Things I would have missed

Laura takes me places I never would have gone, and fills me with experiences I never knew I would have missed.

On the way back from Deep Creek Lake (Western Maryland), she suggested that if we didn't see something earlier, we could stop in Cumberland and go to Baltimore Street Grill (?) for a late breakfast--they make the best Long Island Iced Teas. (Since it would be close to 11:00 am on a Sunday, coffee would probably have been the beverage of choice). I wasn't excited, but I tried not to let on. Having found nothing earlier (there really isn't much) we took the Cumberland exit, and managed to find the place. It's in the town center, so we parked a few blocks away and started walking (we'd been skiiing, so walking wasn't a lot of fun...) As we later were reminded on the radio, most of the town center is closed on Sundays. And like most everything else we walked past, Baltimore Street Grill was closed. But The Daily Grind right next door was open, so rather than waste the walk, and the exit, and the time, we went in.

Cute little coffee house--espresso drinks, coffee, light eats, soup--cozy and inviting. And just as you walk in, beautiful harp music--played live! Coffee was very good, soup was good, ambience was very nice. Sat upstairs near large windows. Newspapers were out, so we read a little. I found out which counties had the best black bear harvest (I think that was the euphemism used) and I read about the guy who shot a 9 point buck, and when he was boiling the skull found that the deer had previously been shot by another hunter using bow and arrow. They found the hunter that hit the buck with the arrow, who sent his congrats to the guy who got the deer two weeks later with a shotgun (wow, what a great story!). And I read a classic Peanuts cartoon from 1960 about New Years resolutions. More of that will have to come on a different post. No pictures, cause my camera had eaten all of my batteries. VERY glad we stopped.

Then later, we stopped again at Port City Java. Ok, so the whole trip should have only taken 4 hours, there really was no NEED to stop twice for refreshments. But we stopped there two days earlier on the way up, and I knew I missed my chance at a photo, so I was going for a second shot. First, this was the place:

Just a little place in a strip mall. On the inside

I certainly enjoyed the company! It was a nice enough place. Espresso drinks, sandwiches, soup, etc. Sense a theme? They apparently have open mic nights for poetry readings, and a piano available as well. And me without my books. No poetry reading while we were there either, shucks. Noteworthy? Well, it was nice, but what really got me was the ashtrays. But for more of that, I'll have to post again later (soon, I think...)

Telephone Excise Tax Refund

I've seen a few emails about the "Telephone Excise Tax Refund" this year. Is it true!?! Yes!

Is it exciting? and secret? Not so much. I haven't filed my taxes yet, but I suspect it will be hard to miss. It's front and center on the IRS site today http://www.irs.gov
and the linked article http://www.irs.gov/newsroom/article/0,,id=161506,00.html
indicates:

Instructions for requesting this refund will be included with your tax
forms and on this Web site

The refund amount may vary depending on the actual amount of excise tax you paid from Feb. 28, 2003 to Aug. 1, 2006. Do you have your phone bills for that period? I do!!! (Uh, I have mine, I don't have yours!) And I'll probably calculate it (or at least try) when we get ready to file. I suspect after all the calculations, I'd be better off taking the standard amount--$60 in the case of filing married with two or more children.

This is a one-time return of taxes collected that the government has ruled no longer applies to long distance service as it is billed today. It only goes back to 2/28/03 due to statutes of limitations.

For businesses (this applies to me too...) standard amount is not available, so we can fill out Form 8913 based on the actual amount of tax paid, or review 2 months of bills and use a super secret special formula.

Happy Anniversary!

Thanks to all who made my 18th wedding anniversary a stupendous day. ESPECIALLY my best friend LB. (The charming picture isn't actually from our anniversary...) Besides 18 better-than-anyone-should-dare-to-hope-for years of marriage, she gave me that pot of gold at the end of the rainbow (that's the other picture...)

We enjoyed a nice church service, a break at Paneras, Bupp4's Basketball game (nice effort... we'll get 'em next time)

Skying...

And one!

Then--and I know everyone would be jealous--TACONESE!!!

And since taconese dessert leaves something to be desired, we opted for Bomboy's candies in Havre de Grace, for a special treat.

And follow that up with a round of Doppelkopf (I know you're jealous now) and a marathon of Monk, well now. Who could ask for more?

I love you, sweetheart.

Meebo Rocks!

At least it does so far. Thanks to PCWorld magazine for identifying Meebo as one of the most useful websites. Meebo lets you log onto all of your IM logins at the same time, and runs it all out of a pretty-well-done web site. The buddy list and message windows will float if you want them to, or they can stay put inside a single browser. Gotta see it to appreciate it. I have AOL, MSN, and Google Talk logins (now also Meebo!) and Meebo will start them all with a single login and better yet I DON'T HAVE TO RUN AIM OR MSN MESSENGER!! Meebo handles all of that! All I need is my login info. I very well may uninstall AIM--wouldn't that be nice!

Check me out if I'm online in the lower right side of this screen. Meebo will tell you if I'm online and if so, you can chat immediately. (Don't forget to identify yourself!)

But whether or not you check me out, check out Meebo
http://wwwl.meebo.com/index-en.html

DirLot and the full hard drive

I don't know where the "Label" shows up, but this post is labeled "IT"

Have you ever tried to clean the clutter out of a nearly-filled-up hard drive, only to find out that after deleting a bunch of stuff, the hard drive is still nearly full?! Where are the big files?!

Sure, you can wipe out the old internet files and cookies, but did it help? (Did you remember to wipe out all the files from each account on the computer?) I did. Didn't really help. So I looked for a utility, preferably one that worked well, was unobtrusive, and FREE. Found a few things that looked promising, but were either not really free, or just didn't do what I wanted. Then I found a tiny little program that looked good, but I had to "register" first. The registration process bombed (fortunately) so I searched the author and found his site, where you can download the software free, unrestricted, without registration! So I did, it's called DirLot

http://soft.km.ua/soft/dirlot/index.en.html

The zipped download is about 25kB (!) and unzips into a tiny directory structure totaling about 52kB. That's KB not MB!!! It doesn't install anything, it is just an html application (no, I don't really know what that means). When you run it, it displays in color, in your web browser, the relative size of each of the folders and files in a directory. It is very intuitive and easy to use.

My (relatively old) laptop has 18GB HD, and had gotten down to < 1 GB free. I used this program to find large file collections that could safely be deleted, and got down to 9 GB free!!! New Life!! One surprising culprit was the large amounts of Windows Update Uninstall files.

Hope this is useful for you!