June 2003 Archives

Home this afternoon—nobody's sick, we're having the carpets cleaned.

The carpets look much better than they did this morning. They're still a little damp, but should dry out in the next day or so. The living room chairs are balanced precariously on small blue plastic blocks, to avoid staining the carpet while it dries.

I filled up Jake's swimming pool this afternoon, after the carpet cleaners left; by evening, it was warm enough that we could all climb in for a swim. Jake really liked going down the slide and making a big splash at the end.

He protested mightily when it was time to go inside. I guess he was having too much fun.

CityDesk foolery: had the notion of creating an article for each image, then using CityScript to assemble the various photo-gallery pages. Alas, it didn't work: there aren't enough fields to hold all the attributes of an image (image, thumbnail, caption, height & width, etc., etc.). In theory, I could use the extra1 and extra2 fields to hold the image & thumbnail, but that doesn't work: there's no HTML view for the extra fields, and Normal View's Insert Image function generates really ugly HTML.

I had also thought to put something like

<img alt="{$.headline$}" ... />

in the article body, but that doesn't work, either: when including the image article in the gallery article, you get the gallery headline, not the image headline.

Back to the drawing board, I suppose.

Everybody slept in this morning, Jake most of all: he didn't make an appearance until 9:40am. Poor little guy, he was sleepy.

Updated nessus: Windows 2000 Service Pack 4, Office 2000 Service Pack 3, etc., etc. Everything seems to work the same as before.

Installed the new version of Moneydance: apparently it's just a slightly more recent build (314 vs. 301), so maybe I needn't have bothered.

Also installed the new Socket Wireless LAN drivers on the iPaq; quite an improvement over the previous version: this one supports network profiles, which means I can set up Home & Work profiles and switch painlessly between them.

Jacob has a swimming pool: Jennifer bought one at K-Mart this afternoon. It's large enough for everyone, though a little floppy when empty. Jacob much enjoyed splashing around in it, and dumping buckets of water over Mama's head.

(Swim time was briefly delayed by a small knot of thunderstorms, passing noisily eastward. No rain here, but Philo got drenched.)

CityScript foolery over in the Genealogy section: I tagged the various obituary articles with the cemetery name, then put some code in the cemetery pages to collect links thereto.

The new version of CityDesk—coming Real Soon Now—will have some useful new scripting features, that will make these lists a bit less ugly. Until then, my apologies for the bad formatting.

Jake & I got our hair cut this morning (just like January, minus the beard). Jake sat in the chair all by himself: a first, I think.

Lunch afterward was at the Courier. Jake didn't eat very much of his lunch, he just smeared it around the table.

Another trip to the library, to look up Jefferson Alldredge (and family) in the 1880 census. After a bit of searching, I found him: Indiana, Posey County, Black Township, Enumeration District 96, Page 26 (also known as Page 80A, for no good reason).

The WPA vital-records indices suggest that Jefferson Alldredge died in September of 1885; his wife, Isabelle, died in May of 1905. (Or maybe not: Cemeteries of Posey County by Carroll O. Cox says she died in 1911.)

On a whim, I tried to look up the original land patents for the particular section of Township 19 N Range 8 East of the 3rd Principal Meridian that contains our house; alas, the Bureau of Land Management Government Records Office has no record of any land sales in our section. Clearly, we are illegal squatters on Federal land.

Ugly clouds swept through from the northwest this evening; there was rain, but not much (sputnik recorded only .03”).

Inexplicably, I have chosen to read Bitter Victory by Carlo D'Este, a massive (666 pages) history of the Allied invasion of Sicily in 1943.

The database tells me that Bitter Victory sat neglected on the shelf for almost fifteen years before I started reading it.

I tried to start Gods of the Well of Souls last night, but I just couldn't. Like the preceding two volumes, it starts with the obligatory two-page chapter in which the Kraang snarls menacingly & gloats over his evil plans. Reading this, I thought: I just don't care.

I put the book back on the shelf this morning. Tonight I'll find something else to read.

Google tells me that the folks in alt.fan.harry-potter have a lot to say about the new book, and they're not too concerned about spoiling the surprises (good and bad) for people who haven't read it yet.

Years ago, I had a few dozen newsgroups I kept up on, and a few in which I made a point of reading every post. I even posted a few messages myself; they lurk in the Google archives, popping up now & then during my searches. These days, not only do I never read newsgroups, I can't: after the last reinstall of Windows 2000 on nessus, I never bothered to reconfigure the Outlook Express newsreader.

There are more important things than alt.tasteless to occupy my time.

It looks like yesterday's MoneyDance download really is a newer version than the one installed on nessus. Time to upgrade.

Chicago commuters are in a lather: last Sunday, a railroad bridge near 137th Street in Riverdale was destroyed by fire, shutting down the entire Metra Electric line. A Metra press release issued Monday says that approximately 13,000 commuters need to find another way to work, but promises that the bridge will be rebuilt and the line re-opened on July 2nd.

Conspiracy theorists—no names; they know who they are—are convinced that this was the work of international terrorists, and that the federal government is censoring the news media to prevent coverage.

Well, I don't know about that:

• Trainorders.com
• Altamont Press Railroad Newsline
• Chicago Sun-Times
• Metra

There's probably more, but I'm too lazy to look any further. An interesting rumor from misc.transport.rail.americas says:

My source from within Metra says that that bridge was due for replacement anyway (the new bridge is there but has to be put into place, is that true?) but they had no “good” time to do it, as the Taste of Chicago is coming up and that's Metra Electric's largest traffic days. I guess now is as good a time as any to do it.

I imagine international terrorists would choose a more spectacular target than an old, about-to-be-replaced-anyway wooden railroad bridge.

The Chicago Tribune web site is a mess of pop-ups, and it demands an active email address before it will grant access to the news stories. Mozilla Firebird does a nice job of stifling the pop-ups, but it can't do anything about the email address requirement. Reading a few stories about the Riverdale bridge fire isn't worth the bushel of spam I'd get from the Tribune if I registered, so good-bye Tribune.

The New York Times web site also requires that people register before reading articles; luckily, it's rather casual on what it will accept. I had to laugh when it told me that user id saflkjsdfkljsdflkjdfs@saflkjsdfkljsdflkjdfs.com was already taken: apparently somebody else's random keyboard-bashing produced the same sequence of letters as did mine.

Poor Jake, he's been coughing a bit lately. Hasn't slowed him down much, though.

Stayed up much too late last night, reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. Only 57 pages to go: should finish tonight.

Jacob back in daycare today. He's not 100% yet, but he's very close: he woke up in a good mood and ate more breakfast than he usually does, neither of which has been happening much these last few days.

Rain this morning: nothing too showy, just an hour or two of steady rain. It's good for the grass, I suppose.

Used WRI bandwidth to download some software for home: Windows 2000 Service Pack 4, and updated drivers for the Socket Wireless LAN card. Supposedly the latter includes some kind of network-profile mechanism, so I can set up profiles for home & work.

In-groups always seem to have a word for people who aren't in the group:

• Nudists call people who wear clothing ‘textiles’.
• Society for Creative Anachronism people call non-SCA people ‘mundanes’.
• Motorcycle riders call people who drive automobiles ‘cagers’.

This last was a new one on me: I always thought a cager was somebody who played basketball.

I thought there was a new version of MoneyDance, so I downloaded it; alas, it appears to be the same as the one I installed on nessus last month.

Finished reading Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. A much more interesting & satisfying read than Shadow of the Well of Souls, definitely.

Yes, somebody dies. No, I won't tell you who it is.

Jennifer & I thought Jacob was well enough for daycare; the daycare ladies disagreed, and so Jake is home for a third day.

Nobody seems to know what he had. The strep test was negative. The daycare ladies think it's croup, but Jennifer & I are quite skeptical of this theory. Maybe it was a case of galloping jungle rot.

My cute little one-cup coffeepot died the other day: I loaded it up (Swiss Chocolate Almond), hit the button, and—nothing. I'm guessing that it blew a fuse, somewhere. As these are not replaceable, that was the end for Mr. Coffeepot.

I might buy another one someday. In the meantime, I have an entire can of chicory coffee going stale in the cupboard.

Tried to go to work this afternoon, only to discover that the windows in my office were being replaced. Hard to get any work done with gaping holes in the wall and a big mess all over the desk & floor.

So I came home and did a little work from there. (It turns out to be quite easy to tunnel a Remote Desktop Connection session over ssh: just forward local port 3389 to port 3389 on the remote machine, then tell RDC to connect to localhost:3389. Works like a charm.)

Finally downloaded pictures from the camera. Quite a few nice ones in there. I sneaked one into last Friday's daybook entry; another will go out in a Kid Pix mailing.

Poor Jacob, still sick, staying home from daycare a second day.

This afternoon, Jake crawled into my lap and said, “I love you, Papa.”

All together, now: Awww.

According to www.familysearch.org, Jefferson Alldredge—father of Arenna Alldredge, who married Jasper Sturm—was the son of Samuel Alldredge.

The Bureau of Land Management reports that a Samuel Alldredge purchased several parcels of land in Posey County, in October of 1835.

Jacob went to see the doctor this morning. Mr. Doctor checked his ears, nose & throat; then poked a culture swab down his throat and sent it off to the lab. “We'll know in an hour or so what's going on,” quoth the doctor.

That was three hours ago; no word yet.

Scoble says:

The New York Times today asks, “How can a blog get more readers?” We all know the real answer: post a naked picture of yourself. My traffic tripled when I did that.

Well. Don't expect anything like that here. This is, after all, a daybook, not a blog.

Once upon a time, there was the Windows CE operating system. It ran on Handheld PCs and Palm-size PCs (such as the late, lamented Nino). Then the Handheld PCs were dropped, the Palm-size PCs were renamed to Pocket PCs, and Windows CE became merely the operating-system core of the Pocket PC software. Pocket PC 2000 gave way to Pocket PC 2002, and ‘Windows CE’ became a phrase Microsoft wished people would just stop using.

The rumor mill said Microsoft was planning to announce Pocket PC 2003 today; and they did, except there's been another name change. Now it's Windows Mobile 2003.

Microsoft says that any Pocket PC 2002 machine will be upgradeable to Windows Mobile 2003; in theory, this means the iPaq could be upgraded. Unfortunately, it appears that Hewlett-Packard, acting through its avatar Compaq, has no intention of offering a Windows Mobile 2003 upgrade for 3600 series iPaqs.

Poor iPaq, soon to be officially obsolete. That doesn't mean I'll be replacing it any time soon, though: I'm still quite pleased with it.

Had some fun just now at the Apple Store web site, configuring a fully tricked-out Power Mac G5: dual 2GHz 64-bit CPUs, 8GB of memory, 500GB disk space, 23” flat-panel display, etc., etc. The total: slightly over $10,000.

We'd have to hit all six numbers in the Lotto before Jennifer would agree to such an extravagance (and perhaps not even then), but what a machine!

Grandparents came to visit this afternoon.

Jennifer & I were supposed to go see a movie, but that sort of fell through. Instead we headed to Lowe's for some concrete steps (to replace the frighteningly decrepit wooden ones outside the back door).

Getting 150 pounds of concrete from the driveway to the back yard was quite a job, but we—the four of us; Jake was sleeping—managed it without breaking anything.

That's one item checked off on our home-improvement projects list. Only thirty-eight to go.

Poor Jake, he's running a bit of a fever. Looks like a trip to the doctor tomorrow, and another ten days of antibiotics.

Finished reading Shadow of the Well of Souls, by Jack L. Chalker. What an awful book.

The Well of Souls, a planet-sized computer than runs not merely the Well World but also the entire universe, has detected Big Trouble Ahead (due to the Kraang, a mysterious being who gets a few pages at the beginning & end of each volume to snarl menacingly and gloat over his Evil Plans but who does not otherwise participate in the story). It desperately needs Nathan Brazil to save the day.

So: the Well of Souls summons Nathan Brazil (and a random selection of secondary characters and irrelevant subplots) from Earth to the Well World, and deposits them at the south pole. Unfortunately, they can't do anything there: they need to be at the equator for that. But the Well of Souls, having transported them tens of thousands of light-years across the galaxy, is mysteriously unable to transport them a few thousand extra miles, and expects them to walk instead.

So they have a few hundred pages of completely pointless adventures trying to get to the equator. More characters get surgically altered in grotesque ways, too: this must be some personal fetish of Chalker's, or something.

I might read the third book, Gods of the Well of Souls; then again, I might not.

Looks like we hit the Lotto for another $3.

Went to the Taste of Champaign-Urbana this evening, on the theory that opening night would be less crowded than Saturday afternoon (when we usually go). Alas, it was not. The food was good, though.

We took Jake to the pony ride. He liked looking at the ponies, but riding them was another matter: as soon as they started moving, he asked to get off.

Maybe next year.

He did like the Curtis Orchard donuts, though: he took a bite out of every one in the bag.

It was ten years ago today that Jennifer & I first met: a lunch date at Treno's, set up by our mutual friend Deb. I was heavily medicated, having strained my back a few days previous; ever since, I've wondered whether Jennifer would have been able to tolerate my unmedicated personality.

Perhaps not. My twenty-nine-year-old self wasn't very nice.

We celebrated with lunch at Timpone's, which is next door to the place that used to be Treno's but is now the Bread Company.

I used to collect things: magazines, books, CDs, software. Over the last few years I've switched to less tangible pursuits: genealogy, this web site, the weather data from sputnik, photography with the digital camera.

I wonder why that is.

Hot today: only 80° outside, but 90° in my office here at dear old WRI.

Jennifer & I dumped a few more bags of topsoil under the trees in the back yard, then Jennifer planted a few things in the new dirt.

And then some scary clouds rolled in from the north, the wind picked up, and the temperature dropped ten degrees. Good time to go inside, we figured.

Paid a visit to the Windows Update site this evening, so the Windows side of nessus is now as up-to-date as the Linux side.

The Office Update site—which I keep forgetting to visit—says there's a Service Pack 3 for Office 2000; I'll have to download that sometime.

Email this evening:

Pinnacle Systems is still after me to upgrade my copy of Studio DV from 1.2.6 to Studio 8. I suppose I should—I do edit the occasional video, and Studio 8 does sound rather nice.

And Scopeware is having a 20% off sale on Scopeware Vision. Sorry, still not interested. Granted, the Windows XP File Search utility is badly crippled—‘search all files’ really means ‘search some files, and ignore all the others’—but I'm not using Windows XP just yet.

WRI in the news, sort of: it seems Theo has an article in Popular Science magazine (for whom no link, as their site is a mess of pop-ups & advertisements), so PopSci readers across the nation are today hammering on Theo's Periodic Table Table web site (which is hosted at WRI). There is little bandwidth remaining for the rest of us, alas.

I've been spending more and more time lately perusing the Apple web site, configuring PowerBooks in the online store and dreaming. I keep half an eye on the PC world, but really it's hard to care.

I've been thinking about why this might be—why, after eighteen years, five different computers, six versions of MS-DOS (3.0, 3,3, 4.0, 5.0, 6.0, 6.2) and seven versions of Windows (2.1, 3.0, 3.1; NT 3.1, 3.5, 4.0; 2000), I seem to be on the verge of making the Big Switch. Having chosen to get off the upgrade treadmill, and to judge computers & software on what they can do rather than some techno-geek notion of coolness, I'm just not impressed by the latest offerings from the Intel / Microsoft axis. CPUs run a little faster; hard disks are a little bigger; Windows accumulates a bit more cruft & lock-in; so what?

On the other hand, I can stuff upwards of 200 CDs into an iPod, and have portable music. That's pretty cool.

[I realize that the Apple side of this comparison is based entirely on marketing hype. Everything just works? OS X never crashes? Maybe; maybe not.]

Hot today: 86° at 4:30pm.

Finally got around to running the Windows XP Upgrade Advisor. It put up a faux-XP window (with cartoony red & green buttons, just like the real Windows XP), trundled a bit, then offered its opinion: I'll have to reinstall Easy CD Creator afterward, but otherwise upgrading nessus to Windows XP will be completely painless.

Aside from the pain of paying $200 for it, that is.

Did a little more work on Jacob's backyard play area: put down the rest of the plastic sheeting (with big metal staples to hold it down), then spread a few more bags of mulch over it, and dumped two more bags of sand into the sandbox (since Jake's preferred style of sandbox play is to extract as much sand as possible and deposit it randomly about the yard).

Next up: a dozen (or so) bags of topsoil under the trees, followed by various plants that like shade. Slowly, our landscaping improves.

Early in the evening's activities, Jennifer's foot had an unfortunate encounter with the rake. Ouch.

Tried again with the Red Hat Network update site, got through again and downloaded all eleventy-one megabytes of updates.

I still intend to upgrade nessus to Red Hat Linux 9.0, but I suppose I won't be abandoning 8.0 after all.

My very own holiday, how nice. I even got presents from Jacob & Jennifer: a pair of manly films, Full Metal Jacket and Once Upon a Time in America.

(Incidentally, Full Metal Jacket is probably the last movie I went to see more than once.)

Spent the morning in Bloomington, eating waffles and watching Jacob & Natlie playing. I got to hold Ryan for a while; it was nice.

(The loyal readership have pointed out that Ryan's page is pretty empty—there aren't any pictures. I'll see what I can do.)

Sneaked over to the library for an hour this afternoon, to check out their new White County books: specifically, the new cemetery indices. Various Sturms and Maurers are buried in Stokes Chapel Cemetery, and a few more in Oak Grove Cemetery: two more destinations for my next White County research trip.

(John and Dorothy Maurer—I'm guessing they are husband and wife—are buried in Oak Grove. The only John Maurer in my database is the son of Jacob Maurer, Sr., and 45 years older than this one: a little mystery to investigate, the next time I'm down there.)

Quilters coming to visit, for an all-day quilter thing.

The loyal readership, having requested a change to the main Daybook page (i.e., that entries be listed oldest-first), expressed surprise at how quickly their wish was granted.

That's the cool thing about CityDesk. Pages are assembled under the control of CityScript, which means sweeping changes to the final HTML can be implemented with just a few lines of code.

Let's see you do that in FrontPage.

On a whim, booted up Linux and—surprise!—got through to the Red Hat Network update site. It trundled a bit, then announced 118MB of updates in need of downloading.

Well. I selected 39MB of the most important-sounding ones, and let it run. Three hours later, it was nowhere near finished, so I cancelled out and shut down the machine.

I think the Red Hat Linux 8.0 install on nessus is officially No Longer In Use. One of these days, I'll lay hands on a real copy of Red Hat 9.0 (I want documentation, and also feel a little guilty using their software unless I've paid for it).

I saw copies of Red Hat 9.0 at Staples today; one of these days, I'll buy one.

Sputnik recorded almost two inches of rain between 7:00pm and 10:00pm last night. (Actually, it recorded 18.80 inches, but the rain guage is miscalibrated and I'm too lazy to fix it.) No rain this morning, just heavy overcast, thick fog and 100% humidity.

Dropped the car off at Hill Ford for an oil change: only two months late. Oops.

Rumors abound of Exciting New Stuff coming from Apple. Various people have said, “I'd love to tell all about it, but I signed an NDA.” I guess it'll show up on Apple's web site soon enough.

Rumors also abound that Microsoft is abandoning the Pocket PC in favor of the new (and not quite completely-baked) Tablet PC. The latter, since it runs real Windows XP instead of a stripped-down rewrite, has a certain appeal. On the other hand, this is another data point for the ‘Microsoft is more interested in writing new code than in maintaining or evolving old code’ conspiracy theory.

Last night, I pulled a track off Vapor Trails (the most recent Rush album) and copied it to the iPaq, figuring to give the newly-installed Windows Media Player a test. There were problems.

First, the iPaq speaker is pitifully small, and barely adequate to emit the usual Pocket PC bloops and bleeps (which I keep disabled, for fear of annoying bystanders). Music played through it is recognizable, barely, but listening to it is hardly a pleasant experience. Second, while there is a standard headphone jack, the lowest volume setting is still painfully loud. I suppose I'll keep Windows Media Player installed, on the off chance that I find a use for it; but I surely will not be listening to music with it.

The loyal readership have requested that entries on the main Daybook page be listed oldest-first (as they once were). Ask, and ye shall receive.

Cloudy this morning, but no rain.

The indexer script reports that the Daybook contains 197,384 total words and 15,045 unique words. That's a little misleading, since numbers, acronyms, etc., all count as words; even so, 197,000 words is as big as a good-sized novel.

I should add a link-extractor to my indexer. There are all sorts of long-forgotten links lurking here & there within the Daybook; some of them might still be of interest.

The top five words in the Daybook:

Another four albums from Gordon Lightfoot's back catalog have been released (a year ago, which shows how well I've been paying attention).

There's a web site, gordonlightfoot.com, but it's a fan site. A fairly good one, but not the man himself.

Apple says:

For Windows users, iPod includes the award-winning PC media player MUSICMATCH Jukebox Plus.

That's all I need—another media-player application cluttering up the computer and fighting with all the others for control of audio & video file types. I'm still a little leery of such things after the RealPlayer disaster of January 14, 2002.

If I have to install Jukebox Plus to use an iPod, maybe I don't want an iPod any more.

Ugly weather this evening, around 7:00pm: low, dark clouds, lots of red blobs on the radar, synthesized voices interrupting all cable channels to read tornado warnings.

No tornadoes, but it did rain quite a bit.

Thunderstorms this morning. Jake & I got rained on.

Ars Technica has an interesting article about Hamlet, an analytical tool that attempts to predict airfare changes (so travellers can buy when prices are lowest).

I don't fly—I don't travel much, and when I do, I drive—so I'm not that interested in tracking the price of an airline ticket. Now, if Hamlet could be adapted to predict gas prices, that would be useful & valuable.

(The way gas prices change is starting to look very suspicious to me. It seems that prices go up quickly, and come down slowly. I've seen plenty of overnight 20¢/gallon increases, but can't remember the last time prices fell that much in a single day. Usually it's just 2¢ here & there, until the next big increase.)

Creating an index of the Daybook is turning out to be easier than I thought. Since I went through the pain of converting these pages to XHTML, they're all valid XML documents, which means I can use the (rather nice) MSXML package to examine them. It didn't take long at all to write a few lines of VBScript that examines one or more XHTML files and generates a list of all words appearing therein. From there, it's a simple matter of coding to build a real index, with links & all.

I knew the XHTML conversion project would prove useful, someday.

Randomly following links here & there across the web—it beats working—I encountered a word I didn't recognize: gafiate. Context suggested it meant something like “quit” or “give up & go home”, but I wanted to know for sure. Most people who use the word already know what it means, so Google wasn't immediately helpful; in the end, I found www.quinion.com/words/weirdwords/ww-gaf1.htm, which says it's the verb form of the acronym GAFIA, short for “getting away from it all”.

Supposedly, gafiate appears in Fallen Angels, by Niven, Pournelle & Flynn; I read that book, years ago, but apparently gafiate didn't leave much of an impression. (Nor did the book itself: as I recall, it was a frothy little item, full of fannish in-jokes and not terribly engaging for non-fans.)

Problems running my HTML indexer: the XML parser wants access to the XHTML DTD, which is over on the W3C web site, and can't find it unless I'm dialed in to Netcom (and not always then, either). There's also some invalid XHTML here & there in the Daybook; I am fixing it as I find it.

Genealogy Society meeting this evening: a brief overview of the Busey family. Sure have been a lot of them, since the first one showed up in Maryland 350 years ago, and they've been busy, too.

The other day, I tried to play a movie on the iPaq, and discovered that Windows Media Player was missing: apparently I never installed it after upgrading the iPaq to Pocket PC 2002. Fortunately, I still have the (two-year-old) upgrade CD, and installed it tonight. I haven't tried to run it yet, but I'm hopeful.

There's an update on Microsoft's web site; I'd better download that now, while I'm thinking about it.

(I also have the Windows Media Play Pack for Pocket PC, which is even older. It contains, among other things, To Kill a Mockingbird in WMA format: only 93MB. Alas, my storage card is only 32MB.)

Had another look at the Shouting Ground Technologies web site (www.shout.net). They have dialup, ISDN and SDSL; the latter, at $175/month & up, is for business only. Their ISDN service starts at $25/month for 64Kbps (i.e., only 25% faster than dialup). Their dialup service, at $17.50/month, is cheaper than EarthLink. They have the usual email, web & news servers, domain hosting, etc., etc., blah blah blah.

If I were inclined to switch Internet providers, and had to stick with dialup, Shouting Ground would be a reasonable choice. But if I'm going to put Jennifer & myself through the hassle of changing Internet providers, I want better than dialup, which they don't provide. (No, ISDN is not better than dialup—not at the price I'm willing to pay.)

Email & web hosting are checklist services that Internet providers are expected to offer, but really it's a bad idea to use them. (Just like it's a bad idea to tie one's cellular number to a particular phone company; fortunately, the FCC is putting an end to that.) I'd rather let Pair.com handle my web site & email; then I can shop around for the best Internet connection. (That I'm still using my Netcom address is due more to laziness than any great love for Netcom / MindSpring / EarthLink, aka the chimps.)

Microsoft has a Windows XP Upgrade Advisor, that will examine Windows 2000 systems and decide whether they can be upgraded safely to Windows XP. I think I will see what it has to say about nessus. (Probably, “Buy a new computer.” Don't hold your breath, 'softies.)

[Downloaded it at work, forgot to bring it home. Maybe tomorrow.]

Apple says the 10GB iPod will hold “2,500 songs”. What they don't say is how many minutes that is, which would be a far more useful measure (unless all the songs you listen to are the same length).

Fortunately, MacAddict magazine (www.macaddict.com) is more helpful: four minutes per song, which means 10,000 minutes per 10GB. If AAC files are 128KB/sec, that implies AAC files are compressed to 14% of the size of the raw audio data, which seems pretty good to me (not that I'm an expert on such things).

On the downside, AAC files aren't supported on Windows. And there's no telling whether the FireWire card in nessus will talk to an iPod. These things are supposedly all standardized, but that doesn't mean they'll work together.

Assembled a list of Things To Buy At Menard's: an entire page of parts & supplies, in aid of the long list of home-improvement projects we've been putting off.

We set off for Menard's with high hopes, but in the end came home with nothing more than two sacks of light bulbs and a plan to try again during the week.

3:05pm, and Jacob is sleeping.

Outside, the wind is picking up, clouds are gathering, and rain seems likely. The forecast was for isolated thunderstorms, but that's small consolation if you're under one.

In the mail, yesterday or Friday (I don't recall which): the July 2003 issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal. My subscription ran out with the May issue; perhaps they can't believe that after eighteen years I've let it lapse.

In today's paper, a letter from Mike Berger, formerly part of the Plato crowd, on behalf of his employer, Shouting Ground Technologies: Don't buy Internet connectivity from Volo Broadband, buy it from us instead. I looked into Shouting Ground a few months ago; their service area is even smaller than DSL and/or cable. If you're not within a few blocks of their office in downtown Champaign, forget it.

Still, he raised one valid point: Volo's 250MB/day bandwidth limit means you can't download entire CD images (e.g., from Red Hat). That's not something I'd do very often (even with a high-speed Internet connection) so the 250MB limit would not be as burdensome as Mr. Berger suggests.

The great Daybook Entry Separation Project is complete: instead of forty-three (more or less) monthly pages, there are 1,077 daily entries. It only took nine months (having started on September 26, 2002); what will I do with my time, now that I don't have to fool with old Daybook entries any more?

And it occurs to me that I haven't inflicted any webcam images on the loyal readership in quite some time. Here ya go!

Coolness: the Maine Solar System Model: www.umpi.maine.edu/info/nmms/solar/index.htm. I read, long ago, of a similar project, in Peoria; here's another one.

Grandparents visited from Arlington Heights today. Much fun was had by all, especially Jacob.

Also today: the WRI Fifteenth Anniversary Picnic, out at Theo's farm (far to the southeast of Urbana). We did not attend.

Finished reading Echoes of the Well of Souls, by Jack L. Chalker: three hundred thirty-eight pages, almost entirely lacking in character and/or plot development.

I guess he saved all that for the second volume, Shadow of the Well of Souls. At least, I hope he did.

All three books in this trilogy are liberally plastered with identifying marks: all three titles include the phrase ‘Well of Souls’ and the covers feature a prominent black hexagon containing the phrase ‘A Well World Novel’. In the foreword, Chalker says this is because the fans were slow to realize that The Return of Nathan Brazil was part of the series, so it didn't sell quite so well as the others.

David Brin's Uplift series gets the same treatment. I suppose it helps to sell books, which encourages authors to keep writing them, but it still seems just a little condescending.

Woke up feeling quite wretched—stuffed-up nose, painfully dry throat, as tired as if I hadn't slept at all, etc., etc. Later, I felt better.

Most WRIfolk trudged off to Hessel Park this afternoon, for the Fifteenth Anniversary Company Photo; I declined to participate. My official excuse is that I wasn't feeling very well, which is true, but mainly I just didn't want to be in the picture. They're going to hang a great big print of it in the WRI lobby, and who'd want to look at me until it's time for the Twentieth Anniversary Company Photo?

Continued the daybook separation project: only November and December of 2000 are left.

Spent a long time this evening looking at old Jacob pictures. He's only twenty-six months old, but that's time enough to accumulate a few remember-whens.

Jake was so tiny when he was born!

My cold is definitely on the wane. Not that I feel particularly well just yet, but I'm getting better.

A gloomy sort of day: cold, cloudy, drizzly.

Jacob went to bed early last night, slept late this morning, and woke up in a reasonably good mood. (Always a good thing.)

My cold seems to have leveled off. I sneeze, I cough, I blow my nose (honk), but I don't feel quite so bad as I did yesterday.

It seems the News-Gazette ran an article last December about Volo Broadband, that goes into some detail as to what the $300 setup fee actually buys. Quite a lot, as it turns out: the technician will come to the house, install a (small) antenna & ancillary hardware, run an ethernet cable from there to the computer, and get everything aligned & calibrated.

I like Volo Broadband. They're a local company. Their prices are half that of DSL or a cable modem. Their attitude is refreshingly technical: they are providing internet connectivity, which means they place no restrictions (other than bandwidth limits) on what their customers do with their internet connection. As their FAQ puts it:

Do you filter ports?
No.
Does this mean I can run a server?
You betcha!

The DSL & cable-modem people think they're providing an ‘entertainment service’—i.e., you're allowed to look at web pages and do email, but most everything else is verboten.

I like Volo Broadband, but that doesn't mean I'll be calling them up any time soon. $300 is a lot of money.

[But if I had known about Volo Broadband before spending $261.74 on a GPS receiver, which would I have chosen? Hm...]

Geekstuff: I happened to double-click on My Computer while holding down the Shift key (or was it Control?), and the My Computer window came up without the usual folder-tasks sidebar. All other Explorer windows were likewise missing the sidebar.

I had quite a time getting it back. The Windows XP online help says go to Control Panel -> Folder Options -> General, and select “Show common tasks in folder”, but apparently this won't take effect until you log out & log back in again (or reboot the machine in frustration, which is what I did).

I have to wonder why Shift-double-click-My Computer (or Control-etc., whatever) does something sneaky like that. It isn't documented anywhere. Probably one of the ’softies thought it was cool & sneaked it in when nobody was looking.

The Chronology page has been mysteriously truncated. I'll have to fix that.

[I believe I have. We'll see.]

I just noticed that my brother has taken his web site down: www.ricesterland.com has been gradually losing pages over the last year or two; now, it just says, “A Defunct Place”. I'm sure there's a story behind that, but I've no idea what it is.

Fooled around a bit with Mozilla Firebird this afternoon. It installs easily (unzip files into a convenient directory, then run MozillaFirebird.exe), uninstalls easily (delete the directory you unzipped the files into), gets along nicely with Internet Explorer (i.e., it doesn't take over the .html file type unless you tell it to), and renders web pages at least as well as Internet Explorer.

And it blocks pop-ups. That's something Internet Explorer will never do, for fear of hurting MSN's advertising revenues. I used Netscape until Internet Explorer 3.x was released; maybe now it's time to switch back.

Jim Mischel contemplates his former self:

My 20-year-old self is idealistic, unforgiving, blunt, foul-mouthed, and damned annoying.

I suppose the difference between Jim and me is that I still am all those things—except, perhaps, that I have replaced idealism with cynicism and the melancholy suspicion that...

The beasts, they hunger, and eat, and die;
And so do we, and the world's a sty;
Hush, fellow-swine: why nuzzle and cry?
Swinehood hath no remedy

Jennifer took a very nice picture of Jacob last Sunday, so I have declared it the official twenty-six-month photo (and sneaked it into the June 1 daybook entry).

Jacob very grumpy this morning, probably because he didn't get enough sleep last night. Poor little guy.

Cloudy all day. Weatherdroids predicted rain, but none fell.

The conspiracy theorists are having fun with this comment by Brian Countryman, “Program Manager in Internet Explorer“ (whatever that means):

As part of the OS, IE will continue to evolve, but there will be no future standalone installations. IE6 SP1 is the final standalone installation.

The simple theory is that Microsoft is trying to force people who use older versions of Windows to upgrade to Windows XP, by denying them newer versions of Internet Explorer. The complicated theory is that Microsoft plans to stuff all kinds of DRM into Internet Explorer, and can't / won't back-port it to Windows 9x / 2000. Or maybe it just means that you won't be able to buy an Internet Explorer CD any more: you'll have to download Internet Explorer from the Windows Update site.

We'll see. In the meantime, there's always Mozilla Firebird.

Must remember to take the official twenty-six-month Jake photo this evening.

Interesting: the current radar image shows rain over most of Illinois, except for an irregular polygon with vertices at (approximately) Peoria, Pontiac, Champaign and Lincoln. The cloud cover just now (4:43pm) looks pretty thick; I wonder why it's not raining here.

It rained a little, but nothing much.

The chamomile has sprouted: lots of tiny little green shoots are poking up from the dirt. (Maybe they're weeds?) Jennifer's been doing all the watering; I've been a most neglectful gardener.

Spent the afternoon in Normal, with the grandparents. Ryan was there, too, but I didn't get to hold him or anything: I've got a cold.

sniffle
cough
HONK

Jake, on the other hand, is doing much better.