Night Rider
So, yesterday was Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement. The Jewish custom is to fast, pray, and ask forgiveness on this day, but our own long-standing mother-daughter tradition is that I spend the day at her place, and we basically eat the traditional food of the "last meal before the fast" throughout the day. :-)
My mom has gone very high-tech recently. I keep telling her she has far more electronic stuff than I do. A spiffy new Plasma TV (I still have a CRT - darn the Japanese for their excellent workmanship, it's as good as the day I bought it and I have no excuse for replacing it), a LCD in her bedroom, one desktop computer (which I bought her as a gift, replacing her old one), and one laptop (which she bought because she wanted to also be able to surf and read e-mail in the living room), and now an Android Phone.
So she wanted me to help her with the new phone, show her how to do stuff with it, etc. This turned out to be a real pain in the ass - too much like work to enjoy Yom Kippur properly. The problem was moving her contacts from the old Nokia to the new (Sony Ericsson Xperia something). Her network provider only transferred what was on the SIM. So I had to find something that transfers from the Nokia to the PC. Then I had to find a way to transfer the data to Gmail. As the saying here goes, "I shat cubes over this". Nokia OVI was no help at all. PC Suite allowed me to export to CSV. But Gmail would not accept that CSV. I read the help, and it said it expected column headers in English. Fine, I tried that - but it only transferred the first and last names - all the phone numbers went to the Notes field.
I tried exporting a file from Gmail and then following the same format. It was an annoying manual job (and I hate-hate-hate Office 2007. It's a piece of crap as far as the GUI goes. What's with the Windows 3.1esque window-within-a-window concept? If I un-maximize a window, I can't scroll its content because it floats in a window inside the main window to whose scroll bars I have access). And it didn't work. It also threw everything into the notes.
I was ready to give up and weep when I finally found that I can drag the contacts from PC Suite to a directory on the PC, and they all converted into nifty VCF files, which Gmail accepts and actually puts things in the correct fields. But loading them one by one would be madness, so eventually I opened CMD, and used - ugh - TYPE *.VCF > FOO.BAR. Amazing, this worked. Thank you, DOS, for still existing on Windows 7. I renamed the FOO.BAR file to something.vcf, and loaded it to Gmail. Yay.
But there was another issue, which is Nokia handling UTF-8 not quite correctly, which meant almost all of the names in the contacts ended up with extra spaces or a botched character somewhere. This happened in the CSV file as well as the VCF files. And there was no help for it but to correct each name manually - through a list of 192 contacts.
Then I synchronized the contact list to the phone. That took all of a second. After 6 hours of working on the damn thing.
This weekend was way too much like work to enjoy.
Anyway, you may recall that on Yom Kippur, no motor vehicles (except ambulances) move. Even among the secular population, it's a day of bikes and skateboarding in the middle of high streets. The motor curfew ends only after the sun sets fully and three stars are visible. Usually, I take the day after Yom Kippur off, so I can ride back home then. But I knew I am going to have a busy half-week this week, and I couldn't take a day off. This meant I had to ride home after the aforementioned three stars were out. Yes, ride 150km home in the dark. Yay. :-(
So I planned on going through route 6, a toll highway, which is the fastest and most convenient way to go lengthwise in Israel. I rode the "normal" route 40, changed into route 6, and only after I entered it I realized that it was not lighted. I never imagined that route 6 would not be lighted. I planned on running at the usual 110km/h (which is the speed limit in that route - the highest in Israel) but that would have been complete madness, given that headlight sight distance would be much shorter than the stopping distance at that speed. Especially since I was not alone on the road most of the time and couldn't keep the high headlight on.
In short, it was a scary experience. I rode it at 90km/h, and kept hoping that no foxes would decide to cross the road. Cars kept overtaking me at ludicrous speeds (their headlights are the same range as mine! Crazy, crazy drivers!). I am not doing this ever again. I don't care how urgent a project I have at work - it's not worth my life.
My mom has gone very high-tech recently. I keep telling her she has far more electronic stuff than I do. A spiffy new Plasma TV (I still have a CRT - darn the Japanese for their excellent workmanship, it's as good as the day I bought it and I have no excuse for replacing it), a LCD in her bedroom, one desktop computer (which I bought her as a gift, replacing her old one), and one laptop (which she bought because she wanted to also be able to surf and read e-mail in the living room), and now an Android Phone.
So she wanted me to help her with the new phone, show her how to do stuff with it, etc. This turned out to be a real pain in the ass - too much like work to enjoy Yom Kippur properly. The problem was moving her contacts from the old Nokia to the new (Sony Ericsson Xperia something). Her network provider only transferred what was on the SIM. So I had to find something that transfers from the Nokia to the PC. Then I had to find a way to transfer the data to Gmail. As the saying here goes, "I shat cubes over this". Nokia OVI was no help at all. PC Suite allowed me to export to CSV. But Gmail would not accept that CSV. I read the help, and it said it expected column headers in English. Fine, I tried that - but it only transferred the first and last names - all the phone numbers went to the Notes field.
I tried exporting a file from Gmail and then following the same format. It was an annoying manual job (and I hate-hate-hate Office 2007. It's a piece of crap as far as the GUI goes. What's with the Windows 3.1esque window-within-a-window concept? If I un-maximize a window, I can't scroll its content because it floats in a window inside the main window to whose scroll bars I have access). And it didn't work. It also threw everything into the notes.
I was ready to give up and weep when I finally found that I can drag the contacts from PC Suite to a directory on the PC, and they all converted into nifty VCF files, which Gmail accepts and actually puts things in the correct fields. But loading them one by one would be madness, so eventually I opened CMD, and used - ugh - TYPE *.VCF > FOO.BAR. Amazing, this worked. Thank you, DOS, for still existing on Windows 7. I renamed the FOO.BAR file to something.vcf, and loaded it to Gmail. Yay.
But there was another issue, which is Nokia handling UTF-8 not quite correctly, which meant almost all of the names in the contacts ended up with extra spaces or a botched character somewhere. This happened in the CSV file as well as the VCF files. And there was no help for it but to correct each name manually - through a list of 192 contacts.
Then I synchronized the contact list to the phone. That took all of a second. After 6 hours of working on the damn thing.
This weekend was way too much like work to enjoy.
Anyway, you may recall that on Yom Kippur, no motor vehicles (except ambulances) move. Even among the secular population, it's a day of bikes and skateboarding in the middle of high streets. The motor curfew ends only after the sun sets fully and three stars are visible. Usually, I take the day after Yom Kippur off, so I can ride back home then. But I knew I am going to have a busy half-week this week, and I couldn't take a day off. This meant I had to ride home after the aforementioned three stars were out. Yes, ride 150km home in the dark. Yay. :-(
So I planned on going through route 6, a toll highway, which is the fastest and most convenient way to go lengthwise in Israel. I rode the "normal" route 40, changed into route 6, and only after I entered it I realized that it was not lighted. I never imagined that route 6 would not be lighted. I planned on running at the usual 110km/h (which is the speed limit in that route - the highest in Israel) but that would have been complete madness, given that headlight sight distance would be much shorter than the stopping distance at that speed. Especially since I was not alone on the road most of the time and couldn't keep the high headlight on.
In short, it was a scary experience. I rode it at 90km/h, and kept hoping that no foxes would decide to cross the road. Cars kept overtaking me at ludicrous speeds (their headlights are the same range as mine! Crazy, crazy drivers!). I am not doing this ever again. I don't care how urgent a project I have at work - it's not worth my life.