July 2002 Archives

MSNBC says:

Consumers will be coughing up for all online media content by 2004, according to Factiva CEO Clare Hart....

Don't count on it, Claire. There's nothing—nothing—I get from MSNBC that I can't get from magazines, newspapers & television. It's occasionally more convenient to read a web page, but not always, and not enough that I'd pay to do so.

Customization and personalization, Hart said, are two ways to entice people to still come to the Web site.

I suppose 'customization and personalization' are discreet euphemisms for advertisements. No, thanks.

www.ivillage.com is in the news for having—drum roll, please—renounced pop-up ads on their web site.

That doesn't mean they've stopped using them, though:

Some pop-up ads will continue to appear on the site....
...the company will focus on alternative ad formats, including...pop-under ads....

They seem to think that the difference between a pop-up ad and a pop-under ad—one annoys you by obscuring the page you're trying to read, the other by hiding in the background and popping up when you least expect it—is somehow meaningful, and that they are somehow better people for using one instead of the other.

Sorry, no. My desktop does not belong to you, and you do not have my permission to sell ad space on it.

(It's a lame site, anyway.)

This is the year of early birthday presents: yesterday, Jennifer presented me with a very nice crock pot. (That I asked for a crock pot, and was happy to get one, suggests I truly have grown old.) We're planning to make soups & stews with it—not to mention an overnight oatmeal recipe from my favorite cooking show, Good Eats.

(That I even have a favorite cooking show also suggests I am aging rapidly.)

I have the notion that nessus has a spare serial port, to which I might connect an external modem. This would free up a PCI slot, which I need for the network card. The only problem is that I'm too lazy to crawl under the table and look. And so I live with uncertainty.

9:30pm: Jake has been sleeping for an hour; I am poking around my usual web sites, having finished updating the checkbook for the week; in the next room, Jennifer is picking up Jacob's toys.

Thunderstorms this afternoon: low, ominously dark & fast-moving clouds; lightning; but only a third of an inch of rain, according to sputnik. But the temperature dropped twenty degrees from 4:00pm (90°) to 6:00pm (71°), so maybe that makes up for it.

Gave the crock pot a workout today: made some bean soup for dinner, then loaded up some oatmeal for tomorrow's breakfast. I hope the oatmeal is good—the recipe makes rather a lot.

[The crock-pot oatmeal project was a dismal failure: instead of breakfast, I got carbonized sludge. I think the recipe was written with a different model of crock pot in mind.]

Jerry Pournelle's dog died. Sigh.

I found www.inxight.com in my bookmarks just now. I can't for the life of me remember why I might have bookmarked it. (I can't even figure out what they're selling, but maybe I'm just tired.)

Sputnik recorded nearly half an inch of rain between 2:00am and 6:00am this morning. How nice.

I've been collecting updated drivers & software for nessus, in preparation for installing the new hard disk (which I bought at the beginning of the month). So far, there's about 350MB of it, though the .NET SDK—which I probably won't install—accounts for a third of the total.

Backed up all my user files to a half-dozen CDs. (I must rethink my backup scheme—I could have fit it all on half that many.)

[Jacob woke up from his nap, and derailed my train of thought.]

It rained this morning: sputnik recorded .02 inches, an unimpressive amount given the impressively thick cloud cover & humidity.

Printed some invitations for the 1st Annual 39th Birthday Party; alas, the color cartridge in the printer was empty, so they were all in black & white.

I've been thinking about gasoline prices. There's always a ten-cent difference between the three grades (regular, premium, super), no matter what the actual price is. It seems like the difference ought to be proportional to the price; that it isn't suggests the oil companies are up to something. Must investigate further....

The daycare ladies sent home Jacob's bottles: he's a big boy now and doesn't use them any more. He used to have a bottle of milk just before bedtime, but at Jake's last checkup the doctor harrumphed at us to stop it.

Finished reading The Three Christs of Ypsilanti. An interesting book, if somewhat disappointing: the experimenters didn't help the three men very much, and their experiment didn't really reveal much about the nature of schizophrenia. They just played head games with these men until their funding ran out.

It used to be a cheap laugh to include 'spook bait' in one's newsgroup postings: a signature containing keywords intended to catch the attention of any CIA, FBI or NSA internet monitors that might be listening. Something like:

--
me me@foo.com
SPOOK BAIT: president white house bomb assassinate

Now there really are government agencies monitoring internet traffic for signs of People Up To No Good: the real world catches up with geek humor.

Regarding the mysterious double check, the bank says, "Our bad, sorry." They've already credited our account, too.

Installed Update #2 on the iPaq. One of the bugs fixed: the crackling noise at the end of nearly all system sounds turns out to have been a copyright notice that Windows CE tried to play even though it was text. Duh..

Another scorchingly hot day—the high was 95°, at 3:00pm—with thunderstorms never more than ten miles away, but no rain here until the briefest sprinkle late in the evening (9:00pm).

Sputnik has recorded only two-tenths of an inch of rain in the last month. The lawn is very unhappy.

Jacob spent the day at daycare, for the first time since July 3rd. The ladies said he had a good day. (He's been very hungry lately. I begin to wonder whether we're feeding him enough.)

Some blather:

Religion—like language—is defined by usage. Christianity is comprised of everyone who says, "I am a Christian." It doesn't matter that, for any given point of doctrine, half of Christianity is convinced that the other half is dead wrong and thus not really Christian at all. The alternative is to have an ISO Standard Religion, which is an interesting notion but utterly impractical absent an unambiguous divine revelation.

This means that the recent debate over the nature of Islam—whether it is a religion of peace, or not—is pointless. Islam as practiced by some people is indeed a religion of peace; as practiced by others, it encourages violence and terrorism. The same is true of Christianity.

Financial news:

The bank has mysteriously cleared one of our checks twice. It appears twice in the statement, our account was charged twice. (I don't suppose the News-Gazette got paid twice, so this is another of those where's-the-money games like the one I played with the one-hour photo place last April.)

Finally got around to looking at the 401(k) statement that came in the mail last week. The stock market has tanked so badly that the losses exceeded my contributions: my balance went down, for the first time since I opened the account in 1994. Egad.

Supposed to hit 98° today. If it reaches 100° I'll have to redo the weather charts, since that's as high as they go. (They're all offline anyway, until I get around to upgrading my copy of CityDesk, so I don't suppose it matters much.)

Went to the farmer's market over at Lincoln Square, for some honey and sunflowers, then wandered around the mall for a while.

Lincoln Square seems deserted—especially compared to Woodfield. The vacancy rate is alarmingly high. If it weren't for Art Mart and the dance studio, there'd be nothing there at all.

Took Jake on an adventure this afternoon, to give Jennifer a few hours of uninterrupted quilting time. Officially we were shopping for Jake supplies, but mostly we were just hanging out. It was fun. (Jake is quite the charmer: he waves at everyone.)

Why this is a daybook, not a blog:

• It doesn't have a cute name: not Over the Edge, nor 24-hour drive-thru weblog, nor Better Living Through Software; it's just a daybook.
• It's written in straight-up HTML: not MySQL + PHP, nor Blogger; just CityDesk.
• It's about me: not web sites I've visited, nor news articles I've read; just boring old me. The other things do appear from time to time, but they are peripheral.

Sometimes I think having an Internet connection is a bit like working in a candy factory. "Sure, eat all you want," new hires are told—and they do, for the first few days. After a while, fressing on chocolate is just no fun any more.

And so it is with the Internet. There are 30,000 newsgroups, uncounted millions of web pages. Trying to keep up is worse than drinking from a firehose—it's trying to drink from Niagara Falls, or perhaps from the Lake Missoula floodwaters.

Even if 90% of the Web is crap (and I think that estimate is a bit low), there's still far more worthwhile material out there than any one person can hope to keep up with. It's frustrating to think that not only do I not know everything, I'll never know everything, but there it is.

Alton Brown has a web site: www.altonbrown.com.

Home with Jake this afternoon (we gave the Grandma Daycare Service the afternoon off). Around 4:00pm it started clouding up outside; rain seemed imminent, so we went outside to have a look. The temperature had fallen, and the wind had picked up, but no rain. We could see storms in the distance—heavy rain, lightning, no thunder—but they never made it to the house.

Disturbing medical device: the Pigg-O-Stat, www.piggostat.com, an immobilization tool for taking x-rays (etc.) of small children. The pictures on the site are quite misleading, as the child being immobilized is not screaming his head off and trying to get out.

Well. At 1:05pm, my office window is wet. It's raining. The last rain I can remember was on the 9th—and it only lasted a few minutes. Perhaps we'll get a good soaking, and the grass will turn green again.

(What little lawn-watering we've done has boosted our water bill by 25%. Egad.)

Pedantry: the words cringe and wince are not synonyms. One cringes in fear, while one winces in pain. Too many people use 'cringe' where 'wince' would be more appropriate.

Windows annoyance: you open an Explorer window, and try to enter a network share, e.g., \\foo\bar. Alas, Explorer windows take so long to open that the first few keystrokes get dropped, and all you get is o\bar. Explorer thinks is an internet search phrase, or some such, which means the MSN search page launches - and pukes a few pop-up ads onto the desktop.

Imagine that—misspelling a directory name causes important offers from special partners to appear on your desktop. Thanks a lot, Microsoft.

[A year later, in September, 2003, Verisign did much the same thing with the entire Internet: they dropped a few wildcard entries into their DNS servers that redirected any references to nonexistent domains to the Verisign web site, no doubt so they could sell advertising space there.]

I've been stumbling across countless This is my blog; there are many like it, but this one is mine web sites lately. Each looks interesting—if a bit over-designed—until I realize that it's just a pile of links to articles on other sites.

I always feel a bit cheated by sites like that—howzabout you tell me a little about yourself, what you're doing and why, and let me read the newspapers myself. Thanks.

My coin collection continues to grow. Today's acquisition: a 2002 D Ohio quarter. The hardest part about collecting the state quarters is that I don't use cash very much any more. Everything goes on the debit card. It's an electronic world....

In other news: WRI has a number of email addresses for feedback from beta testers. Messages sent to them are automatically routed to a request tracker utility (with a really clunky web interface). Alas, most (all?) of these addresses have been compromised by spammers, so the request queue is full of spam.

I had a look at it today. There might have been a few legitimate messages in there, but I surely could not find them.

Still reading The Three Christs of Ypsilanti, on schedule to finish on the 26th (when I must return it to the library). A very strange book, and just a little cruel—I'm left with the impression that psychologists in 1960 understood next to nothing of how the mind works, and the 'experiments' described in the book are like kicking an anthill to see how the ants run around afterward.

Milton Rokeach, who wrote the book, died in 1988; his papers are kept at the Archives of the History of American Psychology in Akron, Ohio: http://www.uakron.edu/ahap/rokeach_m.htm.

I've been trying to figure out a feasible home networking setup. It's making my brain hurt.

The three main goals are:

• Share the internet connection, so Jennifer & I can check our email at the same time;
• Share the two printers (HP LaserJet IIIp, Epson Stylus Photo 785EPX), so Jennifer can print from pox;
• Reduce the number of wires, cables & clutter on the floor in the quilting/computing room, so Jacob can play there with less risk of electrocuting himself.

(There are various minor goals—file sharing, that sort of thing - but they're trivial once the network is operational.)

The two complicating factors are:

• Neither DSL nor cable modem service is available;
• nessus only has four PCI slots, and they're all occupied.

If there were such a thing as a ethernet/modem combo card for desktops, that would simplify matters considerably. Alas, I cannot find one. An ISDN connection might also serve, but they are finicky & expensive.

I'll have to think about this some more—maybe after we win big in the Lotto (tomorrow, definitely).

It takes no effort to fire off a paragraph or three about the latest outrage from Microsoft, and that's why the daybook has held little else recently.

I suppose I could write something about Jacob's illness, but there's no easy way to say, My son was briefly but desperately ill last week; he very nearly died, spent three days in intensive care, and is still recovering. Jennifer and I are slowly coming to grips with the enormous changes this experience will bring to our lives.

And it's not something I much care to relive anyway.

At least I can get through to EarthLink tonight.

Jake is much improved. His voice is still very high & squeaky, but otherwise he's back to his cheerful, rambunctious self.

Something is very wrong with the telephones and/or EarthLink today. Can't get a connection—or, if by some miracle I get one, keep it for very long—can't get to web sites, etc., etc., etc. Disappointing.

One of the Microsofties says, regarding Palladium:

But what exactly is stopping Microsoft from shutting out particular third-party software right now? Why on earth would Microsoft need to invent some new thing called Palladium, when Microsoft already owns the operating system that everything else runs on?

The problem with this argument is that Palladium is designed to prevent use of third-party operating systems, not applications. It is a weapon aimed directly at Linux.

It's important to realize that Microsoft must be judged on the capabilities it acquires (or attempts to acquire), and not on the noble motives it claims for doing so:

Product Activation—Microsoft now has the ability to disable legitimately-purchased software, at any time, for any reason.

Hailstorm—Microsoft tried to amass a database of personal information about its customers: financial information, purchasing habits, etc. Too many people saw through this one, and it was abandoned.

Palladium—Microsoft is trying to take control of other people's computers, and decide for itself what software they are allowed to run, what documents they are allowed to view, etc.

When Microsoft's customers are reluctant to sign up, their only response is trust us. No, thanks.

Jacob came home from the hospital today, after three days in intensive care. Poor little guy, he picked up a strep infection from somewhere (daycare, probably) and it turned into epiglottitis, which can be fatal if untreated (or misdiagnosed as, say, just a reaction to a recent MMR vaccination).

He spent two days under heavy sedation, with a breathing tube down his windpipe and a dozen other wires & tubes attached to him at various places.

He's better now, sort of. His throat probably hurts, and he's still getting out from under all the sedatives, so he wavers between sleepy and miserable. We're hoping a few days' recovery will see him back to his usual rambunctious self.

The best summary of Palladium I've read so far:

No longer is my computer my property, which I have full use and enjoyment of. Now I will hold title to it, but it is controlled by someone else; I may use it only by permission, and only in permitted ways.

Poor Jake, his fever has returned, and he has a bit of a rash to go with it. The doctor says, “There's a lot of that going around.” (Sometimes it seems that's all the doctor ever says.) He's back on the Tylenol, which knocks the fever down very quickly.

Went to the park this morning; Jake enjoyed the swings, but didn't want to ride in stroller while Mom & Dad went for a walk. The distance markers painted on the sidewalk tell me that I carried him just over a third of a mile back to the car. My poor arm.

Reading my last issue of Scientific American this afternoon. I started the year with a half-dozen magazine subscriptions, but haven't renewed any; National Geographic is the only one that hasn't expired. I don't miss the others. (And wouldn't have the time to read them anyway.)

Email from the library: they're holding The Three Christs of Ypsilanti for me.

Reformatted all nine Zip disks, which were used for backup purposes until I got the CD-RW drive in January. The new disk will replace the Zip drive—there's nowhere else to put it: the IDE chains are full—so my plan is to sell it (and the disks) to help pay for the new disk. Didn't want to include all my files in the sale....

[On one of them, I found a file containing the password for my second Netcom mailbox. I'd forgotten what it was, so that was a lucky find.]

Courtesy of the Champaign Public Library, I now have three weeks to read the 334 pages of The Three Christs of Ypsilanti. It's shameful to admit it, but I—who used to read 400-page books in a single day—don't know that I can manage the sixteen pages per day it will take.

(It's a paperback, too: old, yellow, brittle, with a musty dry-wood smell to it; if I read the copyright page correctly, it's thirty-five years old. That's a long time for a paperback.)

Jake had an uneven day. No fever, but he was intermittently quite cranky. Jennifer says he's getting two more teeth, but it's so rare for Jake to hold still with his mouth open that I haven't seen them yet. Maybe it's not the vaccinations, maybe it's all these new teeth.

(He woke up at 5:30am, too. So did I—and this after we got home from fireworks at 11:00pm.)

Just discovered that EarthLink has changed the web-site quota calculations: instead of 30MB shared among the three mailboxes (two of which don't even have web pages), each mailbox gets its own 10MB. These pages—with the weather section truncated due to CityDesk's licensing scheme—clock in at 8.61MB. Maybe I should divide my site into three parts: Jake pictures, weather data, and the main blather. That would let me get everything online again, but would also reveal the secret third mailbox. I suppose I'm not using it for anything anyway....

Hm. EarthLink's DNS servers appear to be down. Can't get to any web sites. No, that's not right—everything works, it's just dog slow.

Poor Jake, still feverish & cranky.

To de-FrontPage a web site, just publish it to a directory then remove all _vti_cnf and _vti_pvt directories from the new location.

Converting my 89 PhotoDraw .mix files to a non-proprietary format is proving more difficult: the batch-save option was apparently removed from PhotoDraw 2000, and the Automation interface is "undocumented and unsupported". I guess we don't need to ask where's the lock-in? for PhotoDraw—Microsoft didn't try very hard to hide it.

[I see that Microsoft pulled the plug on PhotoDraw over a year ago, on May 31, 2001; I must not have been the only one who found it loathsome. This is the second image editor from Microsoft that never made it to version 2.0, the other one being Microsoft Image Composer, included with an early version of FrontPage.]

Sputnik reports 93° at 11:20am. Egad.

Watched the parade on television, Jake being too sick for us to go see it in person. (He seems better now.)

Finished reading The Lessons of Terror, by Caleb Carr. A brief book, but an interesting one.

Manually converted all ninety-five .mix files (my previous survey missed a few) to .tif, so I no longer need PhotoDraw for anything.

Went to see fireworks—like last year, we watched from the air-conditioned comfort of WRI (along with a great many other people). Jake pointed and said, "Oooh." One of these years, when he's a bit bigger, we'll take him out to the field so he can hear the booms close-up.

Epson makes a transparency scanner attachment for the Perfection 636U scanner (which is the one I have): the interesting thing about it is that it can scan negatives. I have a binder full of negatives, going back to 1985; it would be nice to scan them all in.

In other news, Janis Ian has a web site: www.janisian.com. Turns out she's on tour just now, with a concert scheduled for September 27th in Bloomington, Indiana (at the Lotus Festival, whatever that is).

(I tried to visit the Rush web site, to confirm rumors that they'll be playing near Chicago later this month; alas, they've redesigned the site: it's all Flash, popups, here, let me resize your browser window to what I think it should be, every link opens a new window—just about every web-design offense that can be committed, and that's just the main index page. Guess I won't be going back any time soon.)

Poor Jake, very cranky this evening. He had a temperature of 103°, but after a bath and some Tylenol it came down quite a bit. We're thinking it's just a reaction to Monday's vaccinations.

Sputnik recorded a high of 96° this afternoon. The lawn, which in June seemed nearly recovered from last year's neglect, is once again turning brown.

Sneaked out of work a little early, and saw Attack of the Clones at the Savoy 16. Nice special effects, but the plot doesn't bear close analysis.

Sputnik recorded a high of 96° this afternoon.

In the news:

Consumers aren't clicking on banners, buttons and other annoying Internet ads—and now, they aren't responding to special e-mail links either.

The current so-called average click-through rate on e-mail advertisements is an anemic 1.8%

I don't even read e-mail advertisements, let alone click on any links they might contain. If the From: or Subject: lines look bogus, the message goes straight to the bit-bucket, unread.

Now, if there were a Click here to break the legs of the vermin who sent you this spam link, I'd click that until my mouse wore out.

I've been trying to get FrontPage to relinquish my old web pages: to get rid of all those annoying _vti_cnf directories, but—as is typical of Microsoft products—it is resisting. The menu options described in the 'Convert a web to a folder' section of the help are nowhere to be found.

Sometime soon, I'll be installing the 60GB disk I bought yesterday (hm...forgot to mention that, didn't I?), at which time I'll be reinstalling Windows and all the applications I use—and FrontPage will not be among them. (Neither will PhotoDraw, for that matter.) Maybe I can just delete the _vti_cnf directories....

Jake had his fifteen-month checkup today, and three vaccinations. He's big enough now that shots go in his arms, but he doesn't enjoy them any more there than in his legs.

It seems that every new initiative from Microsoft is greeted with fear, loathing and distrust from the very people Microsoft expects to buy into it.

The few unguarded comments I've seen from Microsoft's developers suggest there's a bit of frustration & bewilderment at Microsoft World HQ. “This is a big problem for users, nobody else is doing anything to solve it, and we're just trying to make life better for our customers. Why won't anybody believe us?”

It's as if the 'Softies are presenting To Serve Man as their corporate bible, only their potential customers are crying, “It's a cookbook! It's a cookbook!”

It seems there was an Incident at WRI over the weekend: panicky messages from the users, as the problem was first discovered, followed by equally panicky messages from sysadmin—“Change your password right now. All hands, no exceptions.”

Gee, fellas, I thought unix was secure....

The next time I report a problem to sysadmin and get WINDOZE SUX LINUX IS KEWL in reply, I will remind them of this moment.

There's an Apple Store in Woodfield; on Saturday I had occasion to browse there, briefly. I must confess the iBook is rather appealing: big screen, wireless networking, OS X, the various iXXX applications, etc., etc.

A fully tricked-out iBook runs about $2600. This is—alas!—way beyond my limited means, but considerably cheaper than my last notebook, pox (which in 1998 cost about $4500).

Picked up a copy of the Red Hat Linux 7.3 CDs at work today (and felt just a little guilty at getting them for free instead of paying $60 for a retail copy); one of these days I'll install it on nessus. Hard to say exactly when that might be, but it will happen.

I have just over thirty-four vacation days accrued at dear old WRI. I could take every fourth week off until the end of the year, or take every Friday off until January. (I wonder if they'd let me do that. Probably not.)