December 2002 Archives

Jake & I have the house to ourselves today: Jennifer has to work, but the daycare ladies are taking the day off.

We had some adventures this morning, then had lunch at Le Peep with Jennifer. (The furnace repair fella from last week was at a nearby table, with a half-dozen [presumed] relatives.)

Jacob was very naughty during lunch. At first, he wouldn't eat his pancakes & eggs, preferring instead to throw them across the table. (One shot scored a perfect hole-in-one in my coffee cup. Jennifer and I were laughing so much it was difficult to be stern & disapproving.) Later he cheered up and ate what was left on his plate.

I put him down for a nap at 1:00pm; three hours later, he's still sleeping. I hope this doesn't mean he's getting sick or something.

Jake woke up around 4:30; we had some juice and played on the computer for a while, until Jennifer came home.

The January 2003 issue of National Geographic came in today's mail. The mailing label says my subscription—er, membership—expires next December. This is puzzling, as I have no record of having renewed this year.

More genealogical researches, this time in Indianapolis.

Looked up the obituary of Ruby Akers, who died in Gary in 1984. Alas, in 1984 the Post-Tribune didn't print obituaries: instead, they printed funeral notices, which were singularly lacking in useful detail.

Looked a few more obituaries, for various people named Akers in Parke County; I begin to doubt whether I am related to any of them, but I made copies anyway. They're in the Genealogy section.

A helpful librarian pointed me toward a much more helpful resource: Polk's city directories for Gary. I don't suppose these are still published; they contain far too much personal information for these suspicious times.

Orville Akers, Ruby's husband, appears in the 1945 directory; thereafter, he is missing, and Ruby is annotated ‘(wid Orville)’.

Next: see whether the Lake County Board of Health will send me death certificates for Ruby & Orville.

(Hint to travelers: the best route from Champaign to Indianapolis is I74 to I465 to I70, exit 79A. The Indiana State Library is about a mile north. Park in the underground garage next to the Eiteljorg Museum.)

Nice day today—41° at 2:00pm, and very sunny. The snow is melting rapidly. Cars are rimed with salt, car washes are busy.

Lunch was at Chili's, followed by a stop at the clothes store (since my wardrobe is in dire need of replacement).

Some web sites want me to register before I can read any pages there; I make a point of lying outrageously:

First Name: Tos
Last Name: Advisor
EMAIL: TosAdvisor@aol.com
Sex: Female
Zip Code: 90210
Annual Income: Under $1,000

...that sort of thing. I hope the America Online Terms-of-Service police don't mind my using their email address.

Hm...Jacob is taking an extra-long nap this afternoon: 4:00pm, and he's still snoozing.

Christmas party in Bloomington today, but we aren't attending: Jennifer has a cold. Poor Jennifer.

Temperature today is a few degrees above freezing, and the sun is out, so the snow is melting. It'll melt even faster tomorrow (forecast: 42°) and Monday (51° & rain).

CityDesk has an unfortunate tendency to rename files when publishing: index.html becomes index-2.html, that sort of thing. It thinks it's resolving a conflict between two files that both want to publish as index.html, but most of the time it's just confused.

A workaround: rename the old article, create a new article with the right name, copy the article contents from old to new, then delete the old article.

Upgraded the MN-500 firmware: now it's running 1.08. I can't tell the difference, really.

Poor Jennifer has a cold. Jake and I are fine, so far.

Thanks to Santa (who got a little carried away this year, not that I'm complaining), the iPaq is now on the Really Cool Wireless Home Network. I had a little trouble installing the drivers—it seems Socket's installer can't find the ‘Windows CE 3.x Application Manager’ (whatever that is) unless it's running as Administrator. Happily, I could accommodate it.

Leland is in town for a few days. We—that is, all four of us—had lunch at the Original House of Pancakes.

Called the one-hour photo place, to inquire about the pictures I dropped off last week. “Oh, yes, they're here,” the cheery proprietor said. So I stopped by to pick them up.

Half the pictures turned out to be from last May's visit to Allerton Park (just before Jake caught the hand-foot-mouth disease). The other half are White County cemeteries from last week's trip.

Jake and Papa

Ebenezer Cemetery

It was very foggy in White County that day, though it did clear up later on.

Finished reading In Cold Blood, by Truman Capote. Years ago, I saw the movie starring Robert Blake and Scott Wilson; interesting that Robert Blake is himself accused of murder now.

Santa was here last night, and left many presents.

Staying home today: the first time in sixteen years I haven't been somewhere else on Christmas.

Yesterday's storm threw a big drift across the driveway, so it would be difficult to get out if we were going somewhere.

Woke up to a 61° house this morning: the furnace shut off sometime during the night.

Another call to Krueco, another visit from Mr Furnace Repair Guy (a different one than yesterday). The diagnosis: a broken com-stat (cam-stat?). The price: $275.

Beats shivering.

Grandparents came from Arlington Heights, bearing presents. Most of them were for me, which didn't seem at all fair to everyone else.

Jake got a rocking horse, with which he is greatly pleased.

Poor grandparents: they meant to get out of town before the snow started falling, but didn't. (They had to wait for me to open all those presents.) Took them six hours to get home.

Thermometer said 100.1° this morning, but I feel fine.

Called various furnace-repair places this morning; the first to answer the phone was Krueco, so they got our business. (Memo to the competition: answer the phone. Your answering machines are costing you business.) The diagnosis: a loose wire on the mumble-mumble sensor. The cost: $45.

Beats shivering.

(In the old apartment on Valley Road, I kept the thermostat set to 65. It was always cold, never comfortable. I told myself I was saving money on my power bill, but I don't suppose I really did.)

Supposed to snow tomorrow: 2 to 4 inches, or 1 to 3 inches, depending on whose forecast you believe (and exactly where the storm tracks, I suppose).

9:00pm. Jake is in his crib, and protests loudly that he'd rather be elsewhere. Poor little guy.

I was in the Computer section at Borders the other day, and saw a familiar name: it seems Pavi Sandhu, who also works at dear old WRI, has written a (rather hefty) book about MathML.

I should have been happy for Pavi—who's a nice fellow, after all—but instead I felt sorry for myself that in thirty-nine years I've never written a book about anything. I suppose this is how mid-life crises get started: worrying too much about should-haves, might-haves & why-nots.

Won't be long before I'm shopping for convertibles & toupees.

Hm. Windows Product Activation has been renamed Microsoft Product Activation. A new name, but nothing has changed.

(Long anti-copy-protection rant deleted: mustn't bore the loyal readership. There's nothing new to say about MPA anyway.)

Had a temperature of 101.9° this afternoon; as of 8:00pm, my temperature is back to normal and I feel much better.

Nineteen years ago today, my time as a student at the University of Illinois came to an end.

There are students there now who weren't even born when I was a student. It makes me feel old.

Roused myself sufficiently to attend the 11:00am screening of The Two Towers at the Savoy 16.

The story diverges from the book even more than did The Fellowship of the Ring, but I suppose only the purists will care.

Only a year to wait for The Return of the King.

Bit of homeowner excitement this evening: the temperature in the house started falling, even though the furnace was running.

Much consultation of owner's manuals, followed by a nervous application of the reboot-your-furnace procedure, and all was well.

I hope this doesn't mean we need a new furnace.

Cleaned out the car a little this morning: took all Jake's toys back in the house, vacuumed up the cracker crumbs & general debris, threw away a bunch of lingering junk, that sort of thing.

I raised the back of the car seat one notch, too, since the straps have been digging into his shoulders lately.

Jake is learning words for bodily functions. He gives a big smile, then proudly announces: Burp. Or Toot. I'm hoping he learns I need a new diaper soon, so I can stop sniffing his rear end.

Might go see The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers this afternoon.

Then again, I might not.

Much harassment recently from telemarketers. MCI in particular keeps calling with some offer I don't stay on the line long enough to hear.

The other day I deleted everything from the budget in Money 2002. Money is now much more responsive than it was, but now it pops up these annoying “Do you want to add this to your budget?” dialogs whenever I modify a bill.

Microsoft giveth, and Microsoft taketh away.

Unusually warm today: 53° at 2:20pm. Rain, too, sometimes quite heavy. It's global warming, or El Niño, or something.

Did a little tidying up in the Genealogy section. The whole point of CityDesk is to spend time writing articles, and less time fooling around with index files: that's what the scripting language is for, to automatically generate nicely-formatted lists of articles.

(I didn't rename any pages, though I was tempted to. It annoys the loyal readership when things disappear without warning.)

Went to see Star Trek: Nemesis at the Savoy 16. The newspaper listings & the theater marquee both said the show started at 11:00am, but the ticket said 11:10am. Oops.

Nice movie. Lots of pretty explosions.

I disagree with the general consensus that this is the worst Star Trek film yet. (It would take a lot to beat number five, of which the less said the better.) No time travel in this one, which is good: the whole time-travel thing—not to mention the alternate-universe thing—has been done to death already.

There were only three of us in the theater. I guess everybody was down the hall, watching Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers. I entertained the notion of sneaking into the other theater and catching a free movie, but decided against it.

Ran some errands this morning, but otherwise stayed home all day, loafing. Briefly entertained the notion of going to see the new Star Trek movie; decided to do that tomorrow.

Champaign Computer says, “No, we don't do repair work on notebook computers.”

Did Christmas cards this evening. It was a struggle against technology, it was.

First: Word 2000 can do a mail-merge against the Outlook 2000 address book, but there's no way to filter by categories. All my labor in applying the Holiday Cards category to a few dozen address book entries was in vain.

Second: Outlook 2000 can export the address book to an Access database, but only if the Import/Export something-or-other has been installed. Outlook claimed it wasn't, so I logged in as Administrator to install it. Suddenly Outlook said it was already installed. Not for me, it wasn't. In the end, I added my account to the Administrators group, ran the export—which worked flawlessly—then reverted to a mere Power User. (The Import/Export thingy now works even without Administrator privileges.)

Third: the default is to include every field in the new database. There's a way to remove fields from the export list, but I missed it. Instead, I used Access to drop columns until I had the five I really needed.

Fourth: the labels I bought—Avery 5630—are missing from Word's mailing-label database, so I had to fake an entry (by fishing a tape measure out of my purse and measuring a sheet of labels). I got it mostly right: the addresses were right up against the top of the label, but they didn't run off the edge.

Extra Credit: tried to set up Outlook for Jennifer (who is desperate to read her email, after three days without); it resisted. The MS Installer service kept popping up its favorite dialog boxes:

“I'm doing something to your computer, but I won't tell you what it is.”
“Didn't work, bummer.”

Meanwhile, the event log filled up with:

Event Type: Warning
Event Source: MsiInstaller
Event Category: None
Event ID: 1004
Date: 12/17/2002
Time: 9:59:45 PM
User: N/A
Computer: NESSUS
Description: Detection of product '{00000409-78E1-11D2-B60F-006097C998E7}', feature 'OfficeUserData', component '{C9AF9050-C8BE-11D1-9C67-0000F81F1B38}' failed. The resource 'HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\9.0\Common\UserData' does not exist.

Maybe—just maybe—the reason that registry key doesn't exist is that this is the very first time Outlook has been run from this account. Maybe the Outlook installer should be able to create a simple registry key without falling on its face. Maybe the MS Installer service—like PhotoDraw—was designed by chimps.

I sprinkled the pixie dust of Administrator privileges on Jennifer's account, and all was well. Sure would be nice if Microsoft's application developers respected the security model implemented by their operating systems group, but maybe that's asking too much.

Off to White County, for a whirldwind tour of cemeteries where various ancestors & relations are buried:

I found all of them except Barth, which is supposed to be on county road 2150N, just east of 1300E. There's nothing there but a farmhouse (and a lot of chickens). I suppose the cemetery could have been behind the farmhouse—like Felty Cemetery, a few miles to the southwest—but I was expecting a church with the cemetery.

(Incidentally, 2150N crosses a small creek just west of 1300E, over a bridge that is rather frightening: narrow, with nasty potholes & ruts and no guardrails.)

I found a gravestone for William Casey Bolerjack in Ebenezer Cemetery. I suspect this is the father of Jennie Bolerjack, but have no way to confirm: I couldn't read the dates on the stone.

I need to reorganize the Genealogy section: there are too many pages, just thrown together. It's too hard to find things.

Jake went to see Santa this morning.

(The hat was Jacob's idea.)

Surprise visit from the grandparents this evening. (Clementine, who is apparently none the worse for having chewed up a few Christmas tree ornaments last Thursday, came along too.) Jake was very happy to see them.

I do not want one of these: www.evolution.com. I'm supposed to pay $600 for a motorized cart that needs a notebook computer attached to it before it will do anything?

I'd rather have one of the R/C Mini-Rovers they're selling over at ThinkGeek.com—though not if I have to pay $60 for it.

Looks like the backlight in Jennifer's computer has failed. Or, possibly, the “inverter” (whatever that is). Either way, the screen is really hard to read without the backlight.

The Dell web site is full of diagrams & instructions for replacing various parts of the Inspiron 3000, but it's unclear whether they sell replacement backlights (inverters, whatever). It may be that Jennifer's computer has—alas!—reached the end of its useful life.

Hm...www.man-machine.com claims to do backlight replacements, only $200. They also sell...bomb detectors?

www.visualux.com claims to sell backlights and inverters, but they're in England.

Foggy this morning. The lawns and rooftops are rimed with frost. It looks much colder than it really is.

Monday's forecast for Carmi, courtesy of the NOAA: PARTLY CLOUDY. A CHANCE OF RAIN DURING THE NIGHT. LOWS IN THE MID 30S AND HIGHS IN THE LOWER 50S. Decent enough weather for a research trip, I think.

The Interactive Advertising Bureau, http://www.iab.net/, has mandated even larger & more intrusive banner ads for commercial web sites:

The formats, a subset of the existing IAB Ad Unit Guidelines, include: 160X600 IMU, 300X250 IMU, 180X150 IMU and the 728X90 IMU.

(I suppose ‘IMU’ is advertiser-speak for ‘pixel’.) I wonder if Mozilla can be configured to discard any image or Flash animation matching these dimensions.

Boston—the band—has a web site: http://www.bandboston.com/. It is wretchedly over-designed: full of pop-ups, Flash everywhere, and it uses a really annoying menu system where the links get all jiggly & leap about the screen when the mouse hovers on them. I guess we're supposed to think the web site is just quivering with energy.

Sorry, Mr. Scholz, all this hyperanimated frippery doesn't make me think you're cool. It makes me think your web site designer is a dweeb. I suppose I'll buy the new album anyway, when I get around to it. But I won't be visiting the web site again.

(Boston the city has a web site, too: http://www.cityofboston.gov/.)

There's a new plastic box bolted to the restroom wall at WRI. Inside is a smoke detector from Voice Products, Inc., whose rather minimalist web site (http://www.vproducts.com/) proclaims them The World Leader in Smoking Enforcement.

Apparently this model doesn't go beep-beep-beep when there's smoke in the area: instead, it plays back a recorded message. One imagines the Voice of Stephen issuing from the tiny speaker, saying, “Put it out and go home. You're fired.”

This just in: the Commandant of the United States Marine Corps is James L. Jones, not John P. Tuohy; overloading the web server at www.excedrin.com will not donate any money to Toys For Tots; and anyone who forwards a chain letter claiming otherwise to all her friends is a fool.

Or maybe not. A little research reveals that John P. Tuohy is Commandant of the Marine Corps League, not the Marine Corps; and Bristol-Myers Squibb really is running a click-to-donate promotion on the Excedrin web site. I wonder, though, whether this predates the chain letter, or is in response to it. I suspect the latter—especially since there's a $5000 cap on donations.

Even so, only a fool forwards chain letters.

Jake and I had the house to ourselves this evening: Jennifer was off at a quilter party.

At one point, I was playing the harmonica (badly, as I have no musical skill whatsoever). Jake surprised me by saying, “Stop.”

I said, “Stop?”

Jake said, “Noise.”

A clever lad, and a budding music critic.

WRI company meeting today. This is the one where the bonus is announced, if there's going to be one. When there isn't, it's usually announced in November, so this year everyone is quietly hopeful.

(I had the idea that I could log in to the online banking thingy and check for any unexpected deposits; alas, there were none. I'm still quietly hopeful.)

My skin has been very dry lately. My hands in particular look like I've got some loathsome disease. There's a big jug of hand lotion next to the bathroom sink; I look at it every morning after my shower and forget to put any on my hands.

(Something new to worry about: the static charge one accumulates climbing in & out of one's car can ignite vapors given off by the pump nozzle at a gasoline station. kaBOOM)

“A modest bonus,” Stephen said.

“Better than nothing,” Jennifer said.

Finished reading The Sheltering Sky, by Paul Bowles. A one-sentence review: Angst-ridden married couple and their annoying friend go to Africa, behave irrationally, and come to bad ends.

Halfway through the book, I realized that I didn't like any of the characters, and didn't much care what happened to them. I kept reading anyway.

“I'm glad I met you, because now I can forget all about you.”
—Paul to Jesus, The Last Temptation of Christ

Now I have a wish list at ThinkGeek.com too.

Uploaded the final set of files to the Netcom web server: the move to patrick-rice.net is now complete. No further updates will be posted to the Netcom address.

(Netcom's ftp server was quite balky until I figured out the two secrets to successful uploading: turn off passive mode, and delete everything from the server before starting the upload. Much time was wasted before enlightenment struck.)

Contemplating a trip to Carmi next week, for some genealogical research. There are cemeteries I haven't been to: Barth, Mt. Olive, St. John's, Little Wabash, and Concord. Numerous (distant) relations are buried in each.

I've taken dozens of pictures of White County cemeteries; I even started a photo album of them (how morbid). Alas, I never finished it. I should get back to work on it.

Maybe next week sometime.

Santa's helpers were busy today. One of them is still busy, wrapping presents while her husband goofs off on the computer.

Finally added the official twenty-month picture of Jacob. It was taken on the third, shortly after he got smacked in the head with the Christmas tree. (Poor little guy.)

Dumped yesterday's compote disaster under a tree in the back yard, in the hope that the wildlife will consume it.

Redid the weather charts for October 27th through now—the time zone was wrong in the database, so the graphs were wrong.

The News-Gazette tries to pull a fast one: their latest statement includes a come-on for Automatic Checking Account Withdrawal. Never write another check again! The lowest subscription rate available: only $14 per month! That works out to $14 × 12 ÷ 365 = 46¢ per day. Currently, we pay $25 every ten weeks, or $25 ÷ 70 = 36¢ per day.

Nice try, News-Gazette.

Strung some Christmas lights outside—nothing very fancy, and none of the motorized illuminated reindeer that everyone seems to have this year. (Must have been a special at Menard's or something.)

Had another go at the crock-pot compote recipe: alas, instead of a tasty topping for our ice cream we got a charred and smoking ruin. Perhaps I should have followed the recipe (especially the part about cooking it only four hours).

Dinner this evening was at the Olive Garden. Jake was occasionally bored but generally well-behaved. (I wasn't: unhappy with my chair, I swapped it for one from another [unoccupied] table. Jennifer was embarrassed.)

After that, we hit the (recently remodeled and extremely crowded) Toys-R-Us for a little shopping. Santa's work proceeds nicely, and should conclude with a few days to spare.

Ran off a special version of these pages: each one has a big yellow box at the top that says, “This page has moved to....” and a link to the new web site. (Easy to do, with templates.) The plan is to do one final upload to EarthLink, then abandon it in favor of the new site.

One hopes the loyal readership will update their bookmarks.

It occurs to me that if I set sputnik's clock to GMT, I wouldn't have to worry about daylight saving time....

Today marks five weeks since Jacob last stayed home from daycare—and that was just to recuperate from his tear-duct procedure. He wasn't sick. It's been eight weeks since he was too sick for daycare.

(I hope saying so doesn't jinx him or anything.)

Very cold this morning: 24°, more or less. I wore shorts anyway. People stared.

Whenever I come across a new blog / diary / daybook (whatever) out on the far-flung internet, I check the archives to see when its first entry was written: I feel smug & superior when it's more recent than the inception of the Daybook.

I can be very immature sometimes.

The first two matches returned by a Google search for “Chromeffects” are:

Microsoft debuts Chromeffects
Microsoft shelves Chromeffects

...two news articles, only four months apart.

I wonder what happened to the chrome-plated motorcycle.

Long ago, I was a student at Buffalo Grove High School; one of my fellow students was Walter Stadler. I wondered what had become of him, so I did a bit of Googling. He's been busy these last twenty-two years: University of Illinois, Yale Medical School, Associate Professor of Hemetology/Oncology at the University of Chicago, author of scores of articles in various medical journals.

“It's people like that who make you realize just how little you've accomplished.”
—Tom Lehrer

Another BGHS alum, Norbert Baumgartner, is also a doctor: in private practice near Cape Girardeau, Missouri.

Finally figured out voicemail on my cell phone, only a year after I got it. The big secret: after keying *86 and pressing SEND, press # to interrupt the greeting. That sent me to the voicemail configuration process—I had to say my name for the greeting, and set a password that I'm sure to forget—after which I got to play back the voicemail message that arrived a few days ago.

It was empty: the caller hung up without saying anything.

Booted Linux on nessus this evening, and pointed it at the Red Hat update site. Foolishly, I clicked ‘Select All’ when confronted with a list of packages in need of updating: fifty-two megabytes worth.

It took almost three hours to download it all, but there were no problems.

In today's mail: a CD package from Microsoft, containing the MSN 8 software. I don't know why they sent it; I'm sure I never asked them to.

I'm baffled that Microsoft has custom versions of their own software for their MSN customers. Is the MSN web browser better than Internet Explorer? Then why are they still shipping Internet Explorer?

[I've heard rumors that Internet Explorer 6.0 will be the last release: after that, it's all MSN, all the time.]

Snow in Carmi yesterday: several inches, according to the Carmi Times. My plans for a research trip to the Ancestral Home are in jeopardy.

Christmas parade in downtown Champaign this evening. Perhaps we will go.

Tried to take Jacob to the Parade of Lights, at West Side Park; much unpleasantness ensued, and we ended up going home even before the parade had started.

Poor little guy. We had him all bundled up, but even so he was too cold to enjoy himself.

Feedback from the loyal readership, regarding patrick-rice.net: “I changed over to the new address. Better and faster.”

Yup. That's because Pair.com is staffed by people who know what they're doing, as opposed to EarthLink, which so far as I can tell is not staffed by human beings at all.

Teased the daycare ladies this morning, by telling them: “It would be a lot easier for me if everybody else's children had numbers on their foreheads.”

Yesterday's gas leak engendered considerable discussion in one of WRI's internal mailing lists, until the head of HR put a stop to it with:

...there is no danger to anyone in the building, and...the situation is under control. I think we all have better things to do with the rest of the afternoon.

She sent a similar message last March, when the water coolers vs. faucet filters discussion went on a bit long.

Interesting how WRI's company culture has changed. Ten years ago, HR wouldn't have cared about arguments & whining in a mailing list specifically dedicated to non-work-related topics. Now, such messages are brewing crises that must be stopped before they get out of hand.

(One imagines WRIfolk rioting in the halls: chanting revolutionary slogans, overturning computers, setting fire to laser printers. The head of HR climbs atop a mound of debris and addresses the crowd with a megaphone in a brave but futile attempt to calm them.)

Network problems: the SMTP server is occasionally unreachable. This causes SquirrelMail—the email-via-http tool I've been using at work ever since my copy of Outlook 2000 got trashed two weeks ago—to discard messages instead of sending them.

Nice design, SquirrelMail.

The Windows XP image browser thingy has the rotate left/right function I was wishing for some weeks ago. That's nice.

Interesting: www.scotsman.com/webcams.cfm, a list of webcams pointed at various interesting places in Scotland.

Also interesting: www.lochnessproject.org and www.loch-ness-scotland.com, two sites about Loch Ness and the Mysterious Creature Lurking Therein.

At various times over the last few months, the Trade Center lobby has reeked of natural gas. Various Official Explanations have been proffered—truck exhaust drawn into the building ventilation system, that sort of thing—but no one believes them.

The current rumor is that TGI Friday's has had recurring gas leaks, which they've been patching with tape instead of fixing properly.

Perhaps I should look into telecommuting.

Assembled the Christmas tree this evening. Poor Jake, he leaned in a bit too close while I was fishing the tree out of its box and got smacked in the head. Just when the gash on his other eye was about healed, too.

Jacob was sleepy & grumpy for part of the evening, but a bath seemed to perk him up.

He's learning new words at a rapid pace. We're teaching him all the important ones, like burp.

EarthLink's ftp servers are still not working: the upload starts off nicely, but gets bunged up at the same point every time. I can't see why that one image might cause such trouble, and I don't really care. Life is too short to help the chimps debug their network problems.

I've been telling people to go to the new site instead.

Realized this evening that last year's sticker is still on my license plate. The new one came in the mail some weeks back, but I forgot all about it. I've been a fugitive from justice for the last two days.

Come and get me, coppers!

Did a little house-cleaning this morning. Jennifer did most of the work, I just tidied up a little here & there. (I think I dosed another t-shirt with the bleach cleaner. Now I have two shirts that look like they were tie-dyed, ineptly. Oops.)

Lunch was at the Original House of Pancakes: a western omelette, very tasty.

We were seated very quickly, then waited most of an hour for our food. It's not so easy to keep a hungry 20-month-old entertained for that long, but we managed.

The waitress gave us a gift certificate—breakfast for three, on the house—by way of apology for the long wait. I suppose in a month or two I might be willing to go back, but just now I'm not feeling too congenial toward them.

(I hear rumors that business at the Original House of Pancakes is way down, and management is baffled as to why. If they ever ask me, I might give them an earful.)

Back hurts a little this evening. A few ibuprofen tablets—the store brand, real Advil being too darn expensive—and a session with the cold pack, and I'll be fine.

Pat Robertson is in the news again: he says Islam isn't really a religion of peace, and the President shouldn't go around saying that it is. Seems there are passages in the Quran that recommend killing infidels, and that's got him all upset.

I seem to recall a few passages in Rev. Pat's own holy book that say much the same thing. People who live in glass houses, etc.

EarthLink can't keep their ftp servers online tonight. No web site updates for them. Pair, on the other hand, shows a refreshing degree of competence. Perhaps now is the time to switch over.