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I received a letter from EZ Pass warning me that my pass was only to be used with a motorcycle and that its misuse with a car would result in it being suspended and possibly confiscated on the spot. I was surprised and checked that the one in the car was the right one and that the one in my ’stich was for the cycle. I assumed it was sent as a mistake and I threw the letter away.

Today, several members of the NYC Moto email list mentioned getting similar letters. Looks like the administrators of the EZ Pass system figure that motorcyclists are by definition an untrustworthy bunch and that they should remind the surly lot of cheats, crooks and thieves that they, the upright defenders of order, were on to them. At least that was the tone of the letter.

EZ Pass is a convenience, and if you regularly travel the bridges and toll roads, a necessary evil. However it’s less than fifty percent likely that the pass will work with a motorcycle in the gates and that they originally recommended that motorcyclists not use the automatic gates (hello! that is the point!) they border on losing their intended benefit of convenience. If this is the stance they intend to take with their customers they will shortly find themselves with a few less.

So my Palm Pilot died yesterday. I was furious. I had broken a number of them with not so gentle handling but this one just upped and died on its own- unprovoked! I was about to toss it away and try to buy a used one when I remembered that I had one with a smashed screen lying around (yes, I’m hard on my toys). Maybe, I thought, I could swap the good screen on this one with the good circuit board of the other? I disassembled the recently deceased gadget and it was full of fuzz. Real fuzz. Dust bunnies of gray pocket lint. I pulled the whole thing apart and blew it out then cleaned out the remaining dust with an alcohol soaked swab. I reassembled it and tested. To my relief, it worked.

I had never heard of this with a handheld. It seems that this Palm 3xe has a loose case and admitted the fuzz over the past three years. Weird.

Finished reading Chamond Liu’s Smalltalk, Objects and Design. The book is a fair introduction to Smalltalk and the environment specific stuff is just that, environment specific, but the passages on OO software design patterns are first rate. I have never read a clearer, easier to understand primer on OO patterns. I wish I had read those chapters ten years ago; it might have saved me some time and frustration.

Borrowed a copy of Eric Meyer’s On CSS. You might think I can’t get enough of w3c standards but after this I’ll have had plenty. I haven’t started it yet but I have a long weekend coming up.

Also borrowed a copy of Diomidis Spinellis’ Code Reading. I’ve only read the preface and introduction but I need to order a copy for myself. It’s the kind of technical book that I’ll want to carry around and dog ear by reading every chance I get.

Maria passed me The Fasting Girl by Michelle Stacey. It is the researched account of the Victorian era New York medical hoax (I assume) Mollie Fancher who claimed to suffer bouts of paralysis and experience trances and lived for a dozen years on nothing more than a few bits of fruit and crackers. Looks very interesting.

My laptop for the past three or four years was a Toshiba 7020 that I saved from the trash. It had suffered a broken LCD and, figuring it was worth $100 to try fixing myself, I replaced the screen with one from ebay. For another $60 I added 128MB RAM. It’s worked well enough- for the price- but suddenly the power regulator failed and it will neither charge nor run off batteries, making it a less than portable.

It’s time to upgrade anyway, so I bid on one (1) very nice used laptop on ebay and unleashed a dozen scam artists trying, in varying degrees of broken English, to sell me similar or identical units for anywhere from half to two-thirds the current bid. Does anyone actually wire money to any of Spain, Belgium, Netherlands or Romania(!) for a deal that is too good to be true offered from an account at hotmail or yahoo?

This evening someone in my building decided that my public wireless node was for leeching music with edonkey. It’s not. Now, after nearly two years of letting people use it, I have to firewall off everything outbound but a handful of ports. Idiot.