December 2003 Archives

In the inbox this morning, a message from Bruce Katsiff, Director and CEO of the James A. Michener Art Museum, Doylestown, Pennsylvania (www.michenerartmuseum.org). The message looked real enough—something about a trip to Australia—but clearly was not intended for me, and had a large attachment that was some kind of executable. Looks like Mr. Director/CEO has a virus on his laptop (which, by the way, has the unimaginative name 'laptop').

You might want to have the IT department look into that, sir.

In the news: yesterday, a dead Nigerian was discovered in the wheel well of a British Airways 747 at JFK Airport in New York. The plane had been in Lagos on Christmas Eve, which means British Airways had been flying a dead guy around the world for five days before anybody noticed.

Jacob and I are home today: the daycare ladies are taking the day off.

Conversation with Jacob:

I want a hot dog.
But we're going to have lunch with Mama soon.
That's a good idea! That's a great idea!

Created a bunch of 2004 scaffolding in the web site; now I'm ready for the new year (which, as of this writing, is less than nine hours away).

Fooled around a bit with another of my Christmas presents: Microsoft Picture It Photo Premium 9. It looks a lot like Windows XP, even on nessus, which is still running Windows 2000. I used it to create web versions of some Santa Train pictures, which I then sneaked into the December 7 daybook entry.

iPod update: after adding the entire Jethro Tull catalog, This Was to J-Tull Dot Com (23 albums, not counting the 20-year box set, which I didn't upload), 1170 songs, 3.2 days, 6.33GB. The iPod still has 30.8GB left, which seems like a lot—but I have a lot of CDs left, too.

Overcast this morning, but the rain has stopped. NOAA says the temperature is 42°, and not expected to rise much today. It's a gloomy, quiet day, as everyone recovers from Christmas and looks ahead to New Year's Eve parties. (No parties here, and if I'm up at midnight on the 31st it'll be for Jacob, not for partying.)

Listening to Nanci Griffith on the iPod. Sound quality is (to these forty-year-old ears) equal to the portable cd player I'd been using for work music. Battery life? It hasn't run out yet, but (as of 11:00am) it's only been running for two hours.

Zane Thomas (www.zanethomas.com) asks:

What is it about politics that has it in the category of Things Polite People Don't Discuss—Or At Least Not Seriously?

Reasonable people can disagree; reasonable people can compromise; but politics is not—and perhaps never was—a reasonable process. Politicians encourage a false absolutism, a sense of us-vs.-them that means nobody can win unless somebody loses.

To be politically active is to buy into the ridiculous notion that half the populace is wrong, stupidly wrong, about nearly everything, and if left unchecked will bring about the death of the nation. It's a lot like religion that way—which is why politics, like religion, is one of those things sensible people avoid discussing if they want to get along with others.

www.bullseyecanada.com is a rather annoying web site, stuffed with tiny text and way too much blinking & flashing. (And it resizes the browser window to full-screen. I hate it when web sites do that.) But they're remastering and reissuing the Klaatu back catalog, plus post-Klaatu solo albums from the band members.

Finished reading Pandora, by Anne (no relation) Rice. There's still quite a backlog of unread vampire novels on the shelf; perhaps I will read a few more.

Warm this morning—45° at 11:18pm—and rainy. This doesn't seem much like winter to me.

The iPod fills, slowly, with music: 748 songs, 1.8 days, 3.75GB. After all this labor, the iPod is only 10% full. Egad.

Off to the library, for an hour's genealogy: poring over the WPA vital-records indices of Clay and Parke counties, Indiana. It appears that:

• Elijah Kibbe and Clara Eberhart were married in Clay County on January 15, 1896;
• Mary Helen Kibbe (their daughter) was born in Parke County on June 20, 1919;
• Elijah and Clara had a son, born on March 13, 1904, but there's no telling whether this was Gerald or Russell.

(I really need to be more organized in my research, instead of poking randomly about in online databases and microfilmed records. Perhaps that will be one of my new year's resolutions.)

The iPod project continues. One surprise: when I popped in Nanci Griffith's Clock Without Hands, a window appeared on the screen thanking me for buying the CD and asking whether I wanted to visit the Elektra Records web site. No, I just want to copy the album to the iPod so I can listen to it at work, thanks.

I suppose this is when I'll find out whether any of the CDs in my collection are afflicted with a copy-protection scheme. Any that are will most likely end up at the local used-cd store.

In Olympia Fields, for another family Christmas party. (It's a big family, we need several.) Jake was a bit shy at first, but got over it.

Christmas is pretty much over now, alas.

If the bad guys had any evil plans for Christmas, they were apparently thwarted. But a 727 full of Lebanese holiday travellers went down in Benin, and an earthquake hit southern Iran, so the day did not pass without calamity.

Discussing personal hygiene with Jake:

Jake, you need a bath. You're a dirty bird.
No! I'm not a dirty bird!

The iPod project continues: 522 songs, 1.3 days of music, 2.63GB. Jennifer asks, “Are you ever going to listen to any of this music?”

It's interesting that the advertising copy and documentation for the iPod defines GB as 1,000,000,000 bytes, while the iPod itself (and iTunes) defines GB correctly: 1,073,741,824 bytes, i.e., 2³² bytes. Memo to Apple: if you're going to lie to your customers about disk space, at least do it consistently.

Lunch was at the Original House of Pancakes, with Leland, who's in town for a while. We did the same thing last year, too.

6:24pm, and Jake's been sleeping about four hours now. Poor little guy, he's had a big week and needs a little recovery time.

iPod update: 632 songs, 1.6 days, 3.19GB.

When Jacob woke up this morning, he discovered that Santa had left many presents for him under the tree and in his stocking. There was even a bicycle.

Off to Normal, for Christmas with the grandparents, aunts & uncles, and cousins. Much fun was had by all.

Many pictures were taken, but Mr. Nikon suffered an unfortunate hardware failure—the latch broke off that holds the camera back closed, leaving the camera back flapping in the breeze—so it's unlikely that any of them survived. There were some good ones, too.

Everybody's coughing again. Poor Jacob, he was up a lot last night with it. A temporary relapse? Or a new illness?

Jake and I have the house to ourselves this morning: poor Jennifer had to go to work.

Spent a few hours this morning shoveling CDs into nessus: all fourteen Beatles albums (they have more, but I never got around to buying them).

iPod statistics: 338 songs, 19 hours, 1.5GB.

(One thing I don't like about iTunes: I think of my music collection as albums, not songs, and I want to see it sorted first by artist name, then chronologically for a given artist. iTunes won't let me do that.)

Jacob was fine this morning, though he resisted when it was time to get up. He was sleepy, poor little guy.

And my voice was a reasonable approximation of normal this morning: whatever nasties have afflicted my vocal cords lately are on the wane.

Transferring songs from nessus to the iPod is quick and easy: just plug the iPod into the dock, and it automatically synchronizes with iTunes. FireWire is pleasantly speedy, too: an entire album transfers in just a few seconds. Not so speedy, however, is the process of getting songs into iTunes. At 192kbs (which people have told me sounds better than 128kbps), iTunes can digitize at 3–4 times playback speed, i.e., about ten minutes for a forty-minute album. Four hundred albums would thus take about seventy-two hours.

It's going to take me a while to fill up the iPod, I think.

Snow showers this morning, briefly; they stopped without leaving anything on the ground. (How nice.) We've had heavy cloud cover since then, and the temperature's just above freezing (33°).

Interesting: today, the CNN web site has an article on the privacy implications of online databases, specifically the ones that give you the address associated with a telephone number. The same article was in yesterday's newspaper, and illustrated with the same photograph of a worried-looking Sonjia Kenya, Young Single Woman Living Alone In The Big City. (All those losers she's given her number to, over the years—now they can find out where she lives. I'd be worried, too.) Usually, the web sites scoop the dead-tree news outlets; not this time.

Google doesn't know anything about our home phone number, but it did tell me that my grandmother's old phone number now belongs to one J. Ward, Portage, Indiana.

brand.blogs.com/mantra is run by Jennifer Rice: not the one who's married to me, but a Jennifer Rice nonetheless.

It's hard to tell from her web site exactly what she does for a living. She seems to be a consultant of some kind.

[I just checked Google. Sure are a lot of Jennifer Rices out there.]

I have begun the somewhat laborious process of getting music into the iPod: thirteen albums, and counting.

Finished reading Fahrenheit 451, by Ray Bradbury: only 190 pages, but it still took me nearly two weeks. I'm slow sometimes.

Jacob stayed home from daycare today: more for observation than for any obvious illness. He ate a good breakfast, and a good lunch, and seemed sprightly enough.

Can a new tooth really cause all the symptoms we saw yesterday: runny nose, drooling, upset stomach? Experts are divided, it seems—though it's unclear how many of these experts have ever been in the same room as a two-year-old.

Unusual instructions for the one-hour photo guy: “Half the pictures on this roll are from a genealogy trip, and are all gravestones & cheery stuff like that. The other half are Christmas pictures of Jake & his grandparents. I only want double prints of the latter.” He didn't bat an eye.

And the framed enlargement of Jake and Santa that was on the counter last week? Turns out I was supposed to buy it, only $25 (frame included), but they forgot to mention that when I was there.

Curiously warm today: 50° at 1:00pm. Clouds rolled in later, and the temperature started dropping, alas.

More old television shows are being released on DVD:

• Battlestar Galactica
• Gilligan's Island
• Green Acres
• Lost in Space

I watched all of these, long ago—I watched so much television it's a wonder I had time for anything else—but I don't need to see them again, thank you very much.

Fired up the fixmbr command again, and removed all traces of Linux from nessus. I need that partition for the iPod's music files.

(Did I mention that Santa left an iPod under the tree this year? Rather extravagant of Santa, I must say…)

Woke up early this morning, couldn't get back to sleep. So I fired up the computer, checked my mail, read a few web pages, and looked for Elijah W. Kibbe in the 1880 Census (which I have on a stack of CDs).

There's one living in Worth County, Missouri. He's even the right age (6 years old).

Grandparents—bearing gifts—are visiting from Arlington Heights today.

Jake had a good day, entertaining the grandparents and playing with the many presents they brought for him.

Later, he wasn't feeling so well any more. Poor Jake. Poor Jennifer, who found herself pushing the carpet-cleaner around instead of relaxing after a big day.

People tell us that teething can cause drooling, runny noses, and barfing. Really?

A little housecleaning this morning: company coming tomorrow, and we don't want them to know how messy the house usually is.

Lunch today was at Fiesta Cafe, where the service is better, faster, and friendlier than at Zelma's. And the food is hot—my steak fajitas sizzled alarmingly for a good ten minutes.

It was on December 20th, 1983 that my time as a student at the University of Illinois came to an end. Strange to think that it's been twenty years.

I grow old, I grow old…

Sneaked off the library for an hour of genealogizing: specifically, to look for Elijah Kibbe & family in the 1900, 1920 and 1930 censuses.

The Kibbes were easily found in the 1930 census, but 1920 proved a bit of a challenge: nothing I typed in the search dialog turned up any matches in Parke County, Indiana. In desperation, I tried a sneaky genealogy trick I learned from the archivists: in 1930, the Kibbes' next-door neighbor was Arthur Remington, so I looked for him in 1920. He was easily found—nobody misspells Remington—and living next door was…Elijah Kibbe. His name was so badly mangled by the enumerator that the Ancestry.com indexers can perhaps be forgiven for reading it as “Relehe”.

In 1900, the Kibbes were living in Dick Johnson Township, Clay County, Indiana, just south of Parke County. (No sign of Mr. Remington.)

More snow this morning, just enough to make the morning drive to work a little more interesting than usual.

In the news: RealNetworks has filed an antitrust suit against Microsoft, claiming that Microsoft is interfering with distribution & use of RealNetworks' streaming-media player, RealPlayer.

I'd say the intensely annoying nature of RealPlayer is a bigger impediment to its use than anything Microsoft might have done: the last time I installed it, it tried to take over all audio file types, not just its own, and it was stuffed with advertisements that couldn't be turned off. There were more annoyances, I'm sure, but I've blissfully forgotten them.

Real's argument seems to be that since their media player is a separate product, so is Microsoft's; therefore, including Windows Media Player in Windows is illegal tying of the two products. I don't buy this argument. Where do you draw the line between the operating system and applications illegally tied thereto? Should the makers of EditPad (www.editpadpro.com) complain that Microsoft has illegally tied Notepad to Windows?

[Over at dotnetjunkies.com Mark DiGiovanni has some interesting comments regarding RealPlayer, not only more detailed but also much better written than my feeble screed.]

Lunch today was at Zelma's, the new pizza place on Windsor Road, with Jennifer and a couple of Jennifer's co-workers.

Let's see now…where to begin…

• Before I even got in the door, the Zelma's hostess was telling me to move my car. “Those spaces are for bank employees,” she said. Well, maybe Zelma's and/or the bank should put up a bigger sign?
• Drinks were delivered promptly. No refills—whether this is Zelma's policy, or the waitress just didn't feel like bringing any, is unclear.
• Half an hour after the four of us placed our orders, Jennifer's food arrived. Jennifer had asked for ranch dressing on her salad; she got blue cheese. (Jennifer hates blue cheese dressing.) When I pointed this out to the waitress, she took away the blue cheese, but never came back with some ranch dressing. Poor Jennifer never did get her salad.
• Twenty minutes later, the other three orders arrived. My sandwich clearly had been hot at some point in the past (the cheese was melted) but had long since reached room temperature by the time I got it.
• We waited a long time for the check, but it didn't come until we stood up and started for the door. The waitress took cash (for the co-workers' order) and a debit card (for our order), then disappeared. After another long wait, she returned with a receipt for Jennifer to sign. Then she disappeared again. After another long wait, we cornered her near the kitchen door and retrieved the co-workers' change. (Maybe she thought she was getting a $13 tip? Don't count on it.)

I don't think we'll be going there again.

(Incidentally, the password for their point-of-sale terminals appears to be 4582. Don't do anything illegal with this information, boys & girls.)

Snow this morning: as of 9:00am, about an inch on the ground. Main streets are pretty clear, but side streets & parking lots are a bit treacherous.

Thinking about the word ‘innovation’: it's Microsoft's favorite word. They use it everywhere. During the antitrust trial, they said, “We must be free to innovate.” Bill Gates is always talking about the latest innovations from Microsoft.

As Inigo Montoya said in The Princess Bride, “You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.”

Innovation is nothing more than the introduction of something new. Not necessarily something better, just something new.

I've accused Microsoft of being too distracted by whiz-bangery to pay much attention to improving the infrastructure of Windows. They're more interested in creating something new than in improving what they've already got.

So perhaps innovation is the right word for what Microsoft does, but not for the reasons they intend.

[I say this as if Microsoft knew or cared what I think about them. They don't. I know that.]

I rant about Microsoft, and then I read this on Scripting News:

If you didn't have a sense of humor before, aging gives you one. What else can you do but laugh at the silly idea that what you think matters, even a bit.

Coincidence?

Meanwhile, over at the Guardian, Rebecca Blood says:

Consider the average weblog. Maintained by an unpaid enthusiast, this site will be updated perhaps a dozen times a day with links to interesting news stories and entries on other weblogs, accompanied by a few lines—or paragraphs—of commentary.

I guess that's why this is a daybook, not a blog.

Email from Aunt Betty, who confirms my guess that Elijah W. and Clara E. Kibbe were the parents of Ruby Kibbe.

A little googling this afternoon turned up www.iroots.net/family/kibbe, which is full of useful information. There's even a 600-page book of Kibbe Genealogy, only $40. I might have to send away for a copy.

[I said that about the Bolerjack book, too, but never did.]

My workday, expressed as cvs commands:

cvs update -D yesterday
cvs tag -F Before_Stupid_Change
cvs update -A
cvs tag -F After_Stupid_Change
cvs update -j After_Stupid_Change -j Before_Stupid_Change
cvs commit -m "Back out stupid change."

Six little commands, to back out several days' work. Next time, design first. Then write code.

The other day, Jacob and I discussed eyebrows:

[Jacob touches Papa's eyebrow.] What's this?
That's my eyebrow. Do you have eyebrows?
No, I don't.
[Papa touches Jacob's eyebrow.] Then what's this?
[Jacob touches his eyebrow.] I've got eyebrows!

Last night's bedtime conversation with Jacob:

Hey, don't pull Papa's hair.
That's not hair!
It's not hair? Then what is it?
Whiskers!

Cold today. Thick cloud cover, but with gaps of blue sky here & there.

The ever-mutating plague of spam has developed a curious new twist: the Sender line now has random words, strung together and capitalized like a name. I suppose the idea is to get past the spam filters.

Today I got one from Urinating C. Pause. I was amused, a little, but not enough to read the message before deleting it.

Judge: It says here that you want to change your name to…Urinating C. Pause?
Me: Yes, Your Honor, I do.
Judge: Contempt of court, $50 fine. Next case!

The American Teleservices Association—i.e., Phone Spammers of America—has a web site: www.ataconnect.org. Their Issue Summaries page is particularly amusing. Not surprisingly, they oppose anything that would make phone spammers less annoying:

Poor phone spammers, so misunderstood.

In today's mail: a Christmas card from the Arlington Heights grandparents. It was addressed to Jacob, so we let him open it: a very pretty card, plus stickers. Jake likes stickers…

Much baking this evening: fudge, and pumpkin bread. Very tasty, both of them.

In today's EMAIL: Red Hat threatens to pull the plug on nessus:

RHN has flagged your inactive system profiles for deletion and will remove these profiles from your account in the next 15 days unless you act first.

It says I haven't connected to their update servers since July 4th. Has it really been that long?

The problem is that just now I lack the time & energy to climb the new-operating-system learning curve—and Red Hat's new business model isn't very compatible with casual dabblers such as myself. I'm not going to pay $200 for something I might never use.

Picked up our Christmas cards from the one-hour photo place; the photo guy liked the picture so much he's got a framed enlargement sitting on the counter. Jake is famous, and he doesn't even know it.

In today's mail: a letter from Mr. Doctor: We are pleased to inform you that your chest x-ray is normal.

That's nice.

Messed around with my Amazon.com wish list the other day, succeeded in deleting everything. Oops.

Guess I'll have to start wishing again.

Poked around online, and found two useful documents: a JPEG file format reference, and an EXIF reference. Now, if I'm feeling industrious, I can write a program to pull EXIF data from the digital camera images.

This program—if it's ever written—will have to be in C#, since that's the only compiler I have installed on nessus these days. (My copy of Visual Studio 6.0 stayed on the shelf during the last rebuild; now it's at work, in a grocery bag on the floor of my office. One of these days I'll sneak it into the breakroom, and see whether somebody runs off with it.)

Tonight was Christmas Cookies Night, except that we didn't actually make any cookies. Instead, Jennifer made banana bread while Jacob & I artfully arranged Rolo candies on tiny pretzels.

Later, we tried to make microwave toffee: put some sugar, butter and water in a bowl; microwave on high until the molten lava in the bowl turns a pretty brown color (nine or ten minutes). Then carefully pour onto a buttered cookie sheet, trying not to think of what 300° sugar would feel like spilled on bare feet.

Christmas is the time for peace on earth, good will toward men, etc., etc., but it's also the time when the most loathsome and annoying specimens of humanity crawl out of whatever holes they hide in the rest of the year and clutter the roads & stores.

Two weeks, and they'll all go back into hibernation: something for the rest of us to look forward to.

Not much email recently. Perhaps the usual correspondents have grown weary of me, or maybe the chimps at EarthLink have installed an overzealous spam filter.

Or they're all busy with Christmas?

Lunch today at Le Peep. Very crowded. The promised fifteen-minute wait for a table stretched to half an hour, but the food was pretty good.

Jake got a little bored toward the end of the meal, and started playing with the windowblinds.

Cold this morning: 19° at 8:00am. No snow, though.

Poking around the PocketPC Thoughts web site, I saw a curious bit of underlining in one of the article headlines:

A green double-underline on the word WiFi. It appeared to be a link, but there was no <a href="...">...</a> around it in the underlying HTML. Clicking on it sent me to a page on the Microsoft web site.

Curiouser and curiouser.

A little investigation revealed that the underlining was done by IntelliTXT, from Vibrant Media (www.vibrantmedia.com). It's a scheme for rewriting web pages on the fly to turn keywords into links to advertisers' web sites.

It sounds pretty much like the infamous SmartTags, that Microsoft tried to slip into Internet Explorer 6. They were unprepared for the hostility from web site designers—I'll create my own links, thank you very much!—and backed down.

Hm…how to disable this… A quick newsgroup search turned up the suggestion to add

127.0.0.1 itxt.vibrantmedia.com

to the hosts file, but it doesn't work. Further investigation is required.

Company meeting this afternoon; I neglected to attend, and so was still in my office when Santa's helpers came through, putting envelopes in mailboxes. Yes, a bonus. Bigger than last year, too.

It must have been a good year for Wolfram Research.

More chest x-rays today, to make sure that what I had two weeks ago was pneumonia (as opposed to lung cancer) and that it's gone now. The x-ray technician—a cheerful lady wearing imperial purple scrubs—said, “Looks good to me,” but I suppose Mr. Doctor will have to make the final determination.

Cold front is coming: as of 1:00pm, the temperature in Champaign is 48°; in Bloomington, 39°; in Peoria, 36°;in Moline, 30°.

Once again, I am thinking about organizing my digital photograph archives. Yesterday I renamed them all to fit the template…

yyyy-mm-dd Description (size).jpg

…but there is more work to be done. The size field isn't very helpful: it's ‘full’, ‘medium’ and ‘thumbnail’. It should be the actual dimensions, e.g., 1800x1200, 640x428, 128x85. And it would be nice if the time were somehow encoded into the filename.

I found a perl script on some web site (the location of which I have, alas, forgotten) that pulls width & height information from the headers of several image formats (gif, png, jpeg). This will prove quite useful, I think.

Since I bought the digital camera (a Kodak DX3500, since discontinued) in June of 2001, we've taken just over three thousand pictures with it. Egad. Maybe I should reinstall Picasa?

9:08pm, and the temperature outside is 32°. The cold front has arrived, though the forecast has changed from “1–2 inches of snow” to “little, if any, accumulation”.

Finished reading The Martian Chronicles, by Ray Bradbury. Last in the set is Fahrenheit 451; perhaps I will read that next.

Jacob is staying home today. Jennifer is taking the morning shift of child-wrangling, while I get the afternoon shift (which includes naptime, lucky me).

He's not really very sick. Yesterday, the doctor said he'd be well enough for daycare today, but we figured another day at home would be good for him.

Last night, the doorbell rang: a cheery fellow who wanted us to sign up for AT&T local and long-distance service. Their new plan is interesting in that it's a flat-rate plan, unlimited local and long-distance calling for $44/month.

It looks like they've realized that their 1950s business model, based on an all-analog telephone network, is obsolete, and needs to be replaced if they're going to compete with the wireless companies.

Poor AT&T. Existing revenue streams were not preserved after all.

I was amused that a telephone company was using door-to-door salespeople to drum up business. Perhaps this is a consequence of the national do-not-call list? Will our doorbell be ringing more often than our telephone from now on?

I wonder if it would be legal to post a sign on our door: Solicitors will be used for target practice. Probably not.

Looked at the Pair.com web hosting plans this morning. For only $18/month I can have 500MB of disk space, a MySQL server and PHP. (And twenty-five mailboxes, though I've no idea what I'd do with so many.) This is rather tempting, I must say.

With MySQL & PHP, I could have a nice, interactive Daybook thingy: it would be a discussion, not just tedious blather from me.

Poor Jacob, sent home from daycare with a temperature of 101.9° and a case of pinkeye.

Curiously, neither I nor the doctor—who just happened to have an open appointment this afternoon; lucky us—could detect any hint of a fever, but Jacob does have a bit of an ear infection. He's back on the antibiotics, only eleven days after finishing the last prescription.

Someday, we will all be healthy at the same time. Not quite yet, alas.

Jake was back to normal this morning.

Off to Monticello, for lunch with Grandma and Grandpa, followed by a ride on the Santa Train. Jake was a bit overwhelmed by the experience: I think Santa was too large and loud for him. But he got a big thrill riding the train.

Several screaming children in the parking lot afterward: they didn't want to go home, they wanted to ride the train again.

Sneaked out to the library for a brief bit of genealogizing: I looked up LaDuke families in the 1850 census for Harrison County, Indiana. There's only one: John C. LaDuke, his wife Mary, and various children. One of the children, Harrison LaDuke, might be the father of Elliott LaDuke, who married Mary Alldredge. Then again, he might not.

(The WPA Marriage Index for Harrison County lists everyone who got married—but doesn't list who they got married to. Rather frustrating, that is.)

The inkjet printer has been idle for many months now. I wonder whether it can be made to work again. Time to find out…

Still a little snow on the grass this morning, but with a forecast high of 40° I don't think it will be here much longer.

Goals for the day: Rest. Have fun. Get well.

Off to Lincoln Square this morning, so Jake could talk to Santa. Unlike previous years (2001, 2002), he actually talked this time. (Mostly he just said, “Uh-huh.”)

The mall was rather crowded, because the farmer's market—normally a summer-only affair—has moved inside for the winter. Still, it wasn't nearly as bad as Halloween.

2:48pm, and Jake is supposed to be sleeping. He isn't. Judging by the sounds coming over the monitor, he's not very happy about being in the crib, either. Poor little guy. Take a nap, you'll feel better afterward.

In today's mail: a letter addressed to me, containing a check for $1.02. Apparently this is my share of the settlement reached in the class-action suit Schwartz v. Citibank.

The Ninth Circuit has a web site: www.ce9.uscourts.gov. No sign of Schwartz v. Citibank there, though.

Poor Jake, his dinner did not agree with him: all evening, he was grumpy & miserable. At 9:30…let's just say that after 9:30 his dinner was no longer a burden to him. It was, however, a burden to Mama & Papa, each of whom needed a change of clothing.

Went to bed late, then spent the next two hours coughing. Around 1:00am, my tortured bronchial passages settled down enough that I could sleep.

Feeling rather sluggish this morning as a result. Pity me, pity me.

An inch or so of wet, heavy snow covered roofs, trees and lawns (but, fortunately, not roads) this morning. Supposedly another two or three inches is due this afternoon, but I am skeptical.

Jake wore his winter boots. He likes them, I think:

And this is what the snow looked like from my office window:

The missing diary entries are back on Jeff Duntemann's site.

It's interesting to compare web sites:

www.jerrypournelle.com is created with FrontPage. The HTML is nasty—that's FrontPage's fault, not Jerry's—and there are no stylesheets in evidence, just raw formatting tags in the HTML. Entries are grouped by week; he's up to week 286, having started at the beginning of June, 1998. Jerry's pretty diligent about archiving old entries.

I'm not sure what editor Jeff Duntemann uses on his site, www.duntemann.com, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's using Notepad or some other non-HTML-aware text editor. The HTML just looks hand-coded to me. No stylesheets here, either. Entries are grouped by month, but tend to pile up in the main Diary page for several months before being archived. The archives go back to July 2000.

I use CityDesk to create my site. Daybook entries are grouped by day (previously, it was by month). There is no separate archive process, because entries are created in the archive and CityScript is used to assemble the main Daybook page from (a configurable number of) recent entries. I try very hard to write valid XHTML, though I haven't validated anything recently, and I use stylesheets for almost all formatting & presentation control. (There are exceptions. I'm working on it.)

Then there's Robert Scoble, who uses Radio UserLand to maintain his site, radio.weblogs.com/0001011. The HTML is formatted strangely, but seems reasonable; and he's using stylesheets. There's even a comment mechanism patched in, so people can respond to his posts.

It would be nice to have a feedback mechanism in the Daybook: let the loyal readers get their 2¢ in. But that would mean giving up the static XHTML pages for an article/comment database on the server. Pair.com would be happy to provide this service, for rather more money than I feel like paying.

Maybe I'll just stick with CityDesk for a while longer.

Cloudy & drizzly all day, with the temperature hovering in the mid-30s. Supposedly the rain will change to snow sometime in the night, and we'll wake up tomorrow to an inch or so of the white stuff.

Two more packages arrived today. One of them we'll be sending back, since somebody's Christmas tree (never mind whose) already has one under it.

That makes three from Monday's online shopping binge. I guess they're working overtime.

We've been making a point of watching all the Christmas cartoons that we find. Tonight, it was How the Grinch Stole Christmas (much better as a twenty-two minute cartoon than a two-hour movie). We're trying to get Jake excited about Christmas and Santa, but so far he's unimpressed.

We have conversations:

Jake, what do you want Santa to bring you for Christmas?
Presents.
What kind of presents?
Red ones.

The Matrix Revolutions has apparently left the theaters. Guess I'll have to wait for the DVD. Oops.

Something curious has happened to Jeff Duntemann's online diary: all entries after November 17th have disappeared. Disk crash?

Cold this morning, and cloudy. Last night, the weatherdroids said chance of snow, but there was none.

Mail from Aunt Betty—that is, Cousin Cheri's mom—who knows all there is to know about the Kibbe branch of the family tree. Apparently there's even a book somewhere about the Kibbe clan. Maybe the Mormons have a copy? Must investigate—

I'm not coughing as much, nor blowing my nose as often, as I have been lately; perhaps I am getting over the infernal disease that has plagued (heh) the entire household for the last month. Dare I hope?

On the way home this evening, I noticed a 23¢/gallon price difference between the two Amoco stations on Mattis Avenue (one at John Street, the other at University Avenue); figuring that tomorrow both prices would be higher, I doubled back and filled up Mr. Explorer.

We'll see tomorrow whether I have played the gas futures market correctly. Thirteen gallons × 23¢ = $3, which is nothing to sneeze at.

[Gas prices fell another 3¢, held steady for a few days, then shot up 26¢ on the 8th.]

Checking the 2003/2004 WRI holiday lists, I see that we get three days off for Christmas, but only one for New Year's Day. That's a nice change: who needs New Year's Eve off, anyway? But a five-day weekend for Christmas is quite welcome.

The 2003 holiday list for the Tokyo office includes Coming of Age Day (January 13) and Respect for the Aged Day (September 15).

(Having discovered a white hair in my beard this morning, I now qualify as aged. On September 15, you must respect me, if you're Japanese.)

Happy December, everyone.

Fired up my RSS aggregator this morning, and was surprised to see the following from Slashdot:

Your RSS reader is abusing the Slashdot server. You are requesting pages more often than our terms of service allow.

I have two theories on why this happened:

• I hit Refresh after SharpReader (the aggregator I use) had already fetched the Slashdot RSS data, causing a second fetch, triggering some alarm on the Slashdot servers.
• All web traffic at WRI goes through a proxy server; the Slashdot servers see all WRI traffic as coming from a single machine, again triggering the RSS-abuse alarms.

My solution: unsubscribe. Slashdot is itself an aggregator, so there is no original content there (except for the rabid windoze-sux-linux-is-kewl posts that aren't worth reading anyway). Anything newsworthy will be reported elsewhere, and necessarily sooner than it would appear on Slashdot.

Goodbye, Slashdot. You won't be missed.

Lots of Christmas shopping this evening, all online (and all done by Jennifer, while Jacob & I watched Mail Call out in the living room).