July 2003 Archives

Last night, Jake decided to jump straight up while I was leaning over him, and crashed headfirst into my chin. He barely noticed, and ran off like nothing had happened; but it hurt.

I didn't know a sprained jaw was possible.

Warm today: high of 86°. It hasn't rained in a while, either; might be time to water the lawn again.

Installed Photoshop Album this evening. It seems to be stuffed full of useful features, but learning how to use them will take some time. And I'm wondering what to do with the scores of medium-resolution and thumbnail images I've created over the years; I've yet to find a way to tell Photoshop Album that one file is a thumbnail of another one.

I'll keep trying.

Well, now. I added one image to my Photoshop Album catalog, spent half an hour reading the online help, then decided to fool around with the Calendar Creator.

“Drag your images here to add them to the calendar,” it said, so I did.

Windows 2000 promptly crashed, dead as hammer, Blue Screen of Death & an automatic reboot. Most likely, this is a bug in the display drivers, but why Photoshop Album might be triggering it I've no idea.

Maybe it's time to uninstall Photoshop Album, and see what Picasa has to say for itself.

Slept a little better last night. Setting the air-conditioner at 75° raises our power bill a bit, but sleep is more important than money.

Looking at image-management software:

Microsoft just announced Digital Image Suite 9, which looks to be the latest descendant of PictureIt; the people at Pocket PC Thoughts all seem to like Picasa (www.picasa.net); but PC Magazine gave Editor's Choice to Adobe Photoshop Album.

Photoshop Album is $49, while Picasa in $29. Each has a trial version available for free download. Maybe I'll try them both.

Downloaded Photoshop Album and Picasa, and brought them home to install. The Photoshop Album installer wants to run as Administrator. Alas, I have no time for such foolery tonight; it will have to wait.

And Fog Creek has released CityDesk 2.0 Release Candidate 1. It's free, too, at least to people like me who bought version 1.0. I must remember to download it tomorrow.

So much software, so little time....

Still using SharpReader, and grumbling at sites that don't have an RSS feed.

Pointed one of the WRI build machines at the Windows Update site this morning; it trundled a bit, then announced: 17 Critical Updates. Maybe I should update the build machines more often?

Didn't sleep too well last night. I suppose that 32oz Coke I picked up at the McDonald's drive-through at 4:00pm yesterday might have had something to do with it. When will I learn that caffeine is a morning-only indulgence?

Rain this morning. Nothing too dramatic—no thunder, no lightning—just a long, steady soaking.

jwz & his LiveJournal cronies are having a discussion of Stephen Wolfram's book, A New Kind of Science. This comment made me laugh:

But it's all kinda purty in a data porn way. Eventually I just turned the pages numbly, letting the graphics wash over me like the projections at an electronica concert.

“Data porn”?

Fooled around a bit with SharpReader 0.9.2 (from www.sharpreader.net): it's an RSS aggregator that runs on the .NET Framework. It works pretty nicely. I told it about the sites I read every day, and it tells me whenever any of them posts an update. Beats running the web browser and checking them all by hand, that's for sure.

(This is another in the category of “software that's useful only if your computer is always on and always connected to the internet”. I don't imagine I'll be using it at home any time soon.)

For the last month or so, the tires on Mr. Explorer have been making the familiar your tires are out of alignment & your tread is rapidly being destroyed noise, so I took it in today for a realignment.

Just now—3:00pm—Hill Ford called to say, “Your alignment is fine.” So why the horrible tire noise? It's like this:

Last year, the wheels were badly misaligned, and the tires picked up a little tread wear before I got the alignment fixed (on September 6, that was). The worn tires were on the rear wheels (where they're not so noisy) until last month's rotation. Now they're up front again, and I get to hear wup-wup-wup whenever the car is moving.

The Hill Ford guy said the tread depth is fine, and offered the hope that maybe the current asymmetry—my word, not his—will correct itself over time. He also suggested that I consider a different brand of tire, when it's time for new ones. “Those Goodyears, they wear funny sometimes.”

I'll keep that in mind.

Somebody left a stack of CDs in the WRI breakroom, under a sign reading FREE. One of them was Dream Theater, Images and Words. I've been hearing for ten years (at least) that Dream Theater is a good band, but that never motivated me to buy any of their albums. Free, however, is hard to pass up.

It's…all right. The music is good enough, but the words are buried in the mix so I have no idea what the singer is saying. (There's a lyric sheet, but I'm too lazy to read it.)

I figure this one's going back in the breakroom as soon as it's over (if not sooner).

Grandparents coming to visit this afternoon. Jake will be very happy.

(Just now—2:26pm—he's sleeping, having had a busy morning of swimming & playing with the kids of Jennifer's friend Kim.)

I've never used the My Documents folder in Windows, because it's always been on the system partition: user files don't belong there, they belong on the user partition. So I created my own home directory in the right place, and ignored My Documents.

It turns out to be trivial to move My Documents: just right-click on the desktop shortcut, click Properties, click Move, and pick a new location. Now my home directory & My Documents are the same place, which will make backups much easier.

One snag: ActiveSync didn't notice that My Documents had moved, and insisted on looking in the old place for the Files synchronization folder. Fortunately, the location of this folder is in the registry, in the Briefcase Path value buried in the Windows CE Service key under HKEY_CURRENT_USER. Hack hack hack, and presto! ActiveSync gets with the program.

Went to see Whale Rider this afternoon. The idea was that Jake would play with the grandparents while we were at the show, but he slept the whole time. I suppose he wore himself out, swimming.

Great movie. It makes me want to learn about the Maori.

(There's a web site: www.whaleriderthemovie.com. Unwieldy site design, but lots to read there.)

Orchestral Manoeuvres in the Dark has a web site, www.omd.uk.com, from which I learn that Andy McCluskey released one more album after Liberator (1993): Universal (1996). I'll have to buy it sometime.

Geekstuff: CityDesk Home Edition is going away in version 2.0; the word from Fog Creek is that it was too cheap to support, and customers were worried and/or annoyed by the 500-file limitation. When 2.0 ships, everybody gets Professional Edition and no file limits. How nice.

Today is Opening Day for Curtis Orchard.

Visited Curtis Orchard after work this evening. Jake had fun climbing on the tractor, playing in the hay, chasing the kittens, etc., etc. (No pictures; I forgot to bring the camera.)

This made me laugh: the ISO 639-2 code for Sumerian is sux.

I can be so childish sometimes.

Tired today. Grumpy.

A redesign of the Best Buy web site (www.bestbuy.com) went online a few days ago; I noticed today that they've added Wish Lists, like Amazon.com. I created one, and added a few items, then ran into a problem: there's no way to publish a link to my wish list. I can't post it here, I can't send it in email. I didn't see a search option, either, so people who know I have a wish list won't be able to find it.

What's the point?

Had the notion of creating a LiveJournal account for myself. (Everybody else has one; I'm feeling left out.) Alas, they want money. Not much—$25/year—but more than I feel like paying.

[There's also an invitation system—somebody who already has a LiveJournal account can send account creation codes to potential new users—but I don't know anyone to hit up for an invite.]

A recent conversation:

Mama: “What shall we have for dinner tonight?”
Papa: “Let's have Jake!”
(Papa pretends to nibble on Jake's cheek.)
Jake: “Don't eat my face!”

Jacob's backyard play area has sprouted an impressive crop of tiny purple mushrooms.

Blogging software is everywhere. The Research & Development page on the WRI internal web site was recently redone using Movable Type. Ceej is busily documenting her road trip on www.hiptop.com/hiplog. And everybody has a blog on www.livejournal.com.

Well...I don't, for two reasons:

• I already know HTML, and really don't want to waste what little brainpower I have on memorizing ‘easier’ alternatives, e.g., type ~~foo~~ when you want <em>foo</em>, that sort of thing.
• I can't predict now what the future of the Daybook will be, but I intend to keep these entries online & accessible as long as possible. This means I'll need to translate them from one format (XHTML) to another (whatever supersedes XHTML), probably many times over the years. Blogging software doesn't seem written with that sort of flexibility in mind.

Now, it would be nice if there were an Outlook add-in that could scan incoming email for Daybook entries, and automatically create the necessary pages & whatnot in the CityDesk file. If I were more industrious, I'd write one.

(Anyway, this is a daybook, not a blog.)

Poked around a bit in www.buymusic.com, a new online-music store. It was…interesting. I listened to a sample of Pocket Calculator by Kraftwerk; it was the disco-fied version from The Mix. Ugh. Then I tried a search for ‘Tony Carey’, and got back a list of Tony Orlando & Dawn and Mariah Carey albums. Double ugh.

I think their search algorithms need a little work. Still, it's a Windows alternative to iTunes, which is nice. I might buy some songs (79¢ & up) sometime.

Geekstuff: Microsoft has shipped Money 2004. Usually new versions of Money come out in mid-August; apparently this year they're trying to beat Quicken 2004 to market.

Judging from recent posts to microsoft.public.money, users of previous versions are underwhelmed by Money 2004. The list of new features seems pretty short, and there was one bug report that installing the Money 2004 trial version will overwrite the multimedia files of Money 2003. Maybe I'll just wait for Money 2005.

[I didn't. See November 14.]

I'd love to see some commentary from members of the Money team at Microsoft. Why do so many of their customers greet each new release with indifference and/or hostility? Alas, the Money team is maintaining radio silence.

Joel Spolsky said (three years ago):

But there were also branches that were just not as successful: MSN failed again and again and again; Microsoft Money took forever to get going, and Microsoft Consulting Services is full of airheads. In each of these cases it's pretty clear that a B leader built up a business unit full of C players and it just didn't work.

I want Joel to be wrong about this. I want the Money team to be a bunch of clever folks beavering away on really great software. But available evidence suggests otherwise.

The little purple mushrooms from this morning are already gone.

Thunderstorms last night, starting around 3:00am: they woke up everybody, except for Jacob. Sputnik recorded an inch of rain between 3:00am and 4:00am, which seems excessive for July.

This morning I am very tired, and fighting off a headache.

In today's mail: a check for $50, the rebate from Garmin for the GPS receiver I bought on May 13.

Went out for ice cream this evening. Jake had chocolate.

Slow day: nothing much going on, besides a little cleaning. Jennifer's trying to get over a cold, so we're taking it easy.

Looks like we hit the Lotto again: another $3 for Jacob's college fund.

3:44pm, and Jacob is sleeping. He's in the grandma bed, not the crib: he's a big boy now, time to start sleeping in a big-boy bed.

When we tucked him in, he protested mightily, but after a while he settled down & fell asleep.

A surprise phone call this afternoon: the nice people at the Family History Center called to tell me that I filled out the forms wrong on Friday morning, and paid $3.50 too much for the three spools of microfilm I requested.

Oops.

They offered me a refund, but I declined: I'm sure I'll find more microfilm I need to look at, so they might as well keep the $3.50 until then.

CNN says Idi Amin—living in exile in Saudi Arabia since he was kicked out of Uganda in 1979—is in a coma. Apparently, nobody expects him to recover, since they're arguing over where to bury him.

The Ugandans have already said that they don't want him. Does anyone?

A morning visit to Hessel Park—across the street from my old (1991–1995) apartment—for some sort of fun-stuff-for-kids day. That part of it was pretty much a bust, but Jake really liked playing in the sprinklers.

Another Saturday, another trip to the library. This time I wasn't looking for anything in particular, just poking around in the newly-acquired White County books. There was a very nice book about the Old Cemetery in Carmi: instead of just a dry list of names, this one had detailed maps of the cemetry, showing where the graves are located. It also had some pictures, and relevant historical information.

Well, yes, it had names, too. Alas, all this labor was wasted on me, as I have no relatives buried there. Now, if they publish a similar book for Maple Ridge Cemetery, I'll be very happy: quite a few relatives are buried there, but I've had no luck yet finding their graves.

In the news: Red Hat is apparently abandoning retail sales of Red Hat Linux. I guess that's why I can never find any copies at Best Buy. I suppose they want me to buy a Red Hat Network membership and download CD images from their web site. The last time I checked, RHN memberships cost considerably more than a retail copy, which makes them decidedly unappealing.

Thunderstorms last night: loud enough to wake up Jennifer & me, but not Jacob. Maybe I needn't have bothered to water the lawn the other day.

Paid a brief visit to the local Family History Center, which is tucked into a corner of the Mormon church on Windsor Road (the entrance is on the east side of the building), to request some microfilm: probate & naturalization records for White County, Illinois.

Once the films arrive, sometime in August, I might find Jacob Maurer's naturalization papers.

The other day, I looked at the usage statistics for the old—i.e., Netcom—web site, and was surprised to see that it still gets quite a bit of traffic (relatively speaking). I haven't updated the old site since December, and there's a big yellow box at the top of each page, announcing the move and giving a link to the new site. I'm baffled. Surely by now everyone would have updated their bookmarks?

Word is that America Online has sacked the remaining Netscape developers (or will do so very soon), and is dismantling what's left of Netscape-the-company.

The Mozilla people hasten to point out that Mozilla is still around, still has lots of developers working on it, etc., etc. I hope so—I like Mozilla Firebird, and am looking forward to version 1.0.

Requiescat in pace, Netscape.

Web browsers are heating up again. After years of stagnation, suddenly there's Safari (for OS X) and Mozilla Firebird (which will probably survive the current uncertainty). Microsoft, on the other hand, has abandoned Internet Explorer as a standalone application in favor of ‘integrating’ it with Windows.

I'd love to see the three browsers competing over who best complies with the relevant W3C standards, but I don't think that fits too well with Microsoft's traditional embrace-extend-extinguish strategy. Perhaps instead we'll see Safari and Mozilla competing in standards compliance, while Internet Explorer lags further & further behind.

I thought that the iPaq couldn't synchronize with a Macintosh, but I was wrong: the nice people at Mark/Space (www.markspace.com) have announced The Missing Sync, which synchronizes Pocket PC 2002 & Windows Mobile 2003 devices (and maybe others; they're still testing) with OS X 10.2.

Sprayed more toxic goo on the green beetles nibbling on the backyard shrubbery, since Monday's treatment didn't faze them.

Eat Sevin, chitinous scum!

They're into the apple tree, too. We'll have to spray that tomorrow. I wonder how long we have to wait before the apples are safe to eat. Days? Months? Years?

A few reunion pictures have been sneaked into the July 12 entry.

Overcast this morning. Thunderstorms all around, but no more than a few sprinkles here in Champaign.

Poked around a bit in WriteAPrisoner.com: personal ads from inmates looking for pen-pals.

Most of them discreetly left blank the “Incarcerated For” space in the about-the-inmate form, but a few were upfront: murder, armed robbery, etc. Either way, the ones I looked at were all rather scary-looking.

I wonder: who sends letters to inmates? (Not me, that much is certain.) And why?

The fourth beta of CityDesk 2.0 was released yesterday, which I suppose means they're still a few weeks from final. I'm eager to start using the new functionality in 2.0, but not so eager that I'll trust these pages to beta software.

Dismantled the garage-door opener wall switch this evening: somehow this morning it jammed, preventing the switches in the cars from working. I took it apart, reseated the switch plate, reassembled it, and—presto!—all was well.

I felt very manly.

The Illinois Secretary of State web site (www.sos.state.il.us) appears to be down: for some of my bookmarks, I get 404 (page not found); for others, 403 (authorization failure). Guess I won't be poking around in any of the online databases until they get this sorted out.

This just in: our shiny new kitchen phone is a 2.4GHz model, exactly the sort that is notorious for conflicts with 802.11b wireless networks. We have one of those, too, in the form of a Microsoft MN-500 wireless base station attached to nessus.

In theory, there are ways to persuade the two to play nice together. In practice, we haven't noticed any problems yet (most likely because neither the telephone nor the wireless network gets much use).

The Secretary of State has got his web site online again. The Illinois Statewide Death Index, 1916–1950 lists a Jefferson Aldredge, Jr., who died in Saline County in 1935. He's about the right age to be the brother of Arenna Alldredge, who married James Clinton Sturm.

I'll have to get a copy of his death certificate, the next time I'm in Springfield.

In today's mail: my 401(k) quarterly statement. My balance is up about 24% for the year, which is nice.

Shiny green beetles are eating the bushes in the back yard. I sprayed them with toxic goo, but they didn't seem to mind much. Maybe it just takes a while to kill them.

Interesting: Davis Instruments (makers of sputnik), have a non-weather widget, CarChip. It's a data logger that plugs into a car's diagnostic port (which all 1996 & later models will have) and, according to the CarChip web page, records...

...time and date, distance, speed, idle time, hard accelerations and decelerations, and engine diagnostic trouble codes.

I predict this will be very popular with parents of teenagers.

Back from Janesville.

I took both cameras, hoping to get pictures of as many people as possible; alas, I did not. Jennifer did get some good shots of the kids swimming in the hotel pool. Perhaps I will post a few here.

We are all very tired.

Geekness: I forgot to bring my Sicily book on the trip, and so had nothing to read. Then I remembered the copy of Around the World in 80 Days on the iPaq, and read that whenever it was time for reading.

At the Guild Family Reunion, in Janesville, Wisconsin.

There's an Alldredge family web site, www.aldridgefamilyresearch.org, with lots of information about various Alldredges here & there about the country. As yet I haven't found anything there about Jefferson Alldredge of Posey County, Indiana; but I'm still looking.

(For a web site, it doesn't have much HTML: most pages are Word documents, or RTF.)

Beautiful day today. All the rain has really scrubbed the air clean: the sky is a perfect shade of blue, all the way to the horizon. That's a rare sight, even here in the nearly-rural part of Illinois.

Curious kitchen machinery: the Octodog, www.octodog.net. It's a slicer thingy that turns hot dogs into octopi. Jacob likes hot dogs (especially with ketchup); I wonder what he'd have to say about an Octodog.

Catch-22 of the day: the Dublin Dr. Pepper bottling plant, down in Dublin, Texas (www.dublindrpepper.com) will sell their product in 10oz returnable glass bottles. However, their web site warns that:

Effective immediately, 10 oz. returnable bottles of Dublin Dr Pepper will only be available for purchase at our physical location in Dublin, Texas. To get returnables you have to have the same size and type of returnable to trade in. We no longer sell returnables without trade-ins.

But I don't have any empties to trade in! I just found out about them today, from a link on Alton Brown's web site (www.altonbrown.com). Guess I'll have to buy cans instead.

The Alldredge family site claims that the Alldredges are descended from one Sir Nicholas De Alreswich The Crusader, born sometime in the late 14th century.

Well, yes, I suppose that's possible, but I must confess to a certain degree of skepticism. It doesn't help that their data has no source citations whatsoever.

Interesting coincidence, that the invasion of Sicily took place on July 10, 1943, and sixty years later I am reading Bitter Victory, a book about it.

No thunderstorms today, at least not yet (8:44pm). Outside, everything looks a bit damp. The lawn & trees are as green as they were in May. And the temperature is a pleasant 69°. We have the air conditioner off, and the windows open, for the first time in quite a while.

Thunderstorms last night, shortly after midnight: they woke me up, and interfered with my sleep for a good part of the night.

Rather sleepy this morning.

Yesterday evening I retrieved the Sharper Image stereo from the bedroom closet and laid out the pieces—the speakers and the stereo itself—on the living room bookshelves; this morning I hooked everything up & turned it on. It still works, which means we can play CDs now without turning on the DVD player & television. How nice.

But now there's fifty feet of speaker wire tucked behind the bookshelves, which seems a little excessive: we could put one speaker in the front yard and another in the back, there's so much wire back there. Perhaps I should trim it a little.

(During the stereo's time in the closet, or perhaps while I was wrestling it out of the box yesterday, the volume got turned all the way up; the noise when I turned it on frightened Jacob, who needed a bit of calming from Mama before he'd go back to his breakfast and Bob-the-Builder DVD. Poor little guy.)

Thunderstorms today, too: 12:49pm, the sky is dark & noisy, and sheets of rain hurl themselves against my office window.

It occurs to me that the anti-iTunes contingent might have a point: some albums really are cohesive works, not just collections of unrelated songs. I wouldn't want to buy Amused to Death one song at a time—or listen to it that way.

On the other hand, I have doubts that the average Metallica or Red Hot Chili Peppers album qualifies as a single cohesive work.

Years ago, I stumbled across Jennifer Ringley's web site: either I found it myself, or one of the WRIfolk pointed it out to me, I don't remember. This was long before JenniCam, when she was just a college student using the dorm computer lab webcam to post an atlas of body parts.

Then there was JenniCam, and brief fame (infamy?).

JenniCam still exists. But the fame is long gone, and there never was much fortune to be had from the JenniCam franchise. Instead of doing web design for National Geographic in Washington, DC, Jennifer lives somewhere in California (Sacramento?) and works for an unspecified (but DCFS-ish sounding) goverment agency. She has a house, a boyfriend (of whom former JenniCam fans have just about nothing nice to say), and a bunch of pets.

It sounds pleasant enough—but I have to wonder whether she expected to settle so completely into a pleasant but mundane adult existence. (Does anyone?)

The coming-soon page on the Microsoft web site proclaims the imminence of Money 2004:

Count on faster, easier-to-apply tools for organizing and managing personal or small-business finances.

Faster? I'll believe that when I see it, 'Softies.

On the same page, Streets & Trips 2004:

Right around the corner, it's a complete travel-planning package loaded with maps, points of interest, routes, clear driving directions, and Pocket PC compatibility.

Well, now. Does 'Pocket PC compatibility' mean it works on my three-year-old iPaq 3600, which is running PocketPC 2002? With Microsoft, you can never be sure. Perhaps Streets & Trips 2004 only works with Windows Mobile 2003.

[Streets & Trips 2004 had no problems running on the iPaq.]

More geekstuff from Microsoft! The Wireless Intellimouse Explorer looks nice, and I'd love to remove a few wires from the rat's nest under my desk; but I suspect that Jacob would run off with it and I'd never see it again. I know how to drive Windows entirely from the keyboard, but that doesn't mean I'd enjoy doing it. Better to have a mouse that's tied down.

Sometime when I wasn't paying attention, the other Planet P Project album was released on CD. Amazon has it, for only $7, along with a bunch of Tony Carey solo albums.

Loyal readers will recall that this is one of the six albums saved from the Great Album Purge of last month; I kept it because I was sure it wasn't available on CD. How nice to have been wrong.

More music!

The Nails have a web page, www.the-nails.com. No word whether any of their albums are available on CD. My old, battered copy of Mood Swing is another of the six album-purge survivors; it would be nice to replace it with a CD.

Marc Campbell has a web page, too: www.marccampbell.com. Does this mean he's not with the Nails any more?

Another round of thunderstorms this evening. The creeks are rising, roads are flooded, much excitement all around. We were out in it, on a perhaps ill-advised trip to Circuit City to shop for portable DVD players. We found one, which will come in quite handy for keeping Jacob amused during long car trips.

Sputnik recorded approximately 3½ inches of rain today. It's a soggy world outside.

Jennifer, Jacob & I drove out last night for a look at the Olympian Drive extension project. The long-term plan is to connect Mattis Avenue and US45 with a four-lane divided roadway, but for now they're just connecting Prospect Avenue and Apollo Drive.

The curious thing is that Olympian Drive between Prospect and Market Street is being moved a good fifty feet north of its old route. I wonder why.

Another Rush DVD is in the works: Rush in Rio, a video of the last show of the Vapor Trails tour last year. It won't be released until sometime this fall; I'll have to keep an eye out for it.

Geekstuff: if I were in the market for a new iPaq—I'm not—I think I'd want the iPaq h2210. It has a CF slot, so I could use the Socket WLAN card with it; it has an SDIO slot, so I could add more storage without the need for an expansion sleeve; it has Bluetooth, which is probably useless but the word makes me laugh:

Say, I've got Bluetooth.
Perhaps you should see a dentist?

On the downside, it's running Windows Mobile 2003, on which much of my current software probably won't run; and it costs $400.

[Incidentally, paragraphs like the preceding are not intended to suggest that the loyal readership should rush out and buy for me the geektoy(s) mentioned. Absent obvious grammatical cues to the contrary—second-person pronouns, imperative tense, that sort of thing—Daybook entries are just me nattering in public.]

Genealogy Society meeting this evening.

In the news: InstallShield Software Corp. has filed suit against Wise Solutions, Inc., claiming electronic espionage, misappropriation of trade secrets, copyright infringement, skullduggery, assorted mopery and dopery, plus numerous Acts Contrary To The Laws Of Man And God.

The Wise Solutions web site is silent regarding these accusations.

Corporate lawsuits make me laugh. The press releases are suffused with outrage at the long list of offenses committed by the defendant; but the truth of it is that the lawyers have just piled on every claim & cause they can think of, trusting that a few will be left standing after the initial round of motions-to-dismiss. Nobody—not InstallShield, and certainly not the lawyers engaging in creative doublethink at $400/hour plus expenses—actually believes that Wise Solutions did all the things claimed in the suit, but they have to pretend that they do.

It's the Emperor's new lawsuit, or something.

This quote also made me laugh:

“The InstallShield brand has enormous value in the industry. When users see InstallShield they know they can expect a seamless, bulletproof software installation,” explained Rick Harold, co-founder and CTO of InstallShield.

I don't know about that—having used InstallShield since 1996, the phrase that pops into my mind whenever I think of InstallShield is 'steaming mound of yak dung'.

Interesting weather this evening: just after 5:00pm, a nasty line of storms passed through. The sky darkened alarmingly, the wind picked up (sputnik recorded a gust of 30mph), and the temperature fell ten degrees (88° to 78°) in less than an hour.

About a third of an inch of rain, too. The lawn is surprisingly green for mid-July. Usually by now we have a sere wasteland, not a lawn.

Everybody wanted to sleep in again this morning; alas, the holiday weekend was over and we had to get up. Jake in particular was quite unhappy about this.

I've been training myself to launch Mozilla Firebird instead of Internet Explorer when it's time to read a few web sites. It's just a 0.6 release, not even 1.0, but everything works very nicely. I've only noticed a few differences in page rendering: in Joel on Software, Mozilla puts link underlining below the text descenders, rather than just below the text baseline; and in Joshua Allen's blog, Better Living Through Software, the line & word spacing is all messed up: the lines are smashed together, the calendar columns don't line up, etc., etc.

I suppose Mr. Allen would be offended if I said, He works for Microsoft, what do you expect? But that's what I'm thinking.

The new phone must be returned: it has no answering machine. The phrase ‘answering machine’ appears nowhere in the breathless ad copy on the box, so it's unclear what made me think it had one.

Perhaps I'm just an idiot.

I was hoping that CityDesk 2.0 would be released today, but—alas!—the CityDesk section of the Fog Creek web site hasn't been updated since June 6.

On the other hand, Nomad Electronics (www.nomadelectronics.com) has Pocket Stars PDA, “…a high accuracy star chart, ephemeris, and Celestial Navigation calculator for the Pocket PC.” That ought to keep me busy for a while.

Another trip to Best Buy, to return yesterday's phone and pick out a replacement. Jake enjoyed sprinting up & down the aisles, but we didn't much enjoy chasing after him; finally, I picked him up and refused—in the face of vehement protests—to put him back down. It's difficult to shop while a two-year-old is shrieking in your ear, but we managed it.

The new phone really wants to sit on a table, or a desk, not hang on a wall. There's a wall-mount adapter, but it leaves the phone sticking out from the wall like a diving board.

We can give names to the handset & base station: I think I will call them Alphonse and Gertrude.

[We named them Big_Bird and Elmo.]

Some bands are refusing to sign on to Apple's iTunes music store, because Apple insists on selling individual songs, not entire albums. An amusing quote, from a mouthpiece for several of the offended bands:

“If you download a single, you may ignore the other tracks on the album,” he said. “When our artists record a body of work, it's what they deem to be representative of their careers at that time.”

I doubt it. Most albums have one or two good songs, plus filler. You'd think artists would appreciate the more precise feedback as to which songs are which—then again, I suppose record companies make more money off album sales than singles, and that's the real reason behind their refusal to sell on iTunes.

Thunderstorms last night: sputnik recorded almost two-thirds of an inch of rain between 2:00am and 3:00am. Around that time, the power went out. Two hours later, it came back on, briefly, then went out again; finally, at 6:30am it came back permanently.

No air-conditioning, no ceiling fan: sleeping was rather more difficult than usual.

Picked up a new phone for the kitchen (Jacob having torn the antenna off the old one, reducing its range from half a block to about ten feet). It looks very nice, but we won't know whether it works until the battery is fully charged (sometime tomorrow).

I thought about going to the library this afternoon, but decided against it. It's just too hot outside.

In today's paper: a letter from Volo Broadband, in response to Mike Berger's letter of June 8. The local internet providers are sniping at each other; it's pretty comical. I have to wonder, though, whether Shouting Ground's complaints are just jealousy that they can't provide high-bandwidth wireless internet access, and have nothing to offer their customers except pokey old dialup.

[Well, yes, they also have ISDN—at prices so high that only suckers would buy it.]

Jennifer bought me a new coffeemaker, to replace the one that died last month. She's very nice.

(I saved the removable parts from the old one, so now I have two travel mugs, two filter thingies, etc. No more washing dishes every night, how nice.)

Lunch was at Pickle Tree Farm, over in Mahomet. Very tasty, albeit rather pricy. Jake seemed to think he was at Curtis Orchard: he kept asking about the train (which at Curtis Orchard runs on a track up near the ceiling).

Two recent conversations with Jacob:

“What are you doing, Jake?”
“Nothing.”

“Where are you, Jake?”
“Right here! Right here!”

Another hot day: 94° at 3:45pm.

Finally, a new picture for the main page. No more beard!

Hot today: 88° at 11:00am. The parade starts at 1:05pm, but we've already decided to give it a miss this year: it's just too hot outside for parade-watching.

Fortunately, one of the local-access cable channels usually covers the parade. We'll just watch it on television, in air-conditioned comfort.

If you look closely, you can see that Jacob is wearing a goodly amount of his lunch. He's a very untidy little boy sometimes.

keithclan.com says that Elizabeth Keith married Joel Bramlet on March 23, 1830, in Hall County, Georgia. In the 1860 Census for White County, Joel Bramlet's wife Elizabeth is said to have been born in Georgia. The clues pile up, but still I am not convinced.

[On the other hand, www.bramblett.com says that the White County Joel Bramlet married Elizabeth Brasher, not Keith.]

Camped out in a vacant office at WRI and watched fireworks. It was very comfortable in the air-conditioning.

Jake liked the show. “Wow,” he said.

Sneaked off to the library this afternoon, to see what I could find out about Joel Bramlet.

There's a Joel Bramlet listed in the 1850 Census: White County, district 13, page 308, lines 11–18. He has a daughter, ‘Candas’, 15 years old. Joel & family are listed in the 1860 Census (page 477, lines 21–28), but Candas is not among them. However, two families up on the same page (lines 7–11) appears Wm. Calvin, his wife Candis, and various children; and the Secretary of State's online marriage index says that Candis Bramlet married William Calvin on January 20, 1856. It seems likely that Joel Bramlet is the grandfather of Mary Calvin, who married Jasper Sturm, but I need better evidence before adding him to my database.

According to Carolyn the librarian, the Mormons have microfilmed the land ownership & probate records for White County, and I can have these sent to the local Family History Center (on Windsor Road) for $3.25 per roll. I'll have to pay them a visit, one of these days.

A tiny little cloudburst—no more than a mile in diameter—popped up over WRI just as it was time to go home. My umbrella? At home, of course. West of Prospect, the rain started to thin out; west of Mattis there was no sign that it had rained at all.

It's things like this that make me paranoid.

In the mailbox today: another issue of Dr. Dobb's Journal. My subscription ran out three months ago, but still they come. I hope the publishers aren't expecting me to send them money.

Did a little yard work this evening: I watered the chamomile, Jennifer planted her tomato plant (which has been on the shelf next to the chamomile for a while now), Jake helped.

The chamomile is getting rather bushy, and has little yellow & white flowers all over it. I think I was supposed to thin the seedlings after a few weeks, but I never did. Oops.

Supposedly, this evening marks the beginning of a four-day holiday weekend. It doesn't feel like it.

Interesting: Dollie Austin was the daughter of Benjamin Austin; and the Bureau of Land Management says that several parcels of land were purchased by one Benjamin Austin in 1838 and 1851. I don't think the two Benjamins are the same person: the ages are wrong. Dollie Austin was born in 1880, when the land-buying Benjamin was at least sixty.

There's also a Joel Bramlet, who bought forty acres—the northeast quarter of the southeast quarter of section one, township five south, range nine east of the third principal meridian, etc., etc., blah blah blah—on March 1, 1848. Perhaps he is related somehow to Candis Bramlet, mother of Mary Margaret Calvin, who married Jasper Sturm?

I must investigate this further, when I have the time.

And so begins the second half of the year—the long downhill slide toward 2004. Summer is just getting started, really, but already I am thinking ahead to autumn and colder temperatures.

Only twenty-four days until Curtis Orchard opens for the season. Hmm...donuts....

Rather warm today: 87° at 4:00pm.

A small but surprising bit of rain, right around dinnertime. According to the radar, tiny little thunderstorms were popping up all over Illinois and Indiana. We didn't get any thunder or lightning, but sputnik recorded .01” of rain.

I suppose that means we'll have to water the lawn tomorrow.

Our poor carpet: there's a brand-new chocolate-syrup stain in the kitchen, and a bloodstain (just a drop, really) in the living room. It was clean for a day: that should count for something.