No time for these old roads

Working from home, I drive a lot less these days. It's often two weeks between visits to the gas station. My trips have a purpose, to run errands or go to an appointment or to get from one place to another by a specific time. I drive familiar roads and glance down the side roads. I still know where the side roads go, but it's been years, decades, since I traveled them.

Cars way back when had odometers with removable cables. In some cases, you could hook up a power drill and take miles off of the car in a matter of minutes. My father routinely disconnected the cable on his car, "to keep it young." He'd reconnect it so that the mileage look low, but reasonable.

As a teenager, then, I could drive a couple hundred miles in a day and refill the tank for three bucks. I drove back roads around the small towns of north central Massachusetts, the barely paved roads that wrapped around Mount Wachusett, the twisted tunnels with tree branches shielding the sky. Miles from town, a trailer might have been plunked into a small plot of more-or-less level land. Many houses had more cars than people on the chance that enough cars would start on any given morning.

And so, the other day, coming back from a meeting in Amherst, I took a road I'd not traveled, Monson Turnpike northward toward Athol. Monson Turnpike would have reached Monson except for the intervention of the Quabbin Reservoir in the 1930s. (This 1895 map gives you an idea of the roads before the Quabbin was filled.) The road merged into another road in Athol, nice and nicer houses along the way. The Athol-Royalston Middle School is on the south side of Athol, as far from Royalston as you can get, an eight-to-ten mile ride for school kids.

It wasn't much of a diversion, just a few miles out of my way, but enough to remember that there are old roads that were important once. There are more than enough ways to get anyplace quickly, if that's what you want.

Bought my last HP printer

HP is using WSD ports when its networked printers are configured on Windows 7. (There may be more details on this, but this is as much as I've found.)
The trouble is that, for some machines in some environments, the service that resolves these virtual ports into an IP address will often fail and so the print jobs just sit in the queue. Changing the printer port to an IP port fixes the problem. You then have to make sure that your printer is set up with a static IP address.
This is just the latest in a series of problems that I've had with HP printer software. I also Epson and Brother printers; none of them have had anything like the kinds of setup woes that HP has inflicted on me.
In other words, bye-bye, HP.

New technologies in "smart branches" have...

New technologies in "smart branches" have enhanced bank revenues at the same time as backend savings improve profitability. Most interestingly, these innovations have generally been taking place outside the US.

Better Bank Systems - Karl Hakkarainen - Smart Branches Follow Smart Upgrades

As banks update their core systems, they are better able to reinvent branch banking as well.

Yours truly writes for Digital Draw

Yours truly writes for Digital Draw

BlueWater Technologies Sponsors Digital Draw, an Online Community for Banking Marketing Professionals

BlueWater Promotes its Digital Signage Solutions for Banking Southfield, Michigan – July 10, 2012 –BlueWater Technologies, a national provider of Me

When the moon hits your eye ...

When we remodeled the camp, we^[1] reused a couple of small windows. One is in our bedroom. For a couple of nights, about 2;30, the moon is at just the proper angle to shine directly into my eyes. The skies have been clear so that, even in its waning phase, the moon is bright. When that can happen again is an exercise left to the astronomers.

^[1]When I say we, I mean people who know which end of the hammer not to hit their thumbs with.

Working for a salary won't make you rich...

Working for a salary won't make you rich.

How the Rich Got Rich

Like to emulate the success of others? If wealth is what you're after, look to an unconventional source for tips: the IRS.