November 2003 Archives

A little web site problem: the Elliott W. LaDuke article I typed in on the 2nd has been missing from the Genealogy index page all this time. Seems I forgot to set some keywords. Oops.

I have this theory that Elliott LaDuke, who married Mary Alldredge, is related somehow to Antoinette LaDuke, who married Michael Sturm, and whose son Benjamin F. Sturm married Josephine Alldredge.

2:10pm, and Jacob is supposed to be sleeping. On the monitor, I hear toys being tossed around, and occasionally sounds of Jacob jumping up & down on the mattress.

Silly boy, go to sleep.

3:04pm, and Jake is up & playing. He never did go to sleep. I guess you'll be going to bed early this evening, Jake.

Two weeks ago, it was bronchitis. Last week, it was pneumonia. This week, I seem to have picked up a cold from somewhere.

Pity me, pity me.

Poor Jennifer, she's not feeling well. Last week, she sent me to the doctor; today, I am returning the favor.

Jacob finished his medicine yesterday; I have two days remaining of mine; poor Jennifer is just starting hers. The pills are enormous, too, the sort we used to call horse-pills when I was a kid. Maybe that means they're extra-strong?

Jacob spent the first hour of his nap chattering to himself (and occasionally calling, “Mama! Papa! Where are you?” down the hallway), but seems to have fallen asleep.

The boil order was lifted at 3:00 this afternoon. We can drink again!

Back from Arlington Heights.

The drive back was uneventful. There was snow in the air all the way home, but not much on the pavement. (After sunset, the temperature fell, roads & bridges began to freeze, and many cars ended up in ditches. But we were safely home long before then.)

Minor excitement: Champaign-Urbana and most surrounding towns are under a thirty-six-hour boil order. It seems power went out at the main pumping station, and pressure in the lines dropped below the 20psi limit set by the EPA, so—boil that water, or suffer the consequences.

Finished reading Something Wicked This Way Comes, by Ray Bradbury.

In Arlington Heights.

The President nipped over to Iraq today, to spend Thanksgiving with the troops. Given that politicians operate on multiple levels, and rarely have only one reason for doing anything, I'm wondering why he did this. To improve morale? To get his picture on the news? To annoy the Democrats?

Called the doctor this morning, about my x-rays. It seems I have a touch of pneumonia. Not much, apparently, as they didn't seem very worried about it.

But I have to go back in two weeks for more x-rays, to make sure it's cleared up.

Poor Jake, sent home from daycare for having a temperature of 101°. At home, I couldn't get a reading higher than 97.4°, and Jake's been his usual rambunctious self ever since. A miracle cure!

Last night, I read the Customer Agreement that came with my new phone. It can be summarized as follows:

1. You have no rights.
2. We have no obligations.

I don't suppose that the legal department cares that I'm going to spend the next year resenting Verizon Wireless.

We're the phone company. We don't care. We don't have to.

On the answering machine when we got home: “This is a message for Mr. Rice. Please call about your chest X-ray. Thank you.”

I hate it when they leave messages like that. Do I have pneumonia? Tuberculosis? Lung cancer? Or just a bad cough?

Cold today: sputnik recorded a high of 38° for most of the afternoon. It's a few degrees colder now.

The mystery illness has completed the hat trick by—finally—infecting Jennifer as well. Poor Jennifer. At least she isn't coughing the way Jake and I (still) are.

I'm still taking the antibiotics, but decided to skip the inhaler today. So far, I feel much the same without it as with it.

Went back to Champaign Telephone this morning, to get a working telephone. It cost $91 up front, and I had to sign a one-year contract (at rates slightly higher than the old contract). My new phone, a Kyocera KX414, is cute, but functional.

A year from now, the number-portability regulations will have been in effect for six months (in Champaign; even longer in the larger markets). I'm hoping that when this contract is up, six months of competition will have driven prices down quite a bit. Cell phones are too expensive, especially for people like Jennifer & me who don't use theirs very much.

Cold today, with snow flurries for much of the morning. No actual accumulation, though.

Television viewers have two choices today: Michael Jackson, or John F. Kennedy. I'm not much interested in either, though for different reasons.

After twenty years of the Michael Jackson freakshow, I'm burned out. If he's done something criminal, let the courts take care of it. That's why we have courts. In the meantime, let's all try to find some better use for the airtime & column-inches.

I'm also weary of the endless conspiracy theories about John F. Kennedy, Lee Harvey Oswald, Jack Ruby, Badge Man, Umbrella Man, the Cigarette-Smoking Man, etc., etc., ad nauseam. X-Files was fiction, people. It was make-believe.

Jennifer sent me to the doctor this morning. (She takes good care of me.) Now I have some antibiotics—may cause increased sensitivity to sunlight; use sunblock—and an albuterol inhaler.

Jake's probably consumed a quart of albuterol since he was born; his doctor is always prescribing it when he's got a cold or something.

Cousin Cheri sent me a picture, but—alas!—I can't figure out what the format is, so I can't look at it. None of my software can make head or tail of it.

Email from Vince:

If you are looking for links for your site PLEASE add my latest addiction: www.mgpmrc.org. Thanks!

Still trying to get over whatever illness it is that I caught from Jacob. The fever is gone (I haven't taken my temperature in a while, so I could be wrong about that), but I'm still coughing.

So's Jacob, poor little guy. Especially when he's unhappy about something. If he coughs too much, he tends to hork up a little of whatever he last ate/drank, so keeping him happy has taken on new importance.

My cell phone has been acting up lately. When I turn it on, I get Service Required or some other unhelpful message. Sometimes I get a graphic showing a phone connected to a computer, with little arrows pointing both ways. Maybe it thinks it's trying to synchronize with a computer? No computer here, sorry.

Is it just coincidence that this started happening right when the contract I signed two years ago expired?

I'd go have a chat with the Champaign Telephone Co. people, but I don't expect them to sell me a new phone unless I sign another two-year contract. I don't want to do that. I might sign a six-month contract, then shop around a bit after the number-portability requirement reaches the Champaign market. But two years? No, thanks.

Interesting:

A few years ago—February, 2001, as it turns out, though it is not mentioned in the Daybook—I corresponded with Tony Felty, a (somewhat distant) relative, and ended up offering to send him copies of some vital records I'd obtained. I brought a sheaf of papers to work, and ran them through the copier. The originals I put in a manila folder labeled “Original” while the copies went in an envelope addressed to Cousin Tony.

Today, I needed a manila folder, so I fetched one from the supply cabinet. Across the top was written “Original” in my handwriting. Where has that folder been all this time, what adventures has it had, and how did it come to be at the top of the pile just when I needed one?

Funny old world.

This is cool: the National Weather Service is making weather alerts available via RSS. The feed for Illinois is weather.gov/alerts/il.rss.

(I used to go to the Weather Channel web site for weather information. As time passed, the weather was gradually squeezed out by banner ads and other annoyances. Fortunately, weather.gov has no banner ads.)

Champaign Telephone says I have three choices:

1. Keep my current contract, repair my phone: $75 & up;
2. Keep my current contract, buy a new phone: $130 & up;
3. Sign a new two-year contract.

I don't want to do any of these things. Perhaps instead I will try to survive without a cellular phone—difficult, but possible—while searching for a phone company that won't try to rip me off.

My germs—which used to be Jacob's germs—and I are staying home today.

Fun with the Money 2004 budget function: wrote a check today for the December power bill; now Money thinks I'm way over budget for November. There's a reallocate-funds-from-next-month option, but it doesn't seem to work properly.

I suppose the balance forecast will just be a little off until January.

Today's legal term: assumpsit, which means…

…an oral or written agreement, contract, or promise that exists without being on the record or under seal.

This word is in the Encarta 2002 dictionary, but the Find function does not find it there: you have to open the dictionary and search there. Silly software.

New in the genealogy section: probate and court case indices for White County, Illinois.

Yesterday, I was sure it was Wednesday, so much so that I reminded Jennifer several times of a Wednesday-night television program she wants to watch, and I almost put the garbage out for Thursday-morning pickup.

Now it really is Wednesday: reality has caught up with my delusion.

Jacob is much improved. Jennifer and I are also recovering, though nobody is quite 100% yet.

Interesting: the domain wolfam.com exists, and belongs to WOLF, an AM station in Syracuse.

I wonder how often Wolfram Research internal email ends up going to Syracuse by mistake, because somebody dropped an r while entering the email address.

Finished reading The Illustrated Man, by Ray Bradbury: one of a set I purchased from the Book of the Month Club a while ago. Perhaps I will read the others next.

Poor Jake, still coughing. His temperature's up, too: 102° last night (though lower this morning).

Still getting used to Money 2004. The budget function—which was completely useless the last time I tried it—works pretty well now.

It still has a penchant for long pauses while some grossly-inefficient database operation grinds along, but in general it is (a little) faster than Money 2002.

Quoth the doctor, “Bronchitis, possibly bacterial; here, have some antibiotics.”

Poor Jake, looks like he'll be staying home another day or two. He misses daycare, I think: he keeps asking, “Where are my friends?”

He's also discovered the eternal question: Why?

Where's Mama?
At work.
Why?
Because we need money.
Why?
To buy groceries.
Why?
Because we need to eat.
Why?
So we don't starve.
Why?
And so on, and so on…

Tried to sign up for the credit-report service that is supposedly free when you buy Money 2004; I clicked on the link and…server error.

No free credit reports for me, alas.

Rainy today: sputnik has recorded over two inches of rain in the last twenty-four hours. The back yard is a bit waterlogged.

Jake's doing better. I think he's not coughing so much any more, and this morning he was very playful (even compared to his usual bouncing-off-the-walls self). So maybe he's on the mend?

Myself, I woke up with a scorching headache. Coffee & ibuprofen seem to be knocking it back, though.

Email from cousin Cheri, with some interesting details about the Akers side of my family tree.

A morning visit to the doctor, who listened to Jake's lungs, looked in his ears, looked down his throat, then ordered a strep test from the lab.

The quick strep test came back negative, which is good news. On the other hand, it means Jake's got some kind of virus, and there's nothing much to do but give him lots of liquids (and the occasional dose of cough medicine).

Jake and I are staying home today. Supposedly this is to let him rest and recover, but nobody told Jake: he's as rambunctious as ever, not acting the least bit sick.

(I've been home with him on days where he was too miserable to do anything but cuddle in the rocking chair with Papa. I much prefer Rambunctious Boy to Sickly Guy.)

Bought a copy of Money 2004 today, despite all my previous rantings & disapproval.

Perhaps I will not find cause to regret this. Let us hope.

Poor Jacob, woke up coughing last night. Rather frightening, it was, but after a while he settled down again. (Mama and Papa took a bit longer to calm down.)

Alas, poor Jacob, he was sent home from daycare a few hours early, for coughing. Tomorrow we're off to see the doctor, to see what's going on. (What's Latin for horking up a lung?)

Today's daybook entry is all Jake, all the time!

During his bath this evening, Jacob was heard to sing Old McDonald. He liked my improvised verse:

And on this farm he had a…bathtub!
E–I–E–I–O
With a splash-splash here,
And a splash-splash there,
Here a splash, there a splash,
Everywhere a splash-splash!

Later, during bedtime stories, he regaled us with a performance of Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star.

Clever lad, is our Jacob.

Long-lost cousin Cheri asks, “Why did you decide to seek out family history?” That's not an easy question.

Partly it's another manifestation of my obsession with databases. I like collecting a pile of data, then poking at it to see what information might fall out.

It will be a gift for Jacob, when he's old enough. (I've been neglecting Jennifer's side of the family tree; I should rectify that.) These are people you've never met, I'll tell him, and never will—but they're important, because without them you wouldn't exist.

And it's for my own curiosity. How did I come to exist? How is it that I am me, and not some other person?

Another trip to the dentist this afternoon, for crown #2. It went more easily this time around. I even took a bit of a nap while waiting for the novocaine to kick in. Heh.

Genealogy Society meeting tonight. I was tasked with bringing a jug of cider (from Curtis Orchard) for the post-meeting snacks. I'm not even a member. Again, heh.

Raked some leaves this morning. Jacob helped:

Poor little guy, he wore himself out: at 1:00pm he asked to take a nap, and as of 4:15pm he's still sleeping.

Fooled around a bit with my census XML files (Parke County, Indiana, 1910 and Posey County, Indiana, 1870). I don't know how useful it will be to have this data online, but it's a convenient excuse to play with XML and XML style sheets.

I'm not catching a cold after all. Must be allergies.

Very strange: poking around the MSN Groups web site, I discovered that MSN will let anyone create a group, even people who don't use MSN. So I did: groups.msn.com/PatRicesGroup. There's nothing there, and the 3MB limit ensures that there never will be anything there, but it exists.

Maybe I should put a link to it on the main page somewhere.

The Belkin saga (see November 7) continues. Over in news.admin.net-abuse.email, a Belkin marketroid desperately attempts damage control:

We at Belkin apologize for the recent trouble our customers have experienced with the wireless router/browser redirect issue. We unintentionally overlooked the effect this feature would have. We never intended to compromise the trust of our customers, and we never intend to do so in the future.

Well, now. Maybe they're sorry for having done something evil, maybe they're just trying to come up with a new way to sell ad space on their customers' computers.

I still can't activate the copy of MS Reader on nessus. The activation page still won't tell me why. No DRM'd e-books for me, I suppose.

The weed of copy-protection bears bitter fruit.

Looked up a few Alldredges in the 1870 Census this afternoon, particularly Jefferson Alldredge—my 4 × great-grandfather—and his older brother Samuel.

One of the items recorded in the 1870 Census was value of real and personal estates. Jefferson claimed $27,300, while Samuel claimed $33,000. This seems like an awful lot of money for rural farmers in 1870; I didn't know the Alldredges were so wealthy.

Fun with Windows XP: if you're running Notepad, and you do this—

1. Press and hold right-hand Ctrl key.
2. Press and hold both Shift keys.
3. Release the Shift keys.
4. Release the Ctrl key.

—Notepad will switch to right-to-left mode: the scrollbar switches to the left side of the window, the text is right-aligned, and end-of-sentence punctuation (periods, question marks, etc.) moves to the end of the line (i.e., the left).

It's pretty easy to trigger this key combination by mistake, which is what I did while writing some Perl code this afternoon. A bit of a shock, it was.

[On Windows 2000, this same key sequence does something different, yet equally annoying: it locks the Ctrl key.]

Geeks in an uproar: it seems Belkin (www.belkin.com) has sneaked a trojan into their router firmware that, once every eight hours or so, picks a random HTTP request and redirects it to an advertisement for their new parental-control product.

As yet, Belkin does not understand that what it did was wrong. Given the developing firestorm, I'm sure the light will dawn presently.

[It didn't take long. See November 9.]

The Matrix Revolutions opened in theaters yesterday, and reviews are starting to appear. None very enthusiastic, I'm afraid; usually, they say, “Very pretty, but not too bright.” I'll probably sneak out of work some afternoon this month and see it, despite the reviews.

Hey, pictures of relatives, distant and otherwise: groups.msn.com/FabulousFabriziusFamily/akers.msnw. “Uncle Bob” is my father, Bob Akers.

Finished reading The Year's Best Science Fiction: Nineteenth Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois. It only took me two months.

The west wall of the Trade Center building sported a waterfall this morning: from somewhere above the Arrow Glass scaffolding, a stream of water splashed against the sixth-floor windows, then ran down the wall to the sidewalk (soaking the occasional unwary pedestrian).

I think they were testing the window seals for leaks.

Feels like I'm catching a cold.

Poking around www.tivo.com, I see: UPS Ground Shipping not available to…Hawaii.

Well, duh. You mean UPS can't drive one of their ubiquitous brown panel trucks to Hawaii? Really? Why not?

And Volo Broadband has raised their rates: what was $28/month is now $32/month.

Remember, remember, the Fifth of November,
the Gunpowder Treason and plot.
I can think of no reason why the Gunpowder Treason
should ever be forgot.

Or something like that. Doggerel, like urban legends, has a tendency to mutate over the centuries.

Email from Red Hat:

Red Hat will discontinue maintenance and errata support for Red Hat Linux 9 as of April 30, 2004. Red Hat does not plan to release another product in the Red Hat Linux line.

They suggest that I upgrade to the Enterprise Edition, which costs…er, I don't know how much it costs: I can't persuade the Red Hat web site to divulge that information.

[Found it: Red Hat Enterprise Linux WS, Basic Edition $180, Standard Edition $300.]

It makes me wonder why I'm wasting a 20GB disk on a soon-to-be orphan product. I could cram a lot of MP3 files in there…

Drove to Normal to meet Jennifer and Jacob, and to have lunch with them and the grandparents.

Jake had a great time on his first sleepover. Seems like he didn't miss Mom and Dad at all. Not even a little?

Back from Posey County. Interesting items from this trip:

Isaac Felty filed for divorce from Lillie Maurer on the grounds that she was mean to him, and beat him with sticks of wood, and repeatedly chased him out of their house.

<thingfish>
What a sweet little hunk o' heaven she turned out to be!
</thingfish>

Stanley Felty appears numerous times in the White County court records, charged with various larcenies.

The will of Samuel Alldredge names Jefferson Alldredge as one of his sons, so that connection has pretty much been proven.