according to jeff

For simplifying toll road navigation and making me feel like a VIP, the I-Pass is added to my Nice List.

The I-Pass is an electronic toll collection service provided by the Illinois Tollway and compatible with Indiana’s I-Zoom and the EZ-Pass system used by many eastern states, such as Ohio and Pennsylvania. Setup an account with a valid credit card, put the transponder on your front window or dash, and be prepared to speed through toll-collecting booths, leaving the downtrodden masses to wait in line while you get on with life. Bwa-ha-ha-ha.

Oops. Sorry. The power momentarily went to my head.

Seriously, this is a great. Open an account with a $40 deposit, get a transponder for a refundable $10 deposit, and be treated as a VIP. While others are waiting in line to get a ticket or find the correct change, the I-Pass user gets right through without the headache and less wait. Some states have full-speed I-Pass lanes; others have I-Pass dedicated lanes, which always have the shortest lines. For instance, I recently exited the Ohio Turnpike to find two lines of 10 cars each waiting to pay the toll, while the EZ-Pass lane was empty. I just drove up, waited a moment for the red light to turn green, and was on my way.

In addition to the time savings, there are often toll discounts as well.

I don’t know why more people don’t take advantage of this. A refundable deposit of $10 provides both time and monetary savings. What’s not to like about that?

For providing awesome (if expensive) dried fruit, Just Tomatoes, Etc., is added to my Nice List.

Various dried fruits are available at our local Hy Vee grocery.

For helping me obtain a new health insurance policy that provides better coverage than my current policy for 40% of the cost, Rick is added to my Nice List.

If you live in the Cedar Rapids area and would like to contact Rick for assistance with your health insurance or investment needs, contact me privately and I’ll send you his last name and phone number.

For helping me resolve a oh-so-typical Windows problems, Process Explorer is added to my Nice List.

Today, my Windows XP PC seemed both sluggish and to be running hotter than normal. The task manager was consistently showing my processor running at 100%, and revealed that one of the svchost processes was the culprit.

In the past, I’ve found such issues to be related to an update that some program (often from Adobe) wanted to perform. Upon removing the useless items from the startup with msconfig, the problem was usually resolved. (Adobe applications have a bad habit of inserting themselves back into the startup list on a regular basis.) Not so today.

Unfortunately, the Windows XP task manager will identify that svchost is consuming the processor, it doesn’t identify which of the many processes that are running is the problem.

However, Process Explorer does.

Once I downloaded and ran this nifty tool, within mere moments I was able to identify the service was started with this command line:

C:\WINDOWS\system32\svchost.exe -k HPService

A google search then identified this further as “HP Network Devices Support”, a service that monitors network printers for changing IP addresses. Since my network printers have fixed IP addresses, I don’t need this service. It was then a “simple” matter to turn the service from “automatic” to “manual”.

And now, voila, my PC is cooling off and running better again, and I can get back to what I really wanted to do today.

For taking the time to write a letter to Macworld’s editor to promulgate the ability to use the spacebar to page up and down in the Safari Web browser, Link33 is added to my Nice List.

While it is a rare thing for some one to take time to write the editor of a newspaper or magazine, it is an even rarer things for some one to not only take the time, but also to write something worth reading.

Well done, Link33.

For making a demo version of the Klix software that allows recovery of one file without purchase, JoeSoft is added to my Nice List.

On Christmas Day, I took some family photos using a digital camera and the timer setting. Upon successful import into iPhoto, I allowed iPhoto to delete the pictures from the media card. Inexplicably, however, iPhoto seemed to lose the photos. Since the photos were already removed from the media card, the pictures seemed lost.

Of all the pictures imported, there was only one that I wanted to recover, but I did want to recover it. A Google search suggested that Klix could probably recover the deleted media files, and that the demo version (on the Mac) even allowed one file to be recovered without purchasing the full program.

It worked great, and I did recover the one picture that I wanted to keep. Here it is:

Our Family at Christmas

In the many years that I’ve taken digital photos, this is the first time that I had a problem and needed such a program. So, I’ve not yet purchased Klix. If I need a program like this again, however, I won’t hesitate to select Klix. Kudos to JoeSoft.

(By the way, iPhoto didn’t lose the photos after all. It had just somehow become “confused”.)

Just like the fictional (oops, guess that lets the cat out of the bag) Santa Claus, I’ve got my own Nice and Naughty Lists. For the first time ever, you can now read about them here.