April 2003 Archives

CNN says, in an obituary for journalist Steve Young:

He was one of the first reporters to cover a company housed in a Texas college dorm before most people had heard of Dell Computer.

Perhaps there's no one left at CNN who remembers that Dell Computer was originally known as PC's Limited.

Installed MoneyDance on nessus last night, and played with it a little. I have mixed feelings. The user interface has three modes—Metal, CDE/Motif, and Windows—and they're all rather ugly. (The screen shots on the MoneyDance web site are all of the OS X version, which looks much nicer.) It seems just a tad sluggish, compared to native Windows applications, but even so it's much faster than Money 2002.

The big questions are: Can MoneyDance track all the accounts / loans / investments / etc. that we have? How will MoneyDance's performance degrade as transactions accumulate in the database?

(In every online discussion of MoneyDance I've found, the GNUoids are out in force, clamoring that we should all use GNUcash instead. I don't think so—the GNUfolks hate Windows so much that I don't trust them to write good software for it.)

Jake & I had the house to ourselves this evening, Jennifer being in St. Louis for some PHB-mandated waste of time. We had fun, but it was a little lonely.

Tried again to reattach the washing machine drain hose; I believe that this time I was successful: two loads, and no water on the floor. How nice.

Jennifer & I also put a new latch on the backyard fence gate. I was worried that I had bought the wrong size, but now that it's on the fence it looks pretty good. Hasn't fallen off yet, either.

A few changes in the Daybook archives: the year index pages now contain full-year calendars with links to individual entries, rather than links to the month index pages. I don't suppose anybody ever looks at those pages, but they were so ugly I had to do something.

(It occurs to me that with the year index pages now containing links to individual days, I don't really need to keep months in separate subdirectories. Keeping the whole year in one directory would simplify the underlying CityScript, so maybe I will do that.)

[The year index pages have been removed.]

Three years after we received it as a housewarming gift (thanks bunches, Mom & Bob), the croquet set saw its first use this evening: Jennifer and I played several rounds while Jake played in the sandbox.

Another soccer class for Jacob. He likes to carry soccer balls around, and play with the plastic cones; maybe next year he'll want to play soccer. (Will that make Jennifer a soccer mom? What about me—is there such a thing as a soccer dad?)

A morning trip to the hardware store: for pliers (to fix the washing machine), a big wrench (to tighten the gate on the backyard fence), some hooks for the garage pegboard (to organize our ever-increasing collection of tools), a new latch for the backyard fence gate (the old one having fallen off recently), and a couple of 5/16” bolts (for a new foot for sputnik).

Tidied up the garage a little: put away some things, hung some tools on the new pegboard hooks, threw away some trash.

Stuffed in a corner, I found a plastic grocery-store bag containing everything I took from the Blazer when I sold it, four and a half years ago. Most of it was trash, but there were a few items worth keeping: the emergency blanket, and the notebook in which I recorded all Blazer gas purchases & maintenance.

It runs from March, 1990 (when I bought the Blazer) to June, 1996 (when the Fish Book took over as logbook). I still have the Mustang notebook, which means that just about every gas purchase I've made in the last nineteen years is recorded somewhere. My obsessions disturb even me sometimes....

Re-attached the washing machine drain hose, but not very well: it came off again after only one load of laundry.

Cloudy & drizzly this morning, and a bit chilly (48° at 11:00am). My umbrella is at home, too.

Geekstuff:

The nice people at Red Hat have changed their policies: you can't download iso images any more unless you've paid for a Red Hat Network subscription, $60/year. Now, Red Hat does good work, for which they certainly deserve to be paid; but it would be cheaper for me to buy a copy of RH9 from Borders, so I'll do that (one of these days).

A possible alternative to Money 2002: MoneyDance, www.moneydance.com. And only $30. There's a free trial version; perhaps I will try it out.

More geekstuff:

As of FrontPage 2003, the FrontPage Server Extensions are being abandoned. Microsoft says:

As we examined our options, it became clear that the best solution was to create a new and radically more powerful server story—Windows SharePoint Services—and eliminate the need for server extensions beginning with FrontPage 2003.

I've always thought that the FrontPage Server Extensions—later renamed the Office Server Extensions—were a bad idea, more lock-in from Microsoft: See all these neat-o features you can use in your web site? All you have to do is tell your ISP to install our software on their web server. No, thanks. So it's nothing to me that they're going away.

On the other hand, it does interest me that the replacement technology, Windows SharePoint Services, runs only on Windows. The software changes, but the lock-in endures.

Wondering what's happening on Prince Edward Island? Check out the IslandCam at http://www.gov.pe.ca/islandcam/.

After many adventures, I have MoneyDance downloaded to nessus. Their download server is slow enough that Internet Explorer kept timing out, so I ssh'd to WRI, tunneled a VNC connection to one of the Windows machines there, and downloaded with WRI's T1. (I'm a bandwidth parasite.) Then I scp'd the file from WRI to nessus.

The bits go round and round and come out here.

MoneyDance has a longer history than I thought—Google's oldest newsgroup post mentioning MoneyDance is from January, 1998. It's written in Java, which is why it runs on so many different platforms. (But now I wonder how well it runs. Java has a reputation for slowness.)

(The ‘money dance’ is apparently a New Orleans wedding tradition: wedding guests buy dances with the bride by pinning cash to her dress.)

A little homeowner excitement this evening: the washing machine drain hose came loose. Water everywhere, big mess. At least there was no crawling in the mud this time, as when the dryer vent duct plugged up, or when the sump pump threw its drain hose.

Interesting trailer for Terminator 3, just put up on Apple's web site. After twenty years, James Cameron has completed the syllogism:

1. When Terminators travel through time, they arrive naked.
2. Men like to look at naked women.
3. Let's have a woman Terminator!

Does anybody else remember Lifeforce? Space vampires, very cheesy & lame but livened up by Mathilda May stalking about sans clothing.

Thunderstorms this evening, though more thunder than storm: long, stretched-out rumbles, like the cannonfire in the 1812 Overture.

Jake was concerned, but we told him thunder is just the clouds farting. He seemed relieved.

James F. Dunnigan, designer of World War 3, the game I found in the closet last week, has a web site: jim.dunnigan.com. His latest wargame project is The Hundred Years War—which is a curious coincidence, since just last night I started reading The Hundred Years War, by Desmond Seward.

Mr. Dunnigan also designed Sinai, currently in the closet next to World War 3; and Foxbat and Phantom, which I used to have but threw away sometime in the last twenty years (alas).

Small world, eh what?

Put gas in the car this evening, even though the gauge was still at half-full: gas prices always shoot up on Thursdays, then come back down on Monday morning.

Today's fillup cost $1.53/gallon. We'll see what the prices are tomorrow.

In today's mail: a CD full of Jacob birthday pictures, from the Arlington Heights grandparents. Thanks bunches!

Dug up the second clothesline pole this evening: it was deeper, but smaller, than the first one. Much easier to extract.

Jeff Duntemann says:

Rock has become product, produced at great (and probably needless) expense by the big labels and shoved down the throats of listeners, who have no choice because virtually all radio broadcasting in the country is controlled by two or three national concerns.

I have a choice—I listen to the CDs I already have. My CD purchasing has slowed to the point that three in one year counts as a lot.

It's not because I download music illegally. It's because most of my favorite artists are dead, retired, or just not releasing albums very often any more. It's because I'm not interested in the prefab MusicNuggets I hear on the radio, or the Big Stars who shill for sugar water in between albums.

Maybe I'm just getting old.

It seems the Iraqis are very happy that Saddam Hussein is gone, but aren't so sure that they want a Western-style democracy to replace him. At least some of them would much prefer an Islamic Republic of Iraq, just like they have in Iran (and had in Afghanistan).

As V said,

The door is open. They can leave, or fall instead to squabbling and thence new slaveries. The choice is theirs, as ever it must be.

This caught my eye: it seems the brothers Wachowski—yup, the ones who did The Matrix—wrote (two years ago) a screenplay for V for Vendetta. There's a review online at www.screenwritersutopia.com.

Judging from the (scathing) review, the brothers made a hash of it. Too bad—since I first read V for Vendetta fifteen years ago, I've thought it would make an excellent film.

Errands this evening: to Sears, to get a replacement charger for the lawn mower (they didn't have any); then to Menard's, to look at garbage disposals (we didn't buy one) and lawn mower chargers (they didn't have any).

As it turns out, the charger works just fine—it's only the charging-complete light that doesn't work. As long as it cuts the grass....

Jacob had his two-year checkup this morning. He stood on the scale (29 pounds) and let the nurse measure his height (34 inches) with the wall-mounted yardstick thingy. The doctor listened, looked, palpated, and announced: “Fiftieth percentile.”

I thought he was a little taller than average; apparently not.

Cold today (49° at 11:00am), and very windy (from the west at 21mph). I almost wish I'd brought my coat.

I my WRI mailbox: a bottle of water, with a Mathematica label on it. Everybody else got one, too: leftovers from the developer conference, I suppose. (The label has a typo on it: “Graphic & Kernal Output”. Bad proofreader. No donut for you.)

Took a few CDs with me to work today: one of them was Nanci Griffith's Once in a Very Blue Moon. Listening to The Ballad of Robin Winter-Smith, I wondered what I could find out about him. A few minutes of googling turned up www.johnnyairtime.com, and www.geocities.com/cyclejumper_2000/RobinWinterSmith.html.

(There's also www.evelknievel.com, which has a welcome page with cheesy animation, a one-page biography, and nothing else. Disappointing. There's more at evel1.com, which makes me think there was a little domain-squatting going on at some point.)

Handy thing, the internet—good for satisfying random information cravings.

Phrases you don't want in a newspaper article about you:

• “Ejected from the vehicle”
• “Identified through dental records”

Any others?

I opened the Ant Window: three dead ants, no live ones.

Lunch in Normal, with the grandparents (and surprise guest Aunt Amy).

Jake had a banana with (for?) dinner this evening:

...a rather pugnacious expression from Mr. Jacob, I must say.

Didn't watch any of The Ten Commandments this evening. I've seen it almost as many times as I've seen Shrek, so why bother?

(In the days before video rentals—before VCRs, for that matter—it was a big deal when one of the [only three!] networks broadcast a hit movie. Now, by the time the networks get something it's been at Blockbuster for a year, and the only people who care are the ones without a dvd player. That's not very many people any more.)

Jake had his first soccer class this morning, sort of. He spent the hour carrying a soccer ball around, playing with the drinking fountain, and ignoring all attempts to teach him about soccer.

We think maybe he's still a little young for it, but he did have a good time.

Dug out the concrete footing for one of the clothesline poles today: like an iceberg, only a tiny percentage of it showed above ground level. The whole thing measured about eighteen inches long and ten or so in diameter, and required considerably more digging to extract than I had expected.

Now, instead of a pipe sticking out of the ground, we have a huge lump of cement to deal with. It's too heavy to carry, but it rolls nicely. Maybe we'll roll it out to the curb and see whether Mr. Garbageman takes it away.

Dept. of Rude Surprises: while holding Jake this morning, I opened a window to say hello to Jennifer (who was working in the yard), and about a thousand ants came boiling out, crawling up the wall like in a bad horror movie.

The vacuum cleaner made short work of them. (And then I changed the bag.) Later in the day I sprayed the windowframe with Raid. I think the buggy menace has been eliminated, but I'm afraid to open the window & find out.

Tried sending email to Jim Allbright in Colorado; alas, the address he gave the Mormons doesn't work any more. Yahoo has a snail-mail address that matches what the Mormons have, so maybe I'll have to write an actual letter, on paper & everything.

How low-tech.

Allbright / Sturm

Here's a photo of Richard Allbright, Irene Sturm, and their first child, Richard Jr. Perhaps one of the Colorado Allbrights will stumble across it one day, while googling.

[I found a working email address for Jim Allbright. See September 10, 2003.]

Managed to get to the library this afternoon, fifteen minutes before closing time (the library is open late, but the Archives close at 5:00pm), for a third attempt at extracting data from Pedigree Resource File Disk #2.

Third time lucky—and now I have a nice gedcom (which I emailed home from the library with EarthLink's webmail interface) full of information about various Allbrights & Sturms.

I must contact the fellow who contributed this information. There's an email address on the CD, but it's missing from the gedcom. Oops.

A familiar name in the obituaries this evening: Sirpa Saarinen, who worked in the Kernel group at WRI six years ago, died Thursday morning “at home” (which, I suspect, is newspaper code for “mind your own business”).

I never really got to know her (and haven't seen her since she left WRI in 1997); still, the news came as a shock.

Took Jacob to the mall this evening, for a spin on the carousel and some time in the play area; a pleasant time was had by all, and all are now very sleepy.

Cold today, with heavy overcast & occasional rain. No playing in the sandbox this evening.

The docking station for the digital camera has stopped working: it looks like it's lost power. Maybe something got knocked loose. One of these days I must investigate.

Very tired this evening.

In the news:

Struggling TNN—which just two years ago changed from The Nashville Network to The National Network—announced Tuesday that, effective June 16, it will call itself Spike TV and become the first network aimed specifically at men.

I remember the promise of 500-channel cable systems, where every conceivable human interest or activity had its own dedicated channel; but, alas, it didn't work out that way. Instead, the cable channels are converging to a single business model: attracting the 18-24 set with bright lights, loud music, naked bodies and things that go boom.

I am not interested in television shows where people—

• build things out of junk;
• redecorate each other's homes (with often hideous results);
• compete to marry some loser;
• in general, do stupid things for money and/or fifteen minutes of dubious fame.

My two favorite shows right now are Mail Call, on the History Channel, and Good Eats, on Food TV. Maybe that makes me a middle-aged loser with illusions of continued youth & manliness—but not as much as if I watched Spike TV.

(The Mail Call web site is all Flash, so I can't read it. Disappointing.)

Interesting: the One Year Food Supply for Four. Buy it at www.internet-grocer.net/4yr-unit.htm, if your pantry is large enough to accommodate 1,600 pounds of food. Only $3,000, plus $430 shipping & handling.

Brisk wind from the south all day, and the sky is clouding up. My umbrella is at home, alas. I fear I'll get a soaking when it's time to go home.

9:48pm, and it hasn't rained yet. Maybe later.

Everybody woke up early this morning. Everybody's sleepy.

Another warm (83°), sunny day, but windy. No flying flowerboxes today, though: they're all indoors now.

Jacob had chocolate pudding with his dinner, which means he ended up wearing quite a bit of it; so did Papa. I never knew it until now, but dried chocolate pudding looks very much like dried blood. Jake & I spent the evening looking like a pair of crime victims.

Jennifer mowed the lawn. She does all the housework, poor woman.

Across the nation, post offices are open late (some until midnight) to accommodate last-minute tax return filers. That's not us—we did our taxes quite a while ago.

Jacob woke up on his own this morning, while I was puttering around the kitchen fixing my breakfast; I suppose this means he got enough sleep last night, which is a good thing. Sleepiness makes for grumpy little boys, which is not a good thing.

Jacob's not coughing so much today, and his nose isn't running. I guess he's over whatever it was that he had.

Record high temperature predicted for today: 84°. We'll see.

There's a Bramblett web site: www.bramblett.com. I don't know whether Candis Bramlet is related to them, but it's worth investigating. (Apparently the Brambletts have some connection to the Cherokee nation, which fits nicely with family folklore that there's a full-blooded Cherokee five or so generations back in the family tree.)

In today's mail: my 401(k) statement. The funds I'm in continue to perform dismally, but at least my contributions once more exceed the losses: so the balance goes up, slowly.

Jacob scraped his knee sometime today—the daycare ladies say they were outside all day—and it made him a little grumpy (especially during his bath). Poor little guy. Mama put some ointment and a pair of Scooby-Doo band-aids on it, so maybe he'll feel better now.

Sputnik recorded a high of 84° today—a nice warm, summery sort of day.

I had a flowerbox on the back porch, in which I had some seed-starter mix (Herb Garden 2003, coming soon, maybe). This evening, a stray gust of wind caught it and threw it ten or so feet across the yard: it came to rest upside-down against Jake's sandbox, while the water tray flew all the way to the fence. Jake was standing at the back door when it happened: startled him a bit, I think.

Jacob played outside much of today. We're trying to set up a play area for him, with his sandbox & other toys. I hope he likes it (and not just because the mulch tastes good).

Jacob went to bed early this evening. He was sleepy from playing so hard (and from having his nap cut short by a stinky diaper, poor little guy).

Learned a few things about William Calvin & Candis Bramlet today. (They're the parents of Mary Margaret Calvin, wife of Jasper Sturm; that makes them my great-great-great-grandparents.) They married in White County in 1856, and had five children: Joel, Susan, Henry, James and Mary. Shortly after Mary was born, William married Elizabeth Ward (which is her married name; I don't know her maiden name). I'm guessing that Candis died: death was more common than divorce in those days.

My genealogy database now contains three hundred and sixty-one people. That seems like a lot, but I know it isn't: there are people out there with databases ten times larger.

Found a couple of really old SPI wargames in the closet the other day: Sinai and World War 3. Long ago, I was interested in wargames (though not enough to ever play them), which is why I bought these. I kept them all this time because, well, keeping things is what I used to do.

But now I am getting rid of old junk, and—hearing that SPI games were collector's items—thought I might sell these on eBay. A quick search turned up a copy of World War 3 already for sale: high bid, $1. Maybe I'll just throw them away instead.

After a few weekends of dismal weather, finally a nice one. Jake spent a lot of time outside, playing in his sandbox.

Myself, I spent a few hours at the library this afternoon, searching the 1870 Census for Jacob Maurer. Supposedly, he immigrated in 1864, so he should be recorded somewhere.

I did not find him in Carmi Township, White County, Illinois—but I did find numerous other ancestors & relations, so the effort wasn't wasted.

I really should change the picture on the main page: the beard's been gone for three months now.

Found some interesting artifacts in the closet today:

• A notebook containing carefully-drawn charts of my class schedules, for six of the seven semesters I attended the Big U. One of these days I'll have to HTML-ize them and post them here.
• The plastic name tag from the mailbox for the apartment in Buffalo Grove where the three of us (Mom, Mike & me) lived, twenty-three years ago.

Such a packrat I am.

Everybody's home this afternoon, enjoying the weather and starting our weekend a little early.

It occurs to me that wars and Roger Waters albums often occur together:

...and, with Iraq II winding down, www.roger-waters.com says he's working on a new album, to be released in 2003.

(It's not a perfect correlation. There have been wars with no album, and albums when no war was on. Let's just ignore those data points and concentrate on the ones that fit the trend line, shall we?)

I suppose the war isn't over, not yet—people are still shooting at each other. But Saddam Hussein is gone, and people in Baghdad are celebrating like people in Berlin did fourteen years ago.

That was a surreal time. In the 1960s and 1970s, when I was growing up, the Soviet Union was a vast, inscrutable menace. They held Eastern Europe, and wanted the rest of the world, too. And then, in the blink of an eye, the whole empire just fell apart. In rapid succession, the puppet regimes of Europe were overthrown, dictators ousted (occasionally, executed), statues of Lenin toppled; and people danced in the streets. The nuclear Ragnarok we expected never came.

Funny old world, sometimes.

I find myself wondering whether Microsoft is re-coding any of its products to use C# and the .NET Framework. Somehow I doubt it. If it's not good enough for them, why should I use it?

Saddam Hussein's army is destroyed, his capital is occupied, his palaces are looted & empty, his statues lie broken on the ground. The war is over, in less than three weeks. Some quagmire, hm?

I don't suppose forming a new government will go so quickly or smoothly, and I imagine there are still many random spuds with guns & explosives eager to restore Saddam to power.

No sign of Saddam himself. I suspect he's still alive, hiding somewhere and pretending he's still Fearless Leader.

In today's mail: the last issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal left on my subscription. I subscribed for nineteen years, more or less, but find that I lack the time & interest to keep reading.

Maybe I'll just peek at the library copies at work from time to time.

Jacob hasn't wanted to go to bed these last few days. He cries, he jumps up & down, after a while he goes to sleep. We think it's partly due to the time change, partly due to the unpleasantly wintry weather: the daycare ladies keep the kids inside, so they don't get to play so much, so they're just not as tired.

This just in: the domain www.llamavision.com is available.

Jacob woke up grumpy this morning, but after a while he settled down. I think he was just sleepy.

Cold today, and cloudy. Very gloomy.

I've been toying with the idea of upgrading nessus to Windows XP. I've been using XP at work, on a machine roughly comparable to nessus, and have had no problems. There are a few things XP does that 2000 doesn't (though I can't seem to recall any just now).

But I don't think I will: if I upgrade Windows, I'll probably have to upgrade Office, which will probably break synchronization with the iPaq, and I don't want to buy a new iPaq. That's the downside of Microsoft's mania for integration: if you force an all-or-nothing choice on your customers, some of them will choose the latter.

I have the feeling nessus isn't going to change much until it's time to replace it (which event is still some years down the road).

This really annoys me:

Surely we all have better things to do with our time than come up with new ways to say else if.

Took a bowl of hastily-made (by Jennifer) fruit salad to the Genealogical Society / Historical Society joint meeting / potluck. It was fun.

I think I was the youngest person there.

Cold today, cloudy & rainy. It could be worse—not so many miles north of here, they're shoveling snow.

Jacob is confused by the time change. I had to wake him up this morning, and at bedtime he tried everything to postpone going in the crib:

“Window? See?”
“No, it's dark, there's nothing to see outside.”
“Cookies? Hungry?”
“No, you just had cookies & milk.”

...and so on, and so forth. Poor little guy, none of it worked.

Went to the model railroad show over at Lincoln Square. Jake really liked the trains, especially the big ones on the floor.

(On March 31, 2001, Jennifer & I had plans: lunch at the Original House of Pancakes, followed by a visit to the model railroad show at Lincoln Square. Instead, we spent two days in the hospital and came home with Jacob.)

Afterward, we had lunch at Biaggi's. We felt a little scruffy & conspicuous—it seemed like everybody else had just been to church, and were still wearing their Sunday-go-to-meeting clothes—but had a good time scribbling with crayons on the paper table-cover.

Finished reading Corum: The Coming of Chaos, by Michael Moorcock: number seven of the fifteen-volume Tales of the Eternal Champion collection. Jennifer doubts that I will read them all, but I will.

[The book database tells me that six years elapsed between my purchasing this book and my reading it, so maybe Jennifer has a point.]

Jake got a haircut this morning. He sat in the chair all by himself (instead of sitting on Papa's lap, like last time) and didn't wriggle or yell at all.

Tried to go the Veterinary Medicine Open House, but it was too crowded inside, too cold outside, too close to Jacob's lunchtime, etc., etc.

Better luck next year, I suppose.

Poor Jennifer, she has caught the disease that I had (and Jacob still has).

Tonight is the switch to Daylight Saving Time, and people across the nation are lamenting that they will lose an hour of sleep. I won't: I plan to go to sleep at the usual time, and sleep the usual number of hours (i.e., until Jacob wakes up). At that point, the clocks will read an hour later than usual, but that only means I've lost an hour of being awake.

Jerry Pournelle taunts the talking heads by calling them the 104th Chairborne.

“I wish I'd said that.”

The National Archives & Records Administration is starting to put their holdings online, at www.archives.gov/aad. I tried to get in just now (9:48pm), and failed. Maybe, like www.ellisislandrecords.org, they underestimated the traffic they'd receive.

Dept. of Euwww: according to genealogical data submitted by James Allbright of Littleton, Colorado (to our friends the Mormons, at www.familysearch.org), James Oscar Allbright—apparently the son of Irene Marie Sturm, the sister of William Ralph Sturm, my great-grandfather, which would make him (James, that is) my 1st cousin twice removed—died in 1942, at the age of twelve, from having been run over by a train.

(All this is on Pedigree Resource File CD #2, a copy of which is in the Archives at the Urbana Free Library. Alas, the viewer software wasn't working. Maybe next time. Or I could buy my own copy—they're only $8 each.)

Jacob woke up congested & phlegmy, and very unhappy about it. A little apple juice, a little hydroxyzine, a little time, and he was better.

Lately he's been very clingy and reluctant when I drop him off at daycare. It used to be that on most days he'd wriggle to be put down, then run off to play. Now he just stands as close to me as he can get, holding his arms out to be picked up.

Poor little guy.

Thunderstorms this morning, mostly north of here. All we got was a little rain. (I hope the cover stayed on Jacob's sandbox.)

[It did.]

Dueling press conferences:

Interesting that 1-meter satellite images of the war zone are available—for free—on the web (at www.spaceimaging.com). Twelve years ago, they would have been locked in a vault somewhere in CIA headquarters.

Joshua Allen says:

If you have ever been in a meeting with someone who so incisively extracts the meaning from a mess of details and distills an issue to its core, that you find youself thinking “how is it humanly possible for him/her to make it so simple when the rest of us failed?”, you know what I am talking about.

I don't suppose any of these incisive, meaning-extracting, issue-distilling people worked on the Microsoft Installer Service design—if they had, it wouldn't be the baroque mess it is today.

MSI is a wretched tangle of database tables, sequences, custom actions, special install modes that pretend to install something but really don't, etc., etc. I'm forced to deal with it at work, but they can't force me to like it.

Jake's Grandpa Norm came to visit this evening, bringing with him the last of Jake's many birthday presents: a sandbox, shaped like a turtle, with 150 pounds of sand—described on the bags as clean, safe and fun: it's not often you find all three together—to put in it.

Then we went out to dinner at the Texas Roadhouse. Sirloin, very tasty.

Jennifer wants to send copies of the birthday picture CDs to all the grandparents & family. Sounds like a good idea to me....

The Champaign County Clerk's office has a web site: www.champaigncountyclerk.com. The returns from yeterday's voting are already up—only 17% of registered voters roused themselves to cast ballots. (I wasn't one of them.)

Ken Urban didn't win a seat on the Champaign City Council. Better luck next time, Ken.

(It seems like the URL for the Champaign County Clerk ought to be something like clerk.champaign-county.il.us, but maybe that would have been too hard to remember?)

Whoever's in charge of www.mcleansboro.com needs to update the site: there's a little green box in mid-page announcing, -13 days until Spring!.

The February 14, 1946 edition of the Carmi Democrat-Tribune apparently has an article about John Smiley, who married Helen Maurer. I'll have to get a copy the next time I'm in Springfield.

(There's a web page, www.angelfire.com/or/Shulmire/pageSmiley.html, full of Smiley genealogy. It even has a picture of John Smiley. Maybe the site author will let me use it here....)

On Monday, I dropped off two rolls of film at the one-hour place; today, they called: “Your pictures are ready.” They were half right: only one roll was ready. The other might be ready tomorrow. (Lately I've been getting Photo CDs, since I'm too lazy to scan pictures myself [and I figure Kodak has a better scanner than I do], so it takes two days to get prints & CD.)

Some nice shots in this roll. Perhaps I'll put up a few here.

Papa gave Jake his bath this evening. It was a soggy experience for both of us, but I think it went all right.

Sputnik recorded a high of 80° yesterday: the first 80° day of the year.

Mail from Red Hat: there are new & exciting Linux updates waiting for me from the Red Hat Network update site. That may be true—but so many people are downloading (or trying to download) Red Hat Linux 9 that people with demo memberships aren't allowed in.

Recent photos:

Today Jacob is two years old. Tempus fugit, and all that.

More birthday presents were waiting for him when he woke up this morning: some buckets & shovels for his sandbox (which is still in Grandpa Norm's garage), and a Jake-sized vacuum cleaner that makes real vacuum-cleaner noises.

Jake was so enamored with this last that he didn't want to eat breakfast: he just wanted to vacuum the carpet.

My cold is a little better. The sneezing and nose-blowing are happening less frequently, leaving me with just the cough to deal with. (No, I don't have Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome. Thanks for asking!)

I thought this was an All Fools' Day joke—

Director Peter Jackson is to begin filming a NZ$200 million (US$110 million) version of the movie “King Kong,” on the outskirts of the New Zealand capital, Wellington.

—but apparently it's for real. After putting a Balrog on the big screen, I don't suppose a giant ape could be very difficult.