September 2004 Archives

Today's Doonesbury has Donald Trump saying, “The point of success is to die with more money than God!” I don't suppose God has any money—when you're omnipotent, you don't need to go shopping very often—so I already have more money than God.

Updated cygwin at work, installing Ruby in the process; then installed InstWiki and fired it up. It works pretty well, except that http://localhost:2500/ didn't work: I had to give the full name of the machine, which seems unnecessary.

No build breakage with the new cygwin, either. How nice.

We're considering, in a half-hearted sort of way, replacing the (twenty-year-old, saggy, scratched-up, generally mangy-looking) bookcases in the living room with a new set from Ikea.

So I poked around a bit on the Ikea web site, and put together a likely list of components. The price: $556. That's a bit more than I was hoping to spend…

Somebody, please, tell me there's an email client out there somewhere that runs on Windows, and can handle multiple POP and IMAP accounts without tripping over its own [censored].

Outlook 2002 surely cannot. I am very annoyed with it just now. It can't query my six mailboxes without getting bunged up; once that's happened, it can't send mail any more, because it's still trying to receive mail (and there's no way to tell it not to—the Cancel Delivery option has no discernible effect); and nine times out of ten Outlook hangs on exit. The window is gone, but OUTLOOK.EXE is still in the process list. This causes big problems if you try to run Outlook again, or try to synchronize a Pocket PC: the new process can't launch until the old one is completely gone.

[I suppose it might not be Outlook's fault. Maybe there's some quirk in the cygwin ssh that makes tunnelling to WRI's IMAP server unreliable. It's possible, but I doubt it.]

Had the notion to try out Instiki (http://www.instiki.org/), which might be useful as a record-keeping sort of thing at work. There were problems.

Instiki is a Ruby application. (I don't know Ruby, but that's not really a problem: I could learn.) The Windows port doesn't seem quite finished. I could install the Cygwin version of Ruby, which is probably a lot better than the Windows version, but that would involve upgrading the (year-old) version of Cygwin I'm using, and that runs the unacceptable risk of 1) messing up my ssh configuration, and 2) breaking the build environment.

Building Mathematica is more important than messing about with Instiki, so I will come back to this later.

This looks interesting: the Vicksburg National Military Park, http://www.nps.gov/vick/. Might be fun to spend an afternoon wandering around the place, one of these days.

Yahoo says it's only 650 miles away…

A bit chilly overnight: NOAA recorded 48° at 6:00am. Supposed to be even colder tonight.

Another visit to Mr. Dentist today, for the “difficult” repair job on #31. After yesterday's $370 oil change, I expect the worst.

[It wasn't so bad. It was an awkward angle for Mr. Dentist, but he managed.]

Mr. New Ford Dealer (the old one, Marvin Hill, sold the dealership to some guy from Danville & retired) says the Check Engine light (which lit up last night on the way home from Bennigan's) is due to a failed O₂ sensor.

Faithful readers will recall that Mr. Explorer just got a new O₂ sensor, three months ago (June 28, that was), and may wonder whether today's repair is covered by warranty. Alas, no. Explorers have three O₂ sensors; #1 was replaced in June; #2 is being replaced today; no problems yet with #3, but I am not optimistic.

Mr. New Ford Dealer also reports that Mr. Explorer's battery is “weak” & needs replacing. There was also talk of replacing the plugs & points (or some such), but I decided to put that off until next time.

The executive summary: another $350 oil change.

[$370, as it turned out.]

Sliced 45 tomatoes in half, arranged them neatly on a cookie sheet, spritzed them with olive oil, sprinkled them with salt & pepper, then put them in a 200° oven. That was two hours ago, more or less; two hours from now, we'll have sun-dried tomatoes.

Or inedible carbonaceous sludge. The two seem equally likely.

[It was quite tasty, actually. Good on crackers.]

Fred sent me a Gmail invite, so I signed up. I don't know what I'll do with it.

Artists 99 and 100 in the iPod: Arlo Guthrie and George Harrison. iTunes says I've topped 30GB. Poor iPod, soon it will be full. (Time to buy another one, I guess.)

Today is Jack La Lanne's 90th birthday. Happy birthday, Jack. (His web site: http://www.jacklalanne.com/.)

The 1870 Census records William D. Bramlet as an inmate at the Illinois State Penitentiary in Joliet. That explains why his father's estate was paying money to the Will County Sherriff.

I forgot to check the 1880 Census, to see whether he was still behind bars. Probably not: he was convicted of manslaughter sometime prior to 1866, and fifteen years seems an overlong sentence for that.

Also found a few stray marriage records, for various Bramlets and Matsels.

Nine more tomatoes this evening, for a total of six hundred and forty.

Grandparents coming to visit today.

I had the notion to do a graph of this year's tomato harvest: how many, per day. Excel is pretty handy for that sort of thing.

Jennifer has some recipes for sun-dried tomatoes. As it turns out, the sun is not involved in making sun-dried tomatoes: it's done in the oven, on low heat, for eight or so hours.

I guess oven-dried tomatoes just doesn't have the same ring to it.

Finished reading Time Enough for Love, by Robert A. Heinlein: the first time I'd read it since 1987.

SnipSnap has an interesting feature: at the end of each article (or ‘snip’, as they like to call them [no, I don't know why]), there's a section titled people came here from followed by a list of referrer links.

[If you're on page X, and click a link to page Y, then X is the referrer of Y. If I have my lingo straight. Sometimes X is a Google search-results page, which tells you what people are looking for when they find your site. Handy things, referrer links, and not that much of an invasion of privacy.]

Alas, spammers have figured out how to hijack the list. The people came here from lists on Ceej's blog are full of links to cheap-medications-over-the-internet sites.

There's a patch of new pavement on State Street, just outside Wolfram Research World Headquarters: the old patch was cracked & subsiding, in dire need of replacement.

When I started working at Computer Teaching Corp., in 1987, State Street stopped at Kirby. By the time I left CTC, in January of 1990, the State Street extension was completed, and the Trade Center building was well underway. (I watched its construction from my CTC office, which had a north window.) I don't believe I have any pictures from that time. Too bad.

So the pavement in question lasted fifteen (sixteen?) years. That seems pretty good to me.

Another eleven tomatoes this evening: we're up to six hundred and thirty-one.

Here's a narrowly-targeted application: Volleyball Manager, http://freshmeat.net/projects/volleyball/, which is

Management software to schedule and process volleyball tournaments and leagues.

Only volleyball? If you're running a water-polo league, you need different software?

Hurricane Ivan isn't finished yet: after making landfall last week and causing big problems, Ivan broke up and drifted back into the Gulf of Mexico; now it's reorganized a bit, clawed its way back to tropical storm status, and is preparing make landfall again, tonight in Lousiana.

That must not happen very often: this is the first I've heard about.

In an internal mailing list at work, one of the developers said:

In general, not even the existence is guaranteed, not to speak about smoothness.

And I thought: that may be true for solutions to partial differential equations, but it's also true for life in general.

Nice article on CNN.com about riverboat cruises, with links to RiverBarge Excursions (http://www.riverbarge.com/) and the Delta Queen Steamboat Company (http://www.deltaqueen.com/).

The RiverBarge folks have a Missouri River cruise, St. Louis to Kansas City, that seems very nice. Rather expensive, too: roughly $300 per person, per night. All their other cruises seem to cost about that much, too.

The Delta Queen web site is rather confusing. All I want to know is: when can I take a cruise from, say, St. Louis to New Orleans, and how much would it cost? A bit more poking around, and I have found it: roughly $600 per person, per night. Ouch.

Yusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens (and now known as “Yusuf Islam, formerly known as Cat Stevens”, which probably annoys him a bit) has a web site: http://www.yusufislam.org.uk/.

The other day he was refused entry into the U.S.: seems he's on a terrorist watch list, or something. (Why? The security people won't say.) So his flight was diverted to Bangor, Maine, where he was removed to await deportation. He's back in England now, still wondering why he was turned away.

Some housecleaning this evening: visitors coming this weekend. Jennifer did most of the work. (She usually does.)

A morning visit with Mr. Dentist, who says that the distal surface of #31 has some damage (caused by its neighbor, #32, which was removed last May) and is in need of repair.

Another filling. A difficult one, according to Mr. Dentist. That's not what I wanted to hear.

The alarm goes off every morning; I wake up somewhat later. In between is a period of semiconsciousness during which the radio news blends with any dreams-in-progress.

I think the radio meteorologist said they're getting snow in Montana today, but maybe I just dreamed that? (No snow here.)

Tried to get the X30 to talk to the WRI network this afternoon: some success, some problems. Pocket Internet Explorer was happy with the connection, and could pull down web sites from inside & outside the company; but File Explorer could not access the shared directory on my desktop machine (which is running XP SP2). I think the problem is that XP wants authentication, which the X30 won't provide.

There doesn't seem to be any way to tell File Explorer that sometimes I have to provide a username & password to connect to a network share. On the iPaq, File Explorer popped up a please-log-in dialog, and all was well.

Maybe I'll just get one of those USB memory pods: goes on your keychain, holds 128MB–512MB (depending on the model), shows up as a disk when you plug it into a USB port.

Microsoft has the Microsoft Weblogs site, http://blogs.msdn.com/; Red Hat has the Red Hat People site, http://blogs.redhat.com/people/. Traffic on the former is about two orders of magnitude greater than on the latter.

Those 'softies, they're a chatty bunch.

Another nine tomatoes this evening: six hundred and twenty for the season. We have twenty or so bagged up on the kitchen counter; I think we're going to give them to one of Jennifer's friends, or maybe try to make sun-dried tomatoes.

Grandpa Norm came to visit from Bloomington, with accessories for Jake's swing set: a helicopter swing. Very cool. Jake liked it, too: he had a big smile on his face.

Another six tomatoes from the tomato plants this evening. We're up to six hundred and eleven, from two plants that cost probably $3 each. I think we came out ahead on that one…

Sorted the paperbacks, and shelved them in order. Then I counted them: two hundred and twenty-nine. (The recent purges added up to slightly over three hundred: 58%, more or less.)

The tomatoes I've harvested this year outnumber the paperbacks I've purchased over the last twenty-five years. Go figure.

I have a dentist appointment this week; and Mr. Explorer is due for an oil change. The last few years, both Mr. Dentist and Mr. Ford Dealer have been finding hundreds of dollars of urgently-needed repair work every time I show up.

I don't expect this round will be any better.

It's National Talk Like A Pirate Day! Arr, matey!

Unpacked the paperbacks—which sat boxed-up in various closets for about nine years, then sat on the bedroom floor these last six months—and stuffed them into the otherwise-empty shelves next to my desk. They're in no particular order; one of these days I'll have to sort them out.

Along the way, I did another purge: about two-thirds of a boxful are out in the car, awaiting final disposition: used-book store, library, recycle center. Whatever. (Next to them is a box of twenty-year-old college textbooks. I don't suppose I can recycle those, so maybe I'll sneak them into the library when nobody's looking.)

Sometimes I wonder how many books I have, these days. “An accurate number would be difficult to gauge.” Once upon a time, my library database had about twelve hundred records in it, but that never included the computer books. There have been many unrecorded purges since then.

Sometime this winter, when it's too cold to go out, I must do an inventory.

We went to Curtis Orchard today, so Jake could play (and so we could get some apples to make applesauce). It was amazingly crowded: there were two birthday parties and a Carle NICU reunion on top of the usual weekend crowds.

We had lunch in the new restaurant. Jake managed to dump his hot dog on the floor within ten seconds of getting it, so Mama and Papa shared their lunches (cheese sandwich, bratwurst) with him.

Spent a few hours in the Urbana Free Library Archives this afternoon, looking for persons of interest in the White County reference material they have there. (And chatting with Norma & Carolyn, who are very nice.) I'm collecting newspaper references: if the State Historical Library ever manages to re-open, I will have a long list of things to do there.

The X30 keyboard is smaller than the iPaq keyboard, but I can type on it. So from now on, all my research notes will be online, instead of scribbled on random sheets of paper. It's much tidier that way and much easier to search. (And faster—even struggling with the tiny X30 keyboard, I can type much faster than I can write.)

Dell reports the following dimensions for the Executive Keyboard for Dell Axim X30 Handhelds:

Dimensions (WxDxH):
Closed: 38.58″ × 7.87″ × 52.36″
Open: 70.47″ × 5.71″ × 98.42″

Wow. Eight feet high? That's some keyboard…

Jennifer had a quilting day, so Jake & I had adventures.

We went to the Petsmart on North Prospect, to look at the cats. And the fish, and the birds, and the hamsters, and the $1300 gray parrot (an import from Russia or Africa or somewhere), and the geckos. I didn't know they had geckos.

Then we went to the Octave Chanute Aerospace Museum (www.aeromuseum.org). Third time this year, if memory serves. Jennifer thinks we should buy an annual membership. We looked at planes; Jake really wants to go inside the C130, but he just can't work up the courage.

Poor little guy.

Seems there's a Scouting Jamboree encamped at the airport next to the museum: Jake and I saw hundreds of tents on the far side of the hangars. (Funny place to make camp: if I tried it, the takeoffs and landings would keep me awake. Maybe youth & clean living make for sounder sleeping?)

Then we had lunch at Chili's. Jake wanted a corndog, but when it arrived he refused to eat it. (He tried: he took a bite, then made a face and spat it out.) Instead he had cheerios and other snacks from his backpack.

After lunch, we hit the Best Buy (just up the street from Chili's) for a little window-shopping. Microsoft has refreshed all their consumer software: Encarta, Money, Picture It, Streets & Trips. I'll probably buy them all, sooner or later.

Streets & Trips is bundled with a USB GPS receiver. Too bad the X30 doesn't do USB. There's a Bluetooth adapter, but for what that costs I could get a real Bluetooth GPS receiver, such as the one from Socket Communications.

But I already have a GPS receiver, so spending $180 on another one seems a bit…irresponsible…

Five more tomatoes, from the increasingly spider-infested tomato plants. That makes six hundred and five for the year.

Jennifer wants to make sun-dried tomatoes. Leaving tomatoes out in the sun usually leads to moldy tomatoes; there must be some trick to it I don't know about.

Gas prices today are 25¢/gallon higher than yesterday. Good thing I filled up Mr. Explorer Tuesday evening.

(Interesting web site: http://www.illinoisgasprices.com/.)

Ceej is looking for a new wiki package, after suffering with SnipSnap for the last two years.

I'd be happy myself to find a good wiki package. The PHP daybook program I've been working on is languishing after three months of off-and-on development; at this point I just want something I can use. But I have a few requirements:

• It must be finished. No beta releases, no version 0.9 software: I want a full, polished release.
• It must be written in PHP, and use a MySQL database. That's what Pair provides, so that's what I have to use.
• It must generate clean, valid XHTML, and make sensible use of CSS.
• It must not monkey with the XHTML I write in articles, comments, etc.

SnipSnap fails on #2; WordPress fails on #3 and #4. My own efforts fail on #1.

What to do, what to do…

Gas prices this evening were down 10¢/gallon from this morning. Commodity prices cannot be understood, except perhaps as a demonstration of greed and/or caprice.

Checked the garden this evening, with Jacob: another fifteen tomatoes, for a grand total of six hundred. That's a nice round number.

In the mail recently: a letter from the mortgage people, informing us of two things: first, our escrow payments for 2005 will be $23/month lower than in 2004; second, our escrow account has a projected shortfall of $94 for 2005, so our escrow payments will be raised $8/month to cover it. Which means that our payments will be $15/month lower in the new year, not $23.

Where the erroneous $23 figure came from was not explained.

The US Postal Service Track & Confirm web site says, in regard to the 256MB memory card I ordered from Amazon.com last week:

Your item was delivered at 3:09 pm on September 15, 2004 in CHAMPAIGN, IL.

I didn't know the post office could track packages. Perhaps they've been doing it for years, and I just haven't been paying attention?

MSNBC has given in to temptation: beneath the gratuitous live shots of reporters trying to remain upright in hurricane-force winds, they are running the headline “Ivan the Terrible”.

Couldn't come up with anything clever & original, could we? Losers.

Moved all my Pocket Streets maps, and the half-dozen free e-books I've downloaded so far from Fictionwise (http://www.fictionwise.com/), over to the new memory card.

There's only 237MB left.

Hurricane Ivan, having already flattened Jamaica, the Cayman Islands and western Cuba, is bearing down on the Florida panhandle.

So far, journalists have resisted the temptation to refer to the storm as Ivan the Terrible. There's hope for the profession after all.

2:30pm, and it's raining: first time in quite a while (a week or two, I think; must remember to check sputnik this evening).

Google has a (relatively) new invitation-only free-mail product, Gmail (http://gmail.google.com/). I don't think it's going very well—I see a lot of messages from people who have Gmail invites to give away but can't find any takers.

I don't need another email address, and I don't like the idea of keeping my email archives on Google's server instead of at home on nessus. So no Gmail invites for me, thanks.

3:35pm, and half the lights have just gone out here at Wolfram Research World Headquarters. The hallway is dark, and the HVAC has shut down, but inside my office the lights are on and the UPS isn't complaining. (No problems accessing CNN.com, either.)

Mysterious.

Sputnik recorded only about a fifth of an inch of rain this afternoon; more fell closer to WRI: Neil Street was flooded between Kirby and St. Mary's Road, and Fox Drive was also flooded between State Street and Devonshire.

Fortunately, Mr. Explorer's ground clearance is high enough that neither posed much of an obstacle. (Wet brakes don't work very well, though.)

Genealogy society meeting tonight, with a presentation on land research. Very interesting.

Shared the Trade Center elevator with a DHL driver this morning; to make conversation, I said, “I guess if you're going to 4 none of those packages is for me.”

“Well, let me check,” Mr. Driver said, and started rummaging through the pile.

“I'm expecting a package from Dell this week,” I said.

And he had it. We were both surprised. “First time that's ever happened,” he said.

So now I have a nice new case for the X30, and a new folding keyboard. Once the 256MB memory card shows up—which should be any day now, according to amazon.com—the X30 will be fully tricked-out & operational. How nice.

Jennifer's father has been reading the daybook.

“Does he realize that people are reading it?” he asked Jennifer this evening.

A few more tomatoes: nineteen this evening, for a total of five hundred eighty-five. The twenty from last Thursday are in the freezer now; I imagine tonight's harvest will follow presently.

Jennifer & Jacob are getting over colds; I seem to be catching one.

Long ago—ten years, more or less—I bought a four-drawer file cabinet in which to keep Important Papers: bills, bank & credit card statements, tax papers, that sort of thing.

These days, the Important Papers don't seem so important—I don't really care any more what my car-insurance premiums were in 1987—so I've been purging the archives. There are three garbage bags full of shredded paper out in the garage, with more to come.

The plan is to replace the four-drawer cabinet with a two-drawer one, to free up space in the closet.

I'm trying to come up with a good reason to visit the western half of Illinois. What I really want is to add to the Illinois Counties page, but driving three hours just to take pictures of highway signage would make people question my sanity.

I suppose they do that already…

Back still hurts. Mr. Doctor has graciously added me to his busy schedule, 2:00pm this afternoon.

Amusing typo on the Twinings web site (http://www.twinings.com/): the Travette Tea Maker is described as:

Tea infuser and vacuum insulted carafe.

Poor carafe, the vacuum has insulted it.

The Manitowoc-Ludington ferry (mentioned here on May 29) has competition: the Lake Express, http://www.lake-express.com/, Milwaukee to Muskegon in 2½ hours.

Two adults, one car, one-way: $159. Ouch.

Went to see Mr. Doctor, who seemed very abrupt, almost grumpy. Perhaps he was having a very busy day, and resented making room in his already-crowded schedule for somebody who turned out to have nothing worse than a mild muscle strain.

No diclofenac for me this time: just two Aleve, three times a day, for two weeks.

Sometime between my last visit to Mr. Doctor's Office and this one, they installed a wireless network and issued handhelds (iPaq 3800s, from the look of them) to the staff. Mr. Doctor himself was carrying some kind of Tablet PC. I thought about turning on the X30's wireless networking, to see what I could find out about their setup, but decided against it.

The lately-neglected tomato plants are still producing: Jake and I picked another twenty this evening, bringing the total to five hundred sixty-six.

I'd guess that we've eaten fewer than fifty of them: the rest we've given away, or put in the freezer, or ignored until they spoiled then dumped on the compost heap.

Back feels much better, though I'm feeling a bit sleepy & drugged. Is that the Aleve, or an interaction with the ibuprofen I'd already taken, or just sleepiness from waking up at 5:00am with an aching back?

Some questions may never be answered…

Went to bed last night a bit earlier than usual, woke up this morning a bit later than usual: still tired today.

And my back hurts, probably from carrying around boxes of paperbacks yesterday afternoon.

Pity me, pity me.

A milestone passed, and I failed to notice: on September 2—last Thursday—I was forty-one years and twenty-nine days old: the exact age my grandmother was when I was born.

I feel old.

(Can I have my midlife crisis now, or do I have to wait until I'm fifty?)

Poor NASA: their Genesis spacecraft spent three years collecting samples of the solar wind, then cratered in the Utah desert when its parachutes didn't open.

SPLAT.

Reconfigured all my mailboxes in Outlook 2002 this evening, to use POP3 instead of IMAP. Outlook's IMAP support is just too unreliable (not to mention slower than POP3).

Microsoft Knowledge Base Article 827315 lists ten signs that ‘deceptive software’ is present on your machine. Number four is:

Web pages are unexpectedly added to your Favorites folder.

Well, now. Microsoft products are always sneaking themselves into my Favorites folder. The Mobile Favorites subfolder keeps reappearing no matter how many times I delete it.

Perhaps the 'softies aren't aware that they fit their own spyware definition.

Found an error in the web site today: the style sheet for the Parke County 1930 Census was wrong. (It wasn't even a valid style sheet: it was the HTML boilerplate that CityDesk inserts when you create a new HTML file.)

It's been broken for a good long while, and I never noticed. How embarrassing.

Took two boxes of paperbacks to Priceless Books, in downtown Urbana, to see whether they'd give me any money for them. The proprietor spent half an hour sorting, arranging & examining the books; in the end, he selected about a third of them, and offered $40.

“Sounds good to me,” I said.

The remainder I dropped off at the recycling station on Hagan Street.

Sputnik recorded 1¼ inches of rain between 6:00am and 7:00am this morning. It must have been a quiet rain, as everybody here slept through it.

I went out at 8:00am to bring in the newspaper, and didn't notice any signs of rain. Perhaps I was not fully awake yet.

Went to the Labor Day Parade over in Urbana (apparently Champaign couldn't be bothered):

Ken Urban—whose C++ class at Parkland College I attended, long ago (1998?)—was marching in the parade. He said, “Hi, Pat.”

“I'm surprised you remember me,” I said.

“I remember the good students,” he said.

Hm…I played a lot of Tetris during class, so I don't know how good a student I was…

[I did get 100% on the programming assignments, and missed only one question on the final exam, so by that measure I suppose I did pretty well.]

Did a little tidying-up this afternoon: ran some old papers through the shredder, threw away some no-longer-useful genealogy papers, bagged up some old computer toys (including the iPaq) to take to work, put another box of paperbacks in the car (I will get them to a used-book store one of these days—no, really, honest!), etc., etc., etc.

The other day I installed & activated the latest version of Microsoft Reader on the X30. It runs better than it did on the iPaq (and ClearType looks better, too), so maybe I will buy some e-books. Various science-fiction magazines are available for MS Reader; it might be nice to have a few of them for waiting-room reading.

At 6:14 this morning, Clementine wanted to go out. I wouldn't have minded quite so much if I hadn't gone to bed at midnight…

Went to Menard's this afternoon, for some lawn sprinklers. Unlike two years ago [September 30, 2002], they were still on the shelves: no Christmas decorations in sight. (They did have an impressive Halloween display, which is a little more appropriate for September.)

Stopped at Borders after Menard's, to peruse the computer books. They redecorate the place more often than I go there, so I never know where to find anything.

Rather frustrating, that is.

Our houseguest has gone home: Clementine has left the building.

9:19pm, and Jake has just finished his twenty-minute pre-sleep howl. Poor little guy. He gets really grumpy when he's tired.

Now there is silence. But does that mean he's sleeping? I'm reluctant to peek in on him for fear of re-igniting the howling.

Uninstalled some software from nessus: LookOut, NewsGator and The Sims. LookOut and NewsGator are useful, but I got tired of waiting for the entire .NET Framework to initialize itself every time I launched Outlook. I can't even remember the last time I played The Sims.

Trimmed the tomato plants this morning: cut off the dead branches, the yellow-leaved branches, the eaten-by-bugs branches, etc., etc. We may yet get some tomatoes out of what's left, but I won't be too disappointed if we don't.

Next year we're going to get a couple of half-barrels, and grow tomatoes in them instead.

Jake's home again today: he's not sick (any more?), but the daycare ladies have a twenty-four-hours-no-barfing rule. So our Labor Day weekend started a little early. (Two days early.)

Two items:

Incinolet, the Electric Incinerating Toilet: http://www.incinolet.com/. I think I might find the proximity of an electric incinerator just a little…er…inhibiting…

Evanescence, http://www.evanescence.com/. Jennifer brought home one of their CDs this evening. Interesting vocals, laid over some rather fierce music. I'll have to listen to it again sometime. (Their site is all Flash. I hate all-Flash sites. Can't anybody write HTML any more?)

Poor Jake, sent home from daycare for throwing up. (The ladies report that afterward he said, “I'm sorry. That was my fault.”)

There was one little urp just before lunchtime; aside from that, he's been fine all day. (He ate all his lunch, and kept it down.)

Mysterious.

We have a houseguest for a few days:

Clementine is staying with us. Jake is very excited.

Jennifer reports that NewsGator is really annoying. The trial version does have a please-give-us-money popup that appears whenever Outlook launches (even if it's an invisible instance of Outlook, launched by ActiveSync, which is rather annoying).

Sorry about that.

Rocket scientists, like software companies, sometimes have trouble with version numbers. In an article about the recent launch of the last Atlas 2 rocket (carrying a spy satellite for the National Reconnaissance Office), CNN says:

The Atlas 2 is giving way to the Atlas 5….

What happened to the Atlas 3 and Atlas 4? Lost in the same black hole as: Word for Windows 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0; Visual C++ 3.0, 4.0 and 5.0; DR-DOS 4.0; etc., etc.

[Perhaps they're playing catch-up with the Ariane 5?]

A woman using the nom de plume Troutgirl, instead of the perfectly serviceable name (Joyce Park) bestowed on her by (one assumes) her parents, was sacked recently by Friendster for…er…it's not really clear why she was sacked, but the rumor is that she said something on her web site (http://troutgirl.com/blog/) that her employer didn't like: and so the axe fell.

This has led to much fulmination & discussion on various web sites. Many people are quite upset with Friendster (http://www.friendster.com/) just now. Without knowing the real reason why the fishlady lost her job—and it's a sure bet that the people who know the real reason will never reveal it—it's hard to have an opinion.

I hardly ever write about work in the daybook. Not in obedience to some policy of keeping home & work separate, merely because what I do at work wouldn't be all that interesting to anyone likely to be reading the daybook.

(Friendster sounds a bit like Orkut. Been there, done that. No, thanks.)

Supposedly NEC has announced a new Tablet PC, which is thinner, lighter & generally spiffier than the Versa LitePad (previously longed-for in these pages). Alas, there's nothing on their web site yet about it: Japan only, or something.

We spend lots of money every month on communications:

I've been navigating the twisty little maze of SBC product offerings, trying to save some money (and upgrade to DSL in the process). It's proving difficult: the SBC web site, while very pretty, seems designed to provide as little information as possible.

There are cheap local plans and cheap long-distance plans, but SBC won't tell you whether you can get local plan X with long-distance plan Y. There's some sort of cross-promotion with Cingular Wireless, but they won't tell you what plans are available, or what they cost. It is very frustrating, trying to sort it all out.

Perhaps I should put together a chart of features and expenses, then take it around to the various telephone companies: This is what we're getting now, and this is what we're paying for it. If you can match the features and beat the price by 40%, we'll sign up.

I'm starting to wonder whether cellular phones are worth the cost. I could carry around a $10 calling card from the grocery store, and save lots of money.

The Illinois State Historical Library, which used to be in the catacombs beneath the Old State Capitol in Springfield, is moving to new digs: the Abraham Lincoln Presidential Library, http://www.alincoln-library.com/.

I hope the new library is better-designed than the web site. I wanted to know two things: where the new library is, and when it will be open. The site was not very helpful.

The answer to the first question is tucked away in an about-the-library page:

It will be located on two city blocks in downtown Springfield bordered by Sixth, Madison, Seventh and Washington Streets.

On the latter question, the site is silent, beyond a vague ‘opening this Fall’ comment. Frustrating.

Poor Jake, fell off the swing this evening. No injuries—not even bruises—but he had a lot to say about it afterward.