Spent the day in Normal, at a birthday party for one of Jake's grandmas.
Brought the camera along, but didn't take any pictures—aside from a few of the Piatt County sign on US 150 just outside Mahomet, for the Illinois Counties project. I'm up to thirteen now: eighty-nine to go.
Funny, in a whistling-through-the-graveyard sort of way: the Diebold Variations. It's not who votes that counts, it's who counts the votes.
Starting over on the PHP+MySQL daybook replacement. For now, this means installing software (CVSNT) I shouldn't have uninstalled, downloading documentation (MySQL, PHP) I shouldn't have deleted, and recreating source code I shouldn't have deleted.
I feel rather a chump just now.
If you have two and a half million dollars (Canadian) lying around, you can buy Neil Peart's house. It's in the Lac St. Victor development, which has its own web site: www.lacstvictor.com. Nowhere in all of this is the location of Lac St. Victor revealed. I'm not surprised: rich people like their privacy.
But still—how do you hide an entire lake? I think Lac St. Victor is at 45° 46′ 11″ N, 74° 25′ 22″, but that's just a guess. I need to find a good Canadian atlas.
Too bad the library's closed today.
[This isn't the first time I've indulged in a bit of internet celebrity-stalking: see October 24, 2002.]
Thunderstorms this evening, with a few tornado watches to spice things up.
Sputnik recorded a 9° temperature drop between 7:00pm and 8:00pm, along with a 33mph wind gust and almost two-tenths of an inch of rain; but now (8:48pm) all is quiet.
Geekstuff:
Set up ssh on nessus this evening. With a few LocalForward entries in ~/.ssh/config, I can talk to the WRI mail servers, which is nice. I can also use MySQL Control Center to talk to the MySQL database on Pair's server, which is likewise nice.
Haircuts this morning, for Jake & myself; Jake was a bit reluctant at first, but got over it.
Lunch today at Pizza Garden, across the parking lot from the Savoy 16.
Edible, but only barely.
We go there once every year or so, mainly because it takes us that long to forget how nasty the food is.
Went to see Shrek 2 this afternoon. It was funny, but they slipped in so many riffs on famous movie scenes that it got rather annoying by the end.
At this point, Shrek 3 is inevitable.
Jake was a bit fidgety in the movie theater, but I think he enjoyed the show.
Supposedly, www.ssbadger.com
(not to be confused with www.badgerbadgerbadger.com)
is the web site for the Ludington–Manitowoc car ferry, which is
quite a shortcut for people going from Wisconson to Michigan (or back);
but, alas, they're having problems. The initial page does an immediate
redirect to a new page, defaultContent2.asp, which doesn't
exist.
I hope they're better at running the ferry than they are at running the web site…
(www.ssbadger.com/defaultAlternate.htm works, though it whines at me that I don't have the latest version of Flash installed. As a matter of fact, I do; too bad the SS Badger hired a chump to code their web site, or they'd know that.)
I was thinking that maybe the ferry would make a good shortcut on the way from Arlington Heights to Leland, Michigan; alas, it does not. For one thing, it's expensive: $44 for each passenger, plus $49 for the car. For another, it's slow: four hours from Manitowoc to Ludington. And finally: the ferry leaves Manitowoc at 1:15pm, which is about an hour before the earliest we could possibly get there.
So it's a big never mind on that idea…
Cloudy this morning. Thunderstorms this afternoon, according to the weatherdroids.
Chris Sells (www.sellsbrothers.com) has a brief rant about ReactOS (www.reactos.org). According to the project web site, ReactOS is
…an Open Source effort to develop a quality operating system that is compatible with Windows NT applications and drivers.
That's Windows NT 4.0, which shipped in…1997? 1998?…and has been superseded by Windows 2000, and now Windows XP. The question of why the world needs a half-baked clone of an obsolete operating system—even a free free FREE clone—is nowhere answered on the ReactOS site.
The open-source crowd seems a bit deficient in the original-thinking department. They're always writing clones of commercial software.
The other day, I showed www.badgerbadgerbadger.com to Jacob.
He was fascinated.
In today's mail: a $50 check from Mr. Oral Surgeon. Apparently he overcharged us, or the insurance company overpaid him, or something; whatever the cause, we get a refund. How nice.
This is the second letter this week from Mr. Oral Surgeon. The other day he sent one that said, “I hope your recent surgery was less difficult than you anticipated.”
He's concerned for my physical and financial well-being, is Mr. Oral Surgeon.
Thunderstorms last night. Rather severe, too: on the way to work I saw numerous tree branches on the ground. The lid blew off Jacob's sandbox, which then filled with water; no sandbox-playing for Jacob tonight, I think.
A fly in the DSL ointment: the much-advertised $27/month is an introductory rate, available only to new customers who sign a one-year contract. When the year is up,
…DSL service will revert to the then-current month-to-month pricing in your market.
The month-to-month rate is $50, which is considerably less appealing than $27. It is also about $10/month more than we're paying for dialup service (i.e., EarthLink) on a second phone line.
My enthusiasm for DSL is somewhat reduced by this information.
Jerry Pournelle's catchphrase of the week is: Armies break things and kill people. I think he picked it up from Rush Limbaugh, who overused it when I listened to his radio show (many years ago).
I suppose it's an accurate description of military service—combat involves a lot of breaking & killing—but it's incomplete. The function of an army is the disciplined use (or threat) of force, not mere random violence.
Perhaps Jerry & Rush don't mean to imply that the US Army is a bunch of delinquents running loose with toys that go boom, but that's what it sounds like to me. I find their lack of respect rather annoying.
Still thinking about a PHP+MySQL daybook replacement; I'm coming back around to the notion that I'll have to write my own to get the exact feature set I want.
That would be a lot of work. But it might be fun, too.
Apparently today is National Bike-To-Work Day.
As I haven't ridden a bicycle since the waning months of the Carter administration, and haven't had a bicycle of my own since my silver Schwinn ten-speed was stolen (on my fifteenth birthday, 1978), I did not participate.
How my bicycle was stolen:
I left it, unlocked, outside the Radio Shack at the intersection of 213th Street and Sheffield Avenue, while I went inside to write BASIC programs on the display model TRS-80: something about using the (meager) graphics capability of the TRS-80 to scroll banner messages across the screen, if I remember correctly. When I was finished, I went outside and my bicycle was gone.
I'm a bit more careful about securing my property these days.
TerraServer has .25-meter color images of Dyer, Indiana. The house we used to live in is here. It's on the lower-right (i.e., southeast) corner of the intersection. Sometime in the last twenty-six years, someone built an enormous garage in the back yard. And an enormous pool, too. There's almost no back yard left.
I don't remember that many swimming pools in the neighborhood, back in the 1970s.
(A clever person could, given the date of the picture [April 10, 2002] and the shadow angles, determine the precise time of day when the picture was taken. Alas, I am not that clever.)
It took three tries, but Jennifer & I finally finished mowing the back yard.
Amusement:
Today CNN is running a story headlined “Radiohead guitarist to be BBC composer”; the Advertiser Links sidebar contains a link titled “Tickets for the 2003 US Radiohead Tour”.
I know that Woodstock tickets are collector's items; but tickets for last year's Radiohead tour?
I was eleven days past my sixth birthday when Woodstock opened. I did not attend. I wasn't even aware that there was something called Woodstock happening in New York.
I don't remember any of the historically significant events of the late 1960s. It's frustrating. If I could reach back through time, I would poke my six-year-old self and tell him, “Hey, kid, pay a bit more attention to the rest of the world. You'll be glad you did.”
[Well, all right, I do remember the Apollo missions. So I wasn't completely oblivious.]
Looks like our state income tax refund was deposited today, two months after we sent in the return.
Two months?
The Illinois Department of Revenue is a bunch of slackers.
The more I look into DSL, the better it looks. DSL from SBC will work with the MN-500 base station we already have (though a bit of foolery will be required to get PPPoE working). It's cheaper than Volo Broadband, there's no $300 setup fee, and doesn't require an antenna bolted to the roof. It's not as fast as Volo, but still zippy fast when compared to dialup service.
Sure would be nice to have a faster internet connection, and nothing further to do with the EarthLink chimps.
CNN makes me laugh again:
A Federal Trade Commission rule went into effect Wednesday requiring that unsolicited commercial e-mail that contains sexually oriented material include the words “SEXUALLY EXPLICIT” in the subject line.
Spammers operate outside the law already; what's one more regulation to them? They'll ignore it, as they ignore all the others.
Crummy weather: as of noon, NOAA reports temperature 77°, dewpoint 72°. Thick overcast, too.
Mowing the lawn in conditions like this might be hazardous to one's health. On the other hand, the grass will only be taller if we wait.
Hm…
Fun with Windows XP:
Didn't get very far with the lawn: seems the mower got unplugged early yesterday evening, and never got plugged back in. A three-hour charge isn't nearly enough to tackle the jungle that has taken root in the backyard.
I doubt that even a full charge will suffice. Perhaps mowing the back yard has become like painting the Golden Gate Bridge: by the time the job is finished, it's time to start over again.
The grass in the back yard looks about knee-high after all the rain we've had lately; we'll be days cutting it all with our wimpy little electric mower (which, after four years, doesn't seem to be holding a charge quite so well as it used to).
The other day when Jacob & I were out watering the box garden, I noticed a new plant growing nearby: long, thin, serrated leaves, in groups of seven (or occasionally five). Looks a bit like marijuana, thought I.
The DEA web site (www.dea.gov) has numerous pictures of marijuana plants, presumably from the basement gardens of people who are now serving time in some federal prison.
The DEA pictures show a plant with darker and wider leaves, so I don't think we've got any Proscribed Herbal Remedies growing in the back yard.
Aljazeera says:
Israeli forces have fired on thousands of Palestinians peacefully protesting in the occupied Gaza Strip, leaving up to 20 dead and dozens injured.
CNN says:
Palestinians blame an Israeli helicopter strike for the deaths of 24 people among 200 marching in a protest of Israel's crackdown in Gaza, but the Israeli military vigorously denied its helicopter fired on the crowd.
It would be nice if the Palestinians and Israelis stopped killing each other. I don't suppose it's going to happen any time soon.
(The Aljazeera site runs on ASP.NET. I only know this because the server got confused and started spewing error messages.)
The lawn mower didn't get very far at all before running out of steam—no surprise, given that the grass in the back yard is wet from yesterday's rain, and six inches tall.
We'll have to mow a bit more tomorrow.
Jennifer pulled up the mystery plant, and made me throw it away. Now we'll never know what it was.
Had the notion that I might install MovableType 3.0 on my Pair account, to see whether I could use it for the Daybook; there were problems.
First problem: Six Apart won't let you download anything from their web site until you sign up for a TypeKey account. (Shades of Microsoft Passport!) So I did. They sent a confirmation message, click here to activate your TypeKey account, so I clicked: and got a server error. I tried a few more times, and got the same server error.
Apparently, the activation succeeded despite the errors, because the login page let me in. I downloaded the zip file, extracted its contents, and had a look at the installation instructions.
What a train wreck! Thirteen pages of Perl, Unix & cgi-bin arcana, punctuated by warnings that if you don't get this or that step in the setup process exactly right, MovableType won't work.
Um. No, thanks.
rmdir /q /s "MovableType 3.0"(Six Apart will install MovableType for you, if you ask them nicely—and pay an unspecified installation fee. So they have no incentive to improve the installation process: doing so would cost them money.)
I wonder if there's any way to delete a TypeKey account. Looks like I won't be needing it after all…
Back from a weekend visit to the Arlington Heights grandparents.
Two days of nonstop fun (and no naps for Jacob) has left us all a bit tired.
Added seven counties to the Illinois Counties page: twelve down, ninety to go.
Rain this morning.
Judging from news coverage, “holy city” seems to mean “place where people are killing each other with above-average enthusiasm”. People in holy cities never seem to be doing anything particularly holy.
Why is that?
The march of progress: our home phone line is now—finally!—eligible for DSL service, according to SBC (the ‘local’ phone company, which is based in Texas).
Alas, the SBC web site is long on the wonderfulness of DSL, but rather skimpy on how much it will actually cost. There's an unspecified setup fee, an unspecified hardware fee, the LOW LOW LOW monthly service fee (which isn't all that low), and certain ill-defined additional fees; minimum term one year, $200 early-termination penalty; etc., etc., blah blah blah.
I still think Volo Broadband's offer is better. But it's nice to have more than one option.
Jake & I have the house to ourselves, while Jennifer is away at a quilting retreat.
Thunderstorms yesterday evening. I was a bit worried that sputnik would fall over, or the box garden would fill with water, but neither happened.
According to the Perl History and About Wolfram Research pages, these are the release dates for the various versions of perl and Mathematica:
| Release | Perl | Mathematica |
|---|---|---|
| 1.000 | 1987-Dec-18 | 1988 |
| 2.000 | 1988-Jun-05 | 1991 |
| 3.000 | 1989-Oct-18 | 1996 |
| 4.000 | 1991-Mar-21 | 1999 |
| 5.000 | 1994-Oct-17 | 2003 |
The Perl folks seem convinced that Perl 6 will ship, someday, and will be relevant when it does; but will it? After ten years?
Paid a visit to www.eatsshootsandleaves.com and took the punctuation quiz.
Perfect score. Hah.
A few weeks (months?) ago, I found an online grammar quiz, so I took it. I believe I might have missed a few questions, but my overall score was high enough to earn me the title Grammar Führer.
Turmoil in the blogworld: Six Apart has released Movable Type 3.0, for which most users are now expected—horrors!—to pay, from $100 for the Personal License all the way up to $700 for the Commercial License.
Movable Type is written in Perl, so I wouldn't be using it anyway; but it's amusing to see the outrage ignited by (what strikes me as) an entirely reasonable pricing structure.
Dinner at the Ribeye, with Jennifer and Jacob. I had always heard that they kept a well-stocked salad bar at the Ribeye; alas, they do not. The steak was all right, though.
When nessus was running Windows 2000, shutting down Windows automatically powered down the machine; alas, now that nessus is running Windows XP this no longer happens.
Apparently this is because the Windows XP setup program doesn't recognize the P2B-D motherboard as ACPI-compliant, or something like that. If I'd known, I could have told Setup that nessus is an “ACPI Multiprocessor PC”, but I didn't know.
The question now is whether I can fix this without reinstalling Windows XP. Hm…Knowledge Base Article 810903 seems relevant…
(Rumor has it that ACPI support in the P2B-D was broken prior to motherboard revision 1.10. I'll have to check what's running in nessus, but I'm pretty sure it's newer than that.)
opensourcecms.com has links to (and demos of) a great many open-source content management systems. WordPress is there, as is TextPattern. I poked around a bit, hoping to find one I could use; alas, I did not.
I suppose what I really want is something like SnipSnap, but implemented in MySQL+PHP, so I can run it on Pair's servers. (Also with a bit more polish than SnipSnap, which still seems a bit half-baked after another year of development.)
This requires further contemplation.
Genealogy society meeting tonight. If the iPaq hadn't reminded me, I would never have remembered on my own.
Went to Prairie Gardens this evening, in search of more supplies for the raised-bed garden: a bag of potting soil to top it off (it's full now, definitely), and some plants.
This year's crop: cherry tomatoes, chives, oregano, and carrots.
Jacob likes to play in the dirt in the cedar box. I don't know if he can be persuaded to stop, now that there are plants trying to grow in it.
Total cost of this project, so far: about $120, not counting the circular saw. About $75 of that was for the cedar; perhaps future projects will use cheaper wood.
Had the notion to take a series of pictures of the back yard, then stitch them together later with Picture It to make one big panorama. Alas, it didn't work. I'll have to try again sometime, using the tripod and measuring the angles carefully.
Off to Menard's this morning, for some gardening supplies: specifically, 320 pounds of topsoil to put in the cedar box. Looks like we'll need another 320 pounds or so to fill the thing all the way to the top. Egad.
After Menard's, we went to the Holiday Inn over in Urbana, for a Mother's Day brunch. I didn't know anybody offered such things, let alone a hotel; but the food was very tasty. Most of the nearby tables had babies sitting at them, which provided entertainment during the meal.
New charts from the gas purchases database:
Prices appear to have held relatively steady throughout the 1990s, then shot up in late 1999 to a new (somewhat fuzzy) plateau on the high side of $1.50/gallon. Interesting.
Another trip to Menard's, for another 320 pounds of topsoil. The cedar box is pretty much full now. I'm starting to wonder whether I used enough screws to hold the thing together, given that there is now a third of a ton of dirt in it. Perhaps by morning there will be nothing but kindling beneath a mound of dirt.
Nipped over to Bloomington, for a birthday party: Cousin Ryan's first birthday.
Everybody had a great time.
The other day I wanted to copy some pictures to a CD, so I fired up the Windows XP CD-burning wizard and started dragging & dropping.
I got warnings—which I neglected to write down, so I can't quote them here—about secondary streams being lost because CD file systems don't support them.
I use Microsoft Picture It for image editing, so now I'm wondering just what Picture It is keeping in those secondary streams. It's just curiosity, not paranoia. What's in there?
(It might be the indexing service, stashing its data in the secondary data streams of image files.)
Didn't sleep well last night. Very tired this morning. A bit grumpy, too.
The hot rumor yesterday was that Major League Baseball had sold advertising space on the bases during upcoming games.
By the end of the day, all concerned were backpedaling furiously, astonished—astonished, I tell you!—at the depth of outrage from the fans. There will be no advertisements on the bases, at least for now.
Um…why not?
Baseball is not some sacred ritual, some pure & untainted ars gratia artis performed with bat & ball. It is commercialism at its most crass. Nobody seems to mind that the ballparks—which are all named after corporate sponsors these days—are covered in advertisements; why not the bases, too? Why not the players, like they do over at NASCAR?
Thunderstorms this morning, but none close by. Towns north of here—Gibson City, Rantoul—got hammered, but in Champaign—nothing.
Deleted my Orkut account.
I couldn't see any reason to keep it. Even when everything worked properly (which wasn't as often as it should have been), Orkut was just a half-baked reimplementation of existing tools—email, newsgroups, instant messages—wrapped in a web site.
So goodbye, Orkut.
Today's entry in the Forgotten English calendar (www.forgottenenglish.org) offers the following dyspeptic observation:
A certain unluckiness is held all England over to attend a May kitten as well as a May baby. The latter will be sickly and difficult to rear….
‘Sickly’ and ‘difficult’ are about the least apt descriptions I can think of for my nephew Ryan, whose (first!) birthday is next Tuesday.
The Grim Reaper's Age Guesser, www.danzen.com/grimreaper, guessed that I'm 33 years old.
I wish.
(FBI profilers interpreted the Unabomber's early, crude bomb designs as a sign of youth. They underestimated his age by about ten years, which is one of the reasons they took so long to catch him.)
Meat Loaf has a web site: www.meatloaf-multimedia.com. Two, actually: there's also www.meatloaf.net, but it's just a placeholder for the Official Fan Club (which isn't quite online yet, it seems).
The estimable Mr. Loaf has a new album, too: Couldn't Have Said It Better, released last September.
Sputnik reports 68° at 5:00pm. Perhaps I should have waited until today to finish mowing the lawn.
Updated the Weather section. When I upgraded nessus from Windows 2000 to Windows XP, I did not reinstall Easy Thumbnails (from Fookes Software, www.fookes.com). I had the notion that I would use Microsoft Picture It for all image-editing tasks, hence wouldn't need Easy Thumbnails any more.
Picture It is good at a great many things, but creating thumbnails isn't one of them. With Easy Thumbnails, I get a nice Make Thumbnail option on the context menu for image files: two clicks, and I have a nice thumbnail.
(The thumbnails of the weather charts are larger than the full-size images. Go figure.)
Gave up on WordPress today: deleted the databases, deleted the WordPress source, etc., etc. I believe I will stick with CityDesk for a while longer, and see whether 3.0 (coming soon, according to rumor and/or wishful thinking) is as big an improvement over 2.0 as 2.0 was over 1.0.
Also gave up on my do-it-yourself MySQL+PHP Daybook replacement. I don't have the time, energy or inclination to write a complete, well-designed web application. So all that went into the bit-bucket as well.
I'll probably drop my Pair account back down to FTP, since I don't need a database after all. Still, it was nice to have one to play with for a while.
Rather warm this afternoon: 86° at 5:00pm, which is when I was mowing the lawn. At least I remembered to wear a hat.
Followup with Mr. Oral Surgeon today. It went quickly—I think I spent more time in the elevator than in the exam chair.
Mr. Oral Surgeon says that I'm doing great, and that the holes where my wisdom teeth used to be should heal up in 5–7 days.
Rumors from Microsoft Watch:
Microsoft is expected to recommend that the “average” Longhorn PC feature a dual-core CPU running at 4 to 6GHz; a minimum of 2 gigs of RAM; up to a terabyte of storage; a 1 Gbit, built-in, Ethernet-wired port and an 802.11g wireless link; and a graphics processor that runs three times faster than those on the market today.
I imagine that's what a typical desktop machine will be, by the time Longhorn ships. It hasn't stopped the Slashdot crowd from being deeply offended, though. (The Slashdot crowd is deeply offended by anything Microsoft says or does. Whatever credibility they might have had has long since vanished. Still, they're useful as a source of links to real news sites.)
I sent my mother an Orkut invite the other day. She accepted, too. Somehow I don't think either of us is in the target demographic for Orkut.
Home today, recuperating from yesterday's wisdom-tooth adventure.
I've got ice packs strapped to my head, I took some ibuprofen a little while ago, and I'm sitting at the computer, loafing.
I feel fine, nothing like jwz felt after his wisdom teeth came out.
WordPress has competition: Textpattern (http://textpattern.com/). The web site looks nice enough, but Textpattern itself seems even less far along in development than WordPress.
EarthLink's DNS servers appear to be working properly today.
Visited Mr. Oral Surgeon this morning, and had my wisdom teeth plucked out.
A few minutes after starting the IV, they asked, “How do you feel?” “About the same,” I said. A few minutes later, they asked again. “I can't get the room to hold still,” I said, which was apparently what they were waiting to hear.
At first, they covered the instruments with a cloth, so I never saw them. (Later, my eyes were covered.) Whatever they used to pull the teeth made an interesting grinding noise as they clamped it on.
I had a nice nap afterward, until they made me get up and go home.
So far, I have avoided the nasty side-effects they warned me about. It doesn't even hurt very much.
Another playdate for Jacob this afternoon: one of his friends from daycare came to visit for a few hours while her Mom & Dad went to see a movie.
Playing the bug game
A splendid time was had by all.
Television weirdness: this afternoon's broadcasts included two documentaries on the Charles Manson murders, one on E and another on the History Channel.
Very odd. The 35th anniversary of the murders isn't until August, so why now? Is it sweeps week or something?
8:25pm, and EarthLink's DNS servers seem not to be working very well. Connecting to mail servers and web sites takes forever, when it works at all.
The reason:
*** Request to ns3.mindspring.com timed-out
I'm sure, though, that the EarthLink Network Status page, if I could get to it, would show green across the board.
Workers of the world unite, and all that.
Jacob had a playdate this morning, with one of his daycare friends (a different one from last month's playdate). A grand time was had by all.
Genealogy:
Spent a few hours at the library this afternoon, looking up various Bramlets and Calvins in the census. I'm working on the theory that Joel Bramlet, who appears in every census from 1830 through 1880, is the father of Candis Bramlet, who is the mother of Mary Margaret Calvin, who married Jasper Sturm.
Which means Candis Bramlet is my great-great-grandmother. She was born around 1833, in Tennessee; and married William H. Calvin on January 20, 1856.
[My memory is failing: on July 3rd, 2003, I also looked up Bramlets and Calvins in the census, and came to much the same conclusions as today.]
Installed MySQL Control Center on nessus, thinking I could use it to work with the database on my Pair account; alas, it seems Pair's database servers are locked down too securely to allow that.
