My last US driver license expired in 2004 and I had to get it renewed. Here is how it went:

• Setup appointment at the San Mateo DMV with their online form (if you don't get an appointment, you will wait longer on-site)
• At the DMV:
• "Start here" counter: got number and a form (nobody was in line)
• Waiting area: filled out renewal form and worked on my laptop while waiting for my number (took about 15 minutes for my number to be called)
• Counter 1: gave filled-out form, paid fee (USD 20-something) with credit card, got receipt
• Counter 2: waited a bit in line, got picture taken and renewal test
• Testing area: filled out test as best as I could (last time I actually studied the stuff was 10 years ago)
• Counter 3: waited a bit in line, produced filled-out test (yay I passed) and got my temp license
• One week later: got the actual license in the mail

The positives:

• The appointment + number system works fine.
• The DMV employees are efficient.
• I was done in about one hour total at the DMV.
• I feared I would need a drive test but luckily that was not needed.
• I was not asked for a proof of residence. My SSN and expired license seemed to be enough.

Of course all this could be streamlined even more with appropriate technology. You still spend more time than necessary waiting in line. So always take with you a computer / music player / book or whatever can be used to fill in the gaps.

I am a big user of SLIMTIMER. Not a minute is spent at work without it running, and more and more I am using it for personal tasks as well.

I run the Timer in the Firefox sidebar. However, I have countless times used by mistake the cmd-B (or ctrl-B for non-Mac users) combination, which opens the bookmarks in the sidebar. There goes my timer: I have to reopen it and restart my current task. This is even more annoying as I don't use Firefox bookmarks but del.icio.us instead.

The good news is that I found the Keyconfig extension for Firefox (and Thunderbird) which allows you to easily edit Firefox keyboard shortcuts. Install, go to Tools -> Keyconfig, and get rid of the cmd-B binding (or assign it to something more useful). Note that I downloaded Keyconfig from here.

I was stunned to realize that the Mac OS X Tiger terminal doesn't support accents (and other non-ASCII characters) by default. This includes pasting accented characters in the terminal, listing files with accents in their names, etc.

In fact, this is not really a question of the terminal: it seems that the versions of bash, ls, and other core utilities that come with Tiger are too old and don't support UTF-8. Wow: Tiger came out in 2005. Didn't Java have support for UTF-8 back in 1995 already? This is 2007 and just the kind of things that should work out of the box, right?

Anyway, I had some luck by installing MacPorts and following the suggestions in this post, although this still doesn't work well with iTerm which is unable to combine diacritics.

But maybe I am a little unfair as I am still using Tiger. Please tell me that this is now fixed in Leopard.

As I just did for Mascagni.org, I switched to using Blogger for my personal blog, and my personal web site will just aggregate the Atom feed. A promise for more posts in the future? I hope so :-)