February 2004 Archives

29

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Tried to install a new 80GB disk on nessus yesterday; alas, it didn't work. The BIOS could tell there was something there, but couldn't talk to it: the machine locked up solid during the boot sequence, every time. The auto-detection function in the BIOS setup did likewise, as did any attempt to manually enter the drive geometry.

In theory, the P2B-D should have no trouble with this disk. The BIOS is a little old: updating it to the latest version might fix the problem. There are problems with that, too: specifically, I need a DOS boot floppy to run the BIOS updater, and Windows 2000 can't create DOS boot floppies.

Windows XP can, but I can't install XP until I've installed the disk.

“That's some catch, that Catch-22.”

[Not really—I'll just use the XP machine at work.]


Took advantage of the nice weather with a picnic over at Meadowbrook Park. Jake brought his tricycle, which he has mysteriously learned how to pedal (he didn't learn if from Mama & Papa, that's for sure).

Sunday in the Park sans George:

Lunch at the park

Tricycle

Behind bars

Jake and Papa


Household devices that don't know about leap years:

  • Our new cordless phones.
  • Sputnik.

They all think it's March 1st, which is rather annoying.


Updated the BIOS on nessus from 1012 to 1013. Everything still works, so far as I can tell. Perhaps now the new disk will also work.

One way to find out…


The new BIOS had no trouble at all recognizing the new disk. How nice.

Formatting & verifying a 76GB disk takes a long time, too.

27

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Over at www.ornery.org Orson Scott Card has published an opinion piece on same-sex marriage.

It's full of all the usual arguments: what marriage really is, why those people should be forbidden to marry, why doing so doesn't count as discrimination, etc., etc., blah blah blah.

His arguments sound like someone trying to defend logically a position that wasn't reached by logical means.


I took the iPod to work today, but never did listen to any music. I feel a bit silly when that happens: I could have left the thing at home.


Poor Jennifer, squished one of her fingers in the laundry room door this evening. It's (probably) not broken, but apparently quite painful.

26

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Warm today: sputnik recorded a high of 44° at 4:00pm.


Jacob was sleepy this evening: apparently the daycare ladies took the kids outside this morning for some strenuous fun.


Still feeling like I'm catching a cold. It's been hanging on for a few days now, not getting any worse—but not getting any better, either.

As I recall, this is how the pneumonia got started last November: a lingering almost-but-not-quite cold. Let's hope it doesn't get quite so bad this time around, shall we?


Geekstuff:

Uninstalled a bunch of software from the iPaq this evening: MSN Messenger, Windows Media Player, etc., etc. They were just taking up space.

I upgraded Personal Vehicle Manager from 1.7 to 2.0.1, and bought the desktop version to go with it: now I can back up my data onto nessus, or maybe enter more of the old data (from the infamous Fish Book).

(Warning to other users of Personal Vehical Manager 1.7: it's a free upgrade to 2.0, so don't waste your money buying a 2.0 license. I did, and I'm feeling rather stupid just now. Just buy the desktop license, and you'll be fine.)

[All right, it was only $10 (more or less). It's the principle of the thing.]

25

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According to the Census Bureau, the population of White County, Illinois has fallen 40% since 1900:

White County Population, 1900–2000
Year Population
1900 25,386
1910 23,052
1920 20,081
1930 18,149
1940 20,027
1950 20,935
1960 19,373
1970 17,312
1980 17,864
1990 16,522
2000 15,371

Last one out, turn off the lights…


Clear today, but chilly: 34° as of 10:00am. The sky is blue overhead, but dusty brown near the horizon. What's putting so much dirt & dust into the air?


Jacob very grumpy this evening, but he settled down later. Poor little guy, maybe he was tired?


I looked up at the moon this evening, while taking out the garbage (thereby mixing the celestial and the [very] mundane); tonight, the moon is in conjunction with something—probably Mars, as it looks small & reddish.


More fun in the Politics section at CNN: Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan told Congress today that Social Security is running out of money, and benefits will have to be reduced to avoid economic disaster. The candidates & the incumbent are all outraged—but none of them is willing to go on record as saying Greenspan is wrong. Instead, they all used phrases like “the solemn contract of Social Security” in a transparent play to AARP voters.

As Ebenezer Scrooge said, “Bah, humbug!” Social Security is no more than a Ponzi scheme run by the government.


Mail tonight from Dan Greene, an old Northrop crony. He's living in Arizona these days. Nice to hear from him.

24

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Feels like I'm catching a cold: frequent sneezing, eyes that feel a bit gummed-up (like they're in danger of sticking shut whenever I blink), general feeling of lethargy, etc., etc.

Or maybe it's just allergies?


The sysadmin department at WRI has named Abilon (www.activerefresh.com/abilon.php) the Official WRI News Aggregator. I installed it this morning, to compare against SharpReader (www.sharpreader.net), which is what I've been using.

Abilon comes with an enormous set of pre-subscribed RSS feeds, most of which I didn't care about. (So I deleted them.) It refused to import the OPML file exported from SharpReader, so I had to manually move over my subscriptions. It doesn't render the feeds properly—it just shows the raw HTML tags. The UI is full of buttons & menu items that don't do anything. The online help, for instance, is missing. The company web site appears to have been written by someone whose native language is not English.

But it's free, which—I suspect—had a lot to do with its winning the WRI aggregator-selection contest.


I offered to send Jennifer an Orkut invitation, so she could relieve the rampant geekness of Orkut by inviting all her quilter friends; she laughed, then declined.

Jennifer says Orkut sounds like a playground full of third-graders. I don't know about that—some of the Orkutians are a lot more scary-looking than any third-graders I ever saw.


In the news: President Bush jumps on the constitutional-amendment bandwagon, complaining that:

In recent months, however, some activist judges and local officials have made an aggressive attempt to redefine marriage.

This is the sort of thing that the Economist once described as “breathtaking hypocrisy”. If Mr. Bush truly disapproved of judicial activism, he wouldn't appoint so many activist judges himself.

It's the agenda, not the activism, that he finds distasteful: and, as with political chicanery in general, it's only wrong when the other party does it.


Abilon update: it's very slow in pulling down new rss files, and has an unfortunate tendency to crash while doing so.


Snooping in the WRIfolk-with-stuff-to-sell mailing list, I saw:

Up for sale is my beloved '84 Kawasaki KZ550-F2 LTD motorcycle. The bike itself is in pretty good shape. It has less than 5,000 miles total….

Er…it's twenty years old, and has less than 5,000 miles on it? Just how ‘beloved’ is something that's seen so little use over so long a span of time?


Did a little tidying up of the Windows XP machine I use at work: I removed Internet Information Services, OneNote, and Zope, figuring that I had no pressing need for any of them (and neither the time nor the energy to come up with a need).

The Zope uninstaller didn't do a very good job: it left the Zope service installed (and running!), and failed to delete a good many files in the Zope install directory.

(OneNote, on the other hand, quickly & neatly removed itself.)


Finished reading On Writing, by Stephen King.

23

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Overcast this morning, with occasional rain.

Woke up with a fierce headache. Just now (10:55am) it's mostly gone.


You know you're old when your co-workers break out the black crepe paper & tombstone decorations for somebody younger than you are.

This happened at WRI today. In memory of lost youth, read the sign, framed with lilies and funeral-black bunting.


D U H

Bought a spindle of CD-R blanks at Best Buy this afternoon. A hundred blanks, such luxury! I had the notion of creating a set of Easy CD Creator projects for the various directories that need to be backed up on nessus; alas, there are problems, not least of which is this unhelpful error message.

I think it's just that I'm trying to create a too-deep directory tree (CDs being limited to eight levels). I must contemplate this project further.

(There's an Easy CD Creator update available: 5.3.5. I'm still running 5.1 on nessus, but it's an 18MB download. Maybe I'll parasite a little of WRI's bandwidth tomorrow…)


Aunt Betty reports that one branch of the Akers family settled in Paris, Illinois—about 70 miles from here. I'll have to visit the courthouse down there sometime and see what I can find out.

22

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Jacob likes computers:

Computer wiz

He has an account on nessus, which is a lot more than I had at his age.

20

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Cloudy this morning, but warm: 48° at 9:00am. The snow has been melting rapidly; everything outside is damp, as if it's been raining. The world looks a bit like one of those mountain valleys uncovered by retreating glaciers, seeing the sun for the first time in 40,000 years.


Still thinking about upgrading my Pair account from FTP to Advanced, so I can set up a database-driven successor to the Daybook. The unanswered question is: which front end to use?

WordPress (wordpress.org) seems nice. I've got it running on one of the servers at WRI, and aside from a few wonky (but apparently harmless) errors during installation it's performed well.

On the other hand, MovableType (www.movabletype.org) seems a much more mature product. I'm still leery of half-finished freeware web-site tools after the SnipSnap disaster of last year.

(WordPress is written in PHP: ugh. But MovableType is written in Perl: double ugh.)


The temperature reached 50°, for a brief moment this afternoon, then fell to a disappointing 36° (as of 7:00pm).


I showed Orkut to Jennifer this evening. She was amused.


Here's a feature missing from CityDesk: there's no way to publish a single HTML file. An article has the Save-and-Publish option, but HTML files do not.

All my style sheets were implemented as HTML files, so whenever I changed one I had to publish the entire site just to update the one file.

That's been fixed: now my style sheets are articles, so I can publish them one at a time. I don't think this means yet another upload of the entire site, as happened last week when I moved the style sheets to a different directory; we'll see.

19

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This morning, on a whim, I visited the Hewlett-Packard web site (www.hp.com) and asked their Partner Locator for the nearest HP reseller who carries Tablet PCs. (Not that I intend to buy one any time soon, mind; I was merely indulging in the pleasing fantasy of getting an up-close look at a real Tablet PC.)

The Partner Locator trundled a bit, then suggested Arends & Sons, Gibson City. It seemed a bit odd that HP would pass over Champaign-Urbana (population 100,000, major university, etc.) in favor of Gibson City (population 3,373), but I remembered that Arends & Sons had been the main computer supplier for Computer Teaching Corporation when I worked there. That was fifteen years ago; maybe they're still in the computer business?

Alas, no: these days, the Arends & Sons web site is all about John Deere tractors, no sign of Tablet PCs anywhere. Somebody needs to tell HP they've lost a reseller…


Geekness:


Nice day. A bit cloudy, but warm: 42° at noon.


The amusingly-named www.datawhorehouse.com/orkut displays nice maps of how many Orkut users live in a particular area.

I asked it about Champaign & environs; it said about 400. It even offered a list of names, so—being nosy—I had a look.

It turns out that quite a few WRIfolk, past and present, are Orkutians. Perhaps I will hit up one of them for an invite.


Our new couch was delivered today. It is very nice.


I begged an Orkut invite from Dave, whose office is just down the hall from mine at dear old WRI; this evening I joined up and poked around a bit.

Their signup process is rather involved, and they ask a lot of really nosy questions. I admitted to being male, but left everything else blank.

It was sort of fun, tracing the web of friends, but it's hard to think of a reason to go there a second time.

18

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A nice day: sputnik recorded a high of 46° this afternoon. Tomorrow's forecast is even better: 53°.


Spent some money at Champaign Computer this afternoon: I bought an 80GB disk and a copy of Windows XP, for nessus. The idea is to get more space for iTunes, so I can finish filling the iPod with music; and I've been meaning to upgrade to Windows XP for a while now.

Previous grumbles notwithstanding, there are some neat features in XP that aren't in Windows 2000.


Killed one of my EarthLink mailboxes this evening. I used it for my Red Hat Network registration, but I'm not using Red Hat any more (I even gave away my copy of Red Hat Linux 9); somehow, spammers found it, and the quantity of spam has been growing ever since. So goodbye, zloty@ix.netcom.com.

If I can get all my email correspondents to switch over to one of my newer addresses, I'll probably kill the rest of my EarthLink mailboxes (or keep it, but set the spam filter at super-aggressive).


Fooled around a bit with the Jacob Photo Gallery pages. They're using the new design, sort of.

17

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The morning sports report on NPR has been mentioning Gonzaga quite a bit lately. I don't pay enough attention to sports to know what they're doing to get so much airtime, nor do I really know where Gonzaga is. I think it's Gonzaga University, in Spokane, Washington (www.gonzaga.edu).

What I do know is that it sounds rather crude: “Hey, baby, nice gonzagas!”


The Illinois Democratic primary isn't until March 16th, but the newsdroids are saying that John Kerry has already won the nomination. They're not saying it in so many words—they're just running stories asking why the other candidates haven't dropped out yet, and hinting that Howard Dean's persistence is just a little bit quixotic.

Sometimes I have the gloomy suspicion that the primaries are just for show: that unknown party bosses have already decided who is to be the Democratic nominee, and all this pointless campaigning & voting is just to let the voters feel like they're still in charge.

Sort of like the 'elections' held in the Soviet Union: Comrade Brezhnev has been re-elected in a landslide! What a surprise.


Every now & then, I visit the TiVo web site (www.tivo.com) to see what they're up to. TiVo is interesting, but there are some pretty serious obstacles to actually buying one:

  • It's expensive: $200 up front, $13/month.
  • It wants a telephone line, to phone home for broadcast schedules & TiVo updates.

Do we watch enough television to make TiVo worthwhile? (Should we watch that much television?)

There's also the question of privacy. The cable company can't monitor what I watch, but TiVo can—and, apparently, does: the day after the Super Bowl, TiVo announced that the Janet Jackson [censored]-flashing incident was the most-replayed bit of programming in TiVo history. If I had a TiVo, I wouldn't want it reporting to corporate HQ what I watch.

(I also wonder why TiVo needs a telephone line. Why can't it just hook into the house network?)


Installed the OneNote 2003 trial edition at work this afternoon. As with all those e-book downloads over the weekend, the reasons for doing this are unclear. OneNote is a Tablet PC application, hence won't work very well on a desktop; but even if, by some miracle, it's the greatest thing since sliced bread, it's a trial version. It will expire in 60 days, and WRI is unlikely to spend $200 on a copy just because I ask them too.


More geekstuff!

Checked the Windows Update site, and found Critical Update KB833407, “…remove unacceptable symbols from the Bookshelf Symbol 7 font that is included with Microsoft Office 2003.”

I'm guessing that the two swastikas are the symbols deemed unacceptable. I can see why Microsoft might want to remove them: the bigger the company, the more anxious it is not to offend potential customers. But the update takes more drastic action, and wipes the entire Bookshelf 7 font: it's still there, but the symbols are all blank.

Sheesh, 'softies. What that really necessary?

[Actually, it removed the two swastikas and a Star of David, but left the rest of the font intact.]


Lots of Memory

Happiness is a gigabyte of memory.

(No, it's not nessus. Nessus has 512MB, which seems quite sufficient to our needs.)


Finished reading Shootdown: Flight 007 and the American Connection, by R. W. Johnson. It's been a little more than twenty years since flight 007 was shot down by the Soviet Union, and a little less than eighteen since I bought this book (from the Book of the Month Club, as I recall); reading it was a curious time-warp back to the Cold War.

Shootdown raises some interesting questions. Alas, the governments in question don't seem interested in providing answers. Perhaps in another twenty or thirty years the relevant documents will be declassified (if they haven't been shredded already), and we'll find out whether flight 007 really was a probe to light up the Soviet radars for observation by US ELINT forces.

I did a little googling this afternoon, and discovered that the conspiracy theories have flourished over the last twenty years. I'm surprised no one has suggested that the loss of Columbia last year wasn't an accident: it was intentionally destroyed to keep people from finding out its role in the flight 007 mission.

You heard it here first!

15

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More furniture-shopping today: this time, at Carter's over in Urbana.

Our previous visit (August 27, 2000) ended badly: everything was way out of our price range. Since then, they've opened a new Cheap Stuff section, so we gave them another try.

This time—surprise!—our search turned up a nice sectional, coffee table & end table, for less than I'd expected to pay for just the sofa. The sofa was even the right color already, which means we won't have to wait three months for custom fabric.

It will all be delivered on Thursday. How nice.


Now that MS Reader is re-activated, I have been downloading free e-books as fast as I can. I don't know why.

I doubt that I'll ever read any of them. If the past is any guide, I'll presently lose interest in further downloads; six months from now, I'll notice the megabytes of disk space being wasted, and delete everything.

(I have to wonder: why are e-book file names so short? Is there anyone left on the planet who wants to read e-books but whose operating system doesn't support long file names? More to the point, is there an operating sytem that runs MS Reader but doesn't support long file names?)


All my recent experimenting with CSS has resulted in a new main page. It looks nice in my web browser; I hope it works as well for the loyal readership as it does for me.


“I'll just tidy up the web site a little,” I said to myself, “and move the style sheets to another directory.

“Hm…why is CityDesk republishing every single file in the entire web site…? Oh. Yeah. Oops.

I had a nice long time to contemplate my mistake while watching the upload progress bar crawl slowly toward 100%.

14

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Is it Valentine's Day, or St. Valentine's Day?


We took Jacob to Ants In Their Pants, a rather curious local business: gymnastics, boxing, weight training, a bunch of arcade games, and a large play area for small children.

Jacob had a great time, running around with his friends Joe and Andrew (the children of Jennifer's friend Kim).


Genealogy at the library: according to Patricia Davis' Obituaries of White County, Illinois & Other (Less-Important) Areas of the World, one of James Clinton Sturm's sons got into some trouble in 1894:

Carmi Courier, June 14, 1894—Johnnie Smith; son of Emanuel; involved in fight with son of Clinton Sturm. Sturm hit Smith with fence rail across back near the kidney. The effects causing his death the following evening. (Leading Locals)

The next time I'm at the State Historical Library in Springfield, I'll have to poke around in the Carmi Courier for June, 1894, and see whether I can find out anything more about this incident.

The archives (along with most of the rest of the library) will be closed during March, as they move to temporary space in the new addition. I'll have to find something else to do on Saturday afternoons.


Finally managed to re-activate MS Reader on nessus and the iPaq. The secret? I switched to a different passport account, and temporarily granted my account Administrator privileges.

Once again, the pixie dust of Administrator privileges is required to get around the dumbness of Microsoft's developers.

13

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Many of the geekier WRIfolk are desperately searching for the Microsoft Windows 2000 source code, which was supposedly leaked to the internet the other day. I'm not one of them.

When Netscape released the Mozilla source code under the GNU Public License—has it really been six years?—I dutifully downloaded a copy. I looked at it, saw a huge mass of impenetrable C code, and deleted it.

If somebody handed me a CD of the Windows source code (which is the only way I'll ever see it—I'm much too lazy to go looking for it myself), the same thing would happen: a brief glance at a huge mass of impenetrable code, followed by a rapid loss of interest.

Still, the virus writers will doubtless find all the buffer overruns still lurking in Windows, and exploit them with newer & nastier viruses. (Maybe Microsoft is counting on this? In the short run, more pain for their customers; in the long run, more vulnerabilities found & fixed.)


Competition for CVS-NT: SourceGear Vault 2.0, www.sourcegear.com/vault. Supposedly, it's very nice. (Or so SourceGear tells me.) And it's free for single-user use.

On closer examination, though, some obstacles appear:

  • It requires Internet Information Server (i.e., Microsoft's web server). I surely do not want the hassles of maintaining (and securing!) an entire web server just to use a revision-control tool.
  • It uses SQL Server 2000 (or its little brother, the MS Desktop Engine) for the repository. I don't dispute the technical merits of doing this, but installing MSDE on nessus last year caused a performance hit so painful that I had to uninstall it again after just a few days.

Perhaps I will stick with CVS-NT (which, as of this writing, I have yet to install).


The mayor of San Francisco is annoying the California legislature by instructing the city clerk to issue marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

These couples have been carefully chosen to minimize distress among the homophobic masses. According to CNN:

The first to be married Thursday were Phyllis Lyon, 80, and Dorothy Martin, 83, who have been together for 51 years.

All I can say is: Mazel tov, grannies.

(I cackle when I hear politicians declaim for the evening news that same-sex marriage is unnatural and an affront to decency. What does the average politician know about what is natural and decent?)


Matinee

This is the weirdest piece of furniture I've ever seen: the Matinee sectional from La-Z-Boy. It's four recliners bolted together side-by-side.

I'm trying to imagine one of these in the living room, but I just can't get my brain wrapped around it. Sorry.

[Well, all right, it's for a home theater, not a living room. It's still funny-looking.]

12

|

Schools are closed today in Illinois: it's Lincoln's birthday.


Today I found a bug in Microsoft's C compiler:

#if !(('\?' == 63) \
   )
/* No problems here. */
#endif

#if !(('?' == 63) \
   )
/* fatal error C1012: unmatched parenthesis : missing ')' */
#endif

int main(int argc, char *argv[])
   {
   return 0;
   }

Thanks bunches, 'softies.


In the news: the Massachusetts state legislature is making noises about amending the state constitution to overrule the state Supreme Court, which ruled last week that same-sex couples have the right to marry.

It seems that every unpopular Supreme Court decision—state or federal—prompts a movement to amend the Constitution: not because some profound Constitutional principle is at issue, but merely because it's a way to pass laws that judges can't strike down.


There's a song, The Parish of Dunkeld, on the Silly Wizard live album, Live Wizardry. It's a happy little song about a happy little church, and it makes me smile every time I hear it.

As it turns out, there is a Parish of Dunkeld, and they have a web site: www.dunkeldcathedral.org.uk.

11

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Joshua Allen says:

Some people deride “metacrap” and complain that “nobody will enter all of that metadata”. These people display a stunning lack of vision and imagination, and should be pitied. Simply by living their lives, people produce immense amounts of metadata about themselves and their relationships to things, places, and others that can be harvested passively and in a relatively low-tech manner.

In some far-off utopian time, we may be surrounded by clever gadgets that do all our remembering for us, that memorize every face we see and every voice we hear, that can upload pictures from the camera and automatically index & cross-reference them nine ways from Sunday—but that day is not yet here. It won't be here when WinFS ships (if it ships at all—remember the Object File System that was going to be in Cairo, aka Windows NT 5.0, aka Windows 2000?). Now, and for many years to come, people who want to accumulate metadata will have to enter it all by hand.

Sometimes I think that Microsoft isn't so much trying to solve the problems I have as it is trying to convince me that I have the problems it wants to solve.


Another day, another panicky security bulletin from Microsoft: download & install this patch immediately, or any random spud with internet access can take over your computer and do with it whatever he pleases.

Well, all right. But I have to wonder why these bulletins are always about some peculiar under-advertised bit of technology that nobody knew was in Windows until it started letting in viruses.


Spent forty-five minutes this evening hacking at the enormous glacier covering the end of the driveway. In the end, I was victorious: the driveway is clear, from garage to curb. (The sidewalk scraper I bought at the local True Value on Monday was most efficacious.)

But my hands are very unhappy now: blisters, aches & pains, and a general twitchiness that makes typing difficult and writing pretty much impossible. (No crossword puzzles for me tonight.)

10

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Today's word in the Forgotten English calendar is cumsloosh, which means, ‘A humbug, a flatterer.’

That's not what I would have guessed…


Geekstuff: upgraded to Outlook 2003 at work today. It plays nice with the company LDAP server, which Outlook 2002 never did; aside from that I haven't found anything too exciting. Supposedly the spam filter is pretty good.

At home, nessus is still running Outlook 2000. One of these days I'll probably upgrade.


Over at 22blog.com/callmeishmael is Famosa Chaqueta de Azul Blog, which is either somebody's name, or a title in some language (Spanish?) I don't know. Either way, the author managed a scant twelve entries between July 14 and September 26 of last year before going silent.

One of the entries talks about attending a Maurer family reunion in Sun Valley (Idaho?), and links to a photo album at pnavy.com/jaja. Unfortunately, there are no pictures there (and the site is slower than a dead snail).


Genealogy Society meeting tonight: we ate cookies and chatted about genealogy. It was fun (and a bit unusual to be one of the youngest people in the room).


Just now I tried to upload Sunday's museum pictures from the digital camera, only to discover that the battery's dead. I suppose I'll have to pick up another one at the store tomorrow. (The pictures are safe on the compact flash card.)

09

|

Listening to Janis Ian on the iPod…

Pass the tea & sympathy
For the good old days are dead
Let's drink a toast to those who best
Survived the life they've led

…and thinking of Old Lodge Skins' prayer at the end of Little Big Man:

…and I ask you for the last time to grant me my old power to make things happen.

More mail from Aunt Betty. I'm learning a lot about the Akers side of the family tree, such as Aunt Maude, who ran off to Chicago and became a photographer's model.


Poor Jacob, lately bedtime has become a traumatic experience for him. He's happy enough as we put on his pajamas, and read his bedtime stories—but when we put him in the crib, he cries and cries. (For about five minutes: then he falls asleep.)

He's really too big for the crib. We need to get him into a big-boy bed, but that means dismantling the crib and hiding it somewhere he can't see it. And that means finding the energy for crib-dismantling (not to mention storage space), which is the main reason we haven't done it yet.

One of these days, definitely.

08

|

Off to Chicago, for an afternoon at the Museum of Science and Industry with grandparents, cousins, and aunts & uncles.

Natalie, Jake and Lily at the Museum

Fun, but exhausting.

07

|

Everybody went to bed late last night; inexplicably, everybody also woke up early this morning.

Weird dream last night: something about Carrot Top installing a broadband internet connection on a post in the back yard, from which we had to run a few dozen yards of blue network cable into the house (through an open patio door) to hook up the computer.

“If we don't like it, we can return it,” I said to Jennifer, as neighbor children found the cable and started playing jump-rope with it.


FrontPage 2003 Ad

Embarrassment at Microsoft: the FrontPage marketing folks recently included this snippet of badly-broken HTML in a banner ad for FrontPage.


Trying to come up with a new web site design. It's proving difficult. The overall page structure I borrowed (i.e., stole) from a web site out in the world, but I'm trying to write all the HTML and style-sheet code myself.

Twiddling the myriad settings for margins, padding, spacing, line height, fonts, etc., etc., is making me dizzy. Perhaps I will think more about it tomorrow.

06

|

Dropped off a package at the post office this morning. “Priority Mail, $3.95, should arrive tomorrow,” said Mr. Postman.

[It was a birthday present for Grandma-In-Law Grace, whose birthday is February 10th.]


Used the inkjet printer to print out our federal & state tax returns, since the LaserJet is a bit gimpy. It worked pretty well: the text is dark, and very sharp. No smudges, either, which is always something I expect (irrationally, perhaps) from inkjet printers.

The LaserJet is eleven and a half years old: I picked it up at CompUSA in Schaumburg, on the way home from the Yellowknife trip of July–August 1992. It's served me well ever since.


No snow in the forecast for a few days, which is nice. If only the temperature would get high enough to melt a little of what we already have…

05

|

3:00pm, and there's about an inch of new snow on the ground, with more falling.


The snow stopped shortly after 3:00, with just enough on the ground to make the drive home interesting.

Looks like the TaxCut people have posted the February update, which means tonight's leisure-time activities are return-printing & envelope-stuffing.

Or not: in mid-printout the LaserJet started leaving a wide gray smear down the left side of each page. I don't suppose the IRS would appreciate a smudgy return, so it's time for a new toner cartridge. Or is the inkjet printer well enough for a simple black & white text document?


Magazine

Here it is: the thirty-four-month Jake picture. I can't believe Jake is almost three years old.

04

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Today is my half-birthday, the midpoint between 40 and 41. Not really—it's a leap year, so the downhill slide to 41 is a day longer than the uphill slog from 40.


Our new phones arrived today. We named them Ernie and Bert, to go with Elmo (the original phone) and Big_Bird (the answering machine) that we bought July 7th, 2003.


More foolery in the Genealogy section: I've been going through all the photocopied-from-microfilm newspaper articles and making sure they're online. Then I throw away the paper: electrons take up much less space than dead trees, and space is at a premium just now.


Weatherdroids claim another blizzard is on the way: 4–5 inches by tomorrow night. We'll see.

03

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Ice everywhere this morning, plus a little more snow.


The Google people have a new project: Orkut, www.orkut.com,

…an online community website designed for friends. The main goal of our service is to make your social life, and that of your friends, more active and stimulating.

Membership is by invitation only. I don't know any Orkut members, so I doubt I'll be receiving any invitations. The Orkutians will just have to get along without me.


Asked the Amtrak web site how much it would cost for Jennifer and me to ride to New Orleans & back at the end of next month.

$800, quoth Amtrak.

Then I asked the American Airlines web site how much it would cost to fly to New Orleans & back, the first weekend in April.

$700, quoth American Airlines.

I must be doing something wrong here…

02

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The Chairman of the FCC has denounced Janet Jackson's [censored]-flashing during the Super Bowl halftime show as “a classless, crass and deplorable stunt” and promised a “thorough and swift” investigation.

Hm…“crass and deplorable” is a pretty apt description of the entire Super Bowl, not just Janet Jackson and her anatomy.


Geekness rampant: I have the notion to set up a cvs server on nessus. There's one at www.cvsnt.org that claims to run on Windows 2000/XP.


2:24pm, and snow is falling. Looks to be sticking, too.

On the iPod: In Search of the Lost Chord, by The Moody Blues (www.moodyblues.co.uk). The song Legend of a Mind begins:

Timothy Leary's dead…

Indeed he is, having died of prostate cancer in 1996. But his web site (www.leary.com) lives on, sort of: it's currently marked closed for renovation until fall 2003.

I guess they're a little behind schedule.


I'm contemplating another reorganization of my genealogy files.

My first method, years ago, was to keep everything in a three-ring binder; when the binder filled up, I bought a bunch of hanging file folders and decreed that the bottom drawer of the file cabinet would be the Genealogy Files. But the folders were organized by family, which isn't very useful: the documents I have are mostly about specific individuals. Most of the folders were empty, and likely to stay that way, so setting it up was just wasted effort.

I'm not sure what the new method will be. Probably just straightforward alphabetical order, by last name.

There's surprisingly little paper to organize: I stacked it all on my desk this evening, and it wasn't even four inches high. Most genealogists have box after box of documents, newspaper clippings, journals, notes, etc., etc. Not me. (There'd be nowhere to keep it all anyway.)


Gingerbread house

Here's a picture of the gingerbread house Jacob made in December (that is, just over six weeks ago). It sat on the kitchen counter until the 23rd (eleven days ago), when I took a few pictures of it. The pictures sat in the camera until yesterday, and only this evening did this one make it to the web site.

[And then I didn't upload it until the 3rd. What a procrastinator I am!]

01

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A break in the weather: today's high was 33°, and the first temperature above freezing since 1:00am on the 24th.

Drove over to Normal, to visit with half of Jake's grandparents, two-thirds of his cousins, and one-third of his aunts & uncles: quite a crowd it was, too. There was much chaos (not to mention a puppet show).

The forecast for tomorrow calls for a return to miserable weather: snow, sleet, etc., etc.

Isn't tomorrow Groundhog Day? The Little Zen Calendar on my desk doesn't say. Groundhogs have no place in Zen, perhaps. (Does a groundhog have the Buddha nature? Does its shadow?)


Jennifer made me watch the Super Bowl halftime show at 7:00pm. (Next year, they should have half as many people and give them twice as much time each. But that's just me.) Right at the end, Jennifer said, “Did you see that?

“Er, no. What?”

“One of Janet Jackson's [censored] was hanging out.”

“Really? Euww, the game's back on, change the channel.”

At 10:00pm, I'm reading www.kitta.net (having got there via a link on the WordPress web site), and Kitta—who's somewhere in Western Australia—has a link to another site, which has a frame grab of the exposed [censored].

Small world, that news of pop-star antics can circle it twice in less than three hours.

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