March 2004 Archives

Chilly this morning. Cloudy, too, with a brisk wind (mysteriously, from the northeast).

Finally—two months late—dropped off Mr. Explorer at the Ford dealer for an oil change. As so often in the past, I won't be getting away with just an oil change: the accessory belt needs replacing, the radiator needs flushing & filling, and the mumble-mumble needs mumbleing. (Mr. Technician tried to tell me, but I did not understand him. It will be on the invoice, I'm sure.)

This is going to be another of those $300 oil changes. Cheaper than a new car, I suppose, but…ouch.

Rain this morning.

Spring is really starting to show itself: the trees are budding, the grass is greening up nicely, we even have a few flowers in the back yard. We're not past the risk of snow yet, and the average last frost isn't until mid-April (I believe), but it's encouraging to see that winter is fading at last.

Sometimes the weird stories circulating the internet really are true:

In January, Long John Silver's offered to give America free Giant Shrimp if NASA found conclusive evidence of an ocean on Mars. To celebrate the success of NASA's Mars Rover project, the company is going to give America free Giant Shrimp on Monday, May 10.

The full press release is at www.ljsilvers.com/press/freeshrimp.htm.

Wil Wheaton frequently mentions being cut from Star Trek: Nemesis; there's even a longish essay on the experience at www.wilwheaton.net. But he wasn't completely excised from the film: if you look carefully during the wedding reception scene, he's visible in the background for at least two or three seconds.

Um.

I don't suppose the scenes he shot (which didn't make the final cut) explained the whole gaining super powers and leaving to explore the universe thing at the end of…er, whatever episode it was where Wesley did that. Maybe they're on the DVD?

(Do I have Nemesis on DVD? Must remember to check, the next time I'm near the video shelf.)

Long message from Cousin Richard, with some interesting news about Jacob Maurer. First off, his name is apparently spelled Jakob, not Jacob. Second, he was “…a mean man, a bad man, or a hard man. Depending on the person telling the story.”

In the news: McDonald's has taken the plunge, and will begin accepting credit and debit cards.

Previously, if I wanted to go out for lunch but had no cash, my only choice was the grocery-store salad bar. Soon I'll be able to get McFood instead. But is that such a good thing?

Still monkeying around with WordPress. I may end up hacking on the version I've got (1.0.2) until I like the results, rather than accepting whatever the WordPress developers release.

I have lots of pictures from this weekend. Someday I will get them posted here.

In Arlington Heights, visiting the grandparents.

Also: at the Shedd Aquarium, with the other grandparents (and the cousins, and the aunts & uncles).

The aquarium was rather dark, but the tanks were well-lit. I turned off the flash and pressed the camera right up against the glass. It worked pretty well.

No good pictures of Jacob at the aquarium, alas.

In Arlington Heights, visiting the grandparents.

(Sputnik recorded a high of 70° this afternoon: the first of the year. How nice.)

We're all home today, taking a three-day weekend.

Thunderstorms last night, rain all morning: the creeks are up, and there's standing water everywhere.

The sump pump doesn't sound quite right. It may be time for another trip into the crawlspace. Ugh.

Indeed, all was not well with the sump pump: the outflow pipe had come loose again, and the pump was spraying water all over that corner of the crawlspace.

It's fixed now.

(Lots of water down there. And a dead mouse. Ugh.)

Jacob is staying home today. He doesn't seem very sick (no fever) and isn't acting very sick, but he's staying home.

The visit with Mr. Oral Surgeon was relatively brief. I watched a slick video on the potential complications of having one's wisdom teeth extracted, had one of those wraparound jaw x-rays, and chatted for a few minutes with Mr. Oral Surgeon.

They estimate this will cost about $1,300 before they're finished with me & my wisdom teeth. I can think of a lot of things on which I'd rather spend $1,300.

Jennifer looked into replacing the burner grates & control knobs on our stove, the old ones being somewhat mangy; apparently Whirlpool thinks of replacement parts as a profit center, because four grates and four knobs cost just about $350.

A complete new stove couldn't cost much more than that…

Interesting news: I have a cousin (first cousin, once removed), living in Evansville, Indiana, who inherited a portion of the land once farmed by Jacob Maurer.

At least some of the old homestead remains in the family. That's nice.

I've been wasting a lot of time fooling with Orkut lately; having given the matter some thought, I think I know why.

There's no spam.

Orkut is what the Internet was like, ten or twelve years ago (albeit with a posh GUI instead of the text-only all-the-world's-a-teletype UI of 1991). No spam, no chain letters, just a bunch of people.

A voice from the past: www.gooroos.ca/piranha, which is Alix's web site. I have fond memories of Alix from Plato, many years ago; it's nice to get back in touch.

Recent additions to iTunes: the Macc Ladds, Mannheim Steamroller, Loreena McKennitt, James McMurtry, Meat Loaf, the Pogues, and (just now) Chris Rea.

I'm starting to like WordPress again. I've been fixing all the ugliness in the main stylesheet (setting letter-spacing to a negative value is just evil), so maybe with a little effort I can nudge it toward usability. Or something.

Jacob had a bit of a fever last night, just over 99°. I was sure he'd be staying home today; but he woke up cheerful and with a normal temperature, so off to daycare he went.

His nose is still stuffed up, and he's still coughing. Poor little guy.

Curious web site: www.roman-emperors.org, “An Online Encyclopedia of Roman Emperors”. I found it while searching for a translation of—

…nam qui dabat olim imperium, fasces, legiones, omnia, nunc se continet atque duas tantum res anxius optat, panem et circenses.

—but, alas, it had none. Further searching turned up www.swans.com, which translated thusly:

The people who had once bestowed commands, consulships, legions, and all else now longs eagerly for just two things, bread and circus games.

It's apparently a quote from Juvenal's Satire X. (I'll have to take their word for it: I am sadly ignorant of classical Latin, and the authors who wrote in it.)

The moon—which looks to be about halfway through its first quarter—is joined in the sky tonight by a very bright planet. Jupiter? Saturn?

[Neither: according to www.astronomy.com, it's Venus. Jennifer and Jacob said it was Venus, but I said, “No, it's much too late in the evening for it to be Venus. It must be Jupiter, or Saturn.” Wife & Child: 1; Self: 0.]

Called Mr. Oral Surgeon this afternoon, and set up the initial consultation.

They're going to do one of those full-mouth x-rays, after which I'll probably have a brief (i.e., ninety seconds or less) chat with Mr. Oral Surgeon; and then they'll charge me $125 and send me on my way.

Mr. Oral Surgeon's web site maintains a discreet silence on the subject of prices, except to point out that prompt remittance is appreciated, so there's no telling how much the extraction will cost. More than last year's crowns, I suspect.

Still fooling around with WordPress, both at home and at work; and I am losing my enthusiasm for it.

The post editor uses some wonky library to turn free-form text into HTML, which just seems pointless. I'll write my own HTML, thanks.

The stock install doesn't handle images at all: there's no way to add images to a post. There's a photo manager add-in, but it doesn't seem completely baked.

I could write my own, I suppose.

Jacob has a bit of a cold, but it isn't slowing him down much.

Interesting web site: http://www.fundrace.org/neighbors.php, which lists campaign contributions by zip code.

The results for Champaign (61820, 61821, 61822) are interesting: all nine $2,000 contributions (is that some statutory limit?) were to George W. Bush. A lot of these contributions came in pairs: $2,000 from the husband, another $2,000 from the wife. Nobody in Urbana gave $2,000 to Bush, but there were a few $2,000 contributions to Dean and Kucinich.

Nobody named Pat Rice contributed anything to anyone, but there's a pair of Patricia Rices in Maine, both Dean supporters, who gave a total of $2900.

For a while now, I've thought it would be amusing (if a tad morbid) to find a gravestone with my name on it and take a few pictures. Alas, according to the Social Security Death Index the nearest deceased Pat Rice is somewhere in Ohio.

That's farther than I care to travel in pursuit of a joke that probably no one besides me would find funny.

I have a few Graham Parker albums in my collection, a legacy of my freshman-year dorm roommate Gilbert Pilz.

Gilbert brought his stereo and album collection to school with him, thereby introducing me to some great music: the Doors, Graham Parker, Bruce Springsteen, and probably more. (It's been twenty-three and a half years; memory fades.)

Years later, as I was starting my CD collection, I bought Howlin' Wind and Squeezing Out Sparks. I still listen to them, now and then.

Graham Parker has a web site, www.grahamparker.net, and a new album, Your Country. It's nice to hear that he's still out there, still recording—though it makes me feel a little guilty for not keeping up.

[He also has an album titled The Official Art Vandelay, which will make Jennifer laugh when she reads about it.]

Five and a half years ago, I wrote:

Subject: RE: new virus
From: Pat Rice
Date: Fri, 23 Oct 1998 10:26:14 -0500

> Opening e-mail isn't going to give you a virus.

This is less true than it used to be - certain email
clients can now send/receive HTML messages, with all
the security risks that implies.

There are, of course, security settings to prevent
mischief, but recent news items suggest these are not
yet completely baked.

It's only a matter of time until some whimsical thug
wraps Brumleve's latest hack into a cheery piece of
email titled "good times" and turns it loose.

None of which should be construed as encouraging
people to forward bogus 'email virus' warnings to
everyone they know.  As a rule, any message that
asks you to forward it to all your friends is bogus.

I thought of this, reading today's virus warnings. The Bagle virus doesn't need an attachment to infect your machine—merely reading the message is enough.

That's why I disabled Outlook's message-preview mode, years back: it's too dangerous.

Cold today: the high was 39°, which was quite a disappointment after yesterday's high of 67°. And the wind—the forecast included the windchill, which is just unnatural for the end of March.

The sun was bright & warm, so it was a beautiful day (for everyone who stayed indoors, anyway).

An unexpected bonus of upgrading nessus to Windows XP: games. None of the game publishers ever bothered to support Windows 2000, so for years the vast array of games on the Best Buy shelves have been denied to me. But now, my options have expanded.

Which is why I bought a copy of The Sims Deluxe Edition at the Sam's Club on Friday night. I haven't installed it yet, but it looks entertaining.

Finished reading Life on the Mississippi, by Mark Twain.

Jake went to a birthday party this morning, for one of his daycare friends. I tagged along, but discreetly withdrew when it became clear that I was going to be the only father in attendance.

I didn't want to interfere with the female bonding…

A temporary purge in the Genealogy section: most of the recent obituaries have been removed. I never felt quite comfortable having them up, especially since I'm not even related to most of them. Someone still mourning the loss of (for example) Uncle Ernest wouldn't want to stumble across his obituary on some stranger's web site.

New policy: obituaries less than twenty years old will not be published here. I'll still keep them on file, but they won't be online anywhere.

More relatives have turned up: Katherine, my second cousin once removed. Small world, etc.

I had an 8:50am appointment with the dentist this morning. Quoth Mr. Dentist, “You need a filling in #14, or maybe a crown; and your wisdom teeth really should come out.”

Um. Thanks for the cheery news, Mr. Dentist.

iTunes project for this evening: Bob Geldof (four CDs) and Genesis (seven CDs).

Trespass by Genesis has put iTunes over the 4,000 song mark. That's almost two weeks of music, and the iPod still has 15GB of free space.

(There are rumors that Apple is readying a 50GB iPod. Hm…)

Today is St. Patrick's Day, also known as Wear A Stupid Plastic Hat And Drink Green Beer Until You Barf (Greenly) Day.

I drink tea & coffee (though never yet at the same time), so it would be hypocritical of me to disapprove of others' recreational use of alcohol; but too many people—especially in a college town like Champaign—make a habit of drinking to the point of unconsciousness (and/or throwing up), and where's the recreational value in that?

More snow this morning: less than an inch on the lawn and none on the streets. As of now (3:05pm), it all has melted.

The $10 charge I was expecting from Pair Networks turned out to be a $16.18 charge: the $10 setup fee, plus (16 ÷ 31) × ($17.95 - $5.95). Approximately.

Apparently, the stereo components I unloaded yesterday are selling on eBay for considerably more than the $20 I asked for. Oops.

Now playing on the iPod: the Boomtown Rats, A Tonic for the Troops. I've had this album (on various media) since high school, twenty-four years ago.

I suppose I have an unfortunate weakness for happy bouncy 70s pop songs.

Woke up this morning to an inch of snow on the ground, and more falling.

By lunchtime, it was gone, except in a few sheltered areas. Silly weather.

I keep hearing about Orkut ‘jail’. If you annoy the Orkutian leadership, they put you in jail. After a while, they let you back out. Or not, I suppose, if they're really annoyed.

Apparently, the official term for this is ‘blocked’, though the Orkut help system returns no matches for either term.

Sent a message to the WRIfolk-with-stuff-to-sell mailing list:

Amplifier, tuner, CD player, manufactured by
http://www.nadelectronics.com/ (but too old to appear on the
web site). All in great condition. All three plus bag of wires
& random junk, $20.

Half an hour later, it was sold. Maybe I should have asked for more money?

I misread the fine print on the Pair Networks web site: to upgrade my FTP account to an Advanced account costs $10, not $30. (The upgrade fee is the difference between the setup fees for the two account types.) So: click-click-click, a $10 charge on the credit card, and presently I will have a MySQL database and two dozen additional email addresses to play with.

Woot, or something.

Paid some bills today. As a result, I'm rather annoyed with AT&T.

It seems that on December 6, 2003 (a Saturday), just after 3:00pm, we made a one-minute call to Indianapolis. The charge for this call was 5¢, but after adding in federal taxes, state taxes, fees, surcharges, the pile of obfuscated rip-offs that lurk in the fine print of the average utility bill, etc., etc., ad infinitum, ad nauseam, the total came to $17.

That's right—we paid $17 for a one-minute phone call. Ouch. I'd love to blame somebody else for this—Jennifer, perhaps, or even Jacob, who loves to play with the telephones—but I suspect it was my doing. I was sitting at my desk when the call was made; Jacob was in his crib, not sleeping; and as far as I can recall, Jennifer wasn't even home.

As Gunnery Sergeant Hartman said to Private Cowboy, “That pretty much narrows it down.”

Problems with CityDesk:

I've been trying to store breadcrumbs (arranged as <ul>…</ul> groups) in the extra1 field of the numerous index files of my web site. The first problem is that extra1 fields use only Normal View, never HTML View, but apparently for simple tasks (like creating unordered lists) the MS HTML edit control will generate acceptable code. The second problem is that Normal View won't let you create links out of articles' magic numbers: no, you must choose the article from a dropdown list that takes about thirty seconds to open (except when it won't open at all). The third problem is that suffering through this tedious process too many times (where ‘too many’ means ‘less than five’) scrozzles the Normal View editor somehow: I can create the list and type in the first list element, but thereafter pressing Enter has no effect.

So I think I will abandon this particular web-site project, and contemplate alternatives.

Weatherdroids are predicting two to four inches of snow, beginning sometime tonight. As of this writing (4:20pm) it's been cloudy all day, but the cloud cover appears to be thinning.

Maybe it will snow tonight, maybe not.

Orkut tells me: You are connected to 138215 people through 6 friends. Well, now. 138,215 people is quite a number. Hey, everybody—can I borrow a dollar?

Orkut asks for a picture during the signup process. Here's what my six Orkut friends have provided:

• Two cartoons;
• One picture of Michelangelo's David;
• One picture that is many years out of date;
• One picture that is accurate, and recent;
• And one friend provided no picture at all.

My Orkut network includes at least one celebrity: Me » Dave » Miranda » Greg » Arnold Schwarzenegger. Yup, the Governor of California, only four hops away from a nobody like me.

Poked around the Heinlein Society web site (www.heinleinsociety.org) a little this afternoon; it left me feeling sad, and nostalgic for the time when all my favorite authors were still alive (and most were still writing).

A quarter-century down the road, Robert A. Heinlein is dead, as is Isaac Asimov, Frank Herbert, Ayn Rand, John Brunner, Robert Graves, and (many) others whom I've momentarily forgotten.

CityDesk hack: keep breadcrumbs in the extra1 field of each index file, stored as an unordered list (<ul>…</ul>), then have the templates paste that into the page titles. That would be tidier than the separate breadcrumb files I'm using now.

On the other hand, it doesn't fix the (somewhat embarrassing) problem that each index page includes a link to itself in the breadcrumbs. I didn't have this problem when the breadcrumbs were generated by JavaScript…

Tonight's iTunes food: Dire Straits, and the Doors.

Today is Jennifer's birthday. Happy birthday, my love.

One of Jacob's friends from daycare invited him over to play this afternoon; Jennifer and I used the time to see Secret Window at the Savoy 16.

Soon, Jacob's friend will come to play here, while her parents go see a movie.

Fooling around a bit with CVS-NT (www.cvsnt.org). The idea is to have a local cvs repository, and keep the WordPress source in it. (Revision control: not just for work any more!)

It installed easily enough, and runs nicely on nessus (modulo the occasional long pause when nothing seems to be happening, not even disk access). Early on, I accidentally imported a big chunk of my home directory into the repository, then had to delete everything & start over. Oops.

One problem: the WordPress source has Unix end-of-line characters, not Windows. It's easy enough to convert, but the web server where WordPress will be running (someday) most likely expects Unix end-of-lines. I suppose I could convert it back when uploading.

Darrick says, “Funny, you look just as I remember you.”

Me, I thought I was getting uglier with age. Maybe not—maybe I started out ugly.

This evening's iTunes project: my Chris de Burgh collection, nine CDs worth.

While watching the importer slowly grinding away, I wondered whether Chris de Burgh had a web site. He does—in fact, he has two: www.cdeb.com for fan information and www.cdeb.net for selling albums & other merchandise.

And he's just released a new album: The Road to Freedom, due to hit the stores in Europe on Monday morning.

The cable company has been bombarding us these last few weeks with flyers for digital cable and/or broadband service; I threw them all away, grumbling that they shouldn't advertise services they're not prepared to provide. It turns out that I was wrong: digital cable is indeed available in our corner of town, or so says the cable company web site.

I don't care. It costs too much, the extra channels aren't all that interesting, and I despise set-top boxes. But…but…it's digital! It's twenty-first-century high-tech coolness! No, thanks. When I can get a hundred channels of my choosing (i.e., no sports, no home shopping, no infomercials) for $35/month, let me know.

(Their broadband offering is even worse.)

Another try at straightening out the style sheets. One hopes there is at least some improvement.

(Lots of cruft in the style sheets. I keep finding entries that I don't remember adding, and don't know where or how they're used.)

A recent conversation with Jacob:

What happened to your good manners?
I ate 'em.

Chilly this morning: temperature somewhere in the 30s, with a brisk wind out of the southwest.

Jacob had another good night in his big-boy bed. He did wake up once, briefly (but loudly).

I'm halfway through reading Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain. It's fascinating.

Running through the entire book is a sense of amazement at how rapidly & profoundly the Mississippi remakes itself: bends are cut off, leaving islands and towheads; chutes fill in, attaching islands to the riverbank; over time, the river's course can shift miles to one side or the other.

Now that the Army Corps of Engineers has had a century or so to tame the Mississippi, I wonder how often such things still happen (or if they do at all).

I've read elsewhere that the mouth of the Mississippi has moved many times over the millennia, wandering over quite a range of the Gulf coast. It really wants to move again—turning southwest near Baton Rouge apparently offers a quicker route to the Gulf—but the Army won't let it.

The iPod has reached 50% full: 3364 songs, 9.5 days, 18.66GB.

This morning (at work) I figured out how to turn on the album shuffle feature, so the iPod got to choose today's playlist. It did pretty well, too: Carrie Newcomer, Jethro Tull, Spirit of the West, Janis Ian.

Jacob's second night in the big-boy bed went even better than his first: we put him to bed, he slept until morning. No fuss, no bother. If we'd known it would be this easy, we'd have done it months ago.

The internet grapples with the big question: does the BBC offer a no-spyware, commercial-free version of RealPlayer, or not? Dave Winer says yes, and offers a link; but Tomas Jogin says no, and quotes a Real employee:

P.S. The BBC player meme is BS. There is no customized BBC player.

I don't care, either way. I don't know what it would take to persuade me to try RealPlayer again. Hm…money, I think. Lots of money.

In theory, Windows Media Player can play DVDs on nessus (which has a DVD-ROM drive and a DVD decoder card); in practice, I can't get it to work. Very frustrating.

I think the style sheet problems are sorted out—though I seem to have two slightly-different pictureFrame entries engaged in a struggle for dominance. I'll have to reconcile them, one of these days.

Jake's first night with a big-boy bed went pretty well, except that he didn't actually spend much time in it.

As I feared, Spalding Gray is dead: his body was pulled from the East River on Sunday, two months after he disappeared.

Chilly today: 39° as of 3:00pm, with medium overcast. No repeat of yesterday's snow showers, which is nice.

Abilon, recently anointed by the Wolfram Research sysadmin department as the official company RSS aggregator, proved too annoying to use: so I'm back on SharpReader. There's a new version, 0.9.4.1, which is pretty nice.

Except that organizing the feed list (in the left-hand pane) is painful. Drag & drop works, but getting things where I want them requires considerable fooling around.

Abilon couldn't read an OPML file exported from SharpReader; SharpReader couldn't read Abilon's OPML file, either. So they're even.

[The sysadmin-anointed email client for Windows is Eudora, which was so unpleasant I couldn't bring myself to use it for more than a few minutes. So the sysadmin department is 0 for 2 in its recommendations. Coincidence? Or evidence that the evaluation process needs work?]

Genealogy society meeting this evening. I think I will bring a filled-out membership application (and $20), and join—only a year (or so) after I started going.

I am an honest genealogist now: after a year of crashing the meetings without paying, I am now a paid member of the Society.

Geekstuff: I think I've got my style sheets straightened out, but in the process I changed all my templates. This means the next upload will be a big one, because every page has changed. Alas, there is no time tonight; maybe tomorrow.

Chilly today: the forecast high is only 44°.

I've been reading a lot of complaints recently about Real Networks. Here's another: jogin.com/weblog/archives/000504.

Real is suing Microsoft for anti-competitive mopery & dopery, which is hardly surprising: seems like everyone's suing Microsoft these days. The big surprise is that no one, not even the rabid anti-Microsoft crowd over at Slashdot, is defending them. The general response to Real's suit seems to be: Your product stinks, you abuse your customers in devious & probably illegal ways, we hope you die quickly.

[Yes, I'm back to reading Slashdot, or at least the two-line summaries thereof I see in my RSS aggregator.]

Jacob's big-boy bed will be delivered late this afternoon: no more crib for Jake, he's a big boy now.

One wonders how many days it will take to persuade him of this…

Jacob's bed was delivered just after 5:00pm. It smells rather strongly of cigarette smoke, so we are rather annoyed with the vendor just now.

Jake went right to sleep in his big-boy bed: no fussing, no fidgeting. I must confess to a certain degree of astonishment.

Perhaps he was just sleepy?

The style sheets are still messed up here, alas. I'll have to work on it more tomorrow.

This week's People magazine—Jennifer subscribes—has an article on lottery winners who ruined their lives with all the lovely money.

One idiot took his first check ($290,000) and bought five cars. Five? If Jennifer & I ever hit a six- or seven-figure Lotto prize, I'd probably want to buy a new computer: just one, not five.

Perhaps Lotto winners, like Cæsar riding in triumphal procession, need someone to whisper in their ears: You are not Bill Gates.

Long email from Darrick: he's been reading the Daybook and has many thoughts & reactions thereto. I'll have to come up with an intelligent-sounding reply.

This is more difficult for me than it used to be—either I'm getting stupider with age, or my standards have gone up regarding what sounds intelligent. (Does the Daybook sound intelligent? Not as often as I'd like, I fear. I keep writing, though: hope springs eternal, etc.)

Nessus is 99% operational again. My time at the keyboard is once more spent getting things done (or wasted reading web pages), instead of installing applications, downloading updates, etc., etc., blah blah blah.

Still to do: figure out how to get pictures out of the camera; find out whether the kludge tower (Access, Excel, VBScript) that generates the weather charts still works. I think I installed all the necessary pieces of Excel…

Plugged in the camera, and Windows XP said, “Hello, Kodak DX3500.” It uploaded pictures more quickly, and with much less bother, than the Kodak software ever did.

How nice, when things just work. (I thought that only ever happened to Macintosh users.)

Fooling around with style sheets and CityDesk templates this evening; every index.html page in the entire site is now broken. Oops.

(But if you're reading this, I've already fixed the problem and uploaded the new pages. Ain't they purty?)

Nessus got an upgrade this week: first, the 80GB disk; second, Windows XP. It's taken many hours over the last five days, but finally nessus is reasonably operational again.

Pocket Genealogist doesn't work. I must investigate further. Until then, no genealogy on the iPaq.

There are pictures in the digital camera—including a few candidates for Jake's thirty-five-month picture—but I've yet to figure out how to upload them. Supposedly Windows XP can talk directly to the camera, but I haven't tried it.

CityDesk inserts a meta tag in the header of each web page it generates:

<meta name="citydesk" content="3ABB3CB6/6" />

The content field is installation-specific, which means I got a new one when I reinstalled CityDesk, which means CityDesk had to upload every single article the first time I published the site.

Annoying, but unavoidable.

Lunch at the Original House of Pancakes with Leland, who's in town for a few days. Jake was bored, and very naughty, but it was a quiet sort of naughty—no kicking & screaming, just fidgety and messy.

I have my email set up properly again. For a while, I could receive mail on all accounts but send from only a few; the big secret: use Netcom's SMTP server, not Pair's. And all is well.

This time, I'm writing down all the IMAP, POP3 & SMTP servers for all the accounts, so I won't have to flail around quite so much the next time I set up a machine.

I really should get Jennifer's account set up now. She's been very patient with me through all this…

CNN reports:

It emerged this week that the source for Dasani, which launched in the UK last month, was tap water supplied to Coca-Cola's factory in southeast London.

I suspect that the source for Dasani sold in the U.S. is also the local tap water. Now, they run it through some fancy filters, and add some fancy minerals ('for taste'), but people are still paying $2/pint for tap water.

Jake helped unload the dishwasher tonight…

…in his own special way.

Very tired this morning. Jacob woke up several times last night, and required considerable soothing each time before he'd go back to sleep. Jennifer spent more time in the rocking chair than I did; I can only imagine how sleepy she must be.

Amusing: www.godhatesshrimp.com.

Jennifer, Jacob & I had lunch at Red Lobster the weekend before last; if we'd known they were an instrument of Satan we might have dined elsewhere.

Warm today: sputnik recorded a high of 63° this afternoon. Weatherdroids promised rain & thunderstorms, but these never did appear.

Stayed up much too late last night—partly through watching the Oscars, but mostly through messing around with the new disk in nessus. (No problems yet.) Very sleepy as a result.

One of these days I'll get around to installing Windows XP. In the meantime, though, I have many more gigabytes to fill with music for the iPod…