I was just installing Cygwin on my new Vista laptop, and at the end, I got this message:

Of course the “What settings are applied?” link was less than helpful.

I juse finished reading the new FREE Productive! Magazine download, a digital magazine about David Allen's Getting Things Done.  The content was good, but reading a PDF formatted magazine on my 800 pixel tall MacBook screen was a total pain.  I will continue to read the content, because it seems like its worth it, but I may have to start printing it out (which isn't terribly green.)

To all my US reader(s) have a Happy Turkey Day. 

In quite a departure from their original stance on digital music distribution, Metallica is selling each of their shows from their current North America tour as a digital download.  I picked up the FLAC version of their Houston show for $13.  They also have MP3s for $10.  The quality is really good.  They have the right amount of crowd noise, and the balance between James and the band is good.

Browsing around their site, they also have 20 older concerts available for free download.

Mary and I are approaching our 10th Wedding Anniversary in January.  She pointed out that this was the diamond anniversary.  I mentioned something about it at the office yesterday, and we had a discussion on the two different Anniversary gift themes: Traditional and Modern.  Diamond jewelry is the Modern gift for ten years, but Aluminum is the Traditional ten year gift.

It this a coincidence?  I know I already got a new MacBook this year, but it's not aluminum.  Or maybe I need a new nano.  Apple does do custom engraving on all iPods bought from apple.com.  How much more romantic can you get than a custom engraving on an aluminum iPod?

For years, my employer has been almost anti-Microsoft.  Yes, we always had Windows laptops with Office on them, but the entire network backend was Sun.  My mailbox is on a Sun Java System Communication server, which I access via LDAP.  We also have a Sun online calendar server, but I've never used it.  I've actually always just had Outlook on my work machine also access my personal Exchange account.  Tasks, Calendar entries, and Contacts lived in my personal account, and was easily synchronized to my phone.

Now my employer is testing Microsoft Exchange as a mail and calendar environment.  I'm not on that pilot, but I do have a new laptop with our newly released Vista image, which appears to assume I'm on that pilot.  I attempted to add my personal Exchange account to Outlook, which ended up in a vicious cycle of authentication pop-ups for the Global Catalog on my personal network and the work network.  This has caused it to have a ton of trouble actually receiving any mail.  I usually take my Mac to the office, and Outlook Web Access works quite well, so I don't have an issue reading my personal mail, but I do only want to have a single calendar, which is available to my on my personal machines, on my phone, and on my work machine.

After a bit of Googling, I decided Google was the answer.  Google calendar and the Google Calendar Sync plugin for Outlook.  Basically what this does is on a scheduled basis, it synchronizes your Outlook calendar (in my case a local PST based one on my work machine, and an Exchange based one on a machine on my home network) with your Google Calendar.  It can either be two way or one way (you specify which one way.)  I'm using two-way on both machine.  So far I haven't had any sync issues.

My only complaint so far is that Google's calendar doesn't have any tagging, labeling, categorizing support.  Using the web interface only, you can create separate calendars, and they are color coded.  I suspect that this is how they intend people to segregate their different appointment types.  Unfortunately, the Outlook sync app can only sync one Outlook calendar with your main Google calendar.  I generally categorize (which color codes) all my Outlook calendar items.  Personal, work, Scouts, etc.  Unfortunately for now, all that data doesn't make it into Google's world, so also doesn't make it back and forth between the two copies of Outlook.

I was hoping that Windows Live Calendar would be a solution, but it doesn't seem to sync, that plugin seems to add Live as a new data store in Outlook.  Thread here.

Shiner, we'll miss you.

I'm a morning person, so I left the house at my usual 6am to head to the polling place.  I figured waiting before and getting in to the office relatively early made sense.  A fair number of people had the same idea I did, but the polling location wasn't really prepared for anyone to be there early (except for a few chairs.)  A few minutes before 7 we arranged ourselves into a line.  A guy who had gotten there after me knew I was there first, and had me move in front of him in the line that formed.
For the first time that I've experienced, check-in was on a computer.  And they didn't have any way to test the system prior to 7am.  8-(  The setup was a Dell laptop (I'm guessing the Latitude 530 - it looked like a standard aspect screen, but was the black and silver color scheme of the recent Dells) hooked to a Brother label printer.  Each laptop had an odd USB dongle hanging out the side which was labeled Precinct X Key Y.  I'm guessing it was some kind of smart card or other authentication device.  They had a ton of problems getting the labels to print (that's what we ended up signing.)  They finally had to swap the label printers between the two laptops, and they started working.  I'm not sure I understand how that worked, but it seemed to do the trick.  The rest of the voting was relatively similar to other recent votes I've done.  A small slip with a code on it.  A click wheel type electronic voting table where you enter the code, and then vote each of the ballots.  I don't have any idea how you do a write in with this thing.

Except for the glitch with the printing, which cost me at least 30 minutes, it was pretty painless.  And I got a free cup of coffee out of it.

on a map.

I'm sitting in the foyer of my local polling place.  Thank God for 3G!  All you Americans, don't forget to vote today.  It's your responsibility as an American.