This is the website of Abulsme Noibatno Itramne (also known as Sam Minter).
Posts here are rare these days. For current stuff, follow me on Mastodon
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A few days ago the State Department dropped the travel warning it had on Angola. Thus the number of countries with State Department Travel warnings has dropped to 25. This is once again at the number it was when I started tracking this statistic in October 2003. In between it peaked at 27 countries, where it stayed from December 2003 to March 2004. In April the State Department dropped the warning for Turkey. Now they have dropped the warning for Angola. So start planning your trips to those places now!
State Department Travel Warnings Over Time
A chart of how many countries world wide have US State Department Travel Warnings as that number varies over time. Serves as a proxy to chart roughly how dangerous the world is as the world situation changes over time. Perhaps not the best measure of that, but an interesting one perhaps.
I love my Tivo to death, and hope to buy two more DirecTV / Tivo combo boxes before the end of this year (one regular, one HDTV). It is still the best thing out there in terms of PVRs. But as a business, they keep getting strikes against them. Poor Tivo.
DirecTv Sold Stake in TiVo
(WSJ Online quoted by Shark73 on TivoCommunity)
In a research note Tuesday, William Blair & Co. analyst David Farina said DirecTV sold its entire 3.5 million stake in TiVo shares Monday night for about $7.20 a share. Spokesmen for both TiVo and DirecTV weren’t immediately available to comment on the reported sale, which comes shortly after Eddy Hartenstein, vice chairman of DirecTV, stepped down from TiVo’s board of directors.
(Full Disclosure, I own ONE WHOLE SHARE of Tivo stock. Oh, I probably should have disclosed on the last post too. I own one share of Apple as well. :-) )
I unfortunately have no immediate need for this, and there are other things (many other things) on the priority list anyway, but hey, it is cool.
AirPort Express
Enjoy your iTunes music library in virtually any room of your house. Share a single broadband Internet connection and USB printer without inconvenient and obtrusive cables. Create an instant wireless network on the go. Extend the range of your current wireless network. How many devices do you need to do all this? Just one.
Oh, by the way, did I mention here that my mom did go ahead and get a 12″ Powerbook fully loaded? Boy am I jealous! Powerbook is way down on the list to spend money on at the moment too. Maybe by the end of the year or early next year.
I emailed this to some folks yesterday, but thought I would post it as well. :-)
Hi all! A bunch of you have asked lately, and many more of you haven’t, but just thought I would update you all and beg for a little help. The update is for everyone. The plea for help is really only for the people who live near me, although some from farther away have offered help and would be most welcome.
Anyway, the update first… I’m on my last week in Florida before Brandy, Amy and I actually MOVE to Florida. I fly back up Friday. Then it is packing packing packing. Which goes into 100% mode after Amy’s school finishes on Tuesday. After much debate, we decided to go the UHaul route again instead of professional movers. Saves a bunch of cash which we can use on other things. So over the weekend we’ll be loading up the truck, then Monday morning we’ll drive the truck full of stuff, plus one of Brandy’s cars full of pets down to Florida.
Then probably one last trip to PA on the 30th to actually sign all the papers to close on the house and possibly bring back Brandy’s backup car. Then we will be Floridians!!!
The job is going great and all that too. :-) A tree in the back yard of the house we are staying in did fall over on Sunday, but it didn’t hit the house, so we still have a place to stay. Yea! :-) In general, things are going well, and slowly falling into place down here. As the final move approaches things are getting more and more hectic and stressful, but hey, that is part of the process.
OK, now the plea. Yup, helping us load the truck and stuff. Those of you who have helped me move in the past will recoil in horror. (See the story of Putrid Rotting Fruit.) But Brandy has tamed me somewhat, and there won’t be live bugs this time. Well… probably some crickets for my lizard to eat. :-) And I’ve actually thrown away a lot of junk! Promise! Anyway, those of you far away obviously can’t come to help us load the truck, but anybody close by who is willing and able, we would much appreciate added hands to get everything loaded. (Hopefully everything will be packed by then.) We’ll provide food, refreshing beverages and entertainment!
We’ll be doing the truck loading Saturday the 19th. (Picking the truck up in the morning, loading in the afternoon.) If we don’t finish the 19th, we’ll continue on Sunday the 20th. But the 19th should be the big day. Once we’re all done, we’ll be ready to hit the road at the next opportune moment.
The big loading day is a week from Saturday. If anybody thinks they can come, please let me know via email. We appreciate all the help we can get. Once we get to the Florida end, I expect we’ll be doing it by ourselves. Don’t know anybody well enough yet down here to beg for help. :-)
Anyway, thanks in advance! We appreciate it!
Well, someone else beat our offer. Not sure if they actually beat the dollar amount or if so how much, but we did get told that they put down almost 50% of the price of the house in cash. Something we definately could not do. Oops.
Oh well. It was a nice house and we liked it, but buying before everything was settled on the PA house did make me nervous, as I mentioned. But we finally saw one we liked and moved on it, ya know? Anyway, we’ll still look at any that match our specs which come up in the next month or so. But having said that, I’ll be a lot more comfortable if we wait until late July (when all the cash flow stuff should be settled down) before making another offer. Maybe on one of the places to be built. I really like the Tiffany “Oriole” model. It is at the high end of our range though.
Well, we’ll let it play out. If something perfect comes up we may do the offer thing again. Otherwise… not until at least July, maybe August I’m thinking. The longer we wait the stronger the money situation will be. Of course, at the same time, the longer we wait the higher the prices will be (unless the market crashes) and we’ll have to deal with the whole schooll juggling thing.
Argh! Anyway, time to just think about getting the actual move done.
There are 2 other offers besides ours on the place in Florida. And the owners are playing hardball on things like how much deposit up front as opposed to at closing, and when the closing date will be and things like that. We put in an updated counter offer reflecting that stuff and sweetening our offer a little bit. But there is competition, so who knows what will happen.
If we don’t get this one, we’ll probably wait until mid-July to even look again. The situation in terms of available cash and the closing on the house here and everything else will be a lot more stable then. Juggling the sale of the house here, the timing of relocation payments from the new job, and the purchase of something new is really quite stressful. I like doing things in sequence without so many dependancies a lot better.
But this seemed like a good place that we all liked, and it will also be really nice to actually get settled in the perminant place before the school year starts so Amy won’t have to bounce schools at the second move. Plus prices are going up at a rate that can already be seen in the couple of months we’ve been looking at houses down there. So when we found this one, offering seemed the right thing to do.
We want it.
But… if one of the other two people get it instead, we’ll be OK with that too. We’ll find something a couple months down the line. Every month we stay at the Bou’s should actually do a lot to put us in an increasingly better position… but at the same time, we’re anxious to get settled in a long-term spot, especially because of the school thing.
Anyway, we’ll see what happens.
I put in an offer on a place in Florida today. We had been thinking of building, but saw one on Thursday that seemed to be a good match and all three of us liked. And the price is in my original budget range, not the higher range I had decided to also look in after not being satisfied initially with what I saw in the lower range. If the offer is accepted I’ll post more info in a few days. And I guess if it isn’t I’ll post that too.
Well, as of last night Amy and Brandy have seen the place in Melbourne we are renting from Ivan’s family for the first time. We won’t be fully moved in with this as our primary home for another month or so, but we’re starting to get the feel of the place and the neighborhood.
I was going to take the time and make a photo gallery page on abulsme.com with my look and feel and my navigation and my site stats tracking and all that fun stuff, but things are pretty busy these days and who knows when I’ll have the time. So here is a mac.com photo album (took only seconds to post with iPhoto). Enjoy!
Some Pictures of Our Place
This is a transitional place, for us to stay until the sale of the house in PA closes, and we decide what we want to buy down here and then wait to be able to move in. That may take a little while. In the mean time, this will be home!
Edit 2016-12-05 03:30 UTC to replace link to defunct mac.com page with a new page with the same pictures and captions I just created. The old URL was http://homepage.mac.com/abulsme/PhotoAlbum24.html. A Wayback Machine snapshot of the original page is also available here.
Watch what happens with Chalabi. In many ways he manipulated the American Neo-Cons into the invasion last year. Now it hasn’t gone the way he wants and the Americans are turning on him (finally). But it doesn’t seem he will go quietly. He is definately one to watch.
The Truth About Ahmed Chalabi
(Andrew Cockburn, CounterPunch)
In dawn raids today, American troops surrounded Ahmed Chalabi’s headquarters and home in Baghdad, put a gun to his head, arrested two of his aides, and seized documents. Only five months ago, Chalabi was a guest of honor sitting right behind Laura Bush at the State of the Union. What brought about this astonishing fall from grace of the man who helped provide the faked intelligence that justified last year’s war?
The answer lies in Chalabi’s reaction to his gradual loss of US support in recent months and the realisation that he will be excluded from the post June 30 Iraqi “government” being crafted by UN envoy Lakhdar Brahimi.
Lashing out against his exclusion from power, he has in effect been laying the groundwork for a coup, assembling a Shia political coalition with the express aim of destabilising the “Brahimi” government even before it takes office. “
(via MetaFilter)
I convinced my mom to give a try at putting a print newsletter she edits online in blog form. I set her up on Blogger and showed her how to post. Just a couple posts so far. She is experimenting. I don’t know if she’ll keep it up, but I’ll keep an eye on it! Anyway, it is my mom, so check it out.
Just Peace Advocate
The Just Peace Advocate appears in three formats. The “short version” is two pages per month included in Western Area News and… which is mailed to pastors, churches and leaders in Massachusetts by the Western Area office. The “long version” appears 5-6 times a year and goes to a special list of persons who have requested to receive it or are known to have an interest in justice and peace issues. This site posts updates between publications of the print versions.
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