September 2002 Archives

Clockwise: To avenge the deaths of Israeli civilians, the Israeli army kills Palestinian civilians.

Widdershins: To avenge the deaths of Palestinian civilians, the Palestinians kill...Israeli civilians.

And round & round we go.

Something I read once, long ago:

Spain's chief interest in the New World was the extraction of wealth, specifically as much gold and silver as they could lay hands on. Because of this, they didn't bother establishing viable colonies (as the other European powers did in North America), nor did they develop much of an industrial base at home. They were rolling in money, they didn't need to.

Then the mines played out, and Spain found itself a few centuries behind the rest of Europe: a deficit they're still struggling to overcome.

I wonder if the oil-wealthy nations of the Middle East are heading for a similar collapse. They're rolling in money, but only because they have oil that the rest of the world needs.

What happens when the oil runs out—or when the rest of the world decides they don't need the baggage that comes with it?

I see that Microsoft has a wireless version of the Intellimouse Explorer. Christmas is coming....

Jake had his first bath in the bathtub this evening. At first he was scared, but after a while he started having fun.

Went to Menard's on Saturday, to buy a garden hose and a lawn sprinkler; I discovered that the sprinkler aisle has already been replaced with—no, not Halloween—Christmas decorations. In September?

Poor Jake, sent home from daycare for having a fever (one which, I hasten to add, was completely undetectable once we were home). He and I played all day, and watched The Abominable Dr. Phibes. It was a bonding experience.

He'll be eighteen months old tomorrow. Tempus fugit, etc.

Went to the Apple & Pork festival in Clinton (just west of Champaign on highway 10). The crowds were overwhelming, to the point that it was just too much work to actually see anything. We did get to have lunch with Amy, Scott and Natalie, which made up for it.

[Forgot to mention: we saw Norm Fisher pulling out of the Casey's in DeLand. First he sat next to us at the 2000 fireworks, now this. I think he's stalking us.]

Made chocolate-chip cookies this evening—or, more accuratly, Jennifer did, while I attempted to distract Jacob. One bit of excitement: the spatula Jennifer was using dropped a few chunks of plastic into the bowl. It was easy to find the big one—indeed, I wasn't even looking for it, just sneaking a little dough while Jennifer's back was turned—but it was a job finding the little one. But I did, and so the cookie project was saved.

Construction machineries are busily excavating the block bounded by Bradley Ave., Staley Rd., I72 and I57. A few weeks ago, I read in the paper that a new subdivision was to be built there; I guess this means they've started. Perhaps I should take some pictures, before all the houses are up.

One of my birthday presents came with a $40 rebate offer; I dutifully sent away my paperwork, and waited. Today—two months later, more or less—the check came in the mail. I had forgotten, so it made a nice surprise. Think I'll buy some toys or something.

The check is drawn on the First State Bank, Lake Lillian, Minnesota, a very tiny town roughly 70 miles west of Minneapolis on highway 7. The scam here is that by using a remote bank, a company can work the float to its advantage. (This was written up in a Straight Dope column, many years ago.)

I have to wonder, though: just how remote can a U.S. bank be any more, when everything is electronic?

(Jennifer and I paid a visit to Lake Lillian, on our way to Seattle in 1996.)

Poor Jake, had a hard time going to sleep last night. He was very sleepy, but just couldn't stay asleep. Everything woke him up, and whenever he woke up, wahhhh. After a while, we figured out that he needed a new diaper (did he ever...), and all was well.

Jacob's vocabulary is growing rapidly. He knows that the microwave oven goes beep when it's finished. He says done when he's done with his dinner. He loves to nod yes-yes-yes in response to questions, though he doesn't always mean yes when he does it.

I haven't been reading any child-development books, so I don't know whether this is normal for his age. (Child-development books never agree on what normal is, so maybe it's best that I ignore them.)

The sky is tinged brown near the horizon, in every direction. I haven't been out on the farm roads lately, but a dusty sky this time of year can only mean that the harvest has begun.

[In Chicago, the air looks like that all year long. And it isn't dust. Ugh.]

It's been a bad year for farmers: summer was too hot, with too little rain. The corn has been looking a bit stunted & scorched.

Hilary Rosen, head of the Recording Industry Association Of America, says:

“We want to hit fans with the message that downloading music illegally is, as Britney Spears explains, the same as going into a CD store and stealing the CD.”

Quite true—but the act of uploading music from a CD to a computer is entirely legal under the fair-use doctrine of U.S. copyright law.

Alas, the RIAA can't tell the difference between piracy and fair use, so they are working to make both equally difficult, equally illegal.

Interesting web sites: www.digitalconsumer.org and www.house.gov/boucher/.

(Incidentally, it'll take a better price than ‘free’ to persuade me to acquire Britney Spears albums. If I'm to listen to Britney, I want be paid—and paid well—for my suffering.)

In the news: some nitwit in Poland has a web site full of information about wireless networking on Linux; like Jim Barksdale did on his home page back when Netscape was still alive, he uses a snippet of JavaScript to redirect Internet Explorer users to a rude little buzz-off page.

His redirect was even easier to disable than Barksdale's: a quick addition to the Restricted Sites list, and wireless networking is freed from the shackles of irrational web-browser anti-advocacy.

(I tried to check Barksdale's page, people.netscape.com/~jimb/, just now, to see whether the redirect was still there. Now it's a redirect to www.barksdalegroup.com, which is just a 403 Forbidden error page. Suspecting a server-side Internet Explorer rejection scheme, I tried again from a convenient Linux box: same thing. It turns out the Barksdale Group closed up shop last March.)

Fixed sloppy joes for Jake & myself this evening. It was supposed to be a non-vegetarian, male-bonding sort of dinner, but—alas—he wouldn't eat any of it.

More for me, I guess.

I've been copying bits & pieces from my old WRI web site into this one. Entries from the old Meditations section fit nicely into the new Daybook structure.

In 1998, Babe: Pig in the City was in the theaters. Jennifer and I went to see it, and were more disturbed than entertained: it was a strangely violent and humorless film.

I read an interview with the director, who announced that he had really great ideas already for a third movie, and a fourth after that. I don't believe these were ever made (not that I would have paid to see them if they had been).

For some reason, I've begun the laborious process of splitting the old Daybook pages into daily entries.

[I finished this project on June 8, 2003.]

Many web sites assume the browser is running full-screen at 800x600 or larger. Mine never is—usually I've got other things running in the background that I want to keep an eye on—so I am an unpaid tester for people's web design skills.

Some pages rearrange themselves to fit in the smaller space; others are hard-coded to 800x600, so I have to scroll around to see everything; still others—most notably, Jeff Duntemann's site, www.duntemann.com—are a mixture of relative & absolute positioning, and fail gracelessly as the browser window shrinks.

(Don't get me started on sites that resize the browser window to what they think it should be. A new circle of Hell is even now under construction to accommodate them.)

Amusing item from Mr. Duntemann:

...the story of a British woman wine expert who described a certain white wine...as tasting like "cat's pee on a gooseberry bush."

Heh. I feel that way about alcoholic beverages in general. Nasty stuff, all of 'em.

Still trying to shake off whatever microscopic nasties have taken up residence in my nose and/or throat. I feel pretty good, but I'm running through the kleenex at an accelerated rate, and I'm wishing I had a bag of Ricola close to hand.

(They have a web site: www.ricola.com. Everybody has a web site these days.

The EarthLink ftp servers are completely unresponsive this evening. No uploads for me, alas.

Poor Jacob, woke up around 4:00am very unhappy about something. Jennifer went in to check on him: when she picked him up, he went right to sleep; when she put him in the crib, he woke up again and resumed yelling. After a while, he stayed asleep.

We never did figure out what it was. A nightmare? (Do seventeen-month-olds get nightmares?)

(Me, I stayed mostly asleep through the whole thing. I'm a neglectful father.)

Today's pictures at Consumption Junction include one of lewd activities taking place in a cemetery. One gravestone is partially visible; a little cross-referencing with Ancestry.com filled in the details: Henry T. Leiss, born 27 Dec 1907, died 5 Oct 1990.

I can't find where Mr. Leiss is buried, though. The 1910 and 1920 Censuses (censæ? censera? censi?) might offer some clues; the library has a subscription to the online census data at Ancestry.com. Hm...

Posted something to the Joel On Software discussion forum:

A blog (ugh...hideous word, blog...) full of nothing but links to commercial news sites quickly loses my interest: there's already too much news out there for me to keep up with, I don't need strangers throwing still more links at me.

I like the idea of recording the random minutiae of daily existence—got up, had breakfast, bought shoes—for later perusal. I want to remember, ten or thirty years from now, what it was like to be me. I want my children, my grandchildren (should I ever have any) to know.

That someone reading my pages might find them boring does not oblige me to change what I write about. Maybe I really am boring: if so, why lie to posterity?

I take the long view. The Daybook will continue, for decades (if I live that long). It may not be called the Daybook, and it may not reside on the internet, but it will exist in some form.

I'm reminded of David Hudson's book, Rewired: a brief (and opinionated) net history, in which Online Discussion Groups were (over-) praised as a cultural advance of unprecedented significance. People think blogs (ugh...how it pains me to use that word...) are something new & profound. They aren't—the first personal narratives were doubtless begun shortly after writing was invented. The internet provides a larger potential audience, nothing more.

(www.rewired.com hasn't been updated since last November. Where have you gone, Mr. Hudson?)

Those zany Brits are at it again: www.extremeironing.com,

...the latest danger sport that combines the thrills of an extreme outdoor activity with the satisfaction of a well pressed shirt.

Curious device: the AudioTron, www.audiotron.net, which is a stereo-system component that connects to a PC and plays internet radio and PC audio files on the stereo.

I suppose if I had a big mp3 collection, a home network, a fancy stereo system and $300, I'd be very interested. Alas, I'm zero for four.

Complaints from the loyal readership: they miss having an entire month's daybook entries on one page. Ask, and it shall be given ye.

Jake in a good mood tonight, until bedtime. He slept just fine, so long as somebody was holding him; put him in the crib, wahhhhh. Insomnia? Separation anxiety?

Seems the EarthLink ftp server now requires my complete email address as a login: previously, I had to omit the @ix.netcom.com to get it to work.

Thank you so much for informing me of this change, EarthLink.

MSNBC says:

A Commerce Department study, compiled from a variety of analyst surveys, cites a need for more music, movies and games on the Internet in order to make broadband connections more popular.

Two responses:

First, DSL and cable-modem broadband are not available where I live, and neither Ameritech nor Insight show any interest in making them available.

Second, I have no interest at all in downloading music or movies from the internet, or playing online games. Offering these things is no incentive.

Lots of boot-camp documentaries on cable these days. I watch them, sometimes, mainly out of schadenfreude. Lately I've noticed that the recruits are wearing fancy running shoes instead of good old leather Army boots. Whose idea was that?

Busy day: Jennifer did all the cooking, cleaning, laundry, and yard work, while I...um...watched television, fooled around on the computer, and played with Jacob.

(I suppose Jake & I did contribute in a small way to the day's labors: we picked out a nice birthday card for Grampa Bob, and did the weekly grocery shopping.)

Jake's new thing: he likes to grab my finger & lead me around the room.

He's also taken to climbing to the top of his slide, then holding his arms out like an Olympic gymnast preparing for the big dismount. (Nota bene: it's stick the dismount, not spike. Don't say, "Spike the dismount! Spike the dismount!" People will laugh.)

Finally got around to coding up the daybook month index pages. The style sheet entries are in desperate need of work—an entire calendar rendered in 24-point Arial is ugly. Maybe tomorrow.

Cooling off outside: 50° at 10:10pm. The windows will stay closed tonight, I think.

Went to see Carrie Newcomer at Borders this afternoon. Nice show, and she signed my copy of her new album, The Gathering of Spirits.

Jake lost interest even before the concert started. For a while, Jennifer held him at the back of the crowd—I was trapped up front with the stroller, and could not escape—but ultimately had to retreat to the children's section. Poor Jennifer didn't get to hear much music.

Jake's got a runny nose again. Poor little guy.

Thinking about taking a week off, to do some genealogy: there's lots I could find out over in Indianapolis, and another trip to Carmi would be profitable as well. Best to do it now, while the weather's still good. Last year's post-Christmas research trip was snowed out, alas.

9:23pm, and Jake is finally in his crib. He doesn't want to be there, and is protesting loudly.

9:24pm, and blessed silence.

[It didn't last long. Jake woke up after a few minutes and required considerable time in the rocking chair—along with a change of pajamas—before going back to sleep.]

Sputnik reports 64° outside, 82° inside. We have all the windows open....

9:28pm, and EarthLink is having problems:

500 Sorry, no server available to handle request on 199.174.114.55.
500 Sorry, no server available to handle request on 199.174.114.55.
500 Sorry, no server available to handle request on 199.174.114.55.

Guess I don't get to upload anything tonight.

We've been giving Jake his baths in the kitchen sink for quite a while now (since last November), but he's getting too big for that. Soon baths will move to the tub, so Jennifer & I thought we should get a picture of Jake in the sink, while we still can.

(This was taken on the 17th, but I just now got around to adding it to the web site.)

Nessus (my computer) has a rather nice sound card, and a not too shabby set of speakers. I've never turned the volume all the way up; I'm afraid to. Usually I have the sound turned off so as not to wake up Jacob. Funny old world, innit.

I sure have been out of the office a lot this year:

February - 11,19,27
March - 4,6,25,26,27,28
April - 9
May - 10,13,21,24,28
July - 8,9,10,11,12
August - 13,14,29

I was home sick on February 27; the five days in July were Jacob's hospital stay (and its aftermath); the remainder were staying home with a not-feeling-well Jacob. (Some of those were half-days, split with Jennifer; I know there were even more days when Jennifer stayed home with Jacob, but I don't have any record of them.)

I only have 21 vacation days left....

General Magic—www.generalmagic.com—has “discontinued operations”. All those companies that burst onto the scene in the 90s with wonky hardware & high hopes are gone now.

Danger—www.danger.com—is still here but seems likely to be crushed beneath the Microsoft PocketPC / TabletPC juggernaut.

Some days—today, for one—I just have no patience with people. It takes an effort of will not to send email saying No, I'm not interested in explaining the difference between [censored] and Shinola to someone who can't figure it out on his own. Leave me alone!

Is it too much caffeine that makes me this irritable? Or too little?

Michael Swaine has a web site, www.swaine.com, that he hasn't updated since the end of July. I think he's writing a book: before falling silent, he wrote a few apologetic notes about a contract and a tight deadline.

David Gerrold hasn't updated his site, www.gerrold.com, in almost a year. I've no idea what he's up to.

Jacob saw his shoes this morning, and had a fit until we put them on his feet. Then he clumped happily around the house until it was time to leave.

Poor Jacob, very grumpy all evening. Maybe he's getting sick.

More reorganization of the Daybook. I guess the real goal here is to separate the content—that is, the daily blather—from the navigation, and to simplify future automated transformations. Or maybe I just like fooling with it. Who knows?

(Just noticed this evening a whole bunch of <i> and </i> tags I missed last June during the migration from FrontPage: I meant to change them all to <em> and </em>. Oops.)

Just now (9:52pm), Jennifer said to me, “You need a vacation.”

Took some CDs to work today:

Tales of Mystery and Imagination / The Alan Parsons Project
Audio / Blue Man Group
Into the Labyrinth / Dead Can Dance
Watermark / Enya
The Planets / Holst
A Passion Play / Jethro Tull
If You Could Read My Mind / Gordon Lightfoot
Candyland / James McMurtry

I nurture the conceit that my musical tastes are wider-ranging than average.

Offered some free advice to a co-worker today:

Sending email to twice as many recipients as necessary won't get you an answer in half the time. Usually, it just gets you ignored.

WRI is becoming the sort of place where getting an answer is less important than being seen by the right people to have asked the question. Depressing.

(Another symptom of this shift in company culture is that WRI keeps, online, complete archives of all company mailing lists, back to 1996. I don't suppose they've ever read Jamie Zawinski's story of the really-bad-attitude mailing list, or they might reconsider.)

Web pages of former WRIfolk:

• Matt Cook, www.paradise.caltech.edu/~cook/
• Xah Lee, www.xahlee.org

There are more, I'm sure.

More reorganization of the Daybook pages. Links will be a bit wonky until I get it all sorted out. Sorry.

Jack La Lanne has a web site: www.jacklalanne.com. He's eighty-eight years old, and still going strong.

<yoda>
When half as old I am,
Look half as good I hope to.
</yoda>

Still fighting off something: I've a sort-of stuffy nose, a sort-of scratchy throat, and noticeably less energy than usual. Made a lot of stupid mistakes at work yesterday, and had to fix them today.

Fixed the upload problems caused by yesterday's flaky dialup connection. My solution was drastic, but effective:

• Dump the entire site to a CD, take it to work;
• At work, use WS_FTP LE to pull down a copy of what's on Netcom's server;
• Use the Visual C++ tool WinDiff to see what was different (not much, as it turned out) and upload the changes.

CityDesk won't try to upload all 10 MB next time. I hope.

The local NPR station plays a short beep, every hour on the hour. When the alarm went off this morning at 6:00am, NPR was in mid-beep, which means that their clock and mine are pretty closely synchronized. How nice.

(On the other hand, I only know this because I was already awake at 6:00am, which was not so nice.)

To tunnel a VNC connection through SSH, two ports must be forwarded: 58xx and 59xx. If 59xx is not forwarded, a web connection can be established, but logging in fails with a Java “connection refused” exception.

This is not mentioned in the VNC documentation. Grumble.

Feeling a little better today, cold-wise. (James Herriot caught a variety of unpleasant illnesses from his patients; I suspect a similar process occurs between Jacob & myself.)

Jacob is well. He's talking more and more, and getting pretty good with a spoon. He gets grumpy when we try to feed him: he wants to do it himself.

This just in: if your modem drops the connection while CityDesk is in the middle of uploading its checksum file, the next time you upload, CityDesk wants to upload everything, which in my case is 10MB or so. Over a flaky dialup connection, this can take a long time.

I seem to be catching a cold.

I begin to suspect my ssh software—OpenSSH 3.4-2—of destabilizing the Windows 2000 PPP machinery. Connections seem much more stable when ssh isn't running.

Today's word in the Forgotten English calendar:

clunch, adj.: Sour-tempered; abrupt in speech, and irritable.

That's me.

Spent the afternoon in Bloomington: we dropped Jacob off at the grandparents' house, then went to see One Hour Photo (a very disturbing film) at the GKC University Cinema.

Afterward, Jennifer & I stopped at The Garlic Press, an Art-Mart-like store in Bloomington (or maybe Normal—I've no idea where the boundary between them lies). Many items of interest there: we'll have to tell Santa about it.

And then there was a medium-scale Miller party: Amy, Scott & Natalie came to visit, so there were nine of us (counting Clementine) bouncing around. (Yes, nine is only medium-scale.) Natalie and Jacob chased each other around the house. Pizza was consumed. Time-outs were occasionally issued.

We didn't get home until 8:30pm (more or less).

Yet another web site reorganization in the works: I'm splitting the daybook into one page per day (instead of one page per month), then using CityDesk's scripting machinery to assemble monthly pages.

Ultimately, the main daybook page will contain the thirty or so most-recent entries, so the loyal readership won't have to drill down three or four levels just to read the latest blather.

There will be some transient ugliness while I get this all sorted out: most notably, the little calendar thingy at the top of each daybook page will be going away for a while. It will return, once I've written some JavaScript to generate it on the fly.

(Also: the transition to XHTML has begun. Woowoo)

In the mail: a letter from Tricycle, the Buddhist Review. For some reason, seeing...

“Tricycle is one of the only magazines that I actually read cover to cover.”
—Willem Dafoe

...on the envelope made me laugh. Willem Dafoe?

Fog Creek put up a CityDesk template that might be useful for the Daybook. One possible snag: it keeps each day in a separate file. I suppose that's more flexible than keeping an entire month in each file, but keeping track of a few hundred very small html files is a bit intimidating.

Jennifer & I took Jacob to Curtis Orchard this afternoon, and let him run around the play areas. I think he had fun.

Joel says:

People add so many fields to their bug databases to capture everything they think might be important that entering a bug is like applying to Harvard.

I don't know any companies where that has happened. I certainly don't work for one. No sirree, the WRI bugs database isn't like that at all.

The Microsoft Windows Installer Service has a rather annoying ‘feature’ called advertisement:

If an application is advertised, only the interfaces required for loading and launching the application are presented to the user or other applications. If a user or application activates an advertised interface the installer then proceeds to install the necessary components....

So: advertisement allows you to create an installer that doesn't actually install anything. What a stunning idea.

It gets better: on Windows 2000/XP, User accounts aren't allowed to install software (only Power User & Administrator accounts can do that). When a User tries to launch an advertised application, MSI gamely tries to install it, then dies with an incomprehensible error message.

What bonehead at Microsoft thought this was a good design?

On the other hand, it's wrong to think of Microsoft as a monolith of lockstep zombies. The 'softies are a contentious lot. They squabble. They disagree with Bill, and with each other. Perhaps the MSI team decided that Windows 9x, where anyone can install anything, was the only operating system that mattered, and scorned Windows 2000/XP as beneath their attention. That's what the Money team did, until Money 2002.

Indianapolis has a zoo, and the zoo has a web site: www.indyzoo.com.

Seems the zoo is just down the street from the Eiteljorg Museum, which itself is just down the street from the Indiana State Library. So Jake could see fierce creatures, Jennifer & I could experience Art, and I could do a little genealogy, all within a few blocks. Hmmm....

Another visit to the dentist this morning, for a filling (#29, occlusal). Haven't needed one of those in years; the experience wasn't as unpleasant as I'd expected. (Not that it was fun, mind.)

Mr. Dentist muttered darkly about one of #29's neighbors. Won't be a filling next time, quoth Mr. Dentist: it'll be a crown.

MSNBC, or maybe a Newsweek article hosted by MSNBC, says, regarding the World Trade Center attacks:

At least 1,100 people were trapped on or above the floors where the planes struck.... Of the 17 still alive, 10 agreed to tell their stories to NEWSWEEK....

Seven people refused to talk to reporters. I find that strangely comforting.

[I suppose they could be holding out for more money, or they've already sold publication rights to some other news agency, or something crass like that. But I hope not.]

Jake is getting better at using a spoon to feed himself, though it's still a very messy process.

Put gas in the car this morning. Judging from the horrible smell that has clung to me all day, I spilled more on myself than went into the tank. I don't remember any spillage, but maybe Mr. Dentist injected the novocaine a little too deeply & anæsthetized my brain.

After a year or so of no-no-no, Jake this evening was seen to nod his head yes-yes-yes. And at dinner time, he tried to climb into his high chair by himself and, once there (he needed a little help from his Papa), tried to buckle himself in.

Clever lad, is our Jacob.

The President is itching to go to war against Iraq. I don't claim to be a foreign-policy wonk, so maybe there's more going on here than I understand; but I keep thinking that, when President Kennedy needed to justify his actions against Cuba, he put surveillance photos on national television: “These are nuclear missiles, aimed at the United States.” George just says, “Iraq is bad. Trust me.”

Wrote some JavaScript today, so the new weather chart page is more or less functional. (The code could bear improvement, but it works. [For me, anyway.])

Took Jake to the library today, so he could say hello to the archivists.

This just in: stumbled across an MSNBC article that refers to the Hunley, which sank in 1864, as ‘ancient’. One hundred thirty-eight years counts as ancient?

Grandparents visiting from Arlington Heights.

The phone rang, fairly late tonight—wrong number—and when it did, Jake was heard to say uh-oh from his crib (where we had thought he was sleeping).

Installed the ODBC .NET Data Provider at work today. It did not go well. If you install it as Administrator—in the misguided belief that doing so will make it available to all user accounts—it will only work for Administrator.

So: uninstall, try again from my own account. It installs, but launching the online documentation also brings up MS Installer, which trundles a bit before falling over. After that, the documentation is accessible with no obvious problems. Whatever it was trying to install couldn't have been very important.

The MS Installer service really loves to pop up little I'm doing something to your computer now, but I won't tell you what it is dialogs, which always seem to be followed—after a considerable delay—by another one that says, Something bad happened, but I won't tell you what it was, or how to fix it.

Thank you so much, Microsoft.

Maybe when I've calmed down a little, I can try to write some C# code that uses the ODBC .NET Data Provider and MyODBC to talk to the build monitor database (which is on a MySQL server on a linux machine somewhere in networkland).

An observation: caffeine doesn't wake me up, doesn't make me think or work faster (let alone better); all it does is keep me from sleeping. Perhaps instead of my morning cup of espresso I should just take a nap.

Finally did get the ODBC .NET Data Provider talking to MySQL (by way of MyODBC). It doesn't take much code, either:

OdbcConnection cn = new OdbcConnection();
cn.ConnectionString = "DSN=buildhistory.browse";
cn.Open();

OdbcCommand cmd = new OdbcCommand();
cmd.Connection = cn;
cmd.CommandText = "SELECT id,name FROM builder ORDER BY name";

OdbcDataReader rdr = cmd.ExecuteReader();
while (rdr.Read())
   {
   }
rdr.Close();

cn.Close();

Poking around the Internet instead of working, I came across the following:

To view the Country Curtains On-Line Catalog, please install the TenCORE Net plug-in, which will take just a few minutes.

TenCORE Net is a product of Catharon Software Corporation, www.catharon.com. Did they buy TenCORE from Computer Teaching Corporation before CTC went under? Or is Catharon some kind of escape pod CTC jettisoned on its way down?

[Apparently, Catharon is the previously-anonymous Big New York ISP to whom CTC sold TenCORE.]

(Lots of CTC alumni out there. David Stone—who had a big office and was doubtless in charge of something important, but after eleven years I've forgotten what it was—has a web site, www.dr-david-stone.com.)

MSNBC says:

Looking ahead, standard pop-ups will likely give way to rich-media technologies that incorporate animation, audio and video into online ads. These ads can come in forms that dance or zoom across the computer screen, momentarily cover a Web page, or “interstitials” featuring streaming audio or video that appear in-between pages.

...and any site that tries to inflict such horrors on me will find itself in my Restricted Sites list, to which all programmatic chicanery is forbidden, or find itself boycotted altogether.

I've noticed that most of the web sites I visit fall into two categories: personal sites, written by & about an individual; and corporate sites, which provide an Internet presence for companies that make their money selling something other than their readers.

Neither of these is much inclined toward advertisements. Only the web sites that think they're newspapers or television stations clutter themselves with ads. Guess what—if I want a newspaper or a television station, I know where to find one, and it isn't on the Internet.

I wonder if we'll ever see a CEO (i.e., Clueless & Extremely Offensive person) from one of the big news sites complaining that turning off JavaScript in one's web browser is theft, because it blocks the advertisements. “When you read a web page, you have a contract with the publisher to read the ads. Once you've done that, then you're allowed to read the articles.”

Jake has been waking up once or twice a night. He yells a bit, then goes back to sleep. Sometimes Jennifer or I—more often Jennifer than I—will go to his room and cuddle with him for a while until he settles down.

Windows Media 9, the latest version of what was formerly known as Windows Media Player,

...will bring the experience of viewing video on the Web a little bit closer to watching television.

Not quite. I can record a program on my vcr, then play it back on a different vcr—even a vcr that belongs to someone else. The fair-use-prevention technology in Windows Media 9 will prevent that.

Windows Media 9 is like watching television, but only if you're strapped to the chair—sort of like Alex in A Clockwork Orange—while the RIAA and/or MPAA decide what you'll watch, and when, and how.

No, thanks.

(I doubt that WM9 will run on Windows 2000, so the question is moot: I refuse to be leveraged into upgrading to Windows XP.)

[I was wrong: Windows Media Player 9 does run on Windows 2000.]

On the other hand, it appears that the .NET Framework contains a fairly painless image-conversion facility, so I can convert all those tiff files into something a little less bulky. How nice.

Mark Bernstein says:

Living sites are only as good as today's update. If the words are dull, nobody will read them, and nobody will come back. If the words are wrong, people will be misled, disappointed, infuriated. If the words aren't there, people will shake their heads and lament your untimely demise.

Writing advice makes me sullen & resentful.

I want to write well enough that people will want to read what I've written, but I don't write just to have readers: I write for my own satisfaction. The Daybook—the entire web site, really—is a very selfish project. It is one of the few creative outlets I have left.

So: it's hard not to interpret writing advice as this, too, is an obligation you owe to others; you must please them, not yourself; your own feelings do not matter.

[What a cloying display of self-pity that was. Is it too much caffeine? Or too little?]

[For further rantage in response to Mr. Bernstein, see June 25, 2004.]

There were rumors that Napster had finally gone under: so today I paid a visit to www.napster.com, to see what could be seen. All that's left is a crudely-drawn cartoon, captioned ‘Ded Kitty’. (Which finally solves the mystery of just what the Napster mascot was supposed to be: I always thought it was a demon or something.)

Nothing about it on www.metallica.com, though.

In other music news, Rush is playing a second date in Chicago, on October 30. I figure I'll miss this one, too: too cheap to pay for tickets, too lazy to drive to Chicago, etc., etc., blah blah blah.

Put a new blade on the lawn mower this evening, then mowed (some of) the back yard. The old blade was about as sharp as a butter knife; the new one works much better. (All the while, I worried that I hadn't bolted the new blade on securely enough, and that any minute it would come flying out from under the mower and lop off my feet. Ouch.)

Finally got the weather database back online: all the paths changed when I installed the 60GB disk (in July), so a little tweaking was required. I worried that I had forgotten to install all the necessary Office components, but that wasn't a problem. So now I have reasonably up-to-date weather charts to look at. How nice.

(CityDesk lets you specify external editors for files, so I could point it at my image editing software and update the monthly & yearly graphs that way. Alas, I have no image editing software [and no, I won't reinstall PhotoDraw].)

The Illinois Statewide Marriage Index records that BURKHARDT, JACOB married BEAGLE, BARBRIE in White County on January 30, 1866. I think turning Barbara Biekle into Barbrie Beagle counts as the worst name-mangling I've encountered so far in my genealogical researches.

Saw a headline on MSNBC: Should September 11 Be A National Holiday? I don't think so. I don't want September 11 moved to the nearest Monday just to give people a long weekend. I don't want department stores to advertise September 11 white sales, or grocery stores to encourage me to stock up on September 11 picnic supplies. I don't want newspaper surveys ten or twenty years from now to reveal that 93% of respondents have no idea what happened on September 11, or why there's a holiday for it.

But that's just me.

The stock market goes up, the stock market goes down. The talking heads are always ready with an explanation for what the market has done, but never seem to have anything concrete to say about what the market will do:

“Today the market reacted to...[mind-numbing financial technobabble omitted]...and that's why the market did what it did.”
“What about tomorrow?”
“Well, it'll go up, unless of course it goes down.”
“Could it stay the same?”
“That's always a possibility.”

Ebenezer Scrooge said it best: Bah, humbug.

The modem isn't working so well any more: it just can't hold a connection open. I don't think it's the phone line—Jennifer hasn't had any trouble with her computer—so it's either a hardware problem, or Windows 2000 is somehow fubar'd. (Wouldn't be the first time for either.)

Ran some errands this evening: to the library, to return a book; a visit to the hardware store; and finally, a stop at the grocery store.

Went to the Bloomington Labor Day parade, got pelted with candy. (I left my hat at home—oops—and am currently sporting quite a sunburn.)

The oatmeal curse continues: tried to fix some Scottish Oatmeal in the microwave this morning, made a huge mess instead. Mopping up sticky, boiling-hot oatmeal is rather tricky. The second bowl was better-behaved (and quite tasty).

[A second culinary disaster today: made some minestrone in the crock pot. It might have been tasty, except we were out of onions and I overcooked it by about three hours. The result was an underseasoned pot of mush. Must remember to follow the recipe next time.]

Fireworks over at Dodds Park this evening; alas, we missed them while putting Jacob to bed.

[No, they didn't start until 8:45 or so, an hour after Jake went to sleep. Then we missed them.]