January 2004 Archives

The low temperature overnight was -12°. Egad.

Lunch was at O'Charley's, where I indulged in the ribeye ($16, but very tasty). Afterward, Jennifer & Jacob each got a new pair of shoes today, at the disturbing Shoe Carnival (previously mentioned October 10, 2000).

We had expected to have North Prospect to ourselves, since the temperature was somewhere around 10°; but it was as crowded as always. Apparently too cold to go out is relative.

Actually, it felt much warmer than 10°, most likely because the sun was out and there was no wind.

Another trip to the library, to rummage around in Harriet Vaught's Marriages of White County, Illinois. The library has had these books for a while, but now they also have the indices (published separately, by other people, some decades after Ms. Vaught's books).

James Clinton Sturm and Arenna Aldridge had a daughter, Sarah I. Sturm, who married John Kingery. I seem to recall the name Sarah Kingery turning up in documents relating to Jacob Maurer, which is interesting.

I have the notion to upgrade my Pair account from FTP (aka 'cheapskate') to Advanced, which gets me five times the disk space and MySQL/PHP. Then I could use WordPress to run the Daybook.

That sounds like fun, in a geek sort of way.

Cold today. Very [censored] cold. Last night's low was -9°, today's high was 4°, and the temperature now (10:06pm) is back to -9°.

Did our taxes this evening. The process was a little more complicated than last year, even with TaxCut's able assistance: numerous events last year—no, I won't tell you what they were—made a few of the murkier corners of federal & state tax laws suddenly relevant to us.

All the changes in tax law and in our situation seem to have cancelled out: the bottom line looks to be very close to what it was last year. The refunds are a little larger, which is nice.

And this is the year of e-filing. Everybody wants us to file our return over the internet—and they all want to charge a ‘convenience fee’ for letting us do so.

Surely processing a paper return costs more, and is more error-prone (misreading poor handwriting, etc.) than handling an electronically-filed one? So, to encourage us to use the easier, more reliable method, they charge a $15 convenience fee. They must have a different definition of convenience than I do, something closer to ‘ripoff’.

We don't get to file just yet, alas. The final updates from the IRS won't be available until early February. So we must wait.

Cold today: the forecast high is only 8°, falling to -11° tonight. Egad.

But it's been worse: nineteen years ago, the temperature (in Chicago, where I was living at the time) hit -25° on more than one occasion.

Rumor has it that Microsoft plans to cut prices on their X-Box game console (currently $180 at Best Buy) to $100, in time for the Christmas 2004 shopping frenzy. I have no interested in playing video games, but it might be interesting to have an internet-connected X-Box hooked up to the living room television.

(Is it $100 interesting? Good question! Probably not.)

Amusement: WRI has a wireless network, which is properly secured. Elsewhere in the building is another company, and another wireless network that is not properly secured. Sometimes, WRIfolk unwittingly connect to the wrong network, then wonder why they can't get to any WRI-internal network resources.

(I suppose a nefarious person could do this on purpose: set up an unsecured access point near some other wireless network, then sniff all sorts of useful information from people who don't realize they're connected to the wrong network.)

One of the nice features of the iPod is that I can play all the albums from a given artist. Unfortunately, they're played in alphabetical order, not chronological, but that's a quibble.

The iPod says it contains 212 Beatles songs. That ought to keep me busy for a while.

Interesting software: WordPress (wordpress.org), a blogging tool written in PHP+MySQL. And it's free, which is always nice.

Lots of wonky PHP errors installing WordPress; the best I could discover from the support page is that they're probably harmless and I should ignore them.

An inch or two of snow fell in the afternoon, making the drive home a bit of a challenge (though not much).

Tidied up the iTunes database a little. iTunes keeps marking songs as ‘part of a compilation’, which means they go in a different directory than the rest of the album; and it loves to add extra names to the Artist field, which tends to clutter the list.

I wonder how long it will be before I've actually listened to all 3,185 songs in the iPod.

Cold this morning: sputnik reported a scant 1° at 7:30.

Fed a bunch of Cat Stevens CDs to iTunes this evening while chatting (via the previously-maligned MSN Messenger) with Cousin Cheri.

She tells me that my grandfather Orval (or is it Orville?) Akers also had a bright red beard. That's the sort of detail that can't be found in death certificates and obituaries, which is where most of my information comes from. It makes these people more real to me, instead of just names in a database.

I sent this to Cheri during our chat. Jennifer's been rearranging the quilting gear, so the fabric shelf is no longer visible behind me.

iPod update: 3185 songs, 9 days, 17.75GB. The iPod isn't even half-full yet.

Hm. 10:00pm, time to shut off the computer & put out the garbage. Those garbage people, they show up early.

A little more snow overnight, but still nothing very intimidating (to Mr. Explorer, anyway; other motorists, not blessed with four-wheel drive, seemed to be having problems).

More politics: the New Hampshire primaries are today.

I don't see why New Hampshire—which at 1.25 million people is less than one-half of one percent of the total population of the United States—should be given, every four years, so much influence over national politics.

Perhaps some sort of rotation would be better. In 2008, let Montana go first, and New Hampshire go last. The Montana primary is scheduled for June 8 this year, and it's a certainty that the Democratic nominee will have been chosen long before then. Voters in Montana have exactly zero influence on the nomination process. One wonders why they bother.

If the New Hampshire primary were held on June 8, the newsdroids would ignore it, as they ignore the Montana primary now. Would the nitwits in Dixville Notch still play their juvenile midnight-voting game with no cameras rolling?

A little HTML/CSS foolery this evening. Entry headlines in the main Daybook page look a little different now: I replaced the nasty table code with simpler divs and styles.

The purple background is just a bit of whimsy. I'll probably change it tomorrow.

I thought the domain-squatting craze was over, but apparently not: the Volokh Conspiracy web site moved from volokh.blogspot.com to volokh.com; now, the old address points to SEO Reviewer, which is a bunch of Google press releases. I suspect a domain speculator somewhere hoped to make a lot of money off residual traffic from people who didn't realize the real Volokh Conspiracy site has moved.

I was working at CTC in January of 1988, when the Australians were all in a lather over their bicentennial. As it happened, there was an Aussie working at CTC at the time, and he put together a display of Genuine Australian Stuff to celebrate.

All I remember now, sixteen years later, is that he had Vegemite on crackers. I tried some; it was…er…not to my taste.

The wireless mouse politely asked for new batteries this evening. I think we have some spare AAs in the kitchen somewhere.

Supposed to snow more tonight, and again tomorrow. We'll see.

Geekstuff:

Added Silly Wizard, Simon & Garfunkel, and Paul Simon to the iTunes music library (3013 songs, 8.5 days, 16.79GB).

Downloaded software: ActivePerl 5.8.2.808, ActivePython 2.3.2.232 and Adobe Reader 6.0.1. The next time I'm feeling industrious I might install it all.

Weatherdroids claim that a medium-nasty winter storm is heading our way: snow, sleet, freezing rain, etc., etc. Just now (11:40am) there's no sign of it. Maybe this afternoon?

The snow started around 1:30pm, but as of this writing (three hours later) there's very little on the ground: it's just blowing around.

8:30pm, and there's an inch or so of snow on the ground. The wind—9mph from the east-northeast, according to sputnik—has piled it into cute little drifts, harmless & unthreatening.

Might have to shovel the driveway tomorrow.

Quilters visiting today.

Renamed all the articles in the Genealogy section. The new naming convention is more sensible than the old, but now I'm wondering whether I broke any links out in the world.

Stalking the people I worked with at Northrop:

• Mike Halinski—apparently still at Northrop Grumman
• Don & Linnea Kountz—as recently as 1998, they were still in Lake County, and active in the newsgroup alt.food.ice-cream
• Darrick Coles—apparently working at Best Software (www.bestsoftware.com)
• Larry Latko—no sign of him
• Dan Greene—apparently connected somehow with Greene Software Systems (www.g-ware.com)

[Or not—apparently as of early 2004, Dan's living in Arizona.]

Finished reading Blood Canticle, by Anne Rice. That was the last of the unread vampire novels, so I'm finally caught up.

(For now, at least. Anne Rice says she won't be writing any more vampire novels, but I don't believe her. Arthur Conan Doyle sent Sherlock Holmes over the Reichenbach Falls, but that only kept him out of print for three years. Nothing so dramatic as that happens to Lestat at the end of Blood Canticle, so I doubt it will be even that long before his return.)

This made me laugh:

Aging pop star Bono said a dirty word on live television during last year's Golden Globes broadcast; the FCC bent over backwards to forgive him:

Staffers at the Federal Communications Commission originally ruled in October that Bono did not violate the agency's indecency rules since he used the word as an adjective.

If he had used the word as a gerund, he'd be in trouble?

He's up for another award this year, and has promised to curb his tongue should he win.

In the news: UnitedLinux, which was going to standardize the nine-and-ninety Linux distributions and push Microsoft off the face of the earth, is no more. The legal entity still exists, but all the people have left.

They were doomed from the start (which was May 30, 2002, if memory serves).

Further sad news from the realm of children's television: Captain Kangaroo (occasionally known as Bob Keeshan) died this morning.

His show was another of my favorites when I was a child. Mister Moose and the ping-pong balls, Bunny Rabbit always after the carrots, and the Colgate commercials.

Thirty years ago, nobody thought twice about having Captain Kangaroo shill for toothpaste. These days, commercialization of children's television is strictly verboten, which only means that the advertisements are more subtle (though not by much).

The Disney Channel runs ads for a variety of Disney properties, plus the occasional McDonald's spot, tucked in between the shows. It's mildly annoying.

If we had matched a few more numbers in last night's Lotto drawing, I'd order one of these: the NEC Versa LitePad Tablet PC. Taken as a PC, it's a bit underpowered: the CPU is slow, the disk is small, memory tops out at 512MB, the screen is only 768×1024, etc., etc. But it's eminently portable: it's only two-thirds of an inch thick and weighs only two and a half pounds. It wisely omits the keyboard, which shouldn't be necessary in a Tablet PC, and the flimsy screen pivot, which is needed only to get the keyboard out of the way. It would make a nice second computer.

Alas, the $3 we did win last night isn't nearly enough: we'd have to win $3 in every Lotto drawing for the next six years (more or less) to afford a LitePad—and by then I'd probably want something else instead.

Nipped over to the library on the way home from work, to have a peek in their copy of Germans to America. I was hoping to find an entry for Jacob Ziegler & family, who supposedly came to America from German in 1858; alas, while every third name was Jacob Ziegler—it must have been the John Smith of nineteenth-century Germany—none was the one I wanted.

[That's because Jacob Ziegler came to America in 1852, not 1858. Oops.]

Sad news: Ray Rayner has died. I watched his show on WGN nearly every day, and have many fond memories: growing tomatoes from seed each spring, carving a turkey on Thanksgiving, and craft projects that never turned out quite right.

I think he was the last, too. Ned Locke, Frazier Thomas, Bob Bell, and now Ray Rayner, all gone. Sigh.

(Not quite all: Bill Jackson is still with us, sort of. Apparently he's teaching somewhere [California?], but has a web site, www.dirtydragon.com, where he sells videos of Gigglesnort Hotel.)

Created another Microsoft Passport and fed it to MSN Messenger. It seems to work, but the main window has an unremovable banner ad across the bottom and just about everything else is a link to something only paying customers get to see/use.

I looked, briefly, at MSN Chat—hundreds of chat rooms, whose names are all random punctuation. When I tried to get into one, I got kicked out: paying customers only, buzz off.

Somehow I don't think I'll be using MSN Messenger very much.

Feeding more CDs to iTunes: yesterday it was a few Andy Stewart albums, plus Jeff Wayne's War of the Worlds; this evening it's Janis Ian.

The iPod is still below 50%, but the Music disk on nessus is nearly full. Perhaps it is time for a new disk. Champaign Computer will sell me an 80GB disk and the OEM edition of Windows XP, for the low low price of $226. Tempting, I must say.

Wondering what I look like without the beard?

Now you know!

Marian Brinkerhoff, of Powell, Wyoming, has reported to the Mormons that Jacob Ziegler's parents were Johan Paul Ziegler and Margaret A. Benz. The indefatigable Ms. Brinkerhoff claims to have traced the Zieglers four generations further back, to Jakob Ziegler, born 1662 in Stebbach, Baden, Germany.

Well, it's possible. I'm told there are good records in Germany, if you know where to look (and can read Old German). But accurately tracing one's ancestry so far back (three and a half centuries!) seems so implausible, I can't help but be a little skeptical.

The good news is that one of the spuds campaigning for the Presidency has dropped out, after a wretched showing in the Iowa caucuses. The bad news is that the rest of them are still at it.

Clogging the airwaves tonight: the Please Re-Elect Me Speech…er, make that the State of the Union Address. We didn't watch.

(While the Constitution requires the President to deliver a State of the Union Address to Congress, there's nothing that says he has to stand in front of them and read it out loud, like some junior-high English class struggling through a Steinbeck novel. Perhaps, in this modern age, emailing it would suffice.)

Christmas morning, I found a book of crossword puzzles in my stocking; I've been working through them, slowly, and tonight finished number 7 (of 75).

The word ‘osiered’ appears in number 7.

Osiered?

Genealogy: Jacob Ziegler, Catherine Gomer and their older children (George and Jacob) came to America from Germany in 1852. They should be easy enough to find in the immigration databases at the library. I'll have to look for them next time I'm there.

Installed MSN Messenger 6.1 on nessus this evening, but was too lazy to actually configure it. No messenging for me just yet, alas. Maybe tomorrow.

The daycare ladies are taking the day off, so we decided to stay home also. A three-day weekend, how nice.

Too bad the temperature outside is 6°…

Typed in the biographical sketches from yesterday's library trip:

• Paul Burkhardt
• Jacob Maurer
• Max Nibling
• Conrad Ziegler, Jr.
• George C. Ziegler

A problem: George C. Ziegler is said to be the son of Jacob Ziegler and Catherine Gomer, but Catherine Ziegler (who married Jacob Maurer) is described (in her obituary) as the daughter of George Ziegler and Catherine Gomer.

I'm inclined to believe the biographical sketch over the obituary: in 1901, everyone involved was still alive, so mistakes were (one hopes) less likely.

Discovered the Browse function in iTunes: it pops up a three-pane browser thingy, Genre / Artist / Album. So it is possible to play a specific album with iTunes.

The browser tells me I have 246 albums in my library. That's just the highlights of my CD collection; when I have more disk space on nessus, I'll start filling in the gaps.

Poking around in the file cabinet this evening, I found numerous folders of debit-card receipts, going back to 1998. I tried to think of a good reason for keeping six years of receipts, and failed: so I ran them all through the shredder. Lots of confetti in the garbage can this week. (I hope trash day isn't very windy.)

Today we went shopping for lamps, and bought four: two torchieres for the living room, two nightstand-sized lamps for the bedroom. The living room in particular really needed some illumination; now it's bright enough that we can actually use it.

The fluourescent bulbs—$17 each—for the torchieres give off a pleasant white light that makes all the incandescents seem a bit jaundiced. Perhaps we should replace them all with fluourescents, to even out the color.

Off to the library this afternoon, for a little genealogizing. They had some new White County books, one of which was particularly interesting: excerpts from A Historical Atlas & Biographical Sketches of White County (or something like that). The excerpts were done by the Saline County Genealogical Society, which is a bit puzzling: why are they interested in White County?

The big find: a paragraph about Jacob Maurer, with some details I hadn't known. His father died when he was very young, and his mother remarried before they came to the United States.

Jennifer said, “We should get a picture of your beard before you shave it off.”

There ya go!

Before lunch: a brief stop at the hair place, for a trim and de-bearding. The lady didn't seem to believe that I really wanted the entire beard to go away. She kept asking me, “Do you want this off, too?” Yes, all of it, thanks.

Lunch: the Great Impasta, where I surprised Jennifer by not ordering the Great Impastanoff: instead I had the Italian Beef, very tasty. We ordered a grilled cheese for Jake, but he wouldn't eat any of it.

After lunch: the Orpheum Children's Science Museum, in downtown Champaign. Lots of fun things to do there. Jake did not want to leave; he howled & kicked all the way to the car, and most of the way home.

Recoded the HTML for the class schedules in the Transcripts section. The tables look much better now.

The notebook of hand-drawn charts that inspired this project is missing my last semester, Fall 1983. I think I have some University paperwork around here somewhere that has my schedule for that one. I'll have to fish it out of the closet one of these days.

Scott Smith, scott-smith.com, says:

Yesterday, two guys in a van tried to sell me a set of large speakers.

That happened to me a few weeks ago. I figured it was just a pair of losers trying to unload some stolen property, but according to Mr. Smith it's an organized network of losers. They sell cheap speakers (built in China) for many times their actual worth, then disappear.

I suppose the real losers are the people who buy the stuff.

Sometime around 1979, I let a couple of Krishna devotees in a van sell me a handful of record albums for $10. I resisted at first, but gave in to the hard sell. Alas, when I finally looked at what I'd bought, I discovered it was all junk. Feeling quite foolish, I tossed the records in the nearest dumpster and resolved never again to fall for stupid scams.

Current iPod project: feeding all my Steeleye Span CDs to iTunes. I didn't know I had so many…

Jake has an impressive black eye, but is otherwise unaffected by yesterday's events. He's staying home today, to rest up a little.

I neglected to recharge the iPod last night, so its battery was pretty low when I got to work this morning. I decided to see how long it would last. About three hours, as it turned out: then it stopped in mid-song, put up a little unhappy-battery icon, and powered down.

Three hours today, plus five (or so) hours yesterday, is pretty good battery life.

However: according to ipodsdirtysecret.com, the iPod's battery will wear out after 18 months (more or less), at which point it will no longer hold a charge. Apple will replace the battery for $100, which seems a bit pricey to me. (Cheaper than a new iPod, though.)

Then again, the Neistat brothers—operators of ipodsdirtysecret.com—had a first-generation iPod. Maybe the newer ones use a longer-lived battery?

NOAA says the temperature outside is 42°. It looks colder. The thermometer in my office says 70°, but it feels colder than that to me.

More google-stalking:

Dr. David L. Petersen, who long ago taught Religious Studies 205 & 206 (Introduction to Classical Hebrew I & II) at the University of Illinois, is currently Professor of Old Testament, Cannon Chapel, Candler School of Theology, at Emory University in Atlanta. His entry in the faculty directory is at candler.emory.edu/ACADEMIC/FACULTY/faculty_petersen.html.

The two Hebrew classes—which I took in fulfillment of the ‘Humanities Sequence’ requirement for a B.S. degree in Computer Science—were at once the most difficult and the most enjoyable classes I ever attended.

There was so much memorization! I had to make a set of flash cards to help me learn the vocabulary. The verb forms and tenses were quite a challenge, too. (I often wish English had a causative tense: it would be quite useful.)

The quizzes were all translation exercises: usually the text was a passage from the Hebrew Bible, but occasionally Dr. Petersen would slip in an original composition. One of these was about a visit to the King of Snakes, who said, “You must die, for it is the time of human sacrifice!” He'd read the New York Times while we scribbled, and point out interesting news items.

The classes were very small: no more than five or six of us, sitting around a table. Dr. Petersen assumed that anyone taking Religious Studies 205 would of course follow it up with 206, so he assigned homework over semester break. He grumbled about grading on a curve, saying it gave some of us better grades than we deserved. (I got a B, as I recall.)

The faculty directory has a photo. Twenty years ago, he had big muttonchop sideburns; I was amused to see that he still does.

Jake was so excited when Papa came home from the Genealogy Society research night that he fell off the couch and crash-landed on his Jake-sized wooden table.

Poor little guy, he got a big bump on his head, just above his left eye. It looked scary enough that we took him to the emergency room, but they said he was fine. We left with the standard warnings to be on the lookout for concussion, fractured skull, etc., etc., but also with assurances that these were highly unlikely.

It must have been a slow night in the emergency room: we were in & out in about an hour.

Mr. Garage-Door Repair Guy—a cheery fellow named Tim, who bore a curious resemblance to Lee Van Cleef—came to visit this morning, to look at our problematic garage door.

He did some minor repairs, spritzed oil on all the wheels & hinges, and all was well. He even installed safety cables in the (large, scary-looking) springs. Mr. Home Inspector told us, four years ago, that we should do that; now, finally, we have.

Trying to reacquire a little equanimity as regards my co-workers, some of whom seem to be bucking for Lackwit Of The Year. (If any of my co-workers are reading this, rest assured I don't mean you, I mean that schlub down the hall from you.)

[Interesting word, schlub. Mirriam-Webster knows naught of it, but the American Heritage online dictionary has a nice definition at www.bartleby.com/61/76/S0137675.html. And over in—I think—Switzerland, they name their companies www.schlub.ch.]

Yellowknife, provincial capital of Northwest Territitories, has a web site: www.city.yellowknife.nt.ca. I was hoping for a webcam, but couldn't find one. Nice photo gallery, though.

The garage door works now, but the garage reeks of oil. If it weren't 30° outside, I'd leave the door open for a few hours and air it out.

This week's Pointless Web Site Addition: the Transcripts section, a bunch of cheesy little charts showing what classes I was taking at the University of Illinois, back in the Late Pleistocene when I was (young and) a student.

It's really the HTML-ization of a set of charts that I drew (by hand!) twenty years ago, more or less. Why am I bothering? Do hobbies need reasons?

Tired this morning: tired, frustrated, foul-tempered, and (weakly) resisting the notion that my co-workers are without exception an annoying bunch of gits. (Resisting because some—some—of them aren't.)

The between-song chatter on the live half of Spirit of the West's album Old Material 1984–1986 mentions Uncle Bonsai as having played the same show; in all the years I've had Old Material, I've wondered about Uncle Bonsai. Is it a person, or a band? What sort of music does he / do they play?

Today, I did a little googling, and found www.unclebonsai.com. Lots of information there, and CDs for sale. One of these days I'll have to buy a few.

Stayed up too late, but finished reading Blackwood Farm, by Anne Rice. A curious book: except for fifty or so pages at the beginning & end, the whole thing is one long speech by one of the characters.

And the ending left me feeling a bit cheated.

More on the iTunes song-truncation crisis: iTunes is having problems reading certain tracks on certain CDs, and quietly gives up when after too many errors.

I don't mind the read errors—some of these CDs are ten or fifteen years old, after all—but I do mind that iTunes doesn't say anything about them. Perhaps I will send some free advice to the iTunes Feedback address…

No holidays this weekend, no birthdays, no parties, no trips out of town…just two days of rest & relaxation. How nice.

Well, now: the Macc Lads have a web site, www.macclads.co.uk.

Consider the following ad copy:

Timeless designs carry a certain power. The power to soothe. To calm. To transform your home into a blissful sanctuary from the noise and clutter of the world outside.

This is the manufacturer's description of…a computer case. Specifically, the Overture Piano Black Quiet Media Case from Antec.

A worrisome development in iPod-land: some of the 2,132 songs currently in the iPod have been mysteriously truncated. Carefree Highway by Gordon Lightfoot is only three seconds long. There are others, how many I can't tell.

I really don't want to re-upload any CDs. But it seems that I might have to.

Warmer today (28° at 10:00am), but cloudy. Supposed to snow, a little, throughout the day.

Twenty-three years ago, the University of Illinois required Engineering/Computer Science majors to take two semesters of chemistry. (How this would be relevant to writing software was never explained.) I dutifully attended (or, as they'd say in England, 'read') Chemistry 101 in the fall of 1980, and Chemistry 102 the following spring.

My grades were mediocre, and I finished my freshman year as ignorant of chemistry as when I'd started.

The Chem 101 teaching assistant was Sarah Langer. I disturbed her by failing to do any of the weekly assignments until quite late in the semester, when I turned in two months' worth all at once.

The Chem 102 teaching assistant was Mark Fishbein. I had a running joke that I played on him, most days: I'd get to class early and draw a little cartoon fish somewhere on the blackboard. As Mark presented the day's lesson, he'd slowly fill the board with his spidery, wandering handwriting. (I never once saw him manage a horizontal line of text: always his sentences drooped toward the end, as if gravity were pulling them down.) When he encountered the fish, he'd stare at it a moment, smile, and resume writing.

These days, Mark's a doctor in Springfield: www.siumed.edu/peds/fishbein.htm. I still draw little cartoon fish, on whiteboards now that chalk & slate are obsolete.

Once, while visiting Brian and Linda in Austin, I left a fish on a whiteboard in the Biochemistry Department at the University of Texas. I wrote SAVE under it, just for laughs; years later, Brian reported that it was still there. (I suppose it's gone by now, alas.)

Clear and cold (16°) this morning.

The garage door stayed down all night, so the finger of suspicion points at the remotes. Looks like I'll be visiting Sears at lunchtime for some new ones.

Microsoft has (finally) released a wireless version of their ergonomic keyboard: the Wireless Optical Desktop Pro 2.0. Very nice.

There are too many wires on & under my desk, so anything I can do to reduce the clutter is a Good Thing (© Martha “I didn't do it” Stewart). On the other hand, I already have a wireless mouse, which I am loath to discard.

[My mother & Bob use the Daybook as inspiration when shopping for birthday presents: seven months after this was written, they gave me one. Thank you, thank you, thank you.]

Took my copy of Red Hat Linux 9 to work this morning; I figure I'll leave it in the breakroom, from which it will rapidly disappear. And so ends my latest fling with Linux. Perhaps I'll try again in a few years.

From a CNN article explaining why opera singers are so hard to understand:

The best sopranos can sing nearly as loud as the roar of a jet engine.

Apparently, to pump out the decibels like one of Pratt & Whitney's finest, opera singers must distort their vocal tracts, thereby mispronouncing many of the words they're singing.

Any chance of using microphones? Speakers? Electronic amplification? No: amplification sounds “unnatural” according to the opera folks. Singing so loudly as to invite comparison to jet engines doesn't?

Very cold this morning, 2° at 7:00am, but the ice is gone from the streets & parking lots, and the sun is out. It's a nice day, at least when viewed from inside a nice warm office.

Ken Rubin, a friend from long ago, is apparently a member of the Baltimore Composers Forum: www.baltimorecomposersforum.org/members/rubin_ken, while a bit sparse, seems a pretty close match.

Some years back (sometime during 1991–1993, I believe), Ken came to Champaign; he called me up and said, “Let's have lunch at the Courier.”

“Sure thing,” I said.

But I was mostly nocturnal then, sleeping from 5:00am until early afternoon, and getting up in time to have a normal lunch was harder than I thought. I was still asleep when Ken called from the Courier: “Where are you?”

“Er…I'll be right there,” I said, and promptly fell asleep again.

After a while, the phone rang again: “Get over here!”

“Uh, sorry…”

Poor Ken, he was hoping for a pleasant lunch with an old friend; instead, he got an incoherent, half-asleep old friend who showed up two hours late. No wonder he's never called me since.

I like to visit computer manufacturer web sites (Apple and Dell, mostly) and go through the buy-a-computer-online process. It's just a geekier form of window-shopping, and lets me keep track of this year's typical configurations and prices.

The Dell online store is much too complicated: after picking a model (which itself isn't as easy as it should be), I'm faced with page after page of configuration options, many of which are duplicates of options on previous pages. I've yet to reach the end of the process, because I get too frustrated.

The software options are particularly annoying. I don't want rebranded CD burning software, I don't want six months of America Online, I don't want a bunch of random shovelware, I just want a stock Windows box. I'll install my own software, thanks.

Don Box said:

I don't bother to remove junkware. Rather, I simply repave any PC I'm responsible for with a virgin copy of Windows XP and then add the absolute minimum number of 3rd party drivers needed to get the hardware working. I then add any apps that make sense.

Sounds like a good idea to me.

More geekstuff: Microsoft has abandoned its Smart Display project.

The idea was that you could carry your LCD monitor around the house, and it would talk to your computer via your wireless network: sort of a Tablet PC, but hard-wired to run only the Remote Desktop Connection client, and connect only to a particular remote machine. I'm not surprised that nobody bought one.

Microsoft hasn't taken down the Smart Displays web site (www.microsoft.com/windows/smartdisplay) yet, but I'm sure its days are numbered.

Upgraded iTunes to version 4.2, and the iPod software to version 2.1. I can't tell any difference in iTunes (except that it's slower); the iPod seems to have picked up a few more icons to display, including a big checkmark that means ‘safe to undock’.

Poor Jacob. For a third night, he cried most piteously when we put him in the crib. (After a while, he fell asleep.) Maybe he got too used to staying up late? Maybe he doesn't want to sleep in the crib any more? Mysteries, mysteries.

Trouble with the garage door: it doesn't want to stay down. On the theory that one or more of the remotes is gummed up, I have removed all batteries therefrom. Since then, the door has stayed down.

Time for new garage-door openers, or just new remotes? And why can't these things happen in the summertime, when it's not 16° outside?

Jacob, who didn't want to go to bed last night, likewise didn't want to get up this morning. He perked up after a while, but was very unhappy at first. Poor little guy.

Cold this morning, 24° at 8:00am, with just enough snow to dust rooftops & lawns. Very pretty. But the temperature fell too fast for yesterday's rain to evaporate, so side streets and parking lots are iced over.

Long ago, I used to watch the Ray Rayner Show on WGN out of Chicago. Ray had a thing for Slippery Rock University (www.sru.edu); he even had a Slippery Rock sweatshirt that he wore on the show sometimes.

I had one, too. Not that I had any connection to Slippery Rock: I just liked the name. It's long gone; sometimes I miss it.

I wondered how difficult it would be to get a new one. A moment's poking around turned up www.sgabookstore.com, from which all sorts of Slippery Rock gear can be purchased. Perhaps someday I will order a new shirt for myself.

Googling on my lunch hour, I found:

From: Eric Garrett
Subject: Nikon N4004 film door latch fix?
Newsgroups: rec.photo.equipment.35mm
Date: 2001-10-15 14:49:32 PST

My N4004's plastic catch on the film door side latch broke off. The fact that Nikon made it out of plastic seems to be a really bad idea. Is there a fix part for this item? I am assuming that many other cameras with the same part have broken and been fixed. If I take it to Nikon, will they fix it for a reasonable price? Thanks, Eric.

So I'm not the only one who's had this problem.

Finally got around to adding the thirty-one-month Jake picture. It's in the January 3 entry, and also in the Jacob's First Year(s) page.

No freezing rain last night, nor any sleet, snow, or ‘wintry mix’: just normal unfrozen rain. The storm system must have tracked a little further north than the forecast predicted.

We were watching television this evening when Jennifer said to me, “What's on your foot?”

Blood, as it turned out, from a rather long (but quite shallow) gash just back of the big toe on my right foot. You'd think I would notice when something like that happens, but I didn't.

More music into the iPod: the Moody Blues, and Carrie Newcomer. Current stats: 1744 songs, 4.6 days, 9.16GB.

10:00pm, and Jacob does not want to go to sleep. We put him in the crib, and he cries. We pick him up, and he settles right down. Lather, rinse, repeat.

Poor little guy.

Took down the Christmas tree this morning, and packed away all the Christmas decorations. Christmas is over, alas.

Only 357 shopping days remaining until next Christmas…

Not so warm today as yesterday. Tomorrow's forecast calls for rain, freezing rain, and/or ‘wintry mix’ (which sounds more like a party snack than weather).

Took some nice pictures of Jacob this morning, but as yet haven't got them into CityDesk. Maybe tomorrow.

[Added on January 5.]

Surprisingly warm today: the forecast high is 60°. Thick fog this morning, which made the drive to work rather interesting.

Poor Jennifer is sick just now. The germs just won't leave us alone this winter, alas.

Rush in the news:

Deputies said they had to use a stun gun on 50-year-old Alex Zivojinovich—known on stage as Alex Lifeson—for what they described as drunken, violent behavior at the Naples Ritz-Carlton hotel.

Looks like the 30th Anniversary Tour might have to be postponed a little while Alex sorts out his legal problems.

Geekstuff: the Mirra Personal Server, www.mirra.com. It's a $400 turnkey system (running Linux) that does server-type things: backups, file sharing, etc. (There's also a $500 model with a bigger disk, 120GB vs. 80GB.)

One disturbing ‘feature’:

Behind the scenes, Mirra continuously checks in with our Mirra web service to see if you have any remote access requests.

Having every Mirra in the world constantly polling corporate HQ in case there's a pending remote-access request doesn't seem like such a great design. If I have an always-on high-bandwidth Internet connection, why can't I just connect directly to my Mirra, and eliminate the middleman?

It's interesting that the Mirra box runs Linux, while the client side is a .NET Framework applications.

[Ah. Mirra = mirror. I just now figured that out.]

Was bored, decided to poke around in the server logs for this site. Traffic generally runs around 1MB/day, sometimes a little more, sometimes a little less. I was surprised to see a huge spike on December 7: 160MB. In one day? I'm no good at reading server logs, so I have no idea what happened. A visit from Google? Did somebody famous link here? Very odd.

December 7, 2003 was exactly one year since I abandoned my Netcom web site and switched to the new domain. Coincidence?

Tried looking at the server logs again. It seems somebody on www.fark.com linked to this picture from the Max Lynch page:

Max Lynch

Well, now. I wonder how they found that. Google, I suppose.

Happy new year to the loyal readership (both of you).

iPod update: after adding my Gordon Lightfoot collection, 1356 songs, 3.6 days, 7.2GB. When will it end?

[At 40GB, obviously.]

Lunch and a movie with Jake: first, we hit the Sonic Drive-In for some grilled cheese & fries; second, we went to see Cheaper by the Dozen at the Savoy 16. Jake wouldn't eat in the car (which was out of character for him), so we sneaked his lunch into the theater, where he ate most of it (except for the fries, many of which ended up on the floor). He watched the movie for a while, then got a little bored and fidgety. But he didn't complain, or make any noise.

We'll have to take him to more movies—though maybe a cartoon next time.

While Jake was having his nap, I messed around a bit with Python. I want a script that can pull exif & dimension data from the digital camera pictures and rename the files to something more useful than Picture_1234.JPG.

Someday I will get around to finishing my script. Not today, alas.