April 2004 Archives

Ahem.

The correct spelling is separate.

Not ‘seperate’.

‘Seperate’ is not a word, and doesn't mean anything—except, perhaps, that the person who wrote it can't spell, can't proofread, and is, generally speaking, a semiliterate toad.

Thank you.

[A Google search for ‘seperate’ returns over a million hits. That's a lot of semiliterate toads.]

James McMurtry's web site, www.jamesmcmurtry.com, is back online; and he's released not one but two albums, Saint Mary of the Woods and Live in Aught-Three, since the last time I checked.

Spending an hour in the record store, poring over the racks in search of new titles, used to be a favorite pastime of mine; no more, alas.

I can't even remember the last time I was in a record store. I suppose Borders is as close to the real thing as it's possible to find in Champaign, now that Record Service has closed; but I don't go there very often, either.

Interesting quote:

…the buying of more books than one can read is nothing less than the soul reaching towards infinity…. A. E. Newton

Well, now. That makes me feel much better. I'm not wasting my money and cluttering the living room—I'm reaching towards infinity!

This made me laugh:

The owners of the domain name cumulonimbus.com are accepting offers from interested parties willing to obtain ownership rights over the domain name. You can place your bid by filling out the form below.

Asking price: $400. No buyers yet, obviously.

I have to wonder who would want the name cumulonimbus.com so badly as to pay $400 for it. Not me, I can tell you.

Illinois has its own Lewis & Clark Historic Site: Camp River DuBois, near St. Louis, where the Corps of Discovery spent the winter of 1803–1804. There's a web site: www.campdubois.com.

I'm trying to find out where the mouth of the Missouri River was, two hundred years ago. It's moved since then, but which direction? And how far?

Alas, Google could not help me.

1:21pm, and it's clouding up outside.

I'm hoping for rain: otherwise there will be lawn-mowing tonight, which is something I'd rather avoid.

Nothing much on the radar, though.

Geekstuff:

Thanks to Personal Vehicle Manager from Two Peaks Software (www.twopeaks.com), and a bit of obsessive-compulsive data entry, I have a database containing every gas purchase for Mr. Explorer, since the day I drove him home (November, 1998).

So I thought I'd do up a graph, and see how gas prices have changed in the last five and a half years. Not much, really. Apparently gas prices took a big tumble while I was in the hospital (in October of 2001, that was), hence the big notch in the graph.

I have notebooks for Mr. Explorer's predecessor, Mr. Blazer; perhaps someday I'll create another database, with gas prices going back to March, 1990.

Not tonight, though.

[Finished the Blazer data entry on May 8th; on May 9th I redid the chart & dropped the new one in here.]

It never did rain, but neither did I mow the lawn: Jennifer did, while Jake played in the sandbox and I read the newspaper. Poor Jennifer, she works too hard.

Stayed up too late last night, reading; very sleepy this morning as a result.

I've been using the same bookmark for twenty years.

It's an 80-column computer card, one of a handful that I swiped from the dorm terminal room shortly before I graduated (from the University of Illinois) in December of 1983.

The university made the transition from keypunch machines, card readers, batch processing, PL/C—i.e., 1960s-era high-tech stuff—to DECwriters, CRT terminals, interactive processing, Pascal—i.e., 1970s-era high-tech stuff—in the early 1980s, while I was a student. In the first programming class I took (CS 121, Spring 1981), I keyed in my PL/C programs on a keypunch machine, then fed them to the card reader; five semesters later, I was typing in Pascal programs on a nice DECwriter.

Ah, the smell of machine oil and cheap fanfold paper. I remember it fondly.

I didn't keep any of those PL/C programs. Toward the end of finals week, May 1981, I carried them out to the field across First Street from the dorm, removed the rubber bands holding them together, and cast them into the windy night. (Litterbug!) But I wanted some souvenirs of punch-card days, so in December of 1983 I paid one last visit to the terminal room and stuffed a hundred or so cards into my jacket pocket.

I still have them. They make great bookmarks. The oldest, a creased & flimsy remnant of its original self, has served in that capacity at least since March of 1984, possibly longer.

What a packrat I am!

Jacob's three-year checkup was this afternoon. Mr. Doctor poked & prodded, listened & measured, and pronounced Jake perfectly healthy.

Jacob is 38¾ inches tall, and weighs 38 pounds. No wonder the daycare ladies won't pick him up any more.

Apple released a pair of updates today, for iTunes and the iPod. Will they fix the iPod battery meter, which worked fine until the last update?

Wrestled a bit with Money 2004, trying to get Jennifer's 401(k) accounts reconciled with reality. I think I succeeded, but the experience was most unpleasant.

The problem is that the average 401(k) statement is a multi-page conglomeration of tables, charts & graphs that, despite its bulk, conveys no useful information whatsoever: When did you get the money that was deducted from my paycheck? When did you get matching funds from my employer? When did you use that money to buy more shares in the mutual funds in which I'm investing? How much did you pay per share?

The tables, charts & graphs have no answers.

In the end, I faked a bunch of sell transactions in the old 401(k), with share prices calculated to produce the correct final cash value; then rolled the cash over to the new 401(k); then created some add-shares and cash-account-adjustment transactions to get the balances to match the first-quarter statement.

[It also doesn't help that the CFO where Jennifer works changes plan administrators about as often as he changes his underwear. Seems like every two or three days there's another rollover to deal with. Sheesh.]

Finished reading Founding Father: Rediscovering George Washington, by Richard M. Brookhiser.

Brookhiser raises, in passing, a very interesting point: of the first five presidents, only one—John Adams—had any children. Had it been otherwise, the risk of drifting into a hereditary monarchy would have been very great.

Installed a few more stepping-stones in the back yard: now Jake has a path he can walk on. (Just now, though, he prefers walking in the mud, instead of using the stepping-stones.)

Discussions continue as to where the cedar-box garden should go. We'll find somewhere, I'm sure.

Lumber people share with hard-disk manufacturers a certain disregard for standard units of measurement: just as the 60GB disk in nessus is really a 57GB disk, the 1 inch × 12 inches × 12 feet cedar planks I bought at Menard's on Friday are really 7/8 inch × 11 inches × 12 feet. (At least they got one dimension right.)

Perhaps I should have offered to pay $65 for them, where $1 is defined as 80¢.

Lunch was at Culver's, mainly to have ice cream for dessert. (Hot fudge sundae, very tasty.)

Norm Fisher, my old boss at CTC, was there. Jennifer saw him; I didn't, but I did see his car in the parking lot. It's funny how Norm keeps popping up, every year or two, in random places about town.

He never says hello, though. It's been fourteen years, perhaps he's forgotten all about me.

Problems in the PHP daybook replacement: the Registry class is all messed up. There are too many ways to insert bogus key ids into the database. That would be a Bad Thing.

Memo to self: next time design first, then write code.

Assembled the garden box this evening. It was easier than I expected. (Maybe that means I didn't do it correctly?)

It's out in the back yard, getting used to the weather while Jennifer and I decided where, exactly, we want to put the thing. (Since moving it will be rather more difficult once it's full of dirt.)

Current plans are to grow cherry tomatoes, basil and oregano (or perhaps chives).

Outlook 2000 finds another way to annoy me:

If you enter a date in the Birthday or Anniversary field of a contact, Outlook will automatically create a calendar entry for the birthday or anniversary, then create a shortcut to it in the contact. This is convenient—I don't want to forget people's birthdays, but neither do I want to work very hard to remember them all—but there are a few snags.

For one thing, the shortcut includes the complete path to Outlook's .pst file, which means: move the file, or change your account name, and—presto!—all the shortcuts stop working. For another, there doesn't seem to be any way to manually create the same kind of shortcut as is automatically created by Outlook.

No, as it turns out, there is: open the contact, then click Insert -> Item, then pick the calendar entry, change the Insert As setting to ‘Shortcut’, then click OK. What doesn't work is the obvious method of right-dragging the calendar entry into the contact, and selecting ‘Create Shortcut’ from the context menu. This is because right-dragging always creates a copy, not a shortcut: there is no context menu.

I just wasted a good long while fixing a bunch of broken shortcuts to birthday & anniversary events, so I'm not very happy with Outlook and/or Microsoft just now.

I wonder if Outlook 2003 is any better…

Tidied up the iTunes database this morning: it was getting crufty again. iTunes likes to mark multi-disc sets as (Disc 1), (Disc 2), etc., which breaks the album shuffle setting (since it can't tell that the two discs are part of the same album); and it inexplicably marks some albums as part of a compilation.

All that is gone now. How nice.

(iPod statistics: 82 artists, 425 albums, 4775 songs, 14 days, 27.44GB. The 9GB of free space could hold perhaps 100–150 more albums. I haven't fed it any Frank Zappa albums yet…)

Another weird project to occupy my time: the Illinois Counties page, which will—someday!—contain pictures of county-line signage for all 102 counties in the state of Illinois.

Five down, ninety-seven to go. (I have yet to add Champaign County to the collection. Go figure.)

Went to Menard's this afternoon, and bought $65 worth of lumber and miscellaneous hardware for the raised-bed garden project.

The boards still need to be cut, but once that's done we can begin assembly.

I think we'll be growing tomatoes, basil and chives: a pretty forgiving crop for inexperienced gardeners.

(Once it's built, we'll have to fill it up. How much does sixteen cubic feet of dirt cost, anyway?)

For the three years it's been outside, sputnik has rested on three cinder block footings, with bolts embedded in cement (that I mixed & poured myself: see February 20, 2001).

The last few winters haven't been particularly harsh; even so, two of the cinder blocks have cracked. One is little more than a pile of gravel with two bolts sticking out the top.

So, today's project: replace the cinder blocks with a set of cement stepping stones. They ought to hold up better, and they certainly look nicer.

The last time Jake played in his sandbox, we forgot to put the lid back on. This week's rain turned it into quite a swamp.

This did not deter Jake from playing in it this evening. He was muddy to the elbows when it was time to come inside.

I have pictures. Perhaps there will be a mailing soon.

Mark your calendars: on September 2nd, just one hundred and thirty-two days from today, I will be the exact age my grandmother was when I was born.

When did I get so old?

Took a few pictures of the Posey County Courthouse, before leaving; here's one:

Back from Carmi.

I have the house to myself: Jennifer and Jacob won't be back until tomorrow.

Rather spooky in here, all by myself…

Jacob's in Normal, Jennifer's in St. Louis, and I'm off to Carmi for some genealogy.

Drove over to Paris this morning, to visit the Edgar County Courthouse.

Aunt Betty told me, some weeks ago, that Orville Akers and Ruby Kibbe (my paternal grandparents), were married there (even though they were living across the state line in Indiana at the time).

They're a friendly bunch, in the County Clerk's office; but their policies are not particularly friendly to genealogists: they'll only issue certified copies of vital records, at $14 each, and you can't see what you're buying until you've paid for it.

So I have in my possession an expensive piece of paper that doesn't tell me much beyond that “Orral” Akers married Ruby B. Kibbe in Paris on June 9th, 1921. (I guess that's why I couldn't find them in the 1920 census.)

I've been spoiled by the White County Clerk's office, where I'm allowed to handle the actual marriage licenses and photocopies (stamped 'for genealogy purposes only') cost 25¢.

Jacob will be spending the next few days with the grandparents, while Mama & Papa are elsewhere; so we all met in Le Roy this evening for the handoff.

The house was strangely empty and unnaturally quiet without Jacob.

Took Jacob to Menard's this morning, with the idea of buying some lumber for the raised-garden project. Cedar turns out to be rather expensive: a single 1 inch × 12 inches × 12 feet plank runs about $26. Add a second plank (since I want my raised garden to be raised, not merely somewhat elevated), and some posts for the corners, and a supply of wood screws, and suddenly this whim of mine is up to $60 or $75.

I talked to a burly, tattooed fellow in the Menard's lumber department, who suggested using regular pine instead. Just paint the outside, and staple some plastic on the inside (a garbage bag would do), and it will last as long as cedar.

The kits over at www.raised-garden-beds.com are starting to seem less overpriced.

Hot today: sputnik reports 85° as of 3:00pm.

We put Jake down for a nap around 2:00pm, but he never did go to sleep. Silly little guy, he'll be extra sleepy tonight.

Geekstuff:

The UPS at work conked out the other day; today, the cheerful & efficient sysadmin department brought around a new one: an APC Back-UPS ES 725. Very posh. There's even a cable that plugs into a USB port on the computer, to keep Windows appraised of the battery status.

Only $78.95 from CDW, too. I may have to buy one for home. (The thing weighs nearly 20 pounds, though. I imagine the shipping & handling charge would be exorbitant.)

More geekstuff:

Thinking of writing a PHP class that behaves a little like the Windows registry, i.e., you could do something like…

$reg = new Registry();
$key = $reg->Key(NULL, "Users/Pat");
$reg->CreateValue($key, "First Name", "string", "Pat");

…or…

$reg = new Registry();
$key = $reg->Key(NULL, "Users/Pat");
foreach($reg->Values($key, NULL) as $name => $value)
{
…do something…
}

…instead of fooling around with some unorganized mass of global settings, which is how WordPress does things.

It sounds pretty simple. (Defining the registry structure in such a way as to prevent it from becoming an unorganized mass might be more difficult.)

[Categories (for posts, in an as-yet hypothetical PHP+MySQL replacement for the current static-XHTML Daybook) would fit very nicely into such a scheme: no need for a special categories table with special-purpose classes to read and write categories. Hm…]

Drove over to Normal for the Gamma Phi Circus. Lily and Natalie were there, as were half of the grandparents and a third of the aunts & uncles. Much chaos ensued, but a good time was had by all.

We mailed in our federal & state income tax returns a month ago; our federal refund arrived two weeks ago, but as yet there's no sign of our state refund.

It seems fair to me to charge the Illinois Department of Revenue penalties and interest when they can't get our return processed in a reasonable amount of time. Alas, that's not how we do things.

I find myself wondering just how much force is required to extract a tooth. There is no comfort, either way: if the answer is “not very much”, then teeth aren't very firmly seated and might just fall out on their own someday; if the answer is “rather a lot”, then bringing all that force to bear in such a confined area increases the risk of damage to the jaw and/or neighboring teeth.

I must remember to ask Mr. Oral Surgeon about this.

Michael Covington makes a request:

Please show respect for us Christians, and for our holy day, by not turning it into something silly. We don't pester our Jewish, Muslim, or nonbelieving friends by inventing Passover bunnies, Ramadan trees, or atheism decorations….

Judging from the rest of his web site, Mr. Covington seems like a nice enough fellow; but sheesh.

Some people observe Passover, some observe Easter—and some people put out plastic eggs full of candy for their three-year-old to find on Easter morning. Some people do nothing at all. To pick one of these as the One True Easter, and malign the others as wrongheaded and disrespectful, is unreasonable.

Let's have a little tolerance, shall we?

Hardware troubles:

The mouse started acting up this evening: sluggish, jerky, as if the signals weren't getting from the mouse to the receiver. Interference from the CB maniac down the block, I thought, and grumbled a bit. After a while, the thing conked out completely. Ah, batteries, not CB interference. I replaced the batteries, and all was well.

But why didn't the mouse software warn me that the battery was low? Because when I installed it, the mouse wasn't working, because the BIOS wasn't configured properly (USB IRQ was disabled when it should have been enabled). So the mouse software never believed there was a wireless mouse attached to the system.

I uninstalled & reinstalled, and all was well.

Hardware troubles, part 2:

Tried to install the drivers for the SideWinder Precision 2 joystick, but could not persuade them that such an item was actually attached to the system. No joystick, no drivers.

I tried unplugging the joystick & rebooting; no dice. There was nothing in Device Manager that said ‘joystick’, so I picked one that looked plausible and uninstalled it; the mouse stopped working. Oops.

After a half-dozen variations on the theme, I gave up. I guess I don't get to use the joystick under Windows XP. Maybe I'll take it to work, and leave it in the breakroom…

Finished reading The War of 1812: A Forgotten Conflict, by Donald R. Hickey.

Dinner last night was at Baker's Square (formerly known as Poppin' Fresh, though I doubt many people remember that name): a burger, some pie for dessert, very tasty. (Jake likes French Silk, but only the whipped-cream stuff on top. He wouldn't eat the chocolate part, or the crust.)

The debit card keypad at this restaurant (Neil St., near the mall) has a feature I hadn't seen before. Between the PIN prompt and the amount confirmation, it asks how much to tip: 15%, 20%, Other. No more tip-calculating, at least at Baker's Square. Very convenient—though specifying an exact percentage seems likely to produce a smaller tip than approximating & rounding up (which is what I do).

Geekstuff:

I have a set of Internet Explorer bookmarks at work, and another set at home. Keeping them synchronized is such a pain that usually I don't bother—which means I'm always looking for a bookmark on one machine that's only on the other. Very annoying.

Windows is chock full of little databases that don't talk to each other. They tell me that WinFS—which will arrive in Longhorn, circa 2006—is the solution to this problem: move everything into one big database, that all applications can access.

If it lets me record somehow that this website and this RSS feed belong to this person in my contacts list, that would be nice.

In today's mail: a letter from the dental insurance company, informing me that the whole-jaw x-ray (aka ‘panorex’) taken by Mr. Oral Surgeon last month is 100% covered at 0% (which is insurance-speak for ‘is not covered’). The reason: I'm allowed no more than one panorex every three years.

As this was the first one I've ever had in my life, I'm not sure which previous x-ray they think disqualifies this one.

Yesterday at the park, I picked up quite a sunburn on my (largely hairless) scalp. Today, I am thinking about hats.

I used to buy camouflage hats from the local army-surplus store (Champaign Surplus, www.champaignsurplus.com). They fit pretty well, and were nearly indestructible. The downside was that people kept mistaking them for fishing hats. I got tired of the going-fishing-today-yuk-yuk-yuk from people trying to be funny.

Columbia Sportswear (www.columbia.com) has some nice hats, but they don't hold up well: once or twice through the wash, and the average Columbia hat is reduced to a sort of brimmed yarmulke.

I've had a hat from Solumbra (www.sunprecautions.com) for a few years now. I still wear it occasionally, but its problem is wind: the four-inch brim (which is made of some rigid plastic) will catch even the slightest breeze and take off like the Flying Nun.

This is what I want in a hat:

• It must fit. One-size-fits-all won't fit me: I have a big head, I need a big hat.
• It must not be adjustable. No elastic, no adjustable headbands, no plastic snaps in the back. They never stay adjusted, and I don't want to have to fool with them every time I put on my hat.
• It must stay on my head, even on windy days.
• It must survive repeated trips through the wash, neither shrinking nor falling apart.
• It must be crushable. I want to pack it in a suitcase, or stuff it into my pocket, and have it emerge wearable and undamaged.

There has to be a hat like this for sale somewhere.

[Incidentally, episodes of The Flying Nun are available at amazon.com. No, I don't want any.]

Geekstuff:

Back in 1998, I bought a Philips Nino, one of the first Palm PCs. As I have often done, I bought it for the geekness of the thing, and only later found actual uses for it.

I kept my genealogy data on it, which was handy in the library and on the road. I kept my calendar & contacts on it. The surprise application was Pocket Streets: maps for the Nino. Before Jennifer and I left on our honeymoon (in June of 1999), I downloaded a map of Williamsburg, Virginia, which rescued us at the end of a long day of driving by getting us unlost and to our hotel.

Even Jennifer, who is as non-geeky as they come, agreed that was pretty cool.

These days, I have an iPaq 3635, purchased toward the end of 2000 & later upgraded to the PocketPC 2002 operating system. I still use it for contacts, appointments, genealogy, and maps; but also for keeping track of finances, passwords, gas purchases and probably a few other things that slip my mind just now. The iPaq is four years old, but still renders yeoman service.

I think about what will replace the iPaq, when the time comes; here are two recent relevant observations:

Much of what I do with a computer does not involve significant amounts of typing. Writing Daybook entries is the obvious exception; mostly I just read (web pages, maps, etc.), or do very minimal data entry (genealogy, finances, etc.).

I hate notebook keyboards: they're cramped and uncomfortable, and without exception have a lousy feel. I managed to type on the (late, lamented) Dell Inspiron, but I never enjoyed it. I much prefer the Microsoft Natural keyboard: it's roomy & has a good feel.

So: the ideal iPaq replacement would be a keyboardless Tablet PC, with a wireless (Bluetooth?) keyboard and mouse that are detected automatically whenever the Tablet PC is in range. I want real peripherals when I need them, but the freedom to leave them at home when I don't.

I don't suppose anybody makes such a thing, but no matter: I won't be shopping seriously for one any time soon. (Unless the right numbers come up in Wednesday's Lotto drawing, that is.)

Jennifer's car spent the day at the dealer, for an oil change. As with Mr. Explorer last month, things got a little out of hand.

Still cheaper than a pair of new cars, I suppose.

Had a picnic at Meadowbrook Park today, after which Jake had much fun running around the play area.

He particularly enjoyed the slide.

Geekstuff:

I have a web page, with a form on it. The form contains a <textarea> tag for text entry. Currently, entry of HTML tags and entities is forbidden, but I want to open it up and allow certain relatively harmless tags (<em>, <ol>, <li>, etc.) and entities (&deg;, &times;, etc.). So I need a filter, written in PHP, than can recognize tags and entities in a string, and escape only some of them (i.e., replace & with &amp;, < with &lt;, etc.).

This is proving difficult.

PHP has functions to escape individual characters, but nothing that treats a string as an HTML fragment and performs tag-level manipulations. There's a rudimentary XML parser, which does a good job of recognizing tags; alas, it only recognizes four entities: &amp;, &lt;, &gt; and &quot;. The other 95 named entities cause undefined entity errors.

The XML parser does accept numeric entities (e.g., &#065;). I could write a function that would replace all named entities with their numeric equivalents, then run the result through the xml parser to recognize & escape the disallowed HTML tags, then reverse the entity translation step to get back the named entities.

What a disgusting hack that would be!

[The XML parser will silently replace &#065; with the actual character (in this case, a capital A). So the reverse-translation step might make entities of characters that weren't entities to begin with. Ugh.]

Spring is here, so I'm thinking once again about growing a few herbs, or maybe some flowers: a nice project to get myself outside (or at least up from in front of the computer), and maybe this year Jacob would like to help. (He has a thing for watering cans, though mostly he likes to water himself.)

I've tried windowboxes on the back porch, but they didn't work out too well. The basil ended up all strung out & weird-looking, not to mention far too aromatic for an enclosed space. The mint turned into a big shrubby monster that took over an entire tabletop. The other herbs I've tried—chamomile, cilantro, anise—were without exception dismal failures: they sprouted, grew a bit, then died.

It's time to try an outdoor garden, I think.

The easiest method would be to peel up a patch of grass from a corner of the back yard, and plant my herbs & flowers there. This would provide some free sod for filling in dead spots elsewhere in the lawn, but I fear that a season of crawling on the ground to tend my garden would wreck my knees. And the local rabbit population, which regards the world as their salad bar, would make short work of my seedlings.

I like the idea of a raised-bed garden. It's neat and tidy, a little more rabbit-proof (though I'm sure that no barrier to lepine voracity is entirely secure), and a convenient height for lazy gardeners. On the other hand, building a box and filling it with dirt would require considerably more effort (and money).

Google suggested www.raised-garden-beds.com, which has quite a range of do-it-yourself kits to build cedar-wood raised-bed gardens. They're all rather expensive (the cheapest, a 2×2 foot square, is $75, plus shipping & handling); perhaps Menard's has something cheaper.

[They didn't: see April 17.]

Plucked a tupperware dish from the freezer this morning, for my lunchbox. The dish was opaque, so I couldn't see inside; and it was frozen, so I couldn't open it to look. All morning, I wondered what I'd be having for lunch.

Lasagna, as it turned out. Very tasty, too.

Strange Horizons (www.strangehorizons.com) posted an amusing article the other day: Installing Linux on a Dead Badger: User's Notes. It's a cute spoof of the Linux crowd's inexplicable mania for porting their favorite operating system to anything with a CPU.

Even funnier was the reaction from the slashdot crowd, who were not at all amused.

Jacob wasn't very sleepy last night, when bedtime rolled around. We put him to bed, but he didn't stay there very long: first, he got up to see what Papa was doing (messing about on the computer), then went to check on Mama (writing post-birthday-party thank-you cards, reading magazines). We had a cuddle-fest in the big bed for a while, then—around 10:30—we finally got him to sleep in his own bed.

Poor Jake, he was very sleepy this morning.

The new thing from Microsoft: Channel 9, channel9.msdn.com. Supposedly it gives us non-Microsofties a peek inside the monolith: a chance to talk directly with the developers.

I poked around a bit, but don't know that I'll be going back. I just don't have the time for another online community.

Started work on my do-it-yourself WordPress replacement: first, the database structure (I just can't bring myself to use the word ‘schema’); second, the top-level PHP files, stylesheets, etc.

Next is the underlying class library. I'm still thinking about that.

CNN reports:

A pregnant woman in Mexico gave birth to a healthy baby boy after performing a caesarean section on herself with a kitchen knife, doctors said on Tuesday.

It is thought to be the first known case of a self-inflicted caesarean in which both the mother and baby survived.

There's an essay in this somewhere, something about the moral obligations of parenthood made agonizingly clear—This day is your life required of you, that your child may live.—but I'm not enough of a writer to tackle it.

Sitting at the computer just now, I heard Jake tiptoe up to his bedroom door. The door is open, but tonight we've put the toddler gate across the doorway to prevent any repeat of last night's post-bedtime wanderings.

Jake fiddled with the gate a bit. Then he said, very quietly, “Mama? Mama?”

“Go nighty-night, Jake,” I said.

He ran back to his bed, jumped in, and began to cry. Poor little guy.

The Check Engine light on Mr. Explorer's dashboard lit up on Friday, so this morning it was back to Hill Ford for investigation.

“I checked the engine, and it's still there,” I said, which joke the poor service tech has probably heard ten thousand times. He laughed anyway.

Later, Hill Ford called to say, “Your car needs a new DPFE sensor. $225, please.”

Beats walking to work, I suppose.

Shortly thereafter, the phone rang again: Mr. Oral Surgeon, calling to remind me that I'll have to pay $500 (more or less) to have my wisdom teeth removed.

That's $500 of car repairs, followed by $500 of dentist—excuse me, Oral Surgeon—bills. Soon Jennifer will decide that maintenance costs on her husband & his car are getting out of hand, and trade both of us in on newer models.

The more I look at WordPress, the less I like it. The source code trips all my sloppy-programmer alarms—was there some point in writing

if (($option_result->option_type == 1) || ($option_result->option_type == 1))

or was somebody just not paying attention?—and the generated HTML leaves a lot to be desired.

Two years ago, I rid myself of FrontPage 2000 and its annoying design philosophy (i.e., you'll take whatever crap HTML we feel like generating, and you'll like it). I like having absolute control over the HTML in my web site, but WordPress wants me to give it up again.

No, thanks.

[I suppose my penchant for hand-coding XHTML marks me as a bit eccentric. It's nothing new—years ago, I used to hand-disassemble 6502 assembly language for fun. Somewhere in my files, I have a heavily-annotated listing of the Apple ][ boot sequence.]

Interesting: when the iPod is docked, it appears to Windows as a 40GB disk drive. If the iPod is docked too early in the boot process—as I did this evening, being in a hurry—it becomes the D: drive, pushing the real D: drive down to E:. This causes all sorts of problems, especially since the iTunes music library is on the D: drive.

Undocking the iPod and rebooting the machine doesn't help, either: the drive letter reassignment is sticky. Fortunately, Disk Manager will change it back.

Silly Microsoft. Drive letters are so 1970s. Can we just get rid of them, please?

In today's mail: another letter from the insurance company, something about how much of last month's visit to Mr. Dentist is covered. Less than 100%, I'm sure.

ABC is running The Ten Commandments tonight, which is a bit odd given that Easter Sunday isn't until next week.

Trying to get the weather charts back online, after upgrading nessus to Windows XP. First, the database paths were all wrong (since the home directories moved back to the C: drive); second, the export-to-PNG function wasn't working. Apparently I forgot to install the PNG filter when installing the rest of Office.

It would have been nice to get a more helpful error message from Excel than, “Something bad happened, bummer.”

With the PNG filter in place, all is well—except that I have no convenient way to generate thumbnails for the graphs. I used to use EasyThumbnails, but that never got reinstalled. I suppose I could use Picture It, but the thumbnail-creation process there is a bit cumbersome.

I'll think of something, I suppose.

Very sleepy these last few days. Jennifer says my eyes look weird.

Another thing-not-to-like about WordPress: named character entities (e.g., &amp;) get turned into hex character entities (&#38;). This is apparently the work of the use_htmltrans option; with that turned off, the hex entities are banished.

So what is use_htmltrans good for?

Birthday party for Jake: pizza at Monical's followed by a trip to the Children's Science Museum.

In today's mail: a letter from the insurance company. It seems Mr. Oral Surgeon wants $1,185 to divest me of my wisdom teeth (also known as #1, #16, #17 & #32), of which the insurance company has deigned to pay $727.70.

Better than nothing, I suppose.

Jacob is three years old today. Tempus fugit, etc.

I told him this morning, “OK, Jake, the terrible twos are over now.” I don't think he was listening.

Cloudy this morning, but relatively high and thin enough that some sunshine can get through.

(Whenever I see photographs of long-ago times, or far-away places, I feel a completely irrational surprise that the clouds look just the same as they do here & now.)