "Do you take credit cards?"  "Sure!  Visa and Mastercard."  Great!  So we started filling up.  After about 11 gallons, suddenly all the lights went out and the pumps went dead.  We'd been hit by one of WAPA's infamous power outages.  WAPA is the Water and Power Authority on the Island, and everyone complains about their inefficiencies and frequent outages.

So now we're thinking, "Okay, we don't have any cash.  Our checks are back at home, and the power's out, so we can't pay with a credit card.  Uh oh!"  "Do you have a generator?"  "Yeah, but it's busted."  Okay, we'll just wait for the power to come back on.

5 minutes later, and no power.  The service station owner finally said, "Well it's probably not going to come back on, so I'm just going to close up.  Come back tomorrow and pay me.  Here's a pack of cigarettes; I'll add it to your bill."  "We can go get you a check."  "No, don't bother.  Just come back tomorrow."  Stunned, we said, "Okay...", then introduced ourselves, shook hands, and off we went.

Stay tuned for the exciting conclusion to find out how we eventually got some cash!

The view from our new home.

We're mostly moved in now. We've had some interesting adventures, which I'll share soon.



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One of my carryon bags had 20 PDAs, MP3 players, and cell phones. They didn't say a peep when it went through the X-ray machine. I have to wonder what the X-ray tech was thinking. 'Oh another bag o' Palms...'


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As some of you know, Gerald and I are moving to St. Croix (US Virgin Islands) this winter to work from paradise. I'm going to try to write regular updates in my blog about our trials and tribulations.

Today was our flight from Boston to St. Croix. We're in the San Juan airport now waiting on our layover.

When we unloaded our 10 bags at the curb, we needed a porter. I asked someone rolling a cart and he quickly emptied it and said, 'See that long line over there? That's for this luggage service. But stick with me and I'll take care of you.'

He loads our 6 bags and says, 'You know you only get 2 bags per person.' Gerald said, 'No, AA told us that we get 2 bags per seat, and we purchased 3 seats.' 'Okay I'll go check.'

Turns out he was right. So he says, 'Play along... You're very upset because you were told incorrect information. I can get you to the front of the line, but you'll have to pay for the bags anyway.'

With some guilt, we skipped ahead of the dozens of people in line while he demanded a manager on our behalf and got our tickets in just a few minutes. We gave him a good tip!

Two of our carryons are our cats. Going through security, they said, 'Take the cats out and walk through.' Ack! It was hard getting them in those carriers. Luckily the drugs had kicked in and 2 groggy kitties put up no fight getting back in their carriers.

Temperature: 88F in San Juan, PR. Sunny and humid. Calm.

More later...

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Wow! I've been digging through the mess in my office getting ready for our move. I came across my first 'real' handheld computer: a Tandy Pocket Scientific Computer PC-6. It ran BASIC or assembly programs, stored memos, and did all the scientific calculator stuff... Amazingly, it still works and still has all my programs that I wrote over 10 years ago. Looks like they sell for around $75 on eBay! I think I'll hold on to mine, though.



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Time to try Firefox?

I've resisted trying Firefox so far, but a few irksome problems with IE have recently pushed me over the edge.

1) We installed a wiki for internal collaborative use, and IE ocassionally hangs when trying to load the wiki's page.

2) I recently sent this rant to everyone at NormSoft: Download a large file using IE. Meanwhile, go back to typing email. As you know, email includes lots of spaces, so I hit the space bar all the time.

Suddenly, the download finishes, and the freaking download window pops to the foreground, intercepting all my keystrokes. When this happens, the active button on the download window is "Cancel". So as soon as I type the space bar key (which is very common - see above), it cancels the fucking download.

Now I have to go back to the web site and download the freaking 250MB file again. And then I forget it's downloading and start typing spaces again and I end up cancelling it a second time. Argh!

NowI'mwaryoftypingspaces.Anyonegotabettersolution???

3) There's some kind of limit on how many downloads you can do at one time with IE.  It fluctuates.  Right now it's 2, but I remember a few days ago I could do 6.  Seems like a ridiculous limitation since I have a 4MBit cable modem connection.

4) IE does not download files directly to the destination - it makes a copy.  Why?

Hotels.com Cracked

I just got an email from hotels.com about a recent hotel I booked to North Carolina.  I'm not going to North Carolina!  I called them up, and they confirmed that someone actually placed a reservation on my hotels.com account!  They flagged my account as fraudulent and disabled it.  They weren't super helpful, but they did confirm that the person did not use my credit card to reserve the account.  Very strange...

As many of you know, I'm super vigilant about security (see CryptInfo).  So I can't imagine anything that was my fault that would have leaked my account information.  I recommend avoiding hotels.com; they either have poor security or flaws in their system that allow other people to place reservations with your account.

Another Case Against Blacklists

This was just too good to pass up.  Our customer support person just received this bounce and sent it to me for diagnostics:

From: MAILER-DAEMON@mail01h.rapidsite.net

Date: 4 Mar 2005 03:57:51 -0000

To: yyy@zzz.com
Subject: failure notice

Hi. This is the qmail-send program at mail01h.rapidsite.net.

I'm afraid I wasn't able to deliver your message to the following addresses.

This is a permanent error; I've given up. Sorry it didn't work out.

xxx@yyy.net:

66.150.45.42 does not like recipient.

Remote host said: 550 5.2.1 Mailbox unavailable. Your IP address 131.103.218.175 is blacklisted using SPAMCOP. Details: Blocked - see http://www.spamcop.net/bl.shtml?131.103.218.175.

Giving up on 66.150.45.42.

So, if you'll follow me here: 131.103.218.175 is blacklisted.  That IP address is mail01h.rapidsite.net.  But that's the mail server that's receiving the email (and relaying it to someone else - presumably one of the ISP's customers).  So it's refusing to deliver mail because it is blacklisted, itself!

Real Semaphores on PalmOS 5

It turns out it's fairly easy to implement real binary semaphores on PalmOS 5. This is really handy for folks that want to perform synchronization between their audio callback thread and their UI thread, for instance. Unfortunately, you have to access the semaphore from ARM-native code.

The trick is the SWP ARM instruction. This instruction swaps the contents of a register and a memory location, and it guarantees that this will be an atomic operation.

Here's some sample code in ARM assembly:

@ initialize a 4-byte word value to 1. That initializes your semaphore.

@ wait

@ r4 should contain an address that points to the semaphore.
.Lacquiresemaphore:
mov r5, #0
swp r5, r5, [r4] @ try to set the semaphore to 0
cmp r5, #1 @ if the previous value was 1, then we got it
beq .Lgotsemaphore @ this is a busy wait, but you could insert
@ an OS call - perhaps SysTaskDelay - to make it better
b .Lacquiresemaphore

.Lgotsemaphore:
@ do stuff

@ signal

mov r5, #1
str r5, [r4] @ reset the semaphore

Of course you can extend this example to implement more complicated semaphores as well.

The advantage of this versus a spin lock is that you don't need to know which thread you are executing in. With a 2-slot spin lock, you need to know if you are user #1 or #2.

Enjoy!

ActiveWords

Pretty cool piece of software.  Gerald's been using it to do some customer support, and it really speeds up entering canned responses, etc.  You basically can assign any set of keys to do certain tasks (using an optional action key to trigger the task).  Tasks are very flexible and can include things like running programs, web pages, pasting contents of text files, etc.