March 2003 Archives

Ceej recently listed the U.S. states she's visited; ever the plagiarist, I thought I'd compile my own list:

Illinois, Indiana & South Carolina are special cases: I was born in South Carolina, and spent the first few months of my life there; I grew up in Indiana; I now live in Illinois.

Less than two weeks into the Iraq war, the talking heads are already using words like ‘quagmire’ and assuming that, because Iraq didn't surrender in the first twenty-four hours, the war is lost.

I've noticed an air of superiority from certain journalists: “If only these stupid generals would do what I tell them, we'd win this war in time for tonight's newscast.”

NPR says today was opening day for major-league baseball. It seems a trifle odd for a summer sport to begin less than two weeks after the vernal equinox, and linger until autumn is well underway. I suppose most of their money comes from broadcast rights, and there are plenty of enclosed, climate-controlled ballparks, so it doesn't really matter when they play. They could play year-round.

Maybe I'm just grumpy because I have a cold. I attack it with Sudafed in the daytime and Nyquil at night, and remain somewhat alert & functional. Still, I grow weary of sneezing and blowing my nose.

Grandparents visiting today, for a little more time with Jacob.

Spent an hour at WRI this evening, trying to get the Windows build machines operational for tonight's build; alas, the problems were beyond my ability to correct.

I wasted an hour of my weekend figuring that out, too, when I could have been home playing with Jake.

Shortly after I left, Jacob woke up from his nap, very unhappy about something. The only thing that soothed him was Shrek in the dvd player. I had hoped that March would be the Month Without Shrek, but—alas!—it was not to be.

Birthday party in Bloomington, with all the grandparents & cousins, plus most of the aunts & uncles.

We'd hoped for another visit to the Miller Park Zoo, like last year; alas, the temperature was too close to freezing (with the occasional snow squall to liven things up). Maybe next year.

At one point, Norm left his camera on the dining-room table. No one else was around, so I left him a present:

Hello, Norm

I guess he liked it, because he sent a copy to Jennifer & me. (And one to my mother—Hi, mom!)

Poor Jacob, woke up around 11:00pm very unhappy about something. It took some Tylenol, a new diaper, new pajamas, & lots of cuddling with Mama & Papa before he went back to sleep. We never did figure out what was wrong.

Tired this morning. Thinking of a Carrie Newcomer song:

I don't want to fight today
I just want to go someplace quiet
And keep myself out of the way

Jennifer & I tidied up the house a little: company coming this weekend.

Looks like our federal income tax refund was deposited on March 14th. How nice.

I continue to pay as little attention to war coverage as possible. I try to keep up with the war itself, though, because it's important (unlike the talking heads' empty chatter).

Newsdroids are starting to complain about each other. I stumbled across an opinion piece recently complaining that Umm Qasr had been reported taken at least nine times before it actually was. And NPR this morning grumbled that yesterday's thousand-vehicle Iraqi convoy turned out to be a few dozen, and (for the most part) already destroyed by Allied air strikes.

For months, the drumbeat has been that the Iraqi army hasn't a chance against the U.S. & British forces. That's most likely true—but it doesn't necessarily mean that Iraq will lose this war. Saddam Hussein, like North Vietnam thirty years ago, can win simply by not losing: by surviving long enough, by making the cost of war high enough, that the U.S. loses its will to fight and goes home.

Snooping around in the company mailing-list archives (sometimes the only way to find out what other departments are up to), I found:

I AM AN ACCOUNTANT WITH BEACON NIG. LTD. A FOREIGN OIL COMPANY BASED IN LAGOS, NIGERIA. BEACON IS INVOLVED IN PROSPECTING, DRILLING AND BUNKERING OF OIL AT SEA (OFF SHORE), WITH EXPATRIATE CONSISTING MAJORITY OF THE STAFF STRENGTH. UNFORTUNATELY, THESE EXPATRIATES GOT INTO AN ILLEGAL SALE OF OIL AND THE MONEY FROM IT DEPOSITED WITH A SECURITIES COMPANY.

Yes, the Nigerian oil-money spam. I laughed.

Jake & I had the house to ourselves this evening (Jennifer was at quilt guild). We watched Dumbo, we played a bit, then it was bedtime.

I've a nasty headache just now. Pity me, pity me.

Woke up a few minutes early. Usually, when that happens I either go back to sleep or stare at the clock until the alarm goes off; this time, I got up. Maybe it's the earlier sunrise that makes it easier for me to wake up.

Breakfast was Scottish Oatmeal (from Bob's Red Mill, www.bobsredmill.com) and monkey-picked green tea (a gift from Leland, who found it in a tea store somewhere in Boston). The coffeemaker works as well for tea as for coffee, and the travel mug kept it nicely hot until it was time to leave for work.

(One might ask why I left a travel mug at home. Good question! Perhaps tomorrow I will take it with me.)

(And I see that Bob sells his wares directly, for considerably less than the local grocery store. Having my breakfast shipped in from Oregon seems pretty weird, but if it saves money I'll get used to it.)

I've been trying to lift my eyes from the day-to-day grind (hour-to-hour, sometimes) and look further down the path we—that is, the family: Jennifer, Jacob & I—are on. The phrase “the rest of my life” doesn't sound quite so infinite any more, and the question of how best to use this ever-shrinking resource takes on new importance.

Big questions rarely have answers small enough to fit in the Daybook, but we'll see.

Jacob is rather grumpy this evening: tired from playing outside all day, maybe. I think bedtime will come a little earlier than usual.

Well, now. According to www.familysearch.org, Jasper Sturm died on August 23rd, 1954, in Anna State Hospital, Union County, Illinois, and is buried in Kuykendall Cemetery, White County, Illinois. His wife, Mary Margaret Calvin, is said to have died in 1941.

It also gives Mary Margaret Calvin's mother as ‘? Buchanun’, which fits with family folklore that we are somehow related to President Buchanan. He wasn't a very good President, so I don't know that I'm very pleased to be related to him, however distantly.

I'll have to check this out.

(Anna is a town, not a person. The local newspaper, the Gazette-Democrat, has a web site: www.annanews.com.)

For once, I woke up feeling pretty good.

Jacob is doing better also. We're hoping the mystery illness is about over.

Made some coffee in my new coffeemaker this morning. It came out pretty well. Tomorrow: tea.

Went shopping at Prairie Gardens this evening (and were just about the only people in the place). Along with grass seed & weed killer, we got two packets of seeds: Chamomile and Parsley. Yes, there's going to be an herb garden this year, albeit smaller (and, one hopes, better tended) than in previous years.

[Geekness: forgetting how to spell ‘parsley’ and looking for the correct spelling in the Simon & Garfunkel section of one's CD collection database.]

After Prairie Gardens, we stopped at Jarling's for some ice cream. Jake had chocolate. I think he liked it.

Woke up feeling quite miserable this morning: neck hurt, head hurt, nose all stuffed up, sinuses unhappy, etc., etc., blah blah blah. Took some ibuprofen (around 4:00am), forced myself to get out of bed (somewhat later), had a cup of tea & some breakfast while Jennifer did all the morning chores (getting Jacob up, fed & dressed); I feel better now.

Jennifer thinks I need new pillows. Maybe she's right.

Jake woke up with a 99.3° temperature; compared to what it was over the weekend (103° on Saturday), we figured he was on the mend and well enough for daycare. We'll see if he stays there all day, or if the phone rings: “Jacob has a fever, we're sending him home.”

People are saying silly things about the Iraq war, and about war in general. Here's one:

On the other hand, every war is precipitated by a long sequence of missed opportunites and individual failures for which all humans share responsibility.

Hm...is it really my fault that Saddam Hussein turned out to be so dangerous & intransigent that nothing less than all-out war will get rid of him?

Fun with statistics: Nicholas Petreley says:

More developers who focus primarily on Linux used to focus primarily on Windows than Unix. So there is a much greater shift from Windows to Linux among developers than from Unix to Linux.

I don't think comparing raw numbers here is helpful.

Suppose 50 Windows developers switched to Linux in the last year, while 10 Unix developers switched to Linux. Sounds bad for Windows—they're losing developers five times as fast as Unix. But suppose there were 1000 Windows developers, and 50 Unix developers, to start with. At these rates, after four more years there will be 750 Windows developers and no Unix developers.

Mr. Petreley is ignoring the overall percentages, the influx of new developers each year, and the outflux (is that a word?) of people who stop developing. Instead, he compares two cells out of the three-by-three matrix of last year vs. this year and pretends that it says something meaningful about Linux. It doesn't.

(None of which implies that I dislike Linux, or expect it to fail. I think Red Hat Linux 8.0 is actually rather nice. I think Linux will take over the Unix market, then threaten Microsoft. And I think that's a good thing—I'll get a better operating system out of it, whichever one I end up using.)

Grayville, fifteen miles up Highway 1 from Carmi, has a web site: www.cityofgrayville.com.

In other news, the Illinois Department of Corrections web site has an Inmate Search page: www.idoc.state.il.us/subsections/search/inms.asp. I wonder if anybody I know is currently behind bars.

[I tried a few likely names; no matches. Perhaps they've all settled down since I knew them, twenty years ago.]

The daycare ladies reported that Jacob had a bit of a temperature after naptime (though not enough to send him home), and was a bit grumpy all day. Poor little guy, I guess he's not all the way recovered yet.

The Black & Decker coffeemaker arrived today. (Jennifer said that Jacob thought the big box on the porch was full of donuts. Poor Jacob, he was disappointed.) It's a cute little thing, and produces 15 ounces of scalding-hot water in very little time. Tomorrow morning we'll try it out with some coffee.

I hope the travel mug that came with it works better than the one I bought at the grocery store last year.

Adam Osborne has died. I never bought, nor even used, an Osborne 1 computer, but my library had many books published by Osborne Associates (before & after it was acquired by McGraw-Hill). He'd been living in India for the last ten years. I never knew.

I don't pay much attention to nonstop war coverage on television. Instead, I pop over to the CNN web site a few times a day and read the three-sentence summary under the oversized headline. That's enough.

Took Jacob to the doctor this morning. Quoth the doctor, “There's a virus going around. He'll be fine in a few days.”

Poor little guy.

Another afternoon at the library, poring over the 1930 census records in search of Harry Maurer. I looked at all 23 pages of the Carmi Township census, and he is not listed. I didn't check the 61 pages for Carmi itself, so I suppose he might be listed there. I begin to think the enumerator missed him somehow.

I found a few other items of note:

• Lillie Maurer, with her second husband, Charles Dodson, is in district 97-3, sheet 8A, lines 26–29. Elsewhere on the same sheet is a John Smiley, but I don't think it's the one who married Helen Maurer.
• Edna Burkhardt, probably the daughter of Jacob Burkhardt, Jr., and Rosa Gates, is listed as Housekeeper at the Wesley Boyer residence, district 97-3, sheet 16A, lines 29–34.
• The very next entry, lines 35–39, lists ‘Ester Mauer’, probably the daughter of Jacob Maurer, Jr., and Susie Burkhardt (the sister of Jacob Burkhardt, Jr.), as Housekeeper at the Ivan A. Elliot residence.
• Leroy Burkhardt, probably Edna's brother, is in section 97-4, sheet 8A, line 17–19; inexplicably, the Ancestry.com index has mutated his name to ‘Lovey’.
• Living next to Leroy is Max Nibbling, father of Oatha Nibbling, who married Orlando Felty, whose brother Isaac Newton Felty married Lillie Maurer.

I see a lot more boarders in the 1930 census than in previous ones. I suppose everybody was looking for a little extra income in 1930.

Poor Jacob, he has a bit of a fever again.

This site should be cloying, but somehow is not: www.ratemykitten.com.

(The same folks run www.ratemypoo.com, but you don't want to go there. Trust me.)

Nobody's seen Saddam Hussein since the first cruise missile strike, Thursday morning (Baghdad time). Speculation is rampant that he's dead, injured, no longer in control of the nation and/or military, etc., etc. Certainly Iraq isn't putting up much of a defense.

The anti-war protests I've seen—an unrepresentative sample, I'm sure—seem fixated on the notion that War Is Bad. Well, yes, that's certainly true, and satellite-guided bombs & high-tech weaponry don't do much to improve it. But it's important to ask: What are the alternatives? Are they any better? I haven't seen any protesters asking, let alone answering, these questions.

Sunny today, with big puffy clouds (cumulus?) drifting eastward across the sky. A bit chilly, though: the high was 50° at 1:00pm, and the temperature's been falling ever since.

My birthday is still 136 days off, but it's never too early to start dropping hints, e.g., skyscraperpage.com/poster.

The war has begun, sort of: a few cruise missiles into Iraq, a few Scuds out of Iraq, and then—nothing. No invasion, no shock- & awe-inspiring wave of 800 cruise missiles, just a brief speech from the President, then silence.

The newsdroids were in a frenzy, reporting over & over the few facts they had gleaned from Pentagon reports or their Baghdad correspondents; when not repeating themselves, they interviewed each other over monotonous video of nearly-deserted Baghdad streets. They should have said, “Nothing's happening, now back to your regularly-scheduled programming.” But I don't suppose newsdroids are much inclined to give up the spotlight once they've got it.

It's unhealthy to watch the news for too long during times like this. The breathless logorrhea of reporters who have airtime to fill but nothing to report is more likely to panic viewers than inform them.

Jacob's rash is almost completely gone. So is his ointment.

Looks like we won another $6 in last night's Lotto drawing.

The History Channel has a web site, shop.historychannel.com, for buying videos of History Channel programming (& all sorts of other goodies; the web site is pretty crowded).

When they ran a commercial for it last night, I misread the onscreen URL as SuppositoryChannel.com, the thought of which was as funny as it was disturbing.

Very sleepy today. Can't concentrate.

Reporters are supposed to do three things: observe, comprehend, and explain. They're supposed to know what's happening, and tell me why it's important. Instant news—the sort of war coverage we got last night & today—abandons comprehension and explanation in the mad rush to observe first, before the other networks.

I've seen cruise missile launches before. I know what a city under attack looks like. War is, alas, a very familiar sight. Watching more of the same live on television doesn't tell me anything. I'd be better served if reporters slowed down a little, and paid more attention to the other two-thirds of their journalistic responsibilities.

A message from Black & Decker: my coffeemaker has shipped. No sign of a tracking number, though, so it'll be a surprise when it shows up.

The brief sitzkrieg in Iraq is over: the real shooting has commenced. No word yet on cities captured, casualties incurred (or inflicted), but Things Are Happening.

A little web research this evening revealed that DVD players are very picky about the media they can read. Some DVD players can't play Video CDs on CD-R media; ours—an RCA something-or-other—is apparently one of them.

There were rumors that CD-RW would work even if CD-R didn't; I happen to have a CD-RW disk lying around (it came with the CD burner, I think), so I gave it a try. It worked, so Jake got to watch himself on television for a while.

I suppose I should find out from the grandparents what model DVD players they have, and whether they can play Video CDs on CD-R. Otherwise, we're stuck with playing MPEG files on the computer.

Last month, Jake's favorite movie was Shrek; we watched it at least thirty times, probably more. (After a while, they start to blur together.) This month's movie is Dumbo. It's only an hour long, which means we can squeeze more viewings in before April.

Watching Dumbo so many times, one has time to think—and I started wondering how many different movies featured main characters with oversized body parts. Jennifer & I came up with this list:

Any others?

As the war clock ticks ominously closer to midnight, life goes on, albeit a bit more nervously than before.

That's the curious thing about this war: there's no home front. No war bonds, no scrap metal drives, no rationing, no civil defense wardens, no air raid drills—no need for each of us to do his bit for victory. Service stars hanging in a few living room windows is about the extent of it.

I wonder if that will change when the shooting starts.

I'm wondering if Jacob's illness last month—the chief symptom of which was a tendency to throw up on Papa—had anything to do with rotavirus. Probably not—rotavirus' effects are all at the other end of the digestive system.

Nice weather today. Warm, but a bit cloudy.

The range of opinion regarding the imminent war is a little wider than I thought. The otherwise-sensible Bob Thompson says:

Minimizing Iraqi casualties, rebuilding Iraq after the war, and establishing a Palestinian state should have no priority at all, and his comment about using revenues from our oilfields in Iraq to benefit the Iraqi people shows that Mr. Bush has his priorities totally wrong.

Perhaps this is some kind of over-subtle parody? Or does he really believe what he's written?

If so, I don't think he quite understands why we are going to war. This is not a war of conquest, nor a grab for resources, nor an attempt to destroy Iraq or Islam. It is a war with very precise goals: to rid Iraq of its current leaders, and the weapons (of mass destruction) they have accumulated, with as little damage to Iraq and its people as possible.

At least, that's what the President tells me. If the Army occupies the oil fields & floods the United States with free oil, we'll know he was lying.

Elsewhere, Mr. Thompson says:

We should maintain our alliance with the UK, and should in fact offer them statehood, which is the next logical step. England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales would be excellent choices for states number 51, 52, 53, and 54.

...which suggests that he is not a parodist after all, merely an overopinionated nitwit.

4:45pm: Sunlight through the thickening cloud cover gives a pinkish cast to the world. Soon it will rain.

Trying to create a Video CD of the Jake footage from last weekend; there are problems. I don't know what a Video CD is supposed to look like, so I don't know whether the Roxio software is working properly. Neither do I know whether our DVD player can play Video CDs burned onto CD-R blanks.

The disks don't play, that's all I do know. Frustrating.

Everybody feeling a little better today, though none of us qualifies as entirely healthy.

I hear rumors of a new illness making the rounds: rotavirus. It causes stomach cramps and diarrhea, and sounds very unpleasant. Let us hope nobody catches it.

Eric S. Raymond is indeed working on a new book: The Art of Unix Programming. The chapter on operating-system comparisons is particularly interesting, though perhaps not for the reasons intended by the author. It reads a bit like those ‘Religions of the World‘ tracts published by certain fundamentalist sects, in which every religion examined falls short because it's different from the tract author's particular faith.

I don't think Mr. Raymond has used a Windows machine lately, or he would not refer to the “the weak, remnant command-line interface inherited from DOS”. I would not describe the Windows Script Host, and the Automation interfaces exposed by numerous Windows applications, as ‘weak’.

(He also complains that, under Windows, sockets are different from files. Well, guess what—sockets aren't files. Conflating the two causes at least as many problems as keeping them separate, maybe more.)

The President will address the nation this evening: one last ultimatum to Saddam Hussein before cruise missiles take to the sky. Rumor says there are mere hours remaining before war is unleashed.

Maybe it's just my lack of wisdom or perception showing, but I can't see any good outcome from the current situation, war or no. Either we go to war, and countless Osama bin Laden wannabes around the world start plotting revenge; or we don't, and our threats cease to mean anything.

On the whole, the consequences of war seem slightly less foul than the consequences of backing down.

Visited the Black & Decker web site and fired off an order for a Brew N Go coffeemaker. I had planned to pick one up at the outlet store in Tuscola, but according to Jennifer the B&D outlet store isn't there any more.

I hope this one works out better than the Gevalia coffeemaker, otherwise I'm out $27.

Front-yard signs here & there around town inform me that Ken Urban, who teaches the Parkland College C++ class I took a few years ago, is running for Champaign city council.

He has a web site, too: www.kenurban.com.

Outlook Express is really irritating:

• I've told it that all outgoing messages are in plain-text format, but text copied from a web page retains its formatting when pasted into the message.
• As I'm typing, it looks for text that looks like a URL, and converts any it finds into a hyperlink [that doesn't actually work: click on it, and nothing happens]; I've found no way to disable this ‘feature’, and resort to workarounds like typing ‘ht tp’ then deleting the extra space afterward.
• During normal use, Outlook Express crashes, often enough that I've lost count.

I know of WRIfolk—Windows developers—who telnet to a Linux machine and use elm to read their mail; perhaps I should do likewise.

I meant to hear the President's speech, but ran into time-zone problems: the speech was at 8:00pm Eastern, not Central, so I tuned in an hour late. The CNN transcript includes:

Saddam Hussein and his sons must leave Iraq within 48 hours. Their refusal to do so will result in military conflict commenced at a time of our choosing.

I don't suppose Saddam Hussein will do that.

Woke up feeling quite miserable: headache, sore neck, etc., etc. Maybe I need new pillows?

After a while, I felt a little better.

Half of Jake's grandparents came to visit today, bringing with them a cherry pie (for Jennifer's birthday), along with some patio furniture (just because) and numerous birthday presents. (The other half of Jake's grandparents stayed in Arlington Heights, but we hope to see them soon, one way or another.)

Sputnik recorded a high of 70° this afternoon—not just once, but for three straight hours. We opened all the windows and aired the place a little. It was wonderful.

I have some video of Jacob in his Radio Flyer being pulled around the yard by Grandpa Norm. One of these days I'll have to upload it to nessus and see about making some video CDs. Not tonight, alas.

Jacob's rash is better, but still rather frightening to look at (Jennifer's mother was certainly disturbed by it). We're hoping that a few more days of ointment will produce rapid improvement.

[Sixteen or so years from now, Jacob will be very upset with me when prospective girlfriends read this and tease him about the rash he used to have on his behind.]

Jacob & I have the house to ourselves today: Jennifer is at an all-day quilter retreat in Tuscola.

Jake's bottom looks a little better—not much, but at least it doesn't look any worse. He struggles mightily whenever I apply the ointment, which leads to wrestling matches on the changing table. For now, I am still bigger & stronger, so I win.

A filler piece in today's newspaper says that Christopher Boyce was released yesterday morning (at 4:00am!), paroled after serving twenty-odd years for espionage (and a little armed robbery on the side).

Years ago, I read The Falcon and the Snowman and The Flight of the Falcon; I watched the movie; and, courtesy of the Security Department at Northrop, saw a Nightline interview with Mr. Boyce in which he explained that Crime Does Not Pay.

(Daulton Lee was released in 1998.)

[I'm sure there's a recent Daybook entry mentioning Christopher Boyce, but I can't find it.]

Poor Jake, he's picked up a nasty case of diaper rash. It makes him very unhappy whenever he sits down.

I'd heard that SCO was suing IBM—for divers mopery & dopery regarding Unix, AIX and other irrelevancies—but the news didn't interest me much. Who cares what a sinking-fast, formerly-important Unix vendor has to say?

But this tidbit from SCO's legal filings caught my eye: Caldera Systems, Inc. d/b/a The SCO Group. That explains it—Caldera, which bought DR-DOS just so it could sue Microsoft, is at it again.

They'd do better to concentrate on developing great software, rather than on extorting money from other companies, but I don't suppose they will.

Took Jacob to the doctor, who prescribed a tube of ointment: “Apply sparingly to the affected area, three times daily for ten days.” He should be better by Monday.

Poor little guy.

We were going to celebrate Jennifer's birthday with dinner at Biaggi's, but decided against it. Instead, we had pizza from Bonnie Jean's, very tasty.

Thunderstorms last night; they woke me up around 1:00am, and interfered with my sleep for at least two hours afterward.

Jacob is much improved. His fever got up to 104° Tuesday afternoon, which was a little bit alarming. Even so, he was active & in a good mood, which had me quite baffled. The last time he had a temperature of 104°, he wasn't much interested in being awake, let alone in playing. We dosed him with Tylenol and Advil, and the fever broke Wednesday afternoon. He's still on the antibiotics, though.

Jennifer, on the other hand, appears to have caught Jacob's ear infection. As he improves, she worsens. Poor Jennifer.

Myself, I am nothing worse than a little sleepy.

FedEx tried to deliver a package yesterday, but not very hard: the tracking page says the delivery attempt was at 2:35pm; I was home at 2:35pm, and heard neither knock nor doorbell. (The tracking page also says the package left Indianapolis at 7:01am yesterday and arrived in Urbana exactly twenty-two minutes later, so I don't really trust the tracking page.)

The tag on the door said the package could be picked up at the FedEx Urbana facility “after 6:00–6:30”. This turns out to mean, “It won't be there before 6:00pm; at precisely 6:30pm, we turn off the lights, lock the door, and disappear like scared bunnies.”

Jacob and I will be paying a second visit to FedEx this evening, before 6:30pm.

One of the three concrete blocks supporting sputnik has shattered: it got through last winter all right, but this winter was just a little too long & too cold for it. I suppose I'd better make a new one before sputnik falls over.

[StudioDV does much higher-quality frame grabs than the JVC software did: compare to the pictures from June 3, 2001. Maybe the lighting was better this time?]

Jake & I had the house to ourselves this afternoon—

—so we played with the webcam.

Poor Jacob, woke up in a good mood but with a bit of a fever (101.5°), so he's staying home today.

Genealogy Society meeting tonight. Perhaps I will attend.

Weird dream last night: something about going mountain-climbing the day after having open-heart surgery. Wonder what that means....

Poor Jacob, woke up very miserable this morning, so we kept him home & called the doctor. Quoth the doctor, “If a cold hangs on too long, ear infections become likely.” And that's what the poor little guy has.

He's back on the antibiotics, and seems much improved already. He ate a more-or-less regular dinner, which is more than he's done since Friday.

Poor Jacob, very unhappy much of the day—but his normal perky self the rest of the time. Mysterious.

Fired up the bread machine for another loaf of cinnamon raisin bread. The last one was very tasty (if a bit overdone), so we have high hopes for this one.

Much random HTML cleanup: I removed all those align="bottom" that Tidy's been complaining about, and a bunch of other unnecessary layout tags. It's better to do all that in style sheets.

I tried adding caption-side: bottom; to the relevant section of my style sheet, but Internet Explorer 6 doesn't seem to support that just yet. So all my tables are mispositioned now.

Cold today: high of 24° at 3:00pm, 18° now (8:15pm). It was a sunny day, and looked warm, but it wasn't.

Jake's cold seems to be getting better. Certainly he isn't acting very sick.

Spent the afternoon at the library, poking around in the 1930 Census. Found a few interesting things:

Jasper Sturm—my grandmother's grandfather—was living in White County in 1930. If he lived that long, it should be fairly easy to find out when he died, and where, but I have yet to manage it.

The handwriting on Enumeration District 97-4, Sheet 1A, presumably that of Chas. E. Berry, enumerator, is a close match to the handwriting on several death certificates in my files. Perhaps Mr. Berry's day job was County Clerk? I must remember to look into this sometime.

Harry Maurer was nowhere to be seen, nor were his sons Homer and Herschel (my grandfather). There's an Arthur Maurer, listed as a boarder with someone whose name I don't recall (having foolishly neglected to print that page), but there's no telling whether it's Harry's other son.

Usually, not finding someone in the Census means I'm not looking in the right place, or under the right name. It occurs to me I never looked for Henry Maurer. Maybe next time.

Pleasantly warm and springlike today—sputnik recorded a high of 61° at 2:00pm—then winter reasserted itself: eight hours later, the temperature has fallen nearly forty degrees, to 25°.

Ran these pages through Tidy again—the first time was last November—and it found a few typos & oopsies that had crept into the HTML. I fixed them all.

Tidy doesn't like align="bottom" in table caption tags, but I'm still using it. One of these days I'll figure out how to get the same result with a style sheet entry, but not just yet.

Jake still a bit sniffly today, but the daycare ladies didn't send him home early.

Finished reading Last Climb: The Legendary Everest Expeditions of George Mallory, by David Breashears and Audrey Salkeld.

It seems there was a 2001 follow-up to the 1999 Mallory & Irvine Research Expedition. Their web site is still online: www.mountainguides.com/everest2001. One of these days I'll have to read their dispatches and see what they found.

I always wondered where the movie Harold and Maude was filmed. Near San Francisco, obviously, but where?

www.norcalmovies.com/HaroldAndMaude claims to have all the answers. I won't dispute them, having spent less than 36 hours in the bay area.

Cold this morning, with a dusting of snow. Weatherdroids are predicting a high near 40° today, so I don't suppose the snow will last very long.

Jacob is still running a little warm, and his nose is a bit stuffed up. Cold? Sinus infection? (Does Jacob have sinuses yet?)

Long rant from Jerry Pournelle about his troubles with EarthLink. Seems they've charged him $14 for dialing in on the 800 number, but the good Mr. Pournelle says he never did this. EarthLink customer service was unhelpful—“It says right here on the computer screen that you did, and the computer is never wrong, so pay up.”—prompting this observation:

Earthlink used to be a class act. It seems to have gone a long way downhill.

I agree, except for the part about ‘used to be a class act.’

[Apparently, the Wrath of Pournelle was too much for EarthLink to bear. People smarter & more helpful than the customer service drones called him back and put things right. Jerry has since removed the rant from his site. Me, I don't edit the Daybook. “What I have written, I have written.”]

The phone rang—er, vibrated; the ringer was off—this afternoon: the daycare ladies were calling to say that Jacob was clingy & miserable, and would I please come get him?

Poor little guy. He had some medicine when we got home, and is much perkier now:

9:35pm: Jacob has been in bed about an hour—and can be heard jumping up & down, and occasionally chattering quietly to himself. It used to be that some evenings he'd cry when we put him to bed; now he just quietly amuses himself until he falls asleep.

9:37pm: had just enough of a hiccup to drizzle cocoa down my shirt (and spray the keyboard). Sheesh.

[Some cocoa also ended up on the floor, leaving some brown stains that look more like an embarrassing lapse of personal hygiene than a mere cocoa spill.]

A little snow on the ground this morning, just enough to hide the ice underneath. Jacob & I gave Jennifer a ride to work.

The Dell slogan is, “Easy as Dell,” but their web site is anything but easy:

• Starting at www.dell.com, click on Notebooks & Desktops, because you want to look at notebook machines;
• Click on Notebooks, because you still want to look at notebook machines;
• Click on Choose Latitude, because they seem a bit sturdier & more powerful than the Inspirons;
• Click on Home & Home Office, because you're a person, not a company;

...at which point, all references to the Latitude product line disappear, because Dell thinks home users should buy Inspirons instead.

The Latitude X200 seems like a nice machine—at $2,800, it had better be—but not as nice as the Apple PowerBook. A tricked-out PowerBook runs about $4,000, so I don't suppose I'll be buying either of them any time soon.

Never did get above freezing today—except for 33° at midnight last night—but the snow & ice melted anyway.

Jacob's had a bit of a temperature all day, though not enough to get him sent home from daycare (or even to slow him down any). Earlier this evening, he told Jennifer that his throat hurts. Poor little guy, maybe he's catching a cold?

A new thing from Microsoft: www.threedegrees.com. It's a groupware sort of thing, but personal instead of corporate—i.e., it does the sorts of things that a dormful of college students with computers & always-on high-bandwidth Internet connections would want to do: instant messaging, music sharing, etc.

It's still in beta, so details are still a little vague, but I don't suppose I'll be using it.

For one thing, its target market is people half my age who have lots of spare bandwidth & leisure time. My modem works nicely, but not so speedily as DSL or a cable modem; and most of my leisure time is spent with Jacob (who's a fun little guy).

For another, the 3° model just isn't how I use my computer. My computer is a tool that does a few fairly specific things I need to have done; it isn't a portal into some otherwise inaccessible world of friends & fun. The people I socialize with don't spend their evenings & weekends sitting at their computers, waiting for me to log in to mine.

None of which is intended to disparage 3°. It seems like a nifty application.

A new buzzword is buzzing: Aspect-Oriented Software Development. There's even a web site, aosd.net, that says:

Aspect-oriented software development is a new technology for separation of concerns (SOC) in software development. The techniques of AOSD make it possible to modularize crosscutting aspects of a system.

As with Intentional Programming, my reaction is: Huh?

What, precisely, is meant by ‘concerns’, and why is separating them a good idea? What, precisely, are the ‘crosscutting aspects’ of a system, and why should I modularize them?

Supposedly, this is all explained in the October 2001 issue of Communications of the ACM, but the ACM web site—when it itsn't popping open a new window every time I click on something—refuses to divulge any articles therefrom.

Guess I'll remain in the dark, my concerns unseparated, my aspects unmodularized. Pity me, pity me.

Pineapple for dinner this evening, now my mouth hurts.

[Yes, we had other things too. Thanks for asking!]

A little cleanup of the older Daybook entries. The project of splitting the old monthly pages into daily ones continues, albeit slowly.

I hear it's snowing quite fiercely up in Chicago tonight. Nothing in Champaign but a rain (and not much of that). Today's high was 46°. Is Spring coming at last?

During the 1950s, the Maurers—i.e., my grandparents—were living at 4468 Massachusetts Street in Gary, Indiana. Three blocks east and four north of them, at 4076 Delaware Street, is where the Akerses—i.e., my other grandparents—lived.

I wonder who lives there now.

Kodak has announced a new digital camera, the LS633. Relevant numbers: image size, 2041x1533 pixels; optical zoom, 3x; internal memory, 16MB; it will even capture video (15 fps, with audio); price & availability, to be determined.

I want one, assuming it will work with my computer, isn't outrageously expensive, etc., etc.

[Slashdot says: $399, availability sometime after April.]

Jacob is more and more talkative. Sometimes I can even understand him. Other times, not.

Before Jacob, I assumed my failure to understand small children was just lack of practice. Parents, I was sure, could understand their children perfectly: they talk with them every day.

Maybe it's just me.

I think I need an eye exam: sometimes it's hard to read the screen. That, and it's been almost three years since my last one.

The WRI vision plan doesn't actually cover eye exams, or glasses—I never managed to find out what it does cover—but I'm on Jennifer's insurance now. Maybe I'll call the optometrist tomorrow.

The Girl Scout who lives down the street dropped off a box of cookies this afternoon. I'd forgotten that we had ordered any.

Cold today, with snow (just flurries). Shouldn't we be getting a little Spring by now?

March 2nd, new moon, and no bombs are falling in Baghdad. I confess I am surprised by this.

For weeks now, the Discovery Channel has been flogging their upcoming special, Building the Pyramid: the inside story of how the Great Pyramid at Giza was constructed.

They lied. The first two-thirds of it—all I watched, before giving up—consisted of nothing more than a touchy- feely first-person narrative: I worked on the Pyramid. It was hard work, but I loved it, etc., etc., blah blah blah.

[The ran it again in April, and I watched the whole thing then. It was all right.]

9:12pm, and Jacob is in bed. He's supposed to be sleeping, but instead he is chattering happily away about something I can't quite make out.

Dusted off the bread machine this evening, and started a loaf of cinnamon raisin bread. It'll be done at 10:10pm, more or less, at which time we'll find out whether the bread machine can still make edible bread after two and a half years of disuse.

[The bread came out a bit dark, but otherwise as good as always.]

Off to Bloomington, where we left Jacob with the grandparents and went to see Chicago. Don't think I've ever seen a musical with so high a body count, but it was a good show.

Very foggy on the drive home. Most unpleasant, but visibility improved a bit around Mansfield.