August 2004 Archives

Dosed the front yard with fertilizer & weed-killer this evening, to encourage the grass (of which we have less than when we bought the house) and discourage the weeds (of which we have considerably more than when we bought the house).

We bought a lawn-chemical spreader device at Prairie Gardens last night. It works pretty well.

Three more albums went into the iPod this evening: Love Junk and One Sided Story, by The Pursuit of Happiness; and A Night at the Opera, by Queen.

iTunes reports: 459 albums, 5178 songs, 15.2 days, 29.80GB.

Also installed a trial version of NewsGator (http://newsgator.com/), an RSS aggregator add-in for Outlook. It works, but there are two things I don't like: Outlook's toolbars, sidebars, etc., etc., take up so much space that there isn't much left for the messages; and squeezing rss feeds through a modem connection is very slow.

Neither of these is really NewsGator's fault, of course. But they are good reasons not to pay $29 for a license once the 14-day trial period is up.

New in the Genealogy section: the final probate report for the estate of Joel Bramlett, my great×4 grandfather.

Administrator de bonis non is a legal term I hadn't heard before. Encarta 2002 knows nothing about it.

Up early (for a Saturday) and over to Bloomington, for Day of the Dozer. Better weather than last year (August 23), which was beastly hot; this year, it was merely unbearably hot.

Grandpa Norm was there again; and this year, Jennifer came too. So did Amy & Natalie. Everybody had a good time.

Day of the Dozer

Backhoe

Grader

I believe I have the Dell Axim X30 set up, finally. It was a rather complicated process:

• Upgrade Outlook 2000 to Outlook 2002;
• Download 50MB of service packs and updates for Outlook 2002;
• Upgrade FlexWallet 1.7 to FlexWallet 2005;
• Discover that FlexWallet 2005 can't import a FlexWallet 1.7 database unless it has a password;
• Reinstall FlexWallet 1.7, add a password to the database, uninstall FlexWallet 1.7;
• Try the import again (success!);
• Upgrade Pocket Genealogist from 2.71 to 2.81;
• Etc., etc., blah blah blah.

It's all working now, which is nice. After four years, the iPaq can be retired. (I asked Jennifer if she wanted it; she laughed at me.)

Hot & humid today. Very muggy. So we mowed the lawn after work.

Tonight's tomato harvest: forty-three, for a season total of five hundred and forty-six. I think we're done with tomatoes for this year.

The mystery melon is starting to look like a very small canteloupe. Jennifer planted canteloupes this year, but they never sprouted—and weren't anywhere near the box garden anyway. So where'd this one come from?

Finished reading Rutherford B. Hayes, by Hans L. Trefousse. An interesting read. If anything, nineteenth-century politics was even nastier than the twenty-first-century kind.

Thick overcast today, with thunderstorms predicted. The 1:48pm NOAA radar image shows a line of rather strong storms just northwest of Champaign, heading our way.

My umbrella is at home, too.

Between road construction and the annual Return of the Students (sort of like the swallows returning to Capistrano, or the buzzards to Hinckley, Ohio: take your pick), traffic in town has been pretty bad lately. Perhaps in a month or two things will settle down again.

[The buzzards have a web site: http://www.hinckleytwp.org/.]

Picked up my Dell Axim X30 at the UPS facility on Lincoln Avenue this morning. It came in a fairly large box, which was mostly empty (not even styrofoam peanuts or crumpled-up paper). I unpacked it, plugged it in (“Charge the battery for eight hours before use!” warned the read-me-first pamphlet), and started poking around.

It is very nice. It has 64MB of memory, a 16-bit color display, and a zippy fast processor. Built-in networking, Bluetooth, etc., etc. The companion CD includes a copy of Outlook 2002, so nessus might get an upgrade.

I never did check whether the Pocket PC software I already have will run on the X30. If it doesn't, I will feel quite foolish.

Rain most of the evening, but not much lightning or thunder.

Jake is coming home today. We're not going to say anything about having painted the television room: we'll see if he notices, or has anything to say himself about it.

Probably he will. “It's blue!” he will say.

Jake said, “It's all painted!”

There was a UPS tag on the door when we got home: seems Dell shipped my X30 a little sooner than they said they would. (I wasn't expecting it until September.) That was nice of Dell, but it leaves me with the problem of prying my package from from the clutches of the UPS folks, who seem quite loath to part with it.

The clerk at the Lincoln Avenue facility wouldn't even look for it. Check the web site, she said. Or call the 800 number.

The 800 number is an automated phone system designed to prevent customers from talking to human beings (if, indeed, there are any human beings there).

The web site is very pretty, and tells me quite a bit about my package's route from Hodgkin, Illinois to Champaign. The failed delivery attempt is also recorded, with the annotation: A 2ND DELIVERY ATTEMPT WILL BE MADE. (It also says 9:05 A.M. GREEN BAY, WI, US DELIVERY, which is a little disturbing.)

The Delivery Change Request link brings up a terse page that says:

A Delivery Change Request cannot currently be performed on this package.

So, UPS policy appears to be:

• Yes, we have your package;
• No, you can't come get it;
• No, we won't tell you why;
• No, there's no one you can talk to;
• Thank you for using UPS;
• Now go away, you're bothering us.

I never have these problems with FedEx.

6:14pm, and the UPS package tracker returns a blank page. Perhaps now they will deny ever having had my package. “Nope, hasn't shipped yet, better call Dell.” Sure thing, morons.

Turns out UPS has another 800 number, different from the first in that it is answered by friendly, helpful people. The one I spoke to explained that (for a brief period) Dell issued duplicate tracking numbers. The one assigned to my package was also assigned to a package delivered this morning to the Nordstrom in Green Bay, which is why the tracking system wouldn't let me make a delivery change request: it was already delivered.

Supposedly, everything has been straightened out now, and my package will be waiting for me at the Urbana UPS facility, first thing tomorrow morning.

Drove down to Carmi today, for a few hours in the courthouse.

I found the probate file for Joel Bramlet: as previously suspected (July 3rd, 2003) he was indeed the father of Candace Bramlet, my great-great-grandmother.

(Joel's son, William D. Bramlet, was apparently convicted of manslaughter. Must investigate further…)

One mystery: the probate materials are all dated 1867. So who's the Joel Bramlet in the 1870 and 1880 Censuses?

I took the GPS and camera, and added nine counties to the Illinois Counties page. I'm up to thirty-four: one-third finished!

Did final touch-ups in the television room, crawling on the floor with tiny little paintbrushes, then carted back in all the furniture and most of Jacob's toys (we're doing a minor purge while he's away, in the hope that he won't miss them).

It looks nice. Now we need curtains. Or windowshades. Something.

Felt really sick for a few hours last night: temperature 102° (according to the reliable thermometer) or perhaps 103.5° (according to the less reliable one), generally miserable, etc., etc.

I feel better this morning. I wonder what it was…

Jake is in Arlington Heights. Jennifer & I are painting today.

Went to see The Manchurian Candidate at the Savoy 16, while waiting for the first coat of paint to dry. (Watching paint dry really is boring.) The filmmakers had a bit of a problem: there are no Chinese Communists in the movie, so the title doesn't really make sense any more; but if they changed the title, no one would know it's a remake. Apparently they needed the audience boost from fans of the original, so they found a way to sneak the word ‘Manchurian’ into the movie.

Painting went well. The roller pan got stepped in at one point, which was a little exciting.

Once the second coat had been up for a while, we took down all the masking tape, newspapers, plastic, etc. It's starting to look like a room again.

Met the grandparents in Dwight, for lunch at Pete's (a restaurant, right by the Grundy County sign); afterward, Jake went home with them: he'll be spending a few days in Arlington Heights while Mama & Papa do a little house-painting (Powder Blue #5 in the television room).

Carted everything out of the television room, taped up the trim and put down plastic & newspapers. Painting is tomorrow.

Went to see Garden State at the Savoy 16.

Rain this morning; cloudy & cool all day, more like late September than mid-August.

Another almost-but-not-quite thunderstorm last night, shortly after 11:00pm: a lot of wind, a little thunder, almost no rain. Half an hour later it was over.

This morning, the cloud cover is thick and low. Rain seems likely, though probably just a weak drizzle instead of something more dramatic.

5:00pm, and it hasn't rained yet. “Maybe tonight,” quoth the weatherdroids.

Tonight's tomato harvest: twelve, for a total of five hundred and three.

Installed the Nikon PTP drivers on nessus for the new camera (a Coolpix 3700, very nice); I skipped the shovelware (an out-of-date version of QuickTime, an image editor, various other stuff I didn't look at too closely), figuring I had better tools on nessus already.

Thunder last night, beginning around 11:00pm; but no rain. I must remember to water the tomatoes this evening.

Foggy this morning, but later (11:00am) just cloudy.

I am saving my pennies to buy a Dell Axim X30. It's just too posh (and too cheap) to resist.

http://www.theogray.com/ is not the web site of Theo Gray, co-founder of Wolfram Research. The latter can be found at http://www.theodoregray.com/.

(While I'm on the subject, http://patrickrice.com/ isn't me.)

CNN:

Radical Shiite cleric Muqtada al-Sadr announced Wednesday his militia will leave the Imam Ali Shrine after a threat by the Iraqi government to “liberate” the holy site in Najaf.

Aljazeera:

Shia leader Muqtada al-Sadr has reportedly offered to pull his fighters out of Najaf and disarm them, in a move to allow him to join Iraq's US-backed political process.

Reading Aljazeera is an exercise in cognitive dissonance, but reading opinions with which one disagrees is good exercise for the mind: it forces me to think about what I believe, and why, and whether I might be wrong.

Tonight's harvest: forty-four tomatoes and a bunch of carrots. That makes four hundred and ninety-one tomatoes: nine more and we'll reach the magic number five hundred.

There was a comment in Sunday's paper about this year's bountiful tomato harvest; that pretty much sums it up.

Geekness:

After talking up the iPaq 2215 for a long time (and even trying to persuade my mother to buy one), I'm starting to think that the Dell Axim X30 might be a better choice. The X30 has a newer version of the OS, a faster processor, built-in wireless networking, and a lower price. And there have been dark mutterings about the 2215: hardware problems, handgrips that won't stay on, no OS upgrades, that sort of thing.

I just happen to have some cash lying around. Perhaps I will buy one.

(Among the optional software for the X30: Age of Empires: Pocket PC Edition. I'm doomed.)

Just eight days after I installed the Wireless Optical Desktop Pro 2.0 on nessus, Microsoft has announced the Wireless Optical Desktop 3.0. For a moment, I was worried that this was a new version of what I'd just installed, but it isn't. (Microsoft really needs to straighten out their product-naming scheme for mice & keyboards.) It's a funny-looking thing, a bit curvy but not so much as the real ergonomic keyboards; and it has a round pod off the left side that contains a slider switch (for zooming in and out in map software, according to the ad copy).

It's funny that keyboards are sprouting all kinds of special-purpose keys & widgetry. PLATO keyboards used to have that sort of thing, long ago. What's old is new again, or something.

A few months ago, the local grocery store started carrying Pacific Chai Latte (in the coffee aisle). A bit expensive, but very tasty stuff.

Apparently, we were the only ones buying it, since the grocery store has dropped it in favor of Yet Another Boutique Coffee. (I don't know why. I can't tell the difference between cheap coffee and expensive coffee, so I get my caffeine fix from Folger's.)

Fortunately, the folks at Pacific have a web site (http://www.pacificchai.com/) with a nice online store. A six-pound tub of Vanilla Decaf costs only $39. Hm…

(Pacific is based in Virginia; and before that, Maryland. The web site doesn't say where they got the name Pacific. I guess Mid-Atlantic Chai Latte doesn't have quite the same ring to it.)

Tonight's harvest: thirty-two tomatoes and a half-dozen medium-sized carrots. Nothing close to yesterday's foot-long monster, though.

We're up to four hundred and forty-seven tomatoes so far, but the tomato plants seem to be fading. Still, it looks like there are enough green ones left to ripen that we might make five hundred. That would be nice.

Downloaded CVSNT 2.0.51c (from http://www.cvsnt.com/cvspro) and installed it on nessus; it seems to work.

I might still switch to subversion. CVS is primitive & nasty.

Today's tomato harvest: twelve, for a total of four hundred and fifteen. On the other hand, the carrots are coming in:

We made carrot cake with these. Very tasty. (Check out that monster on the end. It was a foot long, more or less.)

Off to Bloomington, for another birthday party (lots of birthdays in August besides mine: this makes for lots of parties, which is always nice).

Before we left, I harvested another sixty-seven tomatoes from the (increasingly rather shabby-looking) tomato jungle: our total this season is now (drum roll, please) four hundred and three.

We took the fifty-eight from Sunday, plus today's harvest, to Bloomington, and left them with the relatives.

I also took a picture of the Mystery Melon:

It's starting to look like a very small watermelon. Or an alien life-form that's going to take over the planet. Or something.

Windows XP Service Pack 2 broke the CVSNT installation on nessus: suddenly, all my commands fail with cvs [update aborted]: Authentication protocol rejected access. Apparently the new firewall is blocking the ports used by cvs.

The fix: add cvsservice.exe and cvslock.exe to the firewall exceptions list. But doing that apparently tickles a bug in Windows, causing further troubles.

I may have to switch to subversion.

[I upgraded CVSNT to 2.0.51c, and all is well.]

Cold last night: 48° (a record) at 8:00am.

(It would be interesting to see a graph of record lows & highs, plus averages, for Champaign. Would it be a nice, smooth graph, or would there be discontinuities? Today's record low twenty degrees colder than yesterday's, that sort of thing. Must investigate further…)

Jeff Duntemann says:

Since the invention of the printing press, publishing has been a mostly permanent thing: No matter what you publish, a copy will probably continue to exist somewhere. The difference today is that “somewhere” is morphing to “everywhere,” and recall of ancient data is becoming increasingly effortless.

Just so. All the blather I posted to various newsgroups, eight or nine years ago, is in cryo-storage over at Google (formerly Deja, formerly Deja News). Nothing too embarrassing in there, except the one time I said “ectomorphs” when I should have said “mesomorphs”. Oh, the shame!

[No, I was right: basketball players are ectomorphs. Football players are mesomorphs. So there, Kyle Capizzi!]

Disturbing URL of the day: http://www.ToddNeedsALiver.com/. Well, Todd, you can't have mine: I'm still using it.

[Apparently, he got one, even before the CNN.com article about him went up.]

CNN.com also tells me that Julia Child has died. Sigh.

NOAA reports 59° at 1:00pm. In August?

Signs have appeared in the restrooms at WRI:

Employees! Please wash hands before returning to work!

I'm tempted to post signs of my own:

Management! You are not my mother!

Then again, judging by the stench wafting from certain offices here at Wolfram Research World Headquarters, personal hygiene of employees is an issue confronting management.

In today's mail: a birthday card for me, from Amy. It was postmarked August 3; why it took eight days to travel the fifty-two miles from Bloomington to here may never be known.

I still have a birthday cake, in Arlington Heights; it was intended for last Saturday, but Jacob's surprise illness prevented that. It's an ice cream cake, so maybe it will keep in the freezer until we can all get back up there.

Though I'll feel a bit strange eating birthday cake in September.

No genealogy society meeting this month: instead, the Archives at the Urbana Free Library were open this evening for a research night. I took the iPaq & its keyboard, and typed in random extracts from newspapers and various county histories.

Apparently Jacob Maurer was Overseer of Highways, District 6, Carmi Township, in 1881–1882.

Rain last night: about three-quarters of an inch between 7:00pm and 2:00am. The lawn will be happy.

Jacob is staying home from daycare again today. He's pretty much recovered from the hand-foot-mouth disease he picked up last week, but we're keeping him home one more day, just to be sure.

Yesterday Jennifer stayed home; today it's my turn.

Last time Jacob caught hand-foot-mouth disease (which really needs a better name: everybody thinks I'm joking when I say it), the doctor told us that he wouldn't catch it again. Exposure confers immunity, etc.

If that's true, why did Jacob catch it again? But if it's not true, why haven't Jennifer and I caught it? Supposedly it's very contagious, so we'd have it by now if we were susceptible.

Thinking about a genealogy run, to Carmi and / or Mt. Vernon. It's time to commune with the ancestors some more: since the library in Springfield is closed for a few months, that means Carmi.

Hard to say when I might have time for such a thing, though. August is going to be a busy month, for a number of reasons.

Jake & I had a good day. The house is a mess, but we had fun.

Finished reading Dhalgren, by Samuel R. Delany. I read it once before, twenty years ago; it hasn't aged well. (Or perhaps I haven't aged well.)

Poor Jacob, he's picked up a case of hand-foot-mouth disease. It's not the first time—that was May 19, 2002. He was droopy & miserable Friday evening, and all day Saturday, but seems to be perking up today.

He's drinking today, but still won't eat. Just like last time, poor little guy. At least his fever seems to be (mostly?) gone.

Installed my last birthday present (sure did get a lot of 'em this year): a Microsoft Wireless Optical Desktop Pro 2.0 (previously mentioned on January 7), a gift from my mother and Bob.

The new wireless mouse is a little smaller: good for Jacob, who's had trouble getting his hand around the old one. The keyboard has a different feel, a bit on the mushy side but quite comfortable to use. It has a row of special keys across the top, that do things like open the My Documents folder, start Calculator, etc., etc. One of these days I'll have to learn how to use them.

The immediate benefit is that there are fewer wires under the desk than there used to be: and de-cluttering is always a good idea.

I'll probably bag up the old hardware and take it to work. Somebody will want it, I'm sure.

Windows XP Service Pack 2 is coming very soon, according to the rumor mill. Microsoft says to just turn on Automatic Updates and let Windows download it automatically.

Over a 49k modem link, this would take two or three days. No, thanks, 'softies, I think I'll order the CD.

The scroll wheel on the new mouse is much smoother than the old one. Very nice.

And the multimedia keys on the keyboard work with iTunes—just tell the software to use iTunes instead of Windows Media Player, and everything just works. How nice.

More tomatoes: fifty-eight, for a grand total of three hundred and thirty-six. No pictures this time, sorry.

I think the tomato harvest is winding down. I don't see very many green ones left on the vines.

The other day, I discovered a Mystery Melon growing near the tomatoes, either in the box garden or just behind it. (The tomato jungle is so thick I can't see where the mystery vine is rooted.) It looks like a fuzzy watermelon, and at last check was about the size of a golf ball.

Maybe it's the sole survivor of Jennifer's canteloupe experiment? Must remember to keep an eye on it.

Cool and comfortable today: the high was only 76°.

Today's tomato harvest: a paltry twenty-five. (The total so far is two hundred seventy-eight, which is not paltry.) Also pulled a few carrots, to see how they're coming along. They're getting bigger, but aren't quite full-size yet.

Maybe they'll be ready at the end of the month. Garden carrots taste better than the ones from the grocery store. Maybe they're a different variety? Or maybe freshness matters?

The Forgotten English calendar tells me that I share a birthday with Percy Bysshe Shelley.

(What kind of name is “Bysshe”, anyway?)

Today's tomato harvest:

Seventy, for a total of two hundred and fifty-three. Maybe next year only one tomato plant…

(There would have been more, but I dropped a few. And another dozen or two have fallen on their own, or been eaten by critters, or otherwise been rendered un-harvestable.)

A vanload of relatives (six: Norm, Barb, Amy, Scott, Natalie and Ryan) came down from Bloomington and/or Normal, for a birthday dinner at the (newly-opened) local Bennigan's. There was much chaos. It was fun.

More birthday presents for me, too: a bag of cookies, and a sizable contribution to the Toys for Geeks fund.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

We sent all the tomatoes back with the relatives. There will be another fifty on Friday, I'm sure.

Hotter today than yesterday: high 89°, with dewpoints in the 70s. Very uncomfortable.

On the doorstep this evening: a package from the Book of the Month Club. Inside, my Rutherford B. Hayes biography—less than a week after the BOMC told me they were fresh out.

They could have just skipped the card. I wouldn't even have noticed the delay. (Once upon a time, the Astronomy magazine people cashed my renewal check, then expired my subscription anyway. It took me three or four months to notice that I wasn't getting the magazine any more.)

More early birthday presents, this time from Jacob & Jennifer: The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twentieth Annual Collection, Gardner Dozois, editor; and the four-disc, 223-minute running time, extended edition The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

In today's mail: not one, but two birthday cards, one of which included a quite generous birthday present.

Thank you, thank you, thank you.

[I should clarify: both cards were from my mother & Bob. So it's not that somebody sent a card with no present, and I'm feeling cheated.]

Hot & muggy all day. Very unpleasant to be outside, say, mowing the lawn.

[Especially if you get a Japanese beetle stuck in your hair, and you don't notice until you've been back in the house for half an hour, which is what happened to me. Euwww.]

Took the Targus keyboard to the libary this afternoon, to see how well it works for note-taking. Pretty well, as it turns out: I typed in about three pages of newspaper extracts (mostly about people to whom I am in no wise related).

Too bad the iPaq's battery is showing its age; it fizzled out after only two hours. (It's four years old, after all.) As I was too lazy to write anything down with pencil and paper, that meant it was time to go home.

Here's an interesting item from today's researches:

Carmi Democrat-Tribune
June, 1945
Phillip Dean built a very life-like scarecrow on North First Street in hopes of saving his strawberry patch from thievery by birds. His hopes were soon smashed as he went out to find two nests built in the pockets just days later.

My great-grandmother Dorothy Dean had a brother named Phillip, who lived in Carmi. Perhaps he's the one who built the scarecrow.

Very hot today: sputnik reports 87° at 4:00pm.

A conversation with Jacob:

Can I have a cookie?
We're going to have dinner with Mama soon.
But I'm not hungry.
Then why do you want a cookie?
…

Today's tomato harvest:

Fifty-five, for a total of one hundred eighty-three. Finding new recipes isn't enough any more: we're talking about freezing some.

I don't know how well tomatoes take to cryogenic preservation.

The monthly Jacob photo, on time for once:

It's been a while since I managed to take the monthly picture on the first of the month. It'll probably be a while before I manage it again.

Amusing:

I was poking around the Danger web site (http://www.danger.com/), and decided to see how much a hiptop costs these days. Imagine my surprise when I followed the where-to-buy links and saw FREE FREE FREE.

No, not surprise. Suspicion. Telephone companies can't be trusted to give a straight answer to questions of price: they're like the old Monty Python Dung-of-the-Month Club sketch, “Well, you see, sir, it's in very small print so as not to affect sales.”

The FREE FREE FREE hiptop is free only if you sign up for a $40/month service plan (two year contract, minimum), which plan just happens to include no data service or internet access. (Those are extra.)

The whole point of the hiptop is internet access, so selling one without the other is just a little bit deceptive.