October 2003 Archives

Road trips:

• Jacob: A sleepover with the grandparents, in Normal.
• Jennifer: A quilter retreat, in Princeton.
• Me: Genealogy, White County and Posey County.

Surprisingly warm today: 74° at 3:00pm. Very windy, too.

Fooling around with iTunes: I imported the first album from Euphoria, to see how iTunes handled it. The resulting files are 43.7MB, vs. 43.5MB for Windows Media Player; I don't suppose the difference is significant.

Playback seems a bit murky, even to my forty-year-old ears. Maybe I need to adjust the equalizer settings?

Interesting that iTunes records how often a track has been played, and when the most recent playback was.

Finished reading Under the Banner of Heaven, by Jon Krakauer: partly about a twenty-year-old murder case, but mostly a history of the Mormon church. The Saints' closet is well-populated with skeletons, and the church has spawned more lunatic-fringe splinter groups than the Judean People's Front in Life of Brian. This doesn't mesh well with the happy, wholesome and industrious image they present, but no worse, really, than any other church.

Perhaps next year's edition of The Doctrine and Covenants will include a new revelation: Section 139, “Jon Krakauer Is A Big Doody-Head”. Or not.

Now it's time to finish The Year's Best Science Fiction: Nineteenth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois. I've been slogging through it, ten pages at a time, since August. How embarrassing.

The rumor mill suggests that Outlook 2003 can be installed over Outlook 2000, and everything will work properly (including synchronization with the iPaq, which is important). Outlook 2003 can't use Word 2000 as a message editor, but I never used that feature anyway.

Must turn off the computer—which has been on most of the day; what a slacker I am!—and tidy the house a little before Jennifer and Jacob get home.

In today's mail: a terse letter informing me that my doctor is no longer with the clinic, and I'll have to find another. Well, all right, if you insist.

A little reorganization in the Genealogy section. There are some new pages for the three counties of interest (Parke, Posey and White), and I've started transcribing the notes I took Tuesday at the Rockville Public Library (into XML, just to be geeky).

Lunch with Jennifer at Le Peep.

Went shopping at Best Buy, almost bought a copy of Money 2004 Deluxe. I chickened out at the last minute. Money 2002 is quite loathsome, and Microsoft hasn't convinced me yet that Money 2004 is any better.

Interesting: a fella named Michael Hanscom takes a picture of some G5s sitting on a loading dock somewhere on the Microsoft campus, writes a blog entry titled Even Microsoft wants G5s, and gets fired for it.

I don't write much about work here. Not for fear of getting sacked; I just don't think the labors of one tiny cog in the globe-spanning Wolfram conglomerate make for very interesting reading (or writing).

According to www.wolfram.com, Mathematica 5 is now available (and has been since June 23). Go buy a copy.

People are trying to make a big issue out of Mr. Hanscom's sudden unemployment. Sacking him for a photo and two paragraphs of text did seem an overreaction, but after reading a few intelligent posts in the Slashdot discussion (there are never more than a few intelligent posts in any Slashdot discussion) I've changed my mind.

It's a question of security. Microsoft can't have employees wandering the campus, taking pictures wherever they please and posting the results for the whole Internet to see.

Another genealogical road trip, this time to the Illinois State Historical Library in Springfield. My goal was to find out when Dorothy Dean (my great-grandmother) died: my (somewhat desperate) plan was to scan every issue of the Carmi Times for 1978, and see what turned up.

It takes about twenty minutes per month to scan for obituaries, so it took about an hour and a half to find an obituary for the elusive Ms. Dean (dec'd.) in the April 6 edition.

She was buried in Big Prairie Cemetery. I was there, three years ago, but didn't know to look for her grave. Next time I visit the ancestral home, I'll make a point of finding it.

Jake, on the subject of the quilt in his crib:

“That's a nice warm blankie.”
“It has stars on it!”
“There's one!”
“There's another one!”

Chatty fellow, is our Jacob.

Geekstuff: opened the CityDesk .cty file for this site with Access, ran a few queries to change all the Daybook entries to the Daybook Entry template (instead of the default Article template). The idea is to liven up the Daybook archives a little, when I get around to it.

(Sure would be nice if CityDesk could apply actions like changing the template to multiple articles at one time. Maybe in version 3.0?)

Parke County Courthouse

Rockville, Indiana is about 80 miles from Champaign, an easy drive on Interstate 74 to Indiana 63 to US 36. Various ancestors hailed from there, so this morning I drove over to have a look around.

(I should have done it last week, before the time change.)

The Birth & Death Records Clerk, Dena L. Foxworthy, has a small office in the basement (room 12) of the county courthouse. Today was New Cabinet Day—apparently the old cabinet is too small, so a bigger one was being delivered. Unfortunately for me, this meant that all the documents I'd hoped to examine would not be available.

The helpful Ms. Foxworthy sent me to the Rockville Public Library, just two blocks away, which had numerous vital-records indices. The name Akers appears frequently in these records, as does the name Kibbe; alas, no sign of my paternal grandparents, Orville Akers and Ruby Kibbe.

I'll have to keep looking.

The pivot stand on the webcam broke this evening—or it's been broken for a while, and this evening we finally noticed. The ball half of the ball-and-socket pivot split right in half. (The other half is nowhere to be found, hence my suspicion that it's been broken for a long time.)

Now the camera sits flat and unadjustable atop the monitor. This would be inconvenient, if we ever used it; but we do not.

Jake and Papa

Jennifer took this. I think it's nice.

Thunderstorms this morning, around 5:30am, but not much rain.

Finally got around to plugging in the printer cable I bought two months ago (August 28). We can print again, how nice.

Quilt show today, at the National Guard Armory in Urbana.

Dropped off Mr. Explorer at the Ford dealer for an oil change; seems he also needs new brake pads on the rear wheels, for only $175. Ouch.

Mr. Explorer is getting on in years & miles, but replacing him is not in the offing (not for a few more years, anyway). For now, the occasional surprise repair bill is less onerous than four years of car payments.

This has surely been the month of unexpected, unwelcome expenses. Perhaps November will be better.

Had lunch with Jennifer, at Strawberry Fields: a nice mid-week date with my sweetie.

[Does Friday count as mid-week?]

Found a suspicious item on my work machine today: a cookie from imrworldwide.com. Apparently this is the signature of Red Sheriff, a spyware Java applet.

Goodbye, cookie. And welcome, Red Sheriff, to the Restricted Sites zone. No more Java for you.

It's disappointing that Microsoft hasn't provided better privacy and security tools for Internet Explorer. Maybe they think everyone's using an ISP-customized version, so they needn't bother.

Had a brief email conversation yesterday with Chuck from Volo Broadband, about what their $300 startup fee pays for: they install a small (15-inch) antenna on the roof, run a cable down the outside of the house, drill a hole through the wall, and install a cable jack on the inside. It's my job to connect the computer and get it working.

As desperate as I am for a high-bandwidth internet connection, this seems just a little...er...permanent. The thought of drilling a hole through the wall is a little troubling, too—though I suppose I don't mind that the telephone and cable television people did the same thing (long before we moved in).

Today is National Take Back Your Time Day. According to the web site (www.simpleliving.net/timeday):

Take Back Your Time Day is a nationwide initiative to challenge the epidemic of overwork, over-scheduling and time famine that now threatens our health, our families and relationships, our communities and our environment.

The theory is that Americans work an average of nine weeks per year longer than Western Europeans, and subtracting nine weeks from January 1 gives October 24. Hence the holiday.

Interesting coincidence that I am on vacation next week.

In case you were wondering:

Any questions?

Picked up a free LaserJet 4MP from the breakroom at work a few weeks ago; this afternoon, I scrubbed on it a little—it was filthy—then printed a few test pages. It's fast, it's reasonably quiet, but the toner cartridge is going: there are vertical streaks on the page, and large black areas are a little wavy.

It was free, so I can't complain. New toner cartridges are not free—they're around $80—so maybe the printer, like that Dream Theater CD a few months ago (July 28, that was), will go back into the breakroom.

An article in today's paper lists the twelve defendants in the Timothy Kalendek wrongful-death suit (previously mentioned on August 14):

• Bell Helicopter;
• Textron Financial Corp.;
• Cessna Financial Corp.;
• Textron, Inc.;
• the World Free Fall Convention;
• Don Kirlin (its president);
• USA Air;
• the Village of Rantoul;
• Rantoul National Aviation Center;
• Precision Aviation;
• Rodney M. Tinney (pilot of the helicopter);
• Air Center Helicopters (Tinney's employer).

The judge in the case has dismissed all charges against the first four companies, on the grounds that building a helicopter or lending money to someone who wants to buy a helicopter does not obligate one to pay money to the next-of-kin of nitwits who try to get a close-up of a helicopter in the process of taking off.

It's too bad the remaining charges weren't dismissed also. This is no more than a crass money-grab by Kalendek's family and their lawyers.

Update: The County Clerk's web site tells me that on November 18th, 2003, plaintiffs in this case dropped all remaining claims. I hope this means their crass money-grab was unsuccessful.

Another two hours in the dentist chair, another temporary crown—and another $400. I have an expensive mouth.

This time, the temporary crown is aluminum, not plastic. Maybe the decay patterns on #19 were different, and in need of different protection?

Very tired this evening.

iTunes has nothing by the Macc Ladds. Disappointing.

Another new tire for Jennifer's car, the old one having been punctured by something (a bolt?). The remaining tires seem to be holding up well; let us hope.

And a pair of new tires for Mr. Explorer would cost about $240, quoth the tire guy this evening when I asked him. I guess I can live with wup-wup-wup a while longer.

I tried to run the monthly report for October in Money 2002 just now; it trundled a bit, then put up a “Gee, we're sorry, Money just crashed” dialog.

Money restarted; I tried again; Gee, we're sorry…

I guess I don't get to do monthly reports any more.

Curious legal term of the day: nolle prosequi, which apparently means, “We could prosecute, but just now we don't feel like it.”

It turned up in the history of Posey County that I read on Sunday, in a section describing the first murder in the county. The judge granted a nolle prosequi, and the murderer was turned loose—with a jug of poisoned whiskey, which he soon drank.

Interesting sense of justice those pioneer types must have had.

Disturbing thought: I am now covered by the Age Discrimination in Employment Act of 1967.

Shopped around a bit at various cell-phone company web sites. The results were disappointing:

• Cingular—$36 activation fee; plans aren't significantly cheaper than current plan.
• Sprint—Plans too expensive.
• US Cellular—Plans too expensive; phones not free.
• Verizon Wireless—New plan costs more than current plan.

…and they all want us to sign up a two-year contract, with big penalties for early termination.

I don't want a fancy phone, I don't want a camera, I don't want Internet access. (Well, if I could get all that for $30/month, I'd be tempted.) All I need is a phone, but it doesn't seem like anyone wants to sell me one.

Microsoft shipped Office 2003 today.

I passed up on Office XP when it shipped (last year? two years ago?), figuring I wasn't exercising Office 2000 very hard, so why spend $300 on even more features I'll never use? The same reasoning applies to Office 2003, except that I use Office 2000 even less now than I did then.

Except possibly Outlook 2003. I use Outlook 2000 just about every day, and a version with fewer warts would be welcome.

This is interesting: when Jacob starts school (is that only three years away?), he will become eligible for the Student and Teacher Edition of Office 2003—and I, being his dear old Dad, will likewise become eligible. Maybe I'll upgrade then.

(I was wrong: apparently Office 2003 and its component applications will run on Windows 2000.)

Another flat tire on Jennifer's car. Poor Jennifer.

I might be catching a cold: woke up this morning feeling a bit congested, and my eyes feel a bit raw, like someone is peeling onions nearby.

Maybe I'm not catching a cold after all: maybe it's just allergies. Whatever the reason, I feel a little better than I did this morning.

The cell phone in my pocket started buzzing just now (1:42pm); it was the cell-phone company, informing me that the two-year contract I signed up for two years ago expires on November 16th, and pleading with me to sign up for another two years. They offered an incentive of two new phones and a cheaper plan (since the rates have gone down since 2001).

Now, replacing our old phones has a certain appeal (the battery in Jennifer's phone won't hold a charge, and the buttons on mine aren't working so well), as does shaving a few dollars off the bill; but I think I will shop around a bit before taking on another two-year obligation.

The larger question: what is the cheapest way to get the complete set of services—local phone service, long distance, cable television, and internet access—that we want? And how do cell phones fit in?

I must research this further.

Interesting email problem this evening: I made the mistake of checking email while the iPaq was synchronizing, and Outlook forgot how to retrieve messages from my main Netcom account. Coincidence?

After a bit of fooling around, it's working again. Silly Outlook. I'd upgrade to Outlook 2003, but apparently Office 2003 only runs on Windows XP.

Hm. Poking around the Verizon Wireless web site, I can't find any plans cheaper than the one we have now (which isn't very cheap).

Was the marketroid who called me this afternoon mistaken, or lying to make another sale?

Went to the 2003 ISU Homecoming Parade, over in Bloomington. Jake really enjoyed himself (as did everyone else).

A nice picture of Jacob at the computer can now be found in the October 5 Daybook entry. That's when it was taken, but I didn't download it until today.

Finally, the lawn is mowed. Now we can put away the [censored] mower until springtime.

In today's mail: the third-quarter 401(k) statement. The balance is going up again, which is nice.

Fooling around a bit with iTunes. It looks very nice, but I fear it was designed for the broadband set: pulling down a page of song information or search results seems to take a bit longer than an equivalent web page. (Then again, only the foolish and/or desperate would attempt to squeeze music through a modem connection.)

I might upload a few CDs, and see how Apple's AAC format compares to Microsoft's WMA. Rumor has it AAC is better.

Something I've been waiting for: iTunes for Windows.

Mowed some of the lawn, raked a few leaves. The mower isn't lasting quite as long as it used to—maybe the grass is too high for it? This will probably be the last trip round the yard this season, so we're cutting it a bit shorter than usual. Poor little mower has to work extra hard.

(Next year, we're getting a bigger mower.)

Installed iTunes. It runs, though I haven't tried to play music with it yet (nor buy any—even at 99¢ per song, I don't know that there's much pop music I feel like buying).

Woke up at 5:30am with a scorching headache. Took some ibuprofen, drank some water, tried to go back to sleep. Almost managed it, too, but then the alarm went off.

Today, there are two spacefaring nations in the world. The United States is not one of them.

There is an American—Ed Lu—in orbit right now, but he went up on a Russian Soyuz, not on the (grounded, broken, unsafe-at-any-speed) Shuttle. He and Yuri Malenchenko are the Expedition 7 crew on the International Space Station (which itself seems a little on the broken & unsafe side).

Also in orbit (for a few more hours, anyway) is Yang Liwei, launched by the People's Republic of China at 8:10pm CDT last night. www.cctv.com apparently has more information, but only if you can read Chinese. (I can't.)

Perhaps this new competitor will encourage NASA to get its [censored] in a pile and start flying again.

The Cubs, who had been leading the National League Championship Series three games to one, but are now tied with the Marlins at three games each, seem to be in the middle of a classic Cubs meltdown. I find this strangely reassuring. No matter how crazy the world gets, we can rely on the Cubs to lose when it counts most.

Took a long lunch to visit the Map and Geography Library, in an attempt to find names for four stubbornly-anonymous Posey County cemeteries. My plan was to examine the US Geological Survey topographic maps of the area; alas, while many cemeteries are marked on the maps, few have names attached to them.

I did find Goad Cemetery, though, so the trip wasn't a complete failure.

(I also discovered that if one misses the 10E Gold bus, it's quicker to wait half an hour for the next one than to walk to the library.)

[Streets & Trips 2004 tells me that it's 1.4 miles from WRI to the main library building: if I'd known that, maybe I would have just waited for the next bus.]

The Disney Channel has a new show, Jojo's Circus, of which Jacob is inordinately fond. (Anyone with more birthdays than ears will probably find it mind-numbing.) The theme song sounds vaguely Klaatu-ish, which is curious given that Klaatu broke up twenty years ago (and half of them became insurance agents).

As it turns out, the Jojo's Circus theme song is played by “becky”, featuring Rebecca Lord on lead vocals and Keanu Reeves on bass.

Yes, that Keanu Reeves.

Mowed the lawn this evening, or as much as we could before the battery in the lawn mower ran down. I suppose we'll have to finish up tomorrow.

I tied my mowing shoes a little too tightly, which caused one of my toenails to slice into the toe next to it. This left some interesting bloodstains on my socks, which greatly disturbed Jennifer when she saw them.

Maybe this means I should trim my toenails more often.

In today's email, a picture of Jasper Sturm and Mary Calvin, courtesy of Jim Allbright.

The crown took a bit longer than I expected, Mr. Dentist having decided to install a tiny trapdoor in it to facilitate any root-canal jobs that might become necessary later on. The crown resisted this procedure, and stripped a few gears in a few drillheads before giving way.

(How likely is #30 to need a root canal? And how soon? Mr. Dentist was carefully vague on these points.)

The crown is metal, with a baked-on enamel coating, and looks pretty much like a regular tooth (if you ignore the Frankensteinish bolt visible on the upper surface). It's a bit lighter than the rest of my teeth, which seemed to concern Mr. Dentist.

“We can send it back to get darkened,” he said.

Er...no thanks.

#30 is finished. Next week, we start work on #19. By the time all these repairs are finished, I'll be due for my next checkup.

12:56pm, and the novocaine is starting to wear off. This means I can eat lunch without fear of accidentally shredding something important with my newly-crowned tooth.

1:18pm, and the novocaine is completely gone. It's curious how quickly the effect dissipates, after lingering for hours at full strength. I wonder why that is.

Nice day today: sputnik recorded a high of 74°. (It's curious that Indian summer is a perfectly acceptable phrase while Indian giver is not. The two have exactly the same etymology, namely, the use of Indian to mean false.)

Jennifer's car got a new tire today, replacing one that had an unfortunate (and ultimately fatal) encounter with a curb some weeks ago.

Tires for Jennifer's car don't cost nearly as much as tires for Mr. Explorer.

Sometimes Jake asks to watch a movie. (“Sometimes” in this case means “every few minutes”.) Usually, I suggest The Abominable Dr. Phibes, just to see the look on Jennifer's face when I do.

Jennifer has taught Jacob well: the last time I did this, he responded, “Doctor Phibes is icky.”

Geekstuff:

Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 825750 explains how to disable DCOM. On the other hand, Steve Gibson (grc.com) has written DCOMbobulator, which also disables DCOM.

DCOM serves no useful purpose, and is a wide-open door through which viruses and other nasties can infect most any recent version of Windows. Microsoft can't seem to patch it often enough, or well enough, to stay ahead of the virus writers.

I guess that's because they're all working on Longhorn (aka Windows 2007).

Back from Arlington Heights. No pictures—I left the camera at home.

In Arlington Heights, visiting the grandparents.

Overslept forty minutes this morning. The alarm went off, but I never heard it. Oops. Curiously, this did not seem to affect the rest of the morning schedule: everything happened at about the same time as it usually does.

Wrestling with Money 2002, again, fixing all the mortgage payments to use the new escrow account I created the other day.

I'd forgotten that in 2000 and 2001 we actually received refunds from the escrow account, since they'd withheld too much. Since then, the insurance and taxes—hence, the escrow withholding and the mortgage payment itself—have gone nowhere but up, up & away.

I'm starting to wonder why we need an escrow account, and whether we can get rid of it. We're quite capable of managing our money well enough to write three more checks (one for insurance, two for taxes) each year. And I'd rather keep the money in an interest-bearing account. (An account that pays interest to us, I should say: I'm sure the mortgage company enjoys a tidy income from interest on all the escrow accounts they manage.)

Or maybe there's some legal requirement that we have an escrow account. I must remember to ask the banker sometime.

Across the nation, comics (and would-be comics) are perfecting their Austrian accents, the better to get laughs at Governor-elect Arnold's expense.

Those zany Californians. What will they come up with next?

TerraServer has a picture of the Duncan Road bridge over I72:

Streets & Trips 2004 thinks there's an interchange there. Maybe there is, and I just can't see it?

[This was fixed in Streets & Trips 2005.]

Years ago—see January 12, 2001—TerraServer used a nasty little DRM package named Clever Content, that—presumably; I refused to allow it on my computer—would have prevented me from getting a copy of the Duncan Road image to use in the Daybook.

Today, Terra Server has a nice Download This Image link, right there at the top of every page, no DRM anywhere in sight. Clever Content (the company) renamed itself Alchemedia (www.alchemedia.com), then sold out to Finjan Software (www.finjan.com); their product, meanwhile, has apparently morphed into something called Mirage, which does all sorts of annoying DRM-ish things.

[There's also www.terraserver.com, which is a completely different company that also has satellite images. Very confusing.]

Ars Technica posted an article yesterday about SoftSummit 2003 (www.softsummit.com), a conference for the suits & bean-counters of the software industry. This year's hot topic: software activation. Vendors are shocked, shocked I tell you, at the resentment and hostility they get from customers who can't activate the software they've purchased.

On the agenda: an hour-long presentation titled, “Activation—Do's & Don'ts”. A more honest title might have been, “Activation—How To Accuse Your Customers Of Thievery Without Offending Them”.

Strangely warm today: 80° this afternoon. Might have to mow the lawn again this weekend.

Oops: yesterday, I installed Pocket Streets 2004 on the iPaq; today, I discover that it can't read map files created by Streets & Trips 2001. All the maps on the iPaq are now quite useless.

Guess I'll re-create them with Streets & Trips 2004.

An editorial in yesterday's News-Gazette defended phone spammers, and said that the national do-not-call list is an infringement on their First Amendment rights. The editorialist seemed worried that newspapers might be the next target, if the do-not-call list survives its various legal challenges.

The difference between newspapers and phone spam is that newspapers have to be purchased: they don't just land with a thump on the dinner table at mealtime, demanding attention. And it's trivial to keep newspapers out of the house: just stop paying for them. The orange plastic newspaper box bolted to the mailbox post will disappear, and the newspaper delivery guy—remember when newspapers were delivered by ten-year-olds?—will pass on by.

The phone spammers' business model is to annoy a hundred people to make a single sale. I fail to see how this is constitutionally-protected behavior. If I turn off my television, have I infringed the First Amendment rights of companies wishing to beam advertisements into my home?

Today's big news: the California recall vote. Will Governor Davis be sacked? CNN says voter turnout is expected to be heavy.

Recall elections are an incredibly bad idea. The United States is a republic, not a democracy: elected officials are sworn to serve the nation, not follow the whims of the electorate. (The two are not synonymous: voters, like two-year-olds, want all sorts of damnfool things they shouldn't have.) The next governor of California will spend his entire term looking over his shoulder, wondering when the recall petitions will have enough signatures.

Then again, frequent elections held with little warning is how they do things in England. The United Kingdom hasn't collapsed yet; maybe it's not such a bad system.

Meanwhile, www.nmr.nl/deins815.htm reports:

On 5 June 1995 an adult male mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) collided with the glass façade of the Natuurmuseum Rotterdam and died. An other drake mallard raped the corpse almost continuously for 75 minutes. Then the author disturbed the scene and secured the dead duck. Dissection showed that the rape-victim indeed was of the male sex. It is concluded that the mallards were engaged in an ‘Attempted Rape Flight’ that resulted in the first described case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard.

Funny old world sometimes…

Defeated by technology:

Every October, the mortgage company sends out a letter informing us that our property taxes and homeowner's insurance were higher than anticipated, and our escrow payment is being increased to cover the shortfall. That's not a problem. A few dollars more each month is no crisis.

No, the problem is: I have a recurring bill set up in Money 2002 to track mortgage payments. The mortgage account has its own notion of what the loan payment should be. These do not match. Last year, or maybe the year before, I changed the bill, but not the mortgage account, when the escrow payment went up. Now the two are different, and Money offers no way to re-synchronize them.

After wrestling with this for a long time, I gave up and modified both. I suppose I'll have to do that every November until the house is paid off, or we move to a new house and start over with a new mortgage.

Thanks a lot, 'softies.

Yard work this morning: putting down some seed & fertilizer to fill in the dead spots. I think I picked up a little more sunburn on my head (after scorching it yesterday during the pony ride).

I need a new hat (the old one having gone through the dryer and come out a few sizes too small). Or maybe I should dig the Solumbra hat out of the closet?

Spent a few hours at the library this afternoon, looking for relatives from the Akers side of things. The 1930 Census records Ruby and Orville (inexplicably listed as “Orra”) living at 533 Delaware Street, Gary, Indiana. In the same building are listed William L. and Lina B. Akers.

Supposedly, William and Lina are Orville's parents, but the limited research I've done so far has turned up no proof of this. Perhaps a trip to Indianapolis, or to Parke County, is in order.

When I came home from the library, Jacob was awake, so I said to Jennifer, “How about Jake and I go buy some groceries, so you can have a little peace and quiet?”

Jake said, “No peace and quiet!”

Software updates on nessus:

• Uninstalled the SQL Server Desktop Engine. I don't need it, and it kills performance for the software I do need.
• Upgraded Streets & Trips from 2001 to 2004. I still need to upgrade the iPaq, and probably convert all my maps.

(Streets & Trips 2004 still thinks Duncan Road has an I72 interchange. It makes me wonder how accurate the rest of the maps are.)

Jacob likes to play with the computer.

Rush Limbaugh is under investigation for misuse of prescription painkillers. He hasn't thundered his innocence across the airwaves yet, which is a bit surprising. The man has an opinion about everything in the news, except when he's the news?

(And why is it always prescription painkillers? Two years ago, I had a generous Vicodin prescription—I gobbled dozens of them in October and November of 2001, and they had no recreational value whatsoever. When my back stopped hurting, I stopped taking them, and didn't miss them. So why are big-name celebrity types always getting themselves in trouble with the stuff?)

Signs that something is very wrong with the world:

• Roy (of Siegfried & Roy) was mauled by a tiger yesterday.
• Arnold Schwarzenegger might be elected governor of California.
• The Cubs are in the playoffs…and winning.

[After a while, the Cubs stopped winning. It was just a temporary aberration.]

The theme of today: Horses.

Jake rode a pony today, over at Moraine View state park (a few miles north of Le Roy). So did Natalie. It was a big family event: Norm and Barb were there; also Amy, Scott and Ryan; and even Aunt Linda came down from Peoria (that's her, leading Jake's pony—and doubtless she'd be mortified at the thought of her image spread across the internet, so we won't tell her, all right?).

After the pony-riding was finished, we had a picnic. There was a big play area, with lots of places to run around and climb on, and even a few slides. Everybody went down the slides, even me. (No pictures: I left the camera in the car.)

After that, we left Jake with Grandma and Grandpa, and went to see Seabiscuit.

Cold this morning: 31.8° at 8:00am, the first temperature below freezing of the season. Supposed to be even colder tonight, which seems a little extreme for October.

Plugged the iPaq into its cradle this evening; ActiveSync started, trundled a bit, then horked up the following silly error message:

ActiveSync cannot log on to Microsoft Outlook. Make sure Microsoft Outlook is installed and functioning correctly. You may need to restart your computer. You could have a conflict due to two folders on this computer are named C:\Program Files\Microsoft and C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office. If so, rename the C:\Program Files\Microsoft folder so that it does not contain the word “Microsoft.” If this folder contains subfolders, you may need to reinstall programs in the renamed folder. For more information on renaming folders and installing programs, see Help for your operating system.

What it should have said:

IMAP support in Outlook 2000 is so pathetic that Outlook tripped over its own [censored] trying to exit when you finished reading your email earlier in the evening.

I killed the bunged-up Outlook process, and ActiveSync was happy again. No need to rename directories, reinstall applications, or restart the computer.

Fooled around a bit with Visual C# this evening. I worked through the first half of the first lesson in Visual C# Step by Step, which was the obligatory Hello World program in C#.

Visual C# is rather nice. There's no telling whether I'll ever write any actual software with it—I bought every version of Visual Basic from 1.0 through 6.0 (except 3.0), and never used it for anything—but it's nice.

Cold this morning, a bit drizzly & quite unpleasant. But the sun came out later and warmed things up.

Minor excitement at dear old WRI: the hard disk seized up on my primary work machine. It took me about twenty minutes of poking at it to get the machine to reboot.

And then I backed up everything I didn't want to lose: four CDs worth. Always make backups! (But consider making them before the disk fails…)

I'd be worried by this episode, except that a replacement has already been ordered. The new machine is a $1500 mid-range desktop box, nothing extravagant—but still oodles better than what I've got now.

Today the iPaq surprised me with a calendar entry: Rush in Rio DVD Release? Apparently I read about it on some rumor site, months ago, and added a calendar entry in case I forgot (which I did).

Amazon.com says Rush in Rio will be released on October 21st, so I added it to my wish list. (Handy things, wish lists.)

Cute cover: a dinosaur wearing a Carmen Miranda fruit hat, holding one of those drinks with a paper umbrella sticking out the top.

One downside (among many) of the internet: I no longer have to wait until the Thursday afternoon paper to find out how much we won in the Wednesday night Lotto drawing (bupkis). On the other hand, we did hit for another $3 last Saturday.

Curious web site: iPodlounge, ipodlounge.com, “All Things iPod.”

Tried again to re-activate the copy of Microsoft Reader on nessus; again, failure. No error message, just Activation Failed. The iPaq re-activated without incident, so the server isn't down. It's just another frustrating Microsoft screw-up.

Thanks bunches, 'softies.

The Reader online help says:

Activation is a one-time process that enables your computer to read digitally encrypted software, such as, electronic books.

It should say:

Activation allows us to de-activate your books whenever we feel like it. If you jump through all the hoops we place before you, we might re-activate your books. Then again, we might not.

And we'll de-activate them again next month, because we can.

In a fit of bad temper, I deleted all my e-books, except the free (and un-DRM'd) ones I downloaded from the University of Virginia Library. Microsoft's free e-book promotion has another two months left, but I don't think I'll bother downloading any more of their e-books: there's no guarantee I'll ever be able to read them.

[I may be wrong about this. It may be that an e-book, once activated, stays that way. Maybe it's only the newer e-books that require a newer activation. I don't know—but I'm sure that the Microsoft Reader activation process is too annoying to deal with. If I want to buy books, I'll go to the bookstore. If I want free books, I'll go to the library.]

Freeze warnings for tonight.