October 2002 Archives

<Halloween>BOO!</Halloween>

IMAP support in Outlook 2000 continues to underwhelm. If I'm out of the office for a day (say, because my son is having a tear duct Roto-Rootered), about a hundred messages pile up in my inbox. Routing all these through Outlook's message-processing rules can take five minutes (or longer), during which time Outlook is completely unresponsive.

It took a while when I was using POP, but nothing like this.

I gave in to temptation: www.patrick-rice.net should be online in a few days. Unless I change my mind in the next 30 days, I'm on the hook for an entire year at $6/month. Egad.

(I'll probably stick with it. Having my own domain appeals to my geek nature, not to mention my vanity.)

Sent mail to MSNBC just now:

As if pop-up ads weren't annoying enough, MSNBC has now started inflicting interstitials on its readers.

I realize that advertising is a reality of your business (as was condescendingly pointed out to me the last time I complained about intrusive & annoying ads), but you may wish to consider how much of a business you'll have left once you've driven all your readers away.

I've just deleted MSNBC from my list of bookmarks. I won't be back.

I wonder if I'll get a reply.

Mail from Pair.com: my account has been created. How nice.

I'd love to poke around in Pair's account-management site, but tonight Old Unreliable (i.e., the modem) can't seem to keep a connection alive for more than a minute or two at a time.

It's been suggested that I might need a firmware update. I'd love to download one, but I'd have to use Old Unreliable to do it, and...you see where I'm going with this.

The modem has this to say for itself:

U.S. Robotics 56K FAX INT Link Diagnostics...

Chars sent                13539      Chars Received            98808
Chars lost                    0
Octets sent               12730      Octets Received           99724
Blocks sent                 355      Blocks Received             818
Blocks resent                 0

Retrains Requested            0      Retrains Granted              0
Line Reversals                0      Blers                        15
Link Timeouts                 1      Link Naks                     0

Data Compression       V42BIS 2048/32
Equalization           Long
Fallback               Enabled
Protocol               LAPM/SREJ
Speed                  49333/28800
V.90 Peak Speed        49333
Last Call              00:01:41

Disconnect Reason is Unable to Retrain

OK

I took a lot of heat last year from the grandmas for not getting a good picture of Jake in his Halloween costume. Here's one from this year.

The weather was worse than last year, and even fewer children showed up. (No surly teenagers at all, which was nice.) Whatever will we do with all that leftover candy? See if you can guess.

Off to the hospital this morning (at 6:15!) to get Jake's tear duct augered.

Three hours later: we're home, Jake's fine. The rest of us are just a little sleepy, though.

Fooled around a bit with Linux: figured out how to send & receive email, looked at a few web pages, etc. Tried several times to download a Mozilla update, but kept losing the connection (once with less than 100K remaining of a 10MB download—and no, if you dial in again it doesn't pick up where it left off, it starts over from zero).

I haven't found where to turn off the modem speaker, which complicates using Linux during Jacob's naptime.

CNN reports that telemarketers are using “predictive dialing machines”, which

...dial numbers stored in a database using a mathematical algorithm to predict when a telemarketer will be ready to finish one sales call and start another. When the machine reaches a person, the call is supposed to be transferred to a telemarketer who is just finishing a previous call.

That explains all those times the phone rings, but there's nobody on the other end. CNN also reports that the telemarketers get these machines from—wait for it—the telephone companies.

Complaints from the loyal readership are coming in that these pages take too long to load. I've noticed that myself. I believe the problem is at EarthLink's end: the server responds to the initial .html file request, then loses the followup requests for .js files. Since the page can't render until the JavaScript has done its thing, readers are stuck looking at a blank page.

Hm...I suppose I could sign up with www.pair.com: $39 up front, plus $6 per month and $19 per year, and I could keep my blather at patrick-rice.net.

The El Cheapo service plan at Pair offers 100MB, which is five times as much as EarthLink; if I wanted to spend more money (I don't), I could have MySQL, PHP, CGI, all sorts of webtoys.

Hm...tempting....

[I suppose some evildoer out in the world will read this and register patrick-rice.net before I work up the courage to do it myself. Ah, well. I've already missed my chance at pzr.org and zloty.org, and the world didn't end.]

There's a Jeep in the WRI parking lot with license plate PRICE 95. I wonder if people think it's mine. (It isn't.)

Installed Red Hat Linux 8.0 on nessus this afternoon. It was quicker & easier than installing Windows 2000, which was nice. Now I have to decide whether I feel like paying for the update service. (Probably.)

Jacob had his pre-surgery checkup this morning. Quoth the doctor, “He's fine.”

One of the more dangerous 'features' of Outlook 2000 is the Preview Pane, which allows anyone with access to an SMTP server to execute code of their choosing on your computer. In theory, this is safe; in practice, less so: Microsoft is constantly issuing patches to remove the safe-for-scripting attribute from things that are manifestly unsafe for scripting.

So: it's best to disable Preview Pane altogether. But Outlook 2000 provides no way to globally disable Preview Pane; instead, one must turn it off for each and every folder—and remember to turn it off for any new folders that get created.

Knowledge Base Article Q197180 claims that appending /nopreview to the default value of HKCROOT\CLSID\{00020D75-0000-0000-C000-000000000046}\Shell\Open\Command will put the kibosh on Preview Pane; alas, doing this has no discernible effect.

As it turns out, /nopreview does work, if you can get it into the Outlook command line: you just have to find all the ways Outlook gets launched & add /nopreview to each.

[The registry key controls the desktop icon for Outlook. I believe all other shortcuts must be modified directly.]

(Q197180 starts off with an interesting disclaimer:

WARNING: Any use by you of the command-line switches provided in this article is at your own risk. Microsoft provides these command-line switches without warranty of any kind, either express or implied, including but not limited to the implied warranties of merchantability and/or fitness for a particular purpose.

...which means, If it works, we get the credit; if it doesn't, don't come crying to us.)

Picked up some Robitussin DM for Jake's cough. As the dosing chart says under two years, ask a doctor I asked the pharmacist whether I had the right medicine and how much of it Jake should get. Quoth the pharmacist, “Nevermore.”

Er...make that, “Half a teaspoon, every four to six hours.”

I thought it would be easier to dump these pages to a CD, and upload to EarthLink's servers from work; alas, the ftp connection kept dropping. (Curiously, this only happened during uploads. I downloaded the entire 10MB site in one go.)

For some reason, accessing my web site from work is a painfully slow operation. It seems like the initial html page is received speedily enough, but subsequent requests for the style sheet, the various .js files, etc., take forever. People out in the world have no such troubles, so I'm guessing it's due to a misconfigured proxy server (or misconfigured web browser) here at WRI.

More web-site foolery: all pages are using the new XHTML templates. Articles use the article template, index files use the index template; the main index page, being a special case, has its own template.

(This is not [merely] geek foolery. The goal is, as the academics have been saying for years now, to separate content from presentation. I'm nearly to the point where I can implement sweeping design changes without having to slog through a few hundred individual html files: just tweak the templates & the style sheet and presto!)

MSNBC says:

Grocery retailer Safeway is testing new in-store shopping cart technology that traces shoppers' steps through its stores and flashes personalized ads at them while they're shopping.

I first read about these last February; now they are no longer an abstract horror, they're out in the world invading the privacy of real customers.

If the local grocery stores ever start using these things, I'll have to bring some duct tape to cover the screen. I will not be chattered at by computers while shopping for groceries.

Jacob's attempting longer sentences now, but I just can't understand what he's saying. It's frustrating for both of us.

Interesting bit of spam: An Old High School Friend is Looking for you at Reunion.com! People looking for old high school friends don't send spam, do they?

Jennifer's father brought Clementine over for a visit. Jake likes Clementine, but seems a bit afraid of her. (She does get a little carried away sometimes.)

Lots of work on the web site. I may have to take a CD to work and upload to Netcom from there—I doubt that the modem here can keep the connection alive long enough to upload everything.

Feeling no more than the usual sleepiness tonight, which is a welcome improvement: went to sleep at 9:30 last night, and 9:15 the night before.

Poor Jake, he's coughing again. No other symptoms, though, which is a bit mysterious.

Cold today. Rain this morning, followed by thick overcast riding low enough in the sky that it nearly qualifies as fog.

Plans to attend the UI Homecoming parade this evening have been canceled due to the weather.

I want a utility that can look at these pages and answer questions like, “Which img tags are missing the alt attribute?” It should also be able to do global html-aware edits, though I can't come up with a concrete example just now.

[How about, “Terminate all unterminated br and img tags.” Since I am slowly migrating to XHTML, I need to make sure my image tags all end with /> instead of just >.]

I wonder if such a thing is available, and if so what it might cost.

According to the Google Zeitgeist page, operating systems used to access Google are:

I don't know that I believe these numbers—where's Windows ME?—but it's interesting to think that I'm not the only one refusing to upgrade from Windows 2000 to Windows XP.

One of my co-workers forgot to lock the restroom door this morning. Oops.

Very tired this afternoon. I've been staying up too late, trying to finish reading a Michael Moorcock book I've been working on since July (if not earlier). And I ran out of coffee a few days ago.

Pity me, pity me.

Jacob had bratwurst with his dinner last night, carefully peeled & cut into very small pieces to minimize the risk of choking on it. Unlike previous carnivorous experiments—microwave hamburgers, sloppy joes, ground beef, ground turkey—he actually ate the bratwurst.

Consumed company bandwidth last night by downloading Red Hat Linux 8.0: three ISO images, 1,925MB in all. It only took three hours. I really will install this on nessus. (Unlike 7.3, which I've had for three months and never installed.)

Various talking heads & pundits have been reflecting lately on the obsolescence of the telephone network: the countless miles of wire and fiber, which carry only telephone traffic, are being superseded by the internet, which can carry anything.

It made me think of John Brunner's novel, The Shockwave Rider, which predicted thirty years ago that this would happen.

It also made me think about telephone numbers vs. IP addresses. The internet has DNS, so I can type www.netcom.com instead of 199.174.114.57; why is there no equivalent for telephone numbers?

I've been getting back into genealogy lately.

My old database was full of guesswork & undocumented information; I'm being much more careful in my current database. At first, I used only primary sources: birth & death certificates, marriage licenses, family photographs, that sort of thing, but I have a large collection of secondary sources (mostly newspaper articles) that needs to be mined for relevant data.

Thinking about Neil Peart's book, Ghost Rider: he describes his travels in such detail that little effort would be required to find the names & addresses of the friends and family he visisted along the way. It probably wouldn't even be too hard to find the address of Neil's house in Quebec.

I'm not into the celebrity stalking game, but I wonder whether the more fanatical Rush fans are even now starting to annoy Neil's relatives.

(Some years back, one such nitwit found Geddy's house in Toronto. He lingered outside the fence, watching Geddy mow the lawn, until finally Geddy had to come over and suggest that maybe he should leave.)

Or maybe Neil was clever & changed all the names and descriptions, to foil would-be stalkers?

Looking at www.huffel.com, I decided I don't want to live in Quebec: they get way too much snow. (I've read that during the last Ice Age, the North American glaciers started in that part of the continent & spread from there. I can believe it.)

Celebrity stalking: Neil Peart lives in (or near) Morin Heights, Quebec. They have a web page, www.morinheights.com.

Curiously, www.studiomorinheights.com, which is (probably) the web site for Le Studio, returns HTTP Error 403 - Forbidden. Um...why have a web site if you won't let people read it?

I wonder whether it would be possible to create something that looks like the Macromedia Flash web plug-in but doesn't actually do anything. I need this because Internet Explorer offers three equally-bad choices:

• Install Flash, and suffer through endless over-animated advertisements while reading web pages.
• Don't install Flash, and deal with an endless stream of “Do you want to install Flash?” dialog boxes.
• Disable installation of plug-ins, and deal with an endless stream of “I want to install Flash, but you won't let me. Wahh Wahh Wahh.” dialog boxes.

It would be nice if Internet Explorer asked once whether I want Flash, instead of nagging me about it.

I've had too much caffeine today. I'm very sorry.

Jacob likes to throw things. This morning he hit me in the eye with a block. Ouch. Must teach him not to do that....

News item:

Microsoft...plans eventually to eliminate users' ability to disable Microsoft's access to their systems.

So...Microsoft is granting itself the right to examine my computer, whenever it pleases, and to disable any software (or hardware, I suppose) that it thinks I shouldn't be allowed to use. I don't suppose that's legal just yet, but with bribes—er, re-election campaign fund contributions—in the right places, any damnfool law can be greased through Congress.

I wonder what will happen when pirates figure out how to hijack Product Activation keys. When an honest customer tries to activate his software, Microsoft—seeing that the key is already in use—will say, “Fie, hacker, die die die!” and disable his computer.

Looked in the mirror just now, and saw a bruise under my eye where the block hit.

My bagel had a suspicious white powdery coating—probably flour, but it looked enough like mold that I didn't want to eat it.

The power just dropped, and all non-UPS-equipped computers are now rebooting.

It's not shaping up to be a very pleasant morning.

There seems to be a network problem—DHCP can't get a real address, none of the servers is available, etc., etc., blah blah blah. Maybe I should just go home.

Later: seems the network hub in my office got cranky. One power cycle later, all is well. Guess I have to stay & do some work.

Jack Kevorkian's been in prison for three and a half years now (having been convicted of murder, and having changed his mind about staging a hunger strike if imprisoned). Neither he nor his cause have been much in the news since then.

There's a web site, www.kevork.org, with information & dozens of (mostly broken) links to news articles on other sites.

(An opposing view: www.notdeadyet.org, people concerned that euthanasia, once commonplace, will cease to be voluntary.)

Mitch Kapor has a new project, the Open Source Applications Foundation, www.osafoundation.org. They're working on Chandler, an email client / personal information manager / etc.

Regarding the competition (Microsoft Outlook), they say:

Outlook is stuffed with features, but no one can fairly claim it is either an elegant product to use or an easy one to maintain.

I'd have to agree. To secure Outlook against malicious email (spam, viruses, etc.), I've had to disable a great many of those “features”.

Alas, Chandler isn't even in alpha yet, so I'm stuck with Outlook for a while longer.

Stayed up too late last night, but finished reading Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road, by Neil Peart.

Scorching headache for most of the morning, and my distance vision has been even blurrier than usual. Migraine? Brain tumor? Hangover?

I see the new version of Microsoft Office is about to enter beta. I wonder what they're going to call it—Office XP 2? Office XP++? Office $$?

The MSNBC article says Microsoft has “revamped” Outlook, which is probably a discreet euphemism for “mutated beyond recognition”. Outlook is one of the few components of Office 2000 that I actually use; I surely am not interested in an upgrade that renders obsolete my years of learning & familiarity and makes me start over. If I'm to do that, I may as well switch to something cheaper, with better spam filtering and IMAP support.

And I'm still boycotting anything with Product Activation.

Another check from the Lotto people in today's mail: another $3 for Jake's college fund. That makes four times we've hit the micro-jackpot; we're still hoping for the Big One. Wednesday, for sure.

And Jake's vocabulary continues to expand. During breakfast this morning, he pointed at the pantry door and said, “Cracker door.” I took this to mean there are crackers behind that door, and I want some.

Or maybe that was yesterday morning. Time blurs.

My 401(k) statement came in the mail recently; today I finally forced myself to look at it. 10% of my balance went pffft over the last ninety days, as the stock market decides whether to swirl clockwise or counterclockwise down the toilet. Clever people moved everything into bonds before the market collapsed; I, alas, was not clever.

Only twenty-eight years to retirement. Perhaps the market will have recovered by then.

Hm...managed to crash CityDesk just now: did a site-wide search for class="photo", closed the search results window, and thud. Access Violation, followed by Out of Memory, and then CityDesk closed.

(Technically speaking, it wasn't a crash: CityDesk caught an exception, and managed as graceful an exit as it could, with no obvious damage to my web site. [Though all subsequent typos and grammatical errors will be blamed on this event.])

A bit of behind-the-scenes work on the web site: recoded the picture layout tables so they no longer use hard-coded widths. Long ago, I had everything set to 640 pixels wide, which was a bit stupid.

Spent the day at Brookfield Zoo with the grandparents.

Andy Warhol had Empire, an eight-hour film of the Empire State Building; I have Dinner with Jacob, an eight-minute epic of Jake having dinner while Jennifer & I chatter in the background.

I dumped it to a CD this evening; the grandmas—one of them, at least—will get a copy this weekend. (We'll see whether Grandma can sit through the whole thing without suggesting that maybe I should have edited it a little....)

MSNBC has redesigned their web site to look more like MSN, i.e., overbright and cartoonish. It's also full of links to MSN services, in a desperate attempt to get MSNBC readers to subscribe to MSN. No, thanks.

Having a hard time shaking this cold. A week after catching it, I'm still sniffling & blowing my nose (an instance of which appears in Dinner with Jacob, albeit as an off-screen sound effect).

Jake woke up sometime last night—I think it was around 2:00am, but I don't remember looking at the clock—howling with outrage and/or dismay; the cause turned out to be a very stinky diaper. (I'd be mad, too, waking up to something like that.)

Jennifer did all the cleaning, diapering & soothing back to sleep; I stayed in bed the whole time. What a slacker!

News from New Zealand:

A High Court judge today issued an injunction preventing the labour and birth of a child being filmed for a pornographic movie.

I had thought that childbirth was the only bodily function lacking its own sub-genre in the naughty-cinema biz; it seems I was wrong.

Carrie Nuttall has a web site: www.carrienuttall.com. She's married to Neil Peart, who doesn't have a web site. (Rush has a web site, but Neil doesn't. At least, not that I know of.)

Came home to find a package on the doorstep: my copy of the 1880 U.S. Census, arrived at last. I say “at last”—it only took two weeks, but that was long enough for Jennifer to grow weary of my incessant whining.

Jake woke up several times last night, very unhappy about something. We never did figure out what it was.

The Mystery Disease lingers in all three of us: Jake is nearly cured, though still coughing; Jennifer is feeling pretty good; I am still a bit droopy. Lots of phlegm all around.

Jake likes to watch videos of himself. If the video Jake starts giggling, the real one does too.

Had the notion that I might back up the user files on nessus to a few CD-Rs, but between video playback and updating the checkbook I never quite found the time. Maybe tomorrow.

(No freeze last night after all: sputnik recorded a low of 33° at 6:00am.)

Alas, Jennifer & I were too sick to attend the big hayrack ride, which was this afternoon over at Moraine View state park. (I'm a little hazy on the distinction between a hayrack ride and a hayride. Everyone else has been calling it a hayrack ride, and so shall I.) From what I've heard, everybody who did attend had a great time.

We stayed home, blowing our noses and feeling miserable.

Jake has figured out how to stack blocks. (He long ago mastered knocking over other people's stacks.) His best effort so far: seven.

And we've hit the Lotto a third time: another $3 for Jake's college fund.

Jennifer and Jacob are feeling much better, but the Mystery Disease has yet to release its grip on me. Feeling a bit feverish, a bit loopy. Blowing my nose a lot, not that it does much good.

A cold front is coming down from Canada, and should reach Illinois tomorrow night: looks to be our first freeze of the season.

Jacob has learned a new word: don't. Presumably this is because he's been hearing it more often lately, as he begins to experiment with more dangerous activites: playing with the stove, climbing on furniture, trying to pull large metal shelves down on himself, etc.

Modem connection fairly reliable this morning. Was it a hardware problem on EarthLink's side, recently fixed? I have a nasty suspicion that the OpenSSH software I use to VPN my way into WRI is to blame: this morning I have not used it, and the modem is fine.

I see there's a new newsgroup: alt.binaries.pictures.poultry. Um...poultry?

I didn't know this: the Windows 2000 PPP subsystem keeps a session log. On nessus, it's

%SystemRoot%\ModemLog_U.S. Robotics 56K Fax PCI.txt

The line of particular interest to me is:

10-12-2002 10:46:51.937 - CD dropped--Remote modem hung up. ModemStatus=00000030

which seems to imply that EarthLink's modems are to blame. I don't know that I believe that: pox never loses the connection.

More geekstuff: CityDesk has a hard time deleting files from the EarthLink ftp server, so whenever I rename a file I have to manually delete the old one. (I don't blame CityDesk too much for this: ftp servers were designed to interact with people, not with programs, hence are eccentric enough to give software fits.)

In the mail: an Annual Statement from the mortgage people. It seems our insurance & taxes have gone up, so the mortgage payment is also going up, $20/month.

I don't see the point in escrow accounts. We don't have one to pay our car insurance, or our income tax; why do we need one to pay homeowner's insurance or property taxes?

(When we first started house-hunting, we told the realtor that we wanted mortgage payments not much more than the rent we were paying. “Sure thing,” said the realtor—and the principal + interest are about the same as what we were paying Royce & Brinkmeyer. It's the escrow payment that hurts.)

Forgot to mention: Jake had his second haircut this morning. No pictures, though. (Sorry, grandmas.)

Tried to send Jake to daycare this morning, but they wouldn't take him: seems they've a 24 hours symptom-free requirement. So he was home for a third day.

We did take Jake to the doctor yesterday. He's on antibiotics now, and doing much better. Unfortunately, he was contagious, and Jennifer & I are both feeling quite under the weather this evening.

[Quoth the doctor, “Tonsilitis, probably strep.”]

The Disney Channel is stuffed with ads for their web site, www.playhousedisney.com, so Jennifer paid a visit this evening, hoping to show Jacob all the Cool Stuff there.

I suppose there's Cool Stuff there—but unless you have a T1 you'll still be downloading it when your kid goes off to college. And the mouse cursor disappeared whenever it was in that window: I guess they meant to download a Special Disneyfied Mouse Cursor (the Disney people having a thing for mice, after all), only it didn't work.

I don't suppose we'll be going back there any time soon.

There's a sign in the restroom at work, threatening unemployment for anyone caught smoking there. Poor smokers, they are slaves to their addiction, and little things like smoke-free building rules will not deter them.

(I have my own addictions—chocolate, caffeine, that sort of thing—but fortunately I am allowed to indulge them at my desk.)

Poor Jake, he has a bit of a fever today, so he's staying home.

Amusing bit of spam: the pain-free hair loss solution is here! Sounds like a way to lose your hair without feeling it.

Jennifer was home with Jake this morning; I took the afternoon shift. Jake took a long nap, during which I wrote some C# code (doing database-style queries against a collection of XML documents, that sort of thing). Later we watched The Princess Bride.

Jake definitely has some germs: his nose is stuffed up and he sounds a bit phlegmy. His temperature has been just under 100° all day, which is not much of a fever compared to others he's had but enough to worry us a little.

(I think it'll be a while before we stop wondering whether each new case of the sniffles is going to land Jake in the hospital again.)

Tried to read web pages tonight; the modem dropped the connection. (I didn't say, Stupid [censored] piece of [censored], for fear of prematurely expanding Jacob's vocabulary, but I wanted to.

The frustrating thing is that I have no idea what the problem is, or even how to figure out what the problem is. (I suppose I could install Linux, and see whether it can keep a dialup connection open any longer than Windows. But that would be work, and most nights I'm too tired for geek foolery.

Today, Jacob is 555 days old: a nice round number. Sort of.

Cold this morning: 39° at 8:00am, cold enough to see my breath. (I still wore shorts & a t-shirt.)

Off to the ophthalmologist this morning for a brief consulation. The good doctor—who has been sanctified by the insurance company, but not by the people in charge of the building directory: he is not listed—plans to auger Jacob's recalcitrant tear duct early next month.

Poor little guy. At least he'll finally have two working tear ducts.

The Bears are playing tonight at Memorial Stadium; the festivities have already begun.

From my office window, I can see the World's Largest Grill in the IGA parking lot, churning out bratwurst for hungry and/or gluttonous fans. I'm not a fan, except maybe of bratwurst; perhaps I will wander over and get some.

On this side of Kirby, the Trade Center management has decided to make a little extra money by charging $10 to park in their lot.

www.missamerica.org says:

The Miss America Organization is a not-for-profit organization that has maintained a tradition for many decades of empowering American women to achieve their personal and professional goals, while providing a forum for them to express their opinions, talents, and intelligence.

Two reponses:

• If there were such an organization devoted to men, it would be derided as sexist, exclusionary, and just plain evil. Women would demand that they be allowed to participate, on the grounds that their 'personal and professional goals' are just as important as men's.
• Does the swimsuit competition fall under 'opinions', 'talents' or 'intelligence'?

[Maybe I'm just annoyed because the 2002 winner is from Urbana, and the local newspaper has devoted far too many column-inches to her.]

Out for a walk this evening with Jennifer & Jacob, we saw the merest sliver of a young moon. Very pretty. Just thirty-six hours old, according to my ancient copy of John Walker's moontool program.

[That's the John Walker who founded Autodesk, not the one recently sentenced to twenty years for joining the Taliban.]

Well: just a few weeks after I lamented its apparent demise, Swaine's World is back online. How nice.

Looks like my modem just dropped the connection, for about the fifth or sixth time in the last half-hour. No more web reading for me tonight: I grow weary of redialing. Perhaps instead I will pull the modem out of the computer, beat it with a hammer until it is powder, and take up knitting.

Jake woke up early (for a Sunday): 6:30am. One diaper change later, he was asleep again—as long as I didn't try to put him back in the crib. After an hour or so in the rocking chair, he woke up and inquired after breakfast.

Poor little guy, he's been alternating between cheerful & grumpy all day, and has needed considerably more diaper changes than usual. Maybe he's getting sick.

According to sputnik, the temperature was 52° at 5:00am, and has been slowly rising ever since. Twelve hours later, it's up to 67°. At this rate—one and a quarter degrees per hour—the oceans will start to boil around 1:00pm Friday afternoon.

You heard it here first!

Replaced the birthday message JavaScript on the various kid pages (i.e., Natalie, Lily and Jacob) with a function in the (common) time.js file. Lots of old—and ugly—JavaScript lurking in the less-frequently-updated corners of this site; one of these days I must get around to cleaning it all up.

This week's groceries included a package of diapers—real budget-busters, diapers; sometimes I think it would be easier to skip the diapers and just replace the carpet every month or so—and Jacob, ever helpful, carried them to the changing table all by himself. This was harder than it sounds, as a package of diapers is not much smaller than Jacob himself.

Got up early (for a Saturday) and drove to Bloomington, to see the ISU Homecoming parade. Nice weather for a parade: not too hot, not too cold.

Finding a parking space was quite an adventure; finally, I dropped Jennifer & Jacob off near the parade route and parked some ways away (half a mile, as it turned out: I measured it later).

After the parade, we all went to Norm & Barb's house for lunch. Jake and Natalie played together, which was nice. Numerous pictures were taken; perhaps there will be a Kid Pix mailing soon.

Sputnik recorded just over half an inch of rain today as the remnants of Hurricane Lili passed through. As of this evening, the rain has stopped, but the wind is up (10mph) and the temperature continues to fall.

Neil Peart's new book, Ghost Rider: Travels on the Healing Road, finally made it to the bookstore; I had a copy reserved, and picked it up on the way home from work. It's longer than I expected—460 pages—so I'll be months reading it.

Jake and I played a little in the quilting room this evening; I took a few pictures. I like how this one turned out. I was making goofy noises to get Jake to smile, and he was peering around the camera to see what I was doing.

Jennifer's making banana bread. Yum.

Woke up feeling as if somebody had spent the night trying to twist my head off. After breakfast & some coffee, I felt a little better.

(This keeps happening. Is it allergies? Stress? Dirty pillows? Bad karma?)

An interesting piece of legislation: the Digital Choice and Freedom Act of 2002, proposed by Representative Lofgren of the 16th District, California. In short, it requires producers of digital content to respect the fair-use rights of the people who legally obtain it, and undoes a little of the damage caused by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

It'll never pass—the record companies & movie studios will see to that—but it's encouraging to see two people in Congress (the other being Rep. Boucher of Virginia) who understand the problem and are trying to do something about it.

The garbage disposal conked out a few days ago: it drains, but more slowly than usual; the motor spins up nicely when I flip the switch, but the grinder thingy doesn't move. I can (barely) squeeze enough of my hand in there to spin the grinder myself, so I don't think it's jammed. I fear something important has broken, and we need a new disposal.

The installation guide for the current one makes replacing it sound easy. Maybe so. I'd ask Jennifer's father for help, but I still feel guilty over last December's clothes-dryer duct replacement project (which ran about three hours longer than we thought).

[We replaced the disposal on January 9, 2005. Such procrastination!]

Poor Jacob, he took a long time to go to sleep tonight. Lots of yelling from the crib.

Now to find out whether I can keep a connection to EarthLink active long enough to upload today's changes.

MSNBC says:

For those who traded in Yahoo, MSN or AOL for Google as their main home page, the Internet's major portals are aiming to lure users back with new features and services this fall.

I don't have any ‘main home page’ (unless about:blank qualifies as a page). I don't need one, any more than I need my phone to automatically dial some special ‘main home number’ whenever I pick it up.

Portal sites want to be online shopping malls. The problem with this business plan is that malls in the real world offer a real service: shopping in a mall is more convenient than visiting individual stores scattered all over town. Online, though, no web site is further away or more difficult to reach than any other, and people build their own online malls by bookmarking their favorite sites.

So: portals are useless. I wish they would just go away.

The user-interface designers are all excited over mouse gestures: instead of clicking on some obvious bit of on-screen real estate—a button, a link, that sort of thing—you hold down the mouse button and jiggle the cursor in just the right way.

Uh...that's called dragging, it's been around since mice were invented, and it already means something. Redefining it now is going to frustrate & torment people who are used to the old way: no, I didn't want to go back, I just wanted to select a few words from this page!

Microsoft pulled a similar stunt in Windows XP: you have to click the Start menu to open it, but the Programs sub-menu opens as soon as the mouse cursor touches it. If you click on Programs—say, because ever since NT 4.0 shipped in 1996, Programs wouldn't open unless you did—it closes.

I suppose at some point I'll manage to retrain myself to accommodate Microsoft's brave new world of peekaboo menus, but until then it's damned annoying.

[Windows 2000 behaves the same as XP, except the delay is long enough that I can click on the menu before it opens. I wonder if there's some way to increase the delay for XP—to, say, a year or so.]

Jake was going to see a specialist this morning about his eye; alas, there was a bit of a snafu with the insurance company—seems the specialist in question has yet to be properly sanctified & anointed, or something—and we couldn't. Maybe next week.

Did some yard work this evening: raked some dead grass, spread some grass seed & fertilizer, bagged up various yard waste. Jake seemed to enjoy running around the back yard, keeping an eye on Mom (who was doing all the work) and Dad (who was slicing and dicing some branches so they'd fit in the yard-waste bag, which hardly counts as working).

Unhappy modem this evening: it keeps dropping the connection. At least, I think it's the modem; if it were the phone line, Jennifer would be having these problems, too.

I see Red Hat has shipped version 8.0 of Red Hat Linux. I downloaded 7.3 in July, and never got around to installing it; maybe I should download 8.0, and never get around to installing it, too.

Lately I've been contemplating another genealogy road trip, this time to Indianapolis, to learn what I can about the Akers side of things. And the Sturms, who lived in Posey County before crossing the Wabash into White County.

And I've been wondering how long it will take for my copy of the 1880 Census to arrive. I know, I just ordered it yesterday, but I'm impatient.

Seems Outlook 2000 doesn't support IMAP very well:

I'm told that Outlook XP does a much better job, but I rather doubt that it would synchronize with the iPaq. (This is Microsoft, after all: compatibility with last year's version would imply that customers don't need to buy this year's version, and that conflicts with the Upgrade Treadmill policy.) Maybe I'll switch back to POP, or find some other email client.

I've heard good things about Mutt....

Poor Jake: we thought he was done with vaccinations, but there were two more scheduled for today. Now he's done, until he starts kindergarten, three and a half years from now. (So soon?)

Used my $40 amazon.com rebate to buy the 1880 US Census from FamilySearch.org. Lots of useful information in the 1880 Census, but it is a finicky beast—one's questions must be carefully phrased, or the answers will be unhelpful.

Sputnik recorded a high of 86° this afternoon: a little excessive for October, I'd say.