Monthly Archives: June 2007

One thing I won’t miss about the old house

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86 degrees in our kitchen at 10pm
The week started brutally hot and stayed there through last night, when the T-storms finally arrived.Yes, it really was 86F in our kitchen at 10pm on Wednesday night. We brought it on ourselves by giving away our big window AC a couple weeks ago, but I’m still very much looking forward to central air.

Air Andrew

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Yesterday we took the kids down to the Rhode Island National Guard Air Show [as of this writing, website appears busted]. Taking a five-year-old and two-year-old out to an event like that is always a dicey proposition, but they tolerated the long walks and exposure to the sun remarkably well. We arrived just as an F-15 and P-51 did formation passes. That put a silly grin on my face that lasted for the next couple hours through aerobatic demonstrations (Sean Tucker and Michael Hunter) C-23, A-10, C-130J and UH-60 flybys, and a Blue Angels show.
Oh, and Andrew liked it, too Andrew’s toy-of-the-moment is now a spring-loaded Blue Angels flyer, which we flew all over the back yard after returning home. He’s convinced that Blue Angel #6 is the fastest and loudest.

If I still lived there, I think I’d take the week off

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So I finally checked out the Tour of Missouri website…I’ve lived in three of the nine host cities, and went to high school in a fourth. The thought of guys with big motors gunning it up and down the roads of my youth stirs my bike nerd soul. Yeah, if I were still there, I’d be taking the week off and following it. As it is, I better be able to get some kind of daily update.
I hope this lasts long enough for me to get back and see it some year.

Franklin Templeton: Security Through Inaccessibility

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I knew I was in for it when I tried to get to my account on franklintempleton.com last Saturday afternoon, and the main page was replaced with a notice that the site would be down for scheduled maintenance “until 2am on Saturday.” By Sunday afternoon, the main page was back. But I still couldn’t log in; evidently part of the “scheduled maintenance” was a new security scheme that required me to specify a user ID other than a certain personally identifying number (good) and provide answers to a bunch of challenge questions that would be used during the login process (bad, as it turns out). No matter how I filled out that form, it would not validate, insisting that I hadn’t provided answers to some of the questions. I tried in both IE7 and Firefox 2, to no avail. Eventually I forgot about it. I meant to screenshot the security form, but I guess I didn’t.
I took another look tonight, and saw this pleasant little notice (which I did screenshot):
ft_security_thru_inaccessibility.jpg
Given how I make my living, I have some sympathy for this. Wait, no I don’t. It takes real effort to make something that will work in IE6 but not IE7. If I let something like that get into production, I’d at least get yelled at, and I might just get fired. I’d deserve whatever I got, especially if I left it up for a week. Fer cry yi yi, it’s the intertubes…one of the benefits is that it’s easy to update rapidly and fix your mistakes.
I sure am glad I didn’t need to get to my account this week.