Letterpress Stationery

Two very cool letterpress stationary designers, not available to individual customers are Elum Designs (e.g., "Groovy Birthday") and Twig & Fig (e.g., "Baby Booties"). Impossible to purchase individual cards through Web site, but at least the former site has a browsable catalog. Another cool design house is Two Piglets (e.g., "I love you [typewriter]).

Car

[2005-01-03]
PowerCheck received. (1) Need to get payoff quote that is valid for 15 days. Get lender's address where payoff should be sent. Be prepared to submit check before payoff quote expires.


Through Jan. 26th $12,623.04 . Address: American Honda Finance 3625 West Royal Lane no. 105, Irving, TX, 75063. Check made out

American Honda Finance Corp. Lease payment address: 470 Granby Road, Suite 2/South Hadley, MA 01075-3216/Collections no.: (800) 807 7724 #00. Customer Service Hours: Mon-Fri 9 am - 5 pm EST;

Account no.: 62966635; 2002 Honda Accord Sedan; VIN: 1HGCG66812A034522)

(2) Make PowerCheck payable to existing lender for Payoff quote amount only; place 17 digit vehicle identification number (VIN) in space provided on check; Each borrower listed on front MUST sign the check; (3) Sign payoff authorization form: write loan or acct number of existing loan in space provided; form MUST be sent to existing lender along with Check, so they will send evidence that their lien has been replaced, and enable us to list ELoan inc as lien holder on title; (4) Mail completed check and payoff auth form to current lender: lender must receive check before quote expires; Note we will be assessed one-time title transfer fee 35.00, to be added to statement written on check, and to be reflected on final note and Security Agreement. [2004-12-27] Loan application submitted to E-Loan 12/27/04. Approved. Both signatures must be on check. Blank check $13,000 max. loan. monthly payments 217.20, current 248.83. 6.19% for 72 months. Reminders: no prepayment penalties. Loan no. 21372020 cust ser 800 598 3272. bus hours 12 noon to 8:30 pm weekdays. Sat 10 to 3.

Current AHFC interest rate is 6.50% (A.P.R. per "retail purchase order" receipt 11/3/04), $2245.82 interest to be paid over life of loan. $12,683.98 was financed, $2,000 given as down payment. Last payment will be 11/18/09, so a 5-year loan.

Credit score is important in getting preferred interest rates. Mine, as of 12/04, is 735 (vs. 648 in January), above 60th percentile.

Consider 30 day free trial of credit monitoring service. Yearly subscription is $29.95. At the moment, credit card number not being accepted.

Call CapitalOne Auto Finance 1-800-304-4854. Agent says my zip code not eligible for RE-financing however. Suggests I check site and look for special offers. Might be better just to reapply through Honda with Keiko as co-applicant. Or: try E-Loan

[2004-12-07]
Check Owner Link for current rate. Call 800-457-9929 M-F 9-5 EST. Call CapitalOne Auto Finance 1-800-304-4854.

[2004-09-21]
New car buying guide, by Jeff Ostroff might help avoid making mistakes. Also check Kelley Blue Book for wholesale and retail values. E-Loan: is option for car financing. Best rate seems to be same as Capital One, i.e., 5.75%. Ostroff seems to agree the Eloan and Captital One are the way to go.

To terminate E-ZPass: here's their address followed by cancellation instructions:

Inquiries, Correspondence and Tag Returns:
NJ E-ZPass Customer Service Center NJ E-ZPass Customer Service Center
P.O. 52002 P.O. Box 52003
Newark, NJ 07101-8202 Newark, NJ 07101-8203

TERMINATION
You may terminate this agreement at any time by returning all of your E-ZPasstag(s) to us in good working condition except under normal wear. Tags should be returned to the New Jersey E-ZPass Customer Service Center in person or by certified mail. Customers damaging or defacing a tag through misuse or abuse will be required to pay the full cost of the tag (minus any tag deposit). This includes pencil, pen, permanent marker, stickers, and any other writing or marking whatsoever. Tag(s) will remain New Jersey E-ZPass property under all circumstances. Upon termination and return of your tag(s), your account balance and tag deposit will be refunded to you. All outstanding charges will be deducted prior to refund. You agree that we may terminate your E-ZPassaccount for improper use at any time, and without notice.

Mind-mapping (Software)

Experimenting with FreeMind which I found on Sourceforge. Able to construct non-linear flow-charts and diagrams, to aid in mapping the mind, developing ideas, preparing speeches, projects, etc.How does it compare to commercial options like Personal Brain or Grokker 2, MindManager from MindJet ($229) and ResultsManager from Gyronix ($145), discussed in James Fallows NYT Techno Files. Mind Mapping movement stems from work of Tony Buzan, beginning in 1960's, with 101 strict "laws" for drawing mind maps. Fallows writes "MindManager's intellectual effect seems the opposite of PowerPoint's. As any veteran of business briefings knows, the visual tools in PowerPoint can blur distinctions and impose an artificial sameness on ideas. At a minimum, MindManager doesn't retard clear thinking, and it might actually help." For something more linear and left-brained, Fallows cites CaseSoft's NoteMap ($149) as best computerized outliner.

William Kristol at Earlham

[2005-03-29]
Earlham student hits pundit with pie: "The school, which did not release the student's name, said Kristol was hit by an ice cream pie. Some of the pie also hit college President Doug Bennett, who was sitting on the stage." Incident took place Tuesday, March 29. Kristol, once chief-of-staff to Vice President Dan Quayle, is editor of Weekly Standard.

Links (Yale)

Check out beta version of Links, hosted by Medical ITS. Dan Chudnov has a "nominal home" there; worth taking a look at. Links seems to be networked environment for collaboration across university, includes blogging, tagging (xml?), and other neat stuff. Most members don't have personal pages listed, but Dan, Jeff Barnett, David Stern, and some others do.

SFX (Yale)

Katie Bauer, ELI Interface Librarian, gives informative one-hour presentation on SFX. Note current experimental work between Yale and Google Scholar, with citation analysis, Yale holdings, and SFX link appearing to side of results list. Jeffrey Barnett seems to be involved in this initiative.

Firefox has plugin for SFX-enabled Google Scholar. Problem with Google Scholar is we don't know how many or which journals are indexed and how far back in time the indexing goes. So not yet recommended except in combination with other database searches.

OpenURL includes Base URL plus citation information. Base is http://sfx.library.yale.edu/demo?, followed by what looks like a cgi advanced search form dump including all available citation information. Here is example from PubMed http://sfx.library.yale.edu/sfx_local?sid=Entrez:PubMed&id=pmid:2329341. Not all articles have unique numeric identifiers, but those that do can be the easiest for SFX to find.

SFX set of rules asks: first: what journal does article appear in, then; does Yale own this title; then: builds citation on fly.

Example from WebofScience, one of most heavily used databases at Yale, historically an index of citations and well known for having pioneered use of citation analysis (i.e., who's been citing article and how frequently; what's most frequently y cited article, etc.) Following search, every citation has Yale SFX link ; note in lower right hand corner "Analyze Results". People often think SFX link means Yale has full text, but the actual percentage is small.

Clicking on icon yields "SFX Menu". Pulls citation information out of Open URL. FIrst looks for full text, if unfound, then first bullet "SFX could not find full text." Also possible to search directly via Orbis for local holdings, or to see if SFX missed a full-text source. Another database heavily used, with SFX turned on, and also with citation analysis, is Academic Search. "Semantic Interoperability" yields some interesting results from computer science literature. Clicking on PDF link , where available, is often easiest best ways to get full text, since provited by citation publisher itself.

Lexis Nexis is tracked in SFX, but is trickier to search when indicated. They don't link their content quite as directly as one might like. Need to search first title index for newspaper title , e.g., new york times, then enter search terms, then changing default from "previous six months" which tends to make searches fail. Point: sometimes SFX is quite elegant, other times more difficult for ordinary researchers.

Another nice SFX feature, using SFX to copy open URL info into ILIAD ILL photocopy request, minimizing chance of typo from rekeying citation. (Iliad, like RefWorks, FYI, requires individual account set up; and RefWorks can build its own SFX link, if given enough information).

Try citation linker (http://sfx.library.yale.edu/citation/sfx_local), off of Online Journals and Newspapers "when you already know the citation for an article." Top part of farm is dta most likely to be in posession of patron. Menu will emerge where various aggregators will be providing the full text.

Users can make request for additional databases to ahve sfx option turned on. See handout for contact information. 2002 was sfx year one at Yale; now some months more than 60,000 queries.

Books Available for Review

[2005-04-19]
AJL Books for review, e.g., Joseph Lowin's Hebrew Talk, Ivan Marcus's Jewish Life Cycle

Steal this bookmark! (Mieszkowski)

del.icio.us, a "bookmark-sharing system" cited by Katharine Mieszkowski in salon.com. (Thanks, Kalee.) Also discussed in article are photo site Flickr and the web site 43 Things, where one "can post their goals, resolutions and grand designs, and meet others who share the same ambitions.

iPod

[Tips and problem solving]
iPod mini icon not appearing in iTunes source list. No fix available on iTunes for Windows Hot Tips site, except fall-back technique of pressing menu and select buttons simultaneously for about 8 seconds, which does a kind of soft reset, yielding apple logo on screen, which is some times followed by recovery of iPod icon. Same problem cited on Expansys, but without any solutions posted in reply. Also found discussion on macosxhints.com, where one person suggested: "Fiddle with the prefrences. When I first got my iPod, the same thing happened to me. Try switching on and off random things having to do the the iPod and checking and unchecking boxes. Hopefully, one of them will help, it did for me. Good luck!". Another person wrote: "Try deleting your com.apple.ipod.plist file in /Users/your_username/Library/Preferences/ . It might work...". But then a third person wrote: "I have tried both of the suggestions and a number of other things including installing iTunes 3 and trying that", but nothing helped. This was end of thread.

[Purchase information]
Apple iPod, discounted if purchased through Yale Equipment & Supplies. Best to start here, I think.

"Head On" (Gegen die Wand)

[2005-03-11]
NYT film critic Manohla Dargis reviews Head On, story of Cahit and Sibel's bloody romance ...

Provincetown

[2005-05-14]
Carpe Diem Guest House, also listed in bedandbreakfast.com

Vacation Cruise

Cruise package

JC New Haven

JC of Greater New Haven