September 2003 Archives

Jacob woke up at 12:30am last night, loudly unhappy about something. He & I rocked in the rocking chair for a while, then he went back to sleep. Never did figure out what the problem was…

Cold today: the high was 57° at 2:00pm, and the temperature's been falling ever since.

Zope (www.zope.org) is sort of interesting: it provides an HTTP interface to a Python object hierarchy, or something like that. It sounds a little bit like PHP, only with a real programming language behind it.

Jacob has been very contrary this evening. (I suppose that's normal for two-year-olds.)

Cold this morning: 35° at 7:00am. There was frost on the shaded parts of the roof. Autumn is here.

The newspapers have been full of phone spammer sob stories lately: how companies will go under, and their employees—who are all minorities and/or disabled, it seems—will be out on the street, if the national do-not-call list goes into effect.

The phone spammers' latest legal maneuver is to claim that the do-not-call list violates their First Amendment right to interrupt my dinner. I am unimpressed. I can put a No Solicitors sign on my door, and rid myself of door-to-door salesvermin; federal legislation is already in place to protect my fax machine—if I had one, that is—from fax spammers; and even the US Postal Service has a form that lets me keep certain kinds of junk mail out of my mailbox.

The First Amendment guarantees the freedom to speak. It does not guarantee that anyone will listen. When this issue reaches the Supreme Court, the Court should give the phone spammers a judicial spanking & send them home.

This is an interesting issue: it forces congresscritters to choose between big corporations (and the big campaign contributions they provide) and the voters (whom the congresscritters ostensibly serve). Seldom is the true nature of government exposed so clearly.

I was wondering recently what became of Cinemania, Microsoft's movie database on a CD. Google says it was cancelled after Cinemania 97, and the microsoft.cinemania newsgroup is full of porn spam. Apparently, Cinemania went online, and is now buried somewhere in the MSN web site. I looked, but couldn't find it.

No matter. If there were a Cinemania 2004, it probably wouldn't run on nessus anyway.

Only eighty-six shopping days left until Christmas!

Pesotum—the next town south of Savoy on US 45—has a web site: www.pesotum.org.

Long ago, my WRI office had a south view, and I used the Pesotum grain elevators as a measure of air quality: the better I could see them, the cleaner the air.

Downloaded three more free e-books from the Microsoft Reader web site, got a message: “You must re-activate your copy of Reader.” Sure thing, 'softies. Too bad your activation server is down.

We're approaching the time of year when it's too cold to mow the lawn, but not cold enough for snow. How nice.

Installed SQL Server Desktop Engine on nessus this morning. It seems to be running, though I haven't actually tried to talk to it yet. It doesn't slow down the machine very much, unlike the earlier version included with Visual Studio 6.0.

I don't have Visual Studio 6.0 any more: after the last reinstall of Windows (in July of 2002), I left Visual Studio on the shelf. Later, I bagged it up with some other shelfware and took it to work, where it sits on the floor of my office, ignored & unused.

Jennifer, sitting at the computer, watching the boot sequence: “It's taking longer than usual.”

We have SQL Server Desktop Engine to thank for that.

Months after downloading ActiveSync 3.7, I finally installed it on nessus; this evening, I tried docking the iPaq. There were problems. ActiveSync noticed—on the second attempt—that the iPaq was there, and started the synchronization process; but then it stopped, with the little green wheel still spinning (another progress indicator that doesn't indicate whether progress is actually being made—Microsoft products are full of such things).

Later, I tried again, after a soft reset of the iPaq, and it worked.

And then I stopped the MSSQLSERVER service—another example of Microsoft using cryptic, abbreviated names for no good reason— and disabled it.

I'll probably uninstall it, one of these days. I don't need an SQL server on nessus: ADO.NET can talk to Access databases just as easily.

Visual C# .NET 2003 Standard edition is crippleware: it is the C# portion of Visual Studio, with certain functionality disabled or removed so as to encourage sales of the full (and considerably more expensive) package. Still, I don't need GUI database design tools (I have Access 2000), and hadn't intended on creating controls, so I don't mind very much. I'm glad to have a C# compiler with a nice GUI environment, and it only cost $83.

The SQL Server Desktop Engine, which was supposed to be included on the Visual C# CD, is missing: in its place, an IOU pointing to the Microsoft Downloads web site. I guess it wasn't ready in time, or maybe they pulled it due to the Slammer worm.

It's 69MB, so I won't be downloading it from home.

In today's mail: a Notice of Pendency of Class Action, Proposed Settlement, and Hearing. Apparently, one Terri Shields has filed suit, “on behalf of herself and all others similarly situated,” against Bridgestone/Firestone over the tire crisis of 2000 [see August 10, 2000].

For a moment, I thought I was going to get a check or something (in addition to the free tires I got three years ago), but no: the terms of the settlement are that Firestone has to make minor design changes to their tires, and run an advertising campaign focusing on “enhanced consumer awareness of tire and vehicle safetey issues.”

This evening, I asked Jake, “Jake, what do your ears smell like?”

He stopped, with a thoughtful expression, as if such a question had never occurred to him before, then turned his head as if trying to sniff his ears.

He couldn't reach them, though.

Robert Palmer and George Plimpton, dead on the same day. Coincidence, or another covert op from the shadowy conspiracy that did in Johnny Cash and John Ritter?

When Orson Welles and Yul Brynner died on the same day in 1985, it seemd a curious coincidence; but now these paired deaths are starting to look just a little suspicious.

Hm…Thomas Jefferson and John Adams died on July 4th, 1826. This conspiracy goes back much further than I thought.

[Actually, Orson Welles died on October 9th, 1985, while Yul Brynner lingered until the 10th. Somebody slipped up on this one.]

On today's playlist: Summertime Dream, by Gordon Lightfoot. The liner notes mention that this album was released in 1976, which means I've been listening to it for twenty-seven years. Egad.

[Not quite twenty-seven years: as I recall, Summertime Dream first entered the house as a Christmas present—to my mother, not to me—in 1976, so it's three months shy of twenty-seven years.]

Thunderstorms this afternoon: murky, hazy sky, with occasional thunder, but little rain. I have my umbrella with me, just in case.

[The real rain started around 5:00pm. Quite a downpour it was, too.]

The UPS fella brought me a new toy: Microsoft Visual C# .NET Deluxe Learning Edition, which is Visual C# .NET 2003 Standard plus a large tutorial book. The idea is to learn C# and ADO.NET, and do a little database programming.

I ordered it from Amazon.com on Monday, and picked the free (i.e., slowest possible) shipping option. I figured I could get along without a C# compiler for a few weeks, but now I don't have to. How nice.

Jake keeps asking, “Where's my sister?”

You don't have a sister, you silly boy. (One of the kids at daycare does have a sister, which is probably where Jake got the idea.)

Day Two of the temporary crown, and all is well. The gums around old #30 are looking a mite bruised, but it doesn't hurt—it just feels disconcertingly artificial, a lump of plastic that ought not be in my mouth.

But there it is.

It just occurred to me that Christo might approve of #30's transformation: it's been wrapped in plastic, just like Laura Palmer and the Reichstag.

[Then again, Christo's web site rather testily points out that the islands in Biscayne Bay were surrounded, not wrapped, and with polypropylene fabric, not plastic. So maybe my tooth would not interest him.]

It's a bad day in the Blogosphere: Russell Beattie is having a childish & increasingly vulgar dispute with Robert Scoble, who's taking issue with Dave Winer, who's annoyed that Scoble is taking issue with him. Or something like that. It's starting to sound like a playground full of third-graders.

(Blogosphere is perilously close to 'bogosphere', which is sometimes the more accurate term.)

In today's mail: a check for $10, the rebate for Streets & Trips 2004, which I bought last month (August 12, to be precise).

I'm impressed: forty-four days from purchase to rebate, and some of that was consumed by my procrastination getting the rebate form into the mail. Normally these things take months.

Another trip to the dentist this morning, to have #30 ground down & prepared for a crown.

The temporary crown that Mr. Dentist installed today looks like it's made from the same plastic they use in the injection-molding machines at Brookfield Zoo: the ones that dispense (for a dollar) scorching-hot plastic penguins, alligators, elephants, etc., etc.

The permanent crown won't be ready until next month sometime, which gives me a long time to worry about breaking, dislodging, or otherwise messing up the temporary one. I'm told that losing a temporary crown hurts quite a bit; I'd rather not find out.

And then we get to do it all again, on #19.

Robert Scoble says he has five hundred and thirty-three entries in his RSS aggregator. Upon reading this, my first reaction was, “He must not have any children.” As it turns out, he does; and so my second reaction was, “His wife must be contemplating divorce.”

RSS aggregators are nifty things: you can watch information propagate from the main news sites, to the second-tier news digests (like Slashdot), to the vast sea of opinionated individuals.

[Heh. The day after I wrote this, Scoble said, “…my wife is mad at me for weblogging too much….”]

Jake needs new shoes. Already?

Jake's new shoes—size ten!—have little LEDs built into them that flash when he runs around. Pretty cool, Jake.

Back in February, I started fooling around with SnipSnap (snipsnap.org), “The easy Weblog and Wiki Software.” I installed it, first on Red Hat Linux, then later on Windows XP. It ran, albeit slowly. It looked nice—the SnipSnap people surely have better graphic-design skills than I do. For six months, I used the Weblog part of SnipSnap to keep track of tasks & projects at work.

And then, about three weeks ago, I stopped. I got tired of the pseudo-HTML coding: ~~foo~~ instead of <em>foo</em>, that sort of thing. And it bothered me to keep important information locked up in a Java database inaccessible except by SnipSnap itself and a collection of not-fully-debugged admin scripts. (I don't think the SnipSnap folks use Windows much.)

Today I wrestled with the SnipSnap dbexport script, and managed to dump my database to an xml file. Now I can uninstall SnipSnap, and set about looking for a less wonky, more completely-baked replacement.

Interesting: the FAQ page on the NATO web site (www.nato.int) contains the following text, commented out so as not to be visible during normal web browsing:

Q: Is France a member of NATO?

A: France is a member of the Alliance, but does not commit forces to NATO's integrated military structure.

NATO's military structure is composed of forces made available by the various member countries for joint planning, exercises and crisis management within an international military command structure.

France left NATO's integrated military structure in 1967.

In all other respects, however, France is a full member country of the Alliance, committed like all members to the North Atlantic Treaty of 1949 and participating fully in the main decision-making body of NATO, namely the North Atlantic Council.

I wonder if this is related to the current squabbles the United States and France are having over Iraq. And why not just remove the text entirely? Don't they use revision-control software?

We've had a houseguest these last few days: Clementine, Norm & Barb's Bichon Frise (which is French for “Not a Poodle”). I was expecting a disaster, but things have gone quite well. Jake and Clementine do a good job of keeping each other entertained.

Clementine goes back to Bloomington this evening. The house will be strangely quiet without her.

I am slowly uploading CDs to the Windows Media Player media library, so I can listen to music while fooling around on the computer. Lately I've been working through the Rush catalog.

Long ago, I downloaded Dreamline from the internet (this was 1991: there were no web sites outside CERN). I did this at work, since I had no internet connection at home. (I had a CompuServe account, but in 1991 CompuServe was a gated community that had minimal contact with the outer world.) I played it on my office-mate's NeXT machine, since the PC on my desk lacked a sound card, let alone speakers. I downloaded it, I played it, I deleted it.

Twelve years later, I have a somewhat better computer: it has room for a few score albums, a decent sound system to play them, and sufficient horsepower that I can listen to music and use the computer at the same time.

How nice.

Scoble says:

It's a tradition to buy a pound of M&Ms for each year you've been at Microsoft and leave them by your door on your anniversary date.

If we did that at WRI, I'd be buying an awful lot of candy…

I wasn't paying attention, and so nearly forgot that today is Talk Like a Pirate Day (www.talklikeapirate.com). Arrr, matey!

A spammer from the far side of the Pacific—at least, that's where I think the messages came from; with spam it's difficult to be certain—sent a pair of 500KB attachments to one of the spare Netcom mailboxes. I waited through the long download process, then I deleted them.

Perhaps I should configure Outlook not to download large attachments unless I tell it to.

Visited the dentist this morning, for my semi-annual checkup. Last time, Mr. Dentist pointed to #30 (i.e., lower jaw, right-hand side, third from the back) and said, “You need a crown there, but we can put it off until next time.”

Now it's next time, and #30 is scheduled for a crown. So is #19, (lower jaw, left-hand side, third from the back) which came as a bit of a shock.

I turn forty, and people start replacing parts of my body with prostheses. At this rate, I'll be a cyborg before the decade is out.

Jake & I went to Prairie Gardens this evening, to pick up the poster we had framed. (It's very nice.)

Out in the parking lot, as the Prairie Gardens fella put the (somewhat heavy & large) poster in the back of the car, Jake threw up on me.

I thought we were done with that sort of thing, Jacob.

Afterward, he was quite perky & cheerful. The leading theory is that he gagged on a bug or something. He doesn't seem at all sick.

Big changes in the Genealogy section: the index pages now include newspaper names and publication dates for the various articles.

Jake was a little whiny this morning. He perked up after a while, and we never did figure out what was wrong.

One or another spammer database has attached the name Tony Igor to my work email address. Every day, I get a few personalized messages addressed to Tony or to the Igor Family.

Morons.

Spammers—aka vermin, scum of the internet, and other less-polite names—ruined the public newsgroups by flooding them with thousands of advertisements. People were forced to take their discussions into private message boards, to get away from the spam.

It looks like email is heading the same way. People are making noise that blogs and reader comments transmitted via RSS and wrapped in some kind of public-key encryption would be a spam-proof replacement for email. That would be nice.

Soon the mail & news servers will be as busy as ever, but no one will be using them: their traffic will be entirely spam.

Contemplating another trip to Carmi, to spend a few hours poring over the courthouse records. Or maybe to wander the county roads, looking for cemeteries.

Curious medical term of the day: Schatzki's Ring, which is a narrowing of the lower esophagus that interferes with swallowing solid food (such as steak, which is why Schatzki's Ring is also known as Steakhouse Syndrome).

Hm…I know a few people who might have this…

The geometry of my office at dear old WRI is such that (this time of year, anyway) around 5:00pm the sun gets north of the blinds and throws a strip of light right across my monitor.

Lets me know when it's time to go home, it does.

Nice day today: sunny & cloudless, but pleasantly cool (74° at noon).

Another photo-manager to check out: PhotoMeister, www.photomeister.com. This one seems more geared toward creating Video CDs, photo-album web pages, that sort of thing, and doesn't worry too much about organizing the image files themselves.

Now that I think about it, organizing image files is what I'm most interested in. Never mind, PhotoMeister.

Almost ran over a squirrel on the way home from work: the silly thing tried to outrun my car, instead of getting off the road. After a few somewhat tense seconds, it headed for the curb. (A few years ago, a rabbit tried the same stunt on Race Street, near the high school; alas, it chose to stay on the road, and did not survive.)

An unexpected consequence of the recent iPaq power problems: the Personal Vehicle Manager database dropped a few records, presumably because the application was open when the iPaq lost power. I can recreate the missing entries from the debit card receipts, but the odometer readings are lost forever.

Rule One: Always Make Backups!

[As it turned out, backups were available. No data loss after all, how nice.]

In today's mail: a package from the Book of the Month Club, containing a set of Ray Bradbury books. I haven't been reading enough science fiction lately; I must rectify that.

Grandparents came to visit today.

I had the idea of reorganizing the Genealogy section: using the article properties to record publication information for all the newspaper articles I've typed in. Then I could have a list of all Carmi Times articles, or whatever other groupings might make sense.

I keep forgetting: CityDesk is as much a database as a web-site tool. Using it as a database makes it much more powerful.

Sneaked out to the library this afternoon, for a little genealogy; found one noteworthy item: the Wills Deposited Index for White County, Illinois, records that a will for Dorothy Dean Chastain was probated on November 21, 1978, by Robert S. Chastain.

There's no case number, which I believe means the will was never formally probated (whatever that means). But it does help narrow down when Dorothy Dean—my great-grandmother—died.

By a curious coincidence, Robert S. Chastain married Beulah A. (Hines) Bradley on November 16, 1978. At first, I thought he went straight from the funeral to the wedding, but maybe it was just that he had no need to sort out his late wife's estate until he had a new wife.

Still, I'm fairly certain that Dorothy Dean died in 1978. Remarrying before the year was out seems a little creepy.

(Robert Chastain apparently had a sister, Dorothy, who married somebody named Sturm. Very confusing.)

The wireless-network drivers in the iPaq have a setting, “Allow Pocket PC to suspend when wireless network is used.” I cleared this setting a while back, since the iPaq was suspending during long file transfers and starting over got to be a pain.

Now it seems that clearing this setting prevented the iPaq from suspending under any circumstances, not just when the wireless network was active. That's why I've been finding the iPaq with a drained battery every morning unless I plug it into the cradle.

Overslept a little this morning: twenty minutes after the alarm went off, I (somewhat groggily) realized that the radio was on and the NPR newsreader was babbling about interdiction. Of what, I never heard.

(Interdiction ought to mean, “Getting a word in edgewise,” but it doesn't.)

Johnny Cash and John Ritter, dead on the same day. Coincidence?

David Gerrold says (on his sporadically-updated site):

…a blog works best when it traces a journey of discovery, realization, and insight. It is the job of the blogger to sift through the daily avalanche of experiences and sort for events of interest….

That's as may be—but I have to ask: Of interest to whom? Am I obliged to make this Daybook ‘of interest’ to anyone with access to a web browser?

If your goal is to make a living by writing novels, it matters whether your writing is such that random strangers are willing to pay to read it. If you measure your sucess as a writer by the number of hits on your web site, that's just another kind of currency: and, again, you're beholden to your readers.

Myself, I write for my own satisfaction & amusement. A secondary goal is to amuse friends and family. I nurse the secret hope that various long-lost friends will find these pages and get back in touch. But as for the rest of the world—I don't mind that some few of them might read the Daybook, but neither do I mind that the rest of them don't.

Jerry Pournelle says:

The best memorial to the dead is to live normal lives. Which does not mean forgetting.

I agree—if you let fear rule your life, the bad guys have won.

Noticed a new process running on nessus this evening: hidserv.exe. For a moment, I wondered if nessus had been infected by a virus—simply being connected to the internet is enough to get infected these days, what with RPC vulnerabilities popping up every few days—but a little investigation revealed that it's related to the wireless mouse.

According to www.truthorfiction.com/rumors/hidserv.htm, there's a bogus rumor going around that hidserv.exe is malware of some kind, and should be deleted whenever found.

Rumors like this are believable mainly because Microsoft insists on giving internal system files terse and cryptic names. Come on, 'softies—Windows NT/2000/XP has supported long file names since 1993, and Windows 95/98/Me since 1995. There's no reason the wireless mouse driver couldn't be named Human Interface Device Service.exe.

Jim Allbright turned up again, with a post on RootsWeb.com asking for information about James Clinton Sturm. I sent email directing him to the Sturm page of the Genealogy section.

My last email to him (on April 19, 2003) bounced. Perhaps I will have better luck this time.

Sneaked out of work for an hour to visit the Family History Center. There are two wills of interest on the microfilms there: Albert Felty's, and Elizabeth Bolerjack's. The rest—strangers, every one.

I wanted to get printouts, but their only printer was in use. I'll try again tomorrow, or Friday.

Poked around a bit in the EMusic web site (www.emusic.com). It's a bit like iTunes, in that you're forced to use special EMusic software (as opposed to a web browser) to access the service. Unlike iTunes, it's a subscription service: $120/year for all the MP3s you can download.

All I have is a 56K modem connection, so I don't think I'd be able to download my money's worth. Sorry, EMusic.

Allbright / Sturm

A quick reply from Mr. Allbright: “You made my year!” Apparently Richard Allbright and Irene Sturm were his grandparents, and Richard Junior—the baby in the above picture—was his father.

It's probably a little disconcerting to have a complete stranger (who lives a thousand miles away) give you a picture of your father as a baby. I know I'd be a little weirded out if it happened to me.

Yesterday's news: spacecraft fall down, go BOOM:

As the NOAA-N Prime spacecraft was being repositioned from vertical to horizontal on the “turn over cart” at approximately 7:15 PDT today, it slipped off the fixture, causing severe damage. (See attached photo). The 18' long spacecraft was about 3' off the ground when it fell.

Genealogy Society meeting this evening, with a presentation by the librarian of the University Map and Geology Library. Very interesting.

They have a web site: www.library.uiuc.edi/max.

The White County Probate Index lists Sarah I. Kingery as the executrix for the estates of James C. Sturm and Arrena Sturm. According to James Clinton Sturm's obituary, he had a daughter who married one John Kingery.

I must investigate this further.

Jacob wore his new backpack to daycare this morning. He was very excited: “I'm going to school!”

This morning's news:

Microsoft is paying twenty-three million dollars—mere pocket change for them; no, not even that: more like a few grimy coins fished out from between the sofa cushions—to get rid of the litigious rump corporation that used to be Be, Inc. As with Caldera a few years back, this is no more than extortion.

There's a new Myst game nearing release: Uru: Ages Beyond Myst. I liked Myst, but Riven wouldn't run on Windows 2000 (or, for that matter, on dual-processor machines), and I never even bought Exile. Ubisoft refused to support running Exile on Windows 2000, on the grounds that it was a “business operating system” and home users ought to be running Windows 98 instead. The Ubisoft web site is strangely silent on the system requirements for Uru; I have the gloomy suspicion that Windows 2000 remains unsupported, and they want me to run Windows XP Home Edition instead.

Apple has upgraded the iPod to 40GB, which is supposedly enough for 40,000 minutes of music. That's almost twenty-eight straight days, and probably enough to hold my entire CD collection.

Loading the thing up would be a bit tedious—I'd be weeks popping CDs in & out of nessus—but having all my CDs online would be worth it.

On the way home from work this evening, I stopped at the store for some diapers (for Jake); on a whim, I also bought two loaves of crusty bread to go with dinner (leftover soup).

Jake was very interested in the bread: he grabbed one of the loaves and ate about a third of it while we prepared the rest of his dinner (of which he didn't eat very much).

Sneaked out to the library this afternoon, to see what there was to be seen: a White County Probate Index, as it turned out, and full of interesting and/or useful information.

One mystery: in September, 1884, Jacob Maurer served as executor of the will of one Christina E. Hoffa. He was only 29 at the time. I've no idea how he came to be named executor, nor what connection he had to the Hoffas.

The Mormons are holding two spools of microfilmed probate records for me, but only until the 13th. If I want to have another look at them, I'd best hurry. Most of the index entries I copied down today are probably there: much easier than driving to Carmi.

Grandparents visiting from Arlington Heights today.

Day of the Dozer

Sofa climbing

He'p me, he'p me, I'm hyp-mo-tized!

The middle picture is the official thirty-month photograph, but the last picture is a more accurate portrayal.

Much updating of software today: downloaded 89MB of updates from the Red Hat site. It took nearly five hours, but succeeded. Later, I booted up Windows and paid a visit to the Windows Update site for the latest fixes from the 'softies; after that, it was time to visit the Office Update site for even more fixes & security patches.

Off & on over the last few months I've been reading Around the World in 80 Days, by Jules Verne—not on paper, but as a Microsoft Reader e-book. It's been an interesting experience.

My objection to e-books has always been their impermanence: there's no guarantee that Microsoft Reader will be around in five or ten years, or that it will let me read my old e-books. (Microsoft might claim otherwise, but I don't believe them.) But the various de-cluttering projects over the last few years have taught me that most books I read never get re-read. There are exceptions—I've read The Lord of the Rings two dozen times since 1974, when I first read it—but most books go from nightstand to shelf and stay there until they're boxed up and taken to the library. So maybe it's not such a problem that this year's e-books won't be readable next year: I wouldn't be reading them anyway.

And e-books don't take up space, except for disk space (of which I have luxurious amounts these days).

Two weeks after I bought the wireless mouse, Microsoft has announced a slew of new keyboards & mice, including the Wireless Intellimouse Explorer, Black Leather Edition.

Leather?

I imagine these are aimed at executives and the overly fashion-conscious; though neither, I am interested, a little—at least until I find out how much they cost. Dressing mice up in little dominatrix outfits can't be cheap.

My math teacher in 7th & 8th grades was Mr. Idzior, at River Forest Junior High. It's been twenty-eight years (more or less), but I still wonder what's become of him.

There's a Bill Idzior teaching math at Merrillville High School (www.mvsc.k12.in.us/mhs). I wonder if it's him. Perhaps not—I seem to recall that my Mr. Idzior's first name was Ken.

Downloaded 15MB or so of updates from the Red Hat site; more to come (much more).

Poked around a bit in the Disney World web site, trying to find out room rates for the hotel with the built-in monorail station. I'm always telling Jennifer that when we go to Disney World—which day is still some years off—I want to stay at the monorail hotel.

The room-rates page doesn't list the same rooms as the room-descriptions page, but I think a normal room will run $400/night, more or less.

Maybe I don't want to stay there any more.

Checked the BIOS settings on nessus; there's a USB IRQ setting that was disabled, so I enabled it. Windows 2000 came right up; now to check Linux.

Linux is moused as well. How nice.

I installed Apache, PHP & MySQL, because—in my copious free time—I plan to do a little web+database programming.

Next is getting the modem to work: currently, Linux says, “Modem? What modem?” This makes connecting to the Red Hat Network site (for registration & updates) rather difficult.

Sputnik recorded a low of 55° last night. Supposed to be even colder tonight: possibly into the forties.

Slept a little better last night; a little more well-rested & perky today.

The one XHTML validation rule I keep forgetting: literal ampersands may not appear in the href attribute of the a tag and must be replaced with the & entity. According to the W3C HTML Validator (validator.w3.org), I have some tidying up to do in these pages.

Shouldn't take too long.

Installed Red Hat Linux 9 on nessus. It looks much the same as Red Hat 8, which makes me wonder why I bothered.

One problem: the mouse doesn't work. At startup time, the kernel issues a rather cryptic error message—

PCI: No IRQ known for interrupt pin D of device 00:04.2. Probably buggy MP table.
usb-uhci.c: Found UHCI device with no IRQ assigned. Check BIOS settings!

—and never recognizes or initializes the mouse. It's hard to use X without a mouse, but I managed.

[Fixed: see September 4, 2003.]

Homer Hickham has a web site: www.homerhickam.com. He's written quite a few books besides Rocket Boys, too.

Slept poorly last night. Very tired today.

David Gerrold has resurfaced: the long silence was just his old web site being neglected while he worked on the new one. On the other hand, the ‘new’ site hasn't been updated since July 22nd. I suppose I'll have to re-bookmark www.gerrold.com and keep an eye on it for a month or two.

It's nice when authors have web sites, though I don't mind the ones who do not: forced to choose between web site and books, I'd much rather have new books to read. What really frosts me, though, is when an author goes to the trouble of creating a web site then never updates it.

Copied a few more albums to nessus, yesterday and this evening. The Album Info finder in Windows Media Player doesn't always get it right: the Mobile Fidelity Sound Labs version of Dark Side of the Moon has a slightly-different track listing than the Harvest version, and Open Heart Symphony by Spirit of the West has eleven tracks, not ten.

Still, it's convenient having albums online. I'll probably keep copying them, so long as I have disk space to spare.

Still more rain: as of 2:00pm, sputnik had recorded rainfall in each of the preceding twenty-six hours, for a total of 2¾ inches. The grass is looking very green outside.

Poor Jake, he twisted his ankle this morning while sprinting around the house. He's better now, but for a while he was limping & quite unhappy about it.

Added (not (filename "breadcrumbs")) here & there in the CityScript portion of these pages, so as to prevent the new breadcrumb file from showing up where it shouldn't.

The wireless mouse goes into power-saving mode if sees too long a period of inactivity. This is a good thing, except that moving the scroll wheel doesn't wake it up again: only moving it across the desk will do that. This is unfortunate if I'm reading a web page and just want to scroll down a bit.

Worked up the courage to try the fixmbr command (see August 25, 2003); it worked (if it hadn't, I wouldn't be typing this, would I?). This is what I did:

1. Boot from the Windows 2000 CD;
2. At the Welcome screen, press R to repair;
3. Press C to invoke the Recovery Console;
4. Enter the map command, pretend to understand the cryptic & strange output thereof;
5. Enter fixmbr, read the scary warning, dither a few seconds, enter Y;
6. Enter exit to exit the Recovery Console & reboot the machine.

…and Windows 2000 came right up. How nice.

Now the way is clear to install Red Hat Linux 9, just as soon as I have a spare hour or two for the project.