November 2004 Archives

Another overcast, drizzly day. Exactly the same as yesterday: NOAA and sputnik agree that the temperature (currently 37°) hasn't shifted more than 1° up or down in the last thirty-six hours.

Mysterious.

Another theory (plagiarized from the microsoft.public.money newsgroup) on why Microsoft was three months late in shipping Money 2005 for Pocket PCs: the desktop version shipped with some heinous bug, which required database schema changes to fix, which required changes to the Pocket PC version; rather than ship two updates they decided to just hold onto the Pocket PC version until they could get the desktop version's head screwed on pointing forward.

Thereby annoying a good number of their customers.

To the list of sentences you don't want to appear in newspaper articles about you, we can add:

The teen appeared to have been killed instantly after being ejected and having the plane come to rest on top of him….

Euwww…

Today's word in the Forgotten English calendar: dog-end, which is defined as a “Familiar old word for a cigarette butt.”

There's a line in Aqualung by Jethro Tull that I've been wondering about for twenty-five years or so:

…Leg hurting bad,
As he bends to pick a dog-end…

At last all is made clear to me.

Just got off the phone with a cheery & helpful Virgin Mobile service advisor, who set up the transfer of our old phone numbers from Verizon to Virgin. As it turns out, you're not supposed to activate the new phones before doing this.

I thought the web site said to activate them. (Now I can't find where it said that.) My bad, sorry.

So: in three to five business days, our Virgin phones will chirrup and say Welcome to Virgin Mobile!, our Verizon phones will stop working, and we will never have to deal with Verizon ever again.

(The possibilities for juvenile humor are endless with the new phones. “Do you like my phone? It's a Virgin!” Guffaw!)

The SBC web site confirms that our new long-distance plan has taken effect. So the Great Telecom Reorg of 2004 is nearly complete.

How nice.

Fun with phones:

Verizon handed our telephone numbers over to Virgin in considerably less than three to five business days: closer to the two and a half hours suggested by the FCC.

Unfortunately, for the number transfer to work, we had to reactivate the phones, thereby losing the $10 (each) of free airtime that we had, as well as the automatic top-up I had set up. So for a few hours today, Jennifer & I each had two cell phones, neither of which worked.

The new ones are working now. The old ones will be donated to some worthy charity, once we figure out how to erase all personal information from them.

The Money 2005 & Add-ons page on the Microsoft web site still says Microsoft Money for Windows Mobile-based Pocket PCs is coming soon!

If it weren't for the Microsoft Download Site RSS feed, I'd still be waiting.

I've been installing DSL line filters this evening; now it's time to set up the DSL modem. Tomorrow is Activation Day. After almost eight years of poky old dialup, we will have a gratifyingly speedy internet connection.

If it all works, that is.

One final consequence of the recent unpleasantness with my debit cards (see November 12^th): the new cards have different numbers on them (obviously), but I never told EarthLink the new numbers. Oops.

So I updated my EarthLink billing info tonight, so that when they charge me $21.95 (tomorrow? Friday?) they'll get their money.

Time to crawl around under the desk for a bit, to finish the DSL setup.

Overcast, drizzly sort of day. I have my umbrella.

Wondering how to send a letter to Santa and get a reply? The US Postal Service has a helpful publication, Press Release #03-094, on that very subject:

Santa Claus has a lot in common with the United States Postal Service. Neither rain nor snow nor gloom of night keeps Santa from his appointed rounds at the homes of millions of children the world over. Of course, Santa's been doing it a bit longer than the Postal Service. But for the last 214 holiday seasons, he's relied almost exclusively on U.S. Mail carriers to bring him letters from girls and boys all across America.

Jake wrote a letter to Santa this year. We didn't suggest it to him: it was his idea. Perhaps we will have to ask Santa to send a reply.

Some spud had a ten-year-old grilled-cheese sandwich with a blurry patch on one side that looked kinda sorta like the Virgin Mary (if you squint your eyes just right); he recently sold it on eBay for $28,000.

These ‘sightings’ of the Virgin Mary are a little curious. Given some random smear (of paint on a wall, rust on an oil tank, carmelization on a slice of bread, etc., etc.) that kinda sorta looks like a face, people assume that it must be the face of the Virgin Mary. Why? Do they know what she looked like? How do they know it's not some other woman's face? Would the Virgin Mary really manifest in such an undignified fashion?

Maybe it's Mrs. Claus, or Janis Joplin, or Eleanor Roosevelt. Or maybe it's just a random smear on a grilled-cheese sandwich.

[I tried to find a link to the eBay auction for this item, but eBay's categorization & search functions are useless.]

Still no sign of Money 2005 for Pocket PCs, with only thirty-five hours left in the month of November. Looks like the 'softies have blown another deadline.

Microsoft changed the database format between Windows Mobile 2002 and 2003; perhaps this has something to do with the delay? But wouldn't the Money team have known about this breaking change far enough in advance to fix their code?

Poked around the Verizon web site, trying to figure out whether the one-year contract I signed on November 24, 2003 really has expired; I wouldn't put it past Verizon to make their ‘one-year’ contracts fifty-three weeks long, just to squeeze a few $200 early-termination fees out of disgruntled customers who want out as soon as their year is up but who don't read the fine print.

Instead, I found information on the Verizon Pay-As-You-Go program:

Your Verizon Wireless Pay As You Go account is replenished using Refill Cards. Our Refill Cards come in increments of $30, $50 and $75. Refill Expiration (once activated):

• $15-$29.99 expires in 30 days.
• $30-$74.99 expires in 60 days.
• $75-$149.99 expires in 90 days.
• $150 and above expires in 120 days.

Before the expiration date arrives you must replenish your account to keep it active. If you do not replenish your account within the expiration period any remaining balance is lost and you may lose your cellular phone number. As long as you remember to replenish your account before it expires you will not lose any money, as the remaining balance will roll over to the next expiration period.

The payment-expiration scheme seems chosen to maximize profits by requiring substantial up-front payments from customers, then expiring (i.e., confiscating) them as quickly as possible. No, thanks.

The 'softies made their deadline after all: Microsoft Money 2005 for the Pocket PC is now available.

How nice.

As of 3:50pm CST, the Money 2005 & Add-ons page still says:

Microsoft Money for Windows Mobile-based Pocket PCs is coming soon!

I guess it takes a while for updates to propagate to all the servers.

Not one but two messages from SBC on the answering machine this evening: a computer-generated voice, announcing that our order has been completed (but failing to say which order); and one from a human being, calling to say he'll be working on our phone line for an hour or so.

I assume this means we're wired for DSL now. Alas, the service won't be activated for another two days.

Decorated the Christmas tree this evening. Jake helped.

After tree-decorating (and a bath for Jacob), I got around to installing Money 2005 on the X30. It looks the same as Money 2004, which invites the question of why it shipped three months late.

I doubt there will be any answers from Microsoft. There's a lot of chatter on http://blogs.msdn.com/ from 'softies who are fired up about what they're working on & eager to tell the world all about it—but none of them is from the Money team.

Which itself tells the world something, I suppose.

Did a little shopping today: shoes & mittens for Jake, a few presents for a few people, that sort of thing.

Looks like Santa's helpers are a little ahead of schedule this year.

One noteworthy event: changing a stinky diaper in the Toys-R-Us parking lot. (Jennifer did all the work; I just handed wipes to her as needed.)

The restaurant on the northeast corner of Neil Street and Convenience Center Drive is being torn down. Long ago, it was an Uno's; then it became some kind of super deluxe Chinese buffet place; now it is half-demolished.

That's not the only urban renewal going on: the old Robeson parking garage on the southwest corner of Church & Randolph, having been condemned a few months ago as in danger of imminent collapse, likewise stands half-demolished.

I should visit both with the camera while there's still some photogenic rubble to be seen.

Microsoft said they'd ship Money 2005 for Pocket PCs by the end of November; no sign of it yet, with only two days left in the month.

It's very frustrating that the 'softies first said Money for Pocket PCs was in the box with Money 2005 (which shipped in August), then that it was coming soon (end of September), then that it was coming soon (end of October), then that it was coming soon (end of November, no, really!).

CNN tells me that Oliver Stone's new epic, Alexander, made $13.5 million on its first weekend—which was $4 million less than The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie. For some reason this amuses me.

Some flaw in my character, perhaps.

Interesting: Streets & Trips tags the northern half of the Neil Street / I74 interchange (i.e., the intersection of Neil with the ramps to and from the westbound lanes of I74) as ‘Wilbur Heights’. I wondered what that meant; the ever-helpful Google provided a link to Council Bill No. 2002-291, titled “An Ordinance Approving an Annexation Agreement Between the City of Champaign and Robert F. and Helen Pheris”:

Wilbur Heights is an older subdivision consisting of small lots and a mix of land uses. The area is currently without sanitary sewer. Sitting adjacent to the City on two sides, this subdivision is marked by severe infrastructure deterioration and incompatible land uses.

I can't find any references to Wilbur Heights more recent than 2002. Perhaps it was assimilated by the collective…er…annexed by the city, and became just another Champaign neighborhood?

Forgot to mention: we took the no-good Christmas tree back to Prairie Gardens this afternoon, and exchanged it for a new one that actually works. Looks nice, too.

Rain today. The yard is rather swampy.

We learned two things about our $200 pre-lit Christmas tree today: first, it was half-price because it was a return; second, it is defective (which is probably why it was returned).

We thought we had mis-wired it during assembly, leaving one strand without power, but it turns out half the lights on that strand are lit. A bulb taken from the dark half and plugged into the lit half will light up; going the other way, a previously-lit bulb will go dark. There is a suspicious-looking kink in the wire after the last lit bulb, so we're thinking there's a broken wire in there somewhere.

Looks like we'll be taking the tree back tomorrow. Too bad—it's a nice-looking tree.

Entered a few contacts into the new phone: Jen at Work, Jen at Home. I have both numbers memorized, so it's a bit pointless to store them in the phone, but I also added Jennifer's email addresses. That will be a time-saver, because the text-entry process on Kyocera phones makes typing email addresses rather tedious.

I already sent Jennifer a message:

I just spent ten cents!

(That being what Virgin Mobile charges per message.) She'll be so thrilled to read it, I'm sure.

Spent the night at the grandparents' house: the idea was to head over to Peoria first thing this morning to watch the Christmas parade, but the weather turned out too disagreeable for parade-watching.

At least, that's what we thought at the time.

Instead, we had donuts for breakfast, then went to Miller Park Zoo to check out the new rain forest exhibit (very cool).

Much warmer today than yesterday. In Normal, the snow was melting rapidly; in Champaign, the snow had melted before we got back.

Snow on the ground this morning, but only an inch or so. The anemometer on sputnik froze up sometime in the night, so there's no wind speed/direction data just now.

Confusion with SBC: their Order Status page says the order I placed on the 23^rd has been completed, but doesn't say what the order was—and the My Services page doesn't show any of the new services I ordered on the 23^rd.

Can we use the house phone for long-distance calls without getting robbed by AT&T, or not? SBC won't say.

Jake's in the living room, watching the Macy's parade.

Off to Normal for Thanksgiving dinner with the grandparents. (Next year it'll be off to Arlington Heights for Thanksgiving dinner with the grandparents.)

McLean county got about six inches of snow, but the roads had been well-cleared before we got there, so driving was no trouble.

This year's after-dinner movie was The Polar Express, which was pretty good. Jake was a bit scared a few times, but when it was over he said it was his favorite movie.

Cold, windy & rainy, all day. Just now (1:24pm), I am starting to see a few snowflakes mixed in with the rain. None on the ground yet.

Activated our new phones this morning. The process was reasonably quick and painless. For the final step, they send a message to your phone: Welcome to Virgin Mobile! or some such.

The next step: wait until we're sure that our Verizon contract has expired, then transfer the old numbers to the new phones. (Then donate the old phones to charity or something.)

Very quiet at dear old WRI. Half the company is on vacation this week, and half the rest have gone home early due to the miserable weather. Perhaps I should do likewise?

Sputnik has recorded almost two inches of rain so far today, along with wind gusts up to 48mph.

Not one, but three packages on the doorstep this evening when I got home from work: our new phones from Virgin Mobile, the DSL setup kit from SBC, and…er…a package whose contents doubtless will be revealed in another month or so.

The new phones look a lot like the one I got from Verizon a year ago, except the screens aren't color. (Color would have cost more.) At this writing, they're still charging, so we haven't activated them yet. Maybe tomorrow, which also happens to be the last day of our Verizon contract.

They claim to have charged my credit card for the phones, but the online account access shows nothing yet. (It works the other way, too: the credit-card people often claim to have received payments several days before the funds are actually removed from my checking account.)

The DSL setup kit came with a DVD of ethnically-diverse yet uniformly clean-cut & wholesome-looking computer users, illustrating the setup process. It all seems clear enough, but I have to wait until December 1^st to try it out. Very frustrating.

[There is one thing about the DSL project that worries me a bit: what if SBC blocks access to the Pair POP3 server? The plan is to use the Pair mailboxes instead of whatever our internet-provider-of-the-moment gives us, thereby gaining a little independence. But if SBC blocks that port, things could get sticky.]

Supposed to rain tomorrow, then turn to snow in the afternoon, then get really cold tomorrow night.

This time last year, I had pneumonia. Today, all I have is a somewhat elevated temperature (perhaps from a mild ear infection). That's progress, of a sort.

Sunny today, with just a bit of haze. The pleasant autumn weather we've enjoyed lately is supposed to turn unpleasantly wintry on Wednesday night: lows in the teens, that sort of thing.

The nice people at InterVideo (http://www.intervideo.com/) sell the DVD XPack, which is a software DVD decoder that integrates with Windows Media Player, allowing DVD playback within WMP. Given the recent disappointment with the Sigma Designs Hollywood board, this might be a better choice.

In theory, nessus has the horsepower for software DVD decoding. DVD XPack is only $14.95. Hm…

The DVD XPack comes with a rather cheesy DVD player; fortunately, its use is optional. Windows Media Player on nessus can now play DVDs—and better than the Hollywood decoder ever did. How nice. CPU load is only about 30%, too (or 60% of one processor, which leaves the other one to run the rest of the system).

I guess the $65 I spent on the Hollywood card was pretty much wasted. Oops.

Bought a new Christmas tree this morning, over at Prairie Gardens. Our old one, purchased in 1997 (on the day before Jennifer broke her ankle), was looking a little mangy.

The new one is big, and bushy, and pre-strung with lights. And it comes with a sturdy tree stand. I never did like the old tree stand: too flimsy, too hard to set up. Every year, we had to wrestle with it.

Went to the library this afternoon, to chat with the ladies and to poke around a bit in the books. Carolyn looked up Trumbull (a town just west of Carmi, in White County) in a post-office reference book and found that the Trumbull Post Office was established on February 26, 1873, and closed on November 15, 1905.

Perhaps the White County Historical Society has some information about Trumbull. I must remember to ask, the next time I'm in Carmi.

CNN reports that Congress quite literally doesn't know what it's doing:

After the House passed the [$338 billion omnibus spending bill], Democratic Senate staffers discovered that it contained a provision allowing the chairmen of the House and Senate appropriations committees, or their agents, to examine the tax returns of any American.

Congresscritters are unanimous in their shock and indignation: “How did that get in there?” they cry, which is probably code for “We hoped you wouldn't notice.” Or perhaps it means “We just voted for it, we didn't read it or anything.”

Some suggestions for Congress:

1. Get a revision-control system. Subversion is good.
2. Get a grip on who's allowed to make changes to important documents, and who isn't.
3. Read bills before you vote on them, and be prepared to prove that you have done so—say, by signing every page in ink with your own hand. No rubber stamps, no signature machines, no forgeries by the staff.

This last idea would have the added benefit of encouraging smaller legislation: no more 1,000-page omnibus bills that nobody reads. Perhaps such a requirement is incompatible with the dignity of high office; but so is voting for legislation you haven't read, n'est-ce pas?

I don't feel particularly sick. So why does the thermometer say 100.5°?

Jacob had a playdate this afternoon with one of his friends from daycare, while Jennifer & I went to see National Treasure at the Savoy 16.

It was an interesting story, if a bit weird in spots. I'm a bit surprised that the National Archives cooperated with a movie whose central plot element involves stealing the Declaration of Independence.

And would two-hundred-year-old flammable material still be flammable? Seems unlikely…

Thick overcast today: a drizzly grey soggy sort of day. At least I have my umbrella.

Called Mr. Doctor's office, to inquire after the results from Tuesday's blood tests (from which I still have a souvenir in the form of an impressive bruise on the inside of my right elbow—no, thank you, Madame Phlebotomist); alas, Mr. Doctor is a busy man and has yet to look at the test results.

Phase Two of the Great Telecom Reorganization was completed today: our DSL line will be activated on December 1^st. Yay.

I'm resisting the temptation to trundle over to Hardee's and order their latest creation: the Monster Thickburger. Only 1300 calories and 96g of fat: a whole day's nutrition in a single convenient package!

Still no sign of Money 2005 for the Pocket PC. Get a move on, 'softies.

Mr. Doctor's office just called: my hemogoblins are perfectly normal.

Two shiny new debit cards came in the mail today. Unfortunately, there's no hint in either envelope as to which card goes with which account. Guess I'll have to try them in an ATM somewhere and find out.

Uninstalled CVSNT from nessus, having switched to Subversion some weeks ago. Subversion is pretty nice, at least for small projects like mine. CVSNT is…well…CVS, to which the phrase ‘pretty nice’ cannot reasonably be applied.

Read a few old daybook entries this afternoon (a bad habit of mine, whenever I'm bored): found quite a few dead links. Maybe I should remove them?

Noticed that several daybook entries from last week were missing from the RSS feed, and worried that there was something wrong with the web site or the underlying code.

Not really—the RSS file contains only the last five daybook entries, so the aggregator never saw the entries between the 6^th and the 9^th. Crisis averted, no need for panic, etc., etc.

Cloudy today. The weatherdroids were muttering this morning about rain in the area. (None here just yet.)

4:00pm, and it's raining outside. My umbrella is…um…somewhere safe and dry. Pity me, pity me.

Sometime when I wasn't paying attention, Microsoft released this handy (or fingery) little item: the Fingerprint Reader.

Now you can log on to your computer and your favorite Web sites with the touch of your finger, without having to remember all those passwords—simply place your finger on the receiver whenever a password or username is required.

I don't know what I'd do with one, but they're pretty cool.

[It certainly makes losing one's password a much more serious event…]

Completed stage one of the Great Telecom Reorganization, by switching our long distance from AT&T to SBC. Subsequent stages will go something like this:

1. Get DSL (also from SBC);
2. Disconnect the second phone line;
3. Terminate EarthLink;
4. Sign up for wireless service with Virgin Mobile;
5. Transfer our numbers from Verizon & terminate Verizon.

If my calculations are correct, when the dust settles we'll be paying approximately $95/month for local, long distance, wireless & internet, compared to $150/month now.

Alas, the $26.95/month DSL rate only lasts for the first year: then it goes up to $54.95/month. Even so, it's still $30 cheaper—and we'll finally have a decent internet connection at home.

I've been making a nuisance of myself in the microsoft.public.money newsgroup (again, after previous visits on October 18, 2001 and July 22, 2003): one of the MVPs, attempting to calm the grumbles of frustrated Pocket PC users, offered the rumor that Money 2005 for the Pocket PC would ship “near the end of November”.

What year? I asked. Childish of me, but emotionally satisfying.

A bit cloudy today, though more of a thin layer of haze than a solid cloud deck. I can see blue sky, if I look straight up.

It's been a month and a day since I installed Money 2005 on nessus, but the Pocket PC version is not yet available. The web site says Coming soon!; but, as other disgruntled Money 2005 users have pointed out, if it's coming soon now, it surely was not coming soon a month ago, was it?

The lesson here: don't upgrade until you're sure Microsoft has shipped everything they're advertising.

Trying to be polite to co-workers today. Trying not to say things like, Are you completely helpless? Do you need me to come down there and wipe your [censored], too? Tell me again why you deserve to get paid so much more than I do, you nitwit.

Egad. Too much caffeine this morning, I fear.

SBC offers two local phone service plans, the Local Saver Pack Unlimited and the Local Unlimited Package, which appear to be identical—except that the latter costs $10/month more. Very confusing.

The folks at Pair recommend GeekLog (http://www.geeklog.net/) to their customers, so I installed it this evening, just to check it out.

The install script assumes it's installing into your home directory, and creates quite a few files and directories, only some of which belong in ~/public_html. Alas, I installed it into ~/public_html/blog, which broke pretty much everything.

At least it was easy to uninstall: rm -rf ~/public_html/blog.

Another day, another trip to the lab to have some blood drawn—but this time, everything went smoothly. I didn't have to wait very long, and the phlebotomist found a vein on the first try.

Good job, Ms. Phlebotomist.

Perhaps Friday I will call Mr. Doctor's office to inquire after the results, and see what comes next.

CNN reports that Disney has decided to do Toy Story 3 on its own, without Pixar. Perhaps it's my cynical nature, but I predict…disaster.

Disney will rush to market a poorly-made, ineptly-written knockoff. New characters will be introduced solely to sell action figures and stuffed dolls at Disney Store outlets. The box-office numbers will be decent enough, but audiences will be left feeling vaguely cheated. “Not as good as the first two,” they will say, as they leave the theaters.

The DVD release—in time for the 2005 Christmas season, backed by a vigorous advertising campaign on (of course) the Disney Channel—will be used to finance production of Toy Story 4, which will be even worse. The downward spiral will continue until the franchise finally peters out, somewhere around Toy Story 6½: Zurg: Before the Empire.

Which will be a shame.

I'll probably go see Toy Story 3, but I make no promises after that.

Leland is in town. We had lunch at the Original House of Pancakes.

Cloudy today, in a gloomy sort of way. No rain, though.

Jennifer pointed out this evening that the tone of recent daybook entries has been rather dyspeptic. I'll try to do better.

[Well, no, she didn't actually use the word ‘dyspeptic’…]

Stopped at the local camping-supply store, to look for wallets: no luck. Stopped again at the army-surplus store (just up the road), and found the one I was looking for. 35% off, too. I don't remember whether it was there yesterday. Perhaps it was, but I didn't want to pay $16 for it?

So the posh leather passport-holder wallet (purchased from the Book of the Month Club, of all places) can be retired in favor of something a little more secure.

New at the army-surplus store: Tilley hats (http://www.tilley.com/). They seem like good, sturdy winter hats; but they cost $80, so I doubt I'll be buying one any time soon.

Their latest ad campaign involves a zookeeper whose Tilley hat has been eaten by an elephant three times. Yup—three times. He waits for it to…er…reappear, then washes it and puts it back on his head.

If an elephant ever eats my hat, I think I'll just buy a new one.

The Encarta 2005 dictionary has stopped working. If I try to look up a word, I get the We're sorry, an error has occurred… dialog.

Rumor has it that Microsoft Money 2005 for Pocket PC was briefly available last Friday, then disappeared again. Those 'softies, they're such teases sometimes.

Cloudy today, but no sign of rain. Rather chilly, too: 51° at 11:00am.

All I want is a tri-fold nylon wallet with a velcro closure (so I don't leave any more debit cards in parking lots). There are problems.

Jennifer says, “Try Wal-Mart,” but their web site doesn't have any wallets, nylon or otherwise. JC Penney has wallets, but no nylon ones. Ditto Sears. Amazon.com does, but I don't want to buy a wallet without seeing it first. (Pictures on web pages don't count.)

Perhaps the army surplus store up the street from WRI has a few. They're probably camouflage, but I can live with that.

[Alas, no. They had an impressive variety of hiking & camping gear, but no good wallets. The search continues.]

Played a bit of phone tag with Mr. Soon-To-Be-Ex Doctor's office, but finally got to talk to a human being: it seems that my second trip to the lab was wasted effort, since the tests that were performed were not the tests requested by the doctor. Apparently they just did the first tests a second time.

Bad lab folks. No donut for you.

So I go back tomorrow for a third lab visit. I will be less passive with the phlebotomist, too: “No, don't stick the needle there, you won't hit a vein. No, it won't work on that arm, either. Try right here on this arm. Thanks.”

These people are losers: www.rothco.com (for whom no link, as I am annoyed with them). Their web site is coded to capture right mouse clicks, and pop up a rude little message box.

Guess what, RothCo: there are plenty of uses for the right mouse button that don't involve stealing your property. (For instance, opening links in a new window.) And all artwork is cached in the Temporary Internet Files folder, from which it is easily extracted.

So you're not protecting anything from anyone, you're just annoying potential customers and making yourselves look like a bunch of weenies.

The Columbia Sportswear Money Pocket 3-Fold looks better than anything from RothCo anyway.

Cut up some old railroad ties we had lying around, and nailed them together into a sort of open-plan compost heap.

Now my arms are a bit sore. Maybe I should have used the circular saw?

CNN tells me that the next-generation DVD format, using a blue laser to cram more bits onto a disc, is actually two mutually-incompatible formats: Sony & its friends are pushing Blu-ray, while Toshiba & its friends say HD DVD is the future. Both formats are expected to hit the stores over the next year or two.

Consumers are expected to immediately replace their DVD players, and all their movies (which doubtless will cost considerably more than the old format); then, once the market has shaken out one or the other format, everybody who picked wrong is expected to do it all over again.

Sorry, I don't play that game any more. I'm quite content to wait for the early-adopters to sort out the mess. By the time I buy a blue-laser DVD player, there will be only one format still on the market.

Which one? I don't care. As long as it plays movies, I'll be happy.

Wrote up some blather about our vacation, pasted it into the appropriate daybook entries. (This seems a little like cheating, but it's my daybook. I can do whatever I want. So there.)

I still haven't sorted through the pictures (except to note how many really crummy ones I took), so it'll be a while yet before any show up here.

A few vacation pictures are up, over in the Road Trips section. There will be more presently.

[The Road Trips page has been removed.]

Jake & I went to the bank this morning, to ask for new debit cards.

We also went shopping for wallets, but didn't find any good ones.

In today's mail: another letter from Verizon, this one begging me to lock in their exorbitant rates for another two years. In return, I'll get…nothing, really, that I couldn't get elsewhere for considerably less.

So sorry, Verizon. For the last year, I've been resenting you: as soon as my contract is up, it's goodbye. Existing revenue streams will not be preserved.

Also in today's mail: a letter from Mr. Doctor, announcing his resignation. Time to find a new doctor, I suppose. Rather than let the insurance company computers pick one for me, this time I think I'll choose one myself.

Driving home from Erlanger, Kentucky.

We left Jake's bedrail in the hotel room. Oops.

I275 crosses the Ohio River just downstream of the Ohio state line, but stays in Indiana only about three miles before curving back eastward into Ohio. I275 to I74 westbound, and thirteen miles after entering Ohio we left it again.

Indiana is flat. Very flat. This is a good thing, after dealing with hills & mountains. We took I74 to Indianapolis, then clockwise on I465 (which was also I74) to I74 westbound.

Our final indulgence: lunch at the Beef House in Covington, Indiana. It was…just okay. Nothing earth-shaking. Jake was bored, didn't eat his lunch, and mashed all the butter packets into a greasy ball. Sorry about that, Beef House.

We got home at…um…sometime in the early afternoon. I forgot to make a note of the time. Total distance, approximately 1350 miles.

…and we're back. The camera has somewhere in excess of a hundred pictures in it; soon I will upload them & put a few of the good ones here.

[A hundred and twenty, as it turned out.]

While we were away:

Yasser Arafat finally died, leaving unanswered a few rather important questions: Who will succeed him? Where did all the money go? (I suspect that answering either of these questions will answer the other.) The Palestinians mourned his passing by rioting during his funeral and by firing automatic weapons into the air (thereby necessitating a few more funerals).

(Remember what happened when Ayatollah Khomeini died in 1989? The mourners dumped his body from its coffin and carried it around. Apparently this was to express the depth of their grief, and/or their respect for the late Mr. Khomeini.)

FireFox 1.0 has finally shipped, and is apparently luring enough users away from Internet Explorer to drop the latter's market share from 95% to 92%. Maybe one of these days I'll give FireFox another try.

Had some errands to run this evening:

First, go to WRI and clean out the 6,000 messages in my inbox (most of which were notifications from a cron job gone awry). The WRI webmail interface doesn't work very well on an inbox that big, so I had to tackle the mess from my desk.

Second, buy a replacement bed rail for Jake's bed, since we (apparently) left the old one in Cincinnati (or, more precisely, Erlanger, Kentucky).

Third, buy some groceries, since we were out of important things like bread & milk.

It all went pretty well, until I opened my wallet in the Meijer checkout line and found an empty space where my debit cards used to be. Hm, must've fallen out in the car, thought I.

They weren't in the car. They weren't on the ground near the car. Must've fallen out in the K's Merchandise parking lot, thought I.

Not there, either. The nice lady at the service desk didn't have them, either. Maybe somebody turned them in at Meijer, thought I.

And it was so.

But the service-desk ladies at Meijer had already called the 800 number on the back of the cards, reported them as lost, and—as instructed by the debit-card people—cut them in half.

The good news is that nobody used my debit cards for any unauthorized spending sprees; the bad news is that I still have to ask the bank for new ones. Until then, everything goes on the credit card.

Such as the new wallet I'm going to buy tomorrow: one from which nothing will fall out.

Jacob and I each seem to be fighting off a rather mild cold. A bit of sneezing, a bit of coughing, nothing serious.

Mail from Verizon:

During a recent review of Verizon Wireless accounts, we discovered that we have been incorrectly charging your account $5.00 each month to receive Detailed Billing, rather than the $1.99 per month charge described by your Calling Plan.

Consumed with guilt, Verizon is refunding $3.01 × 11 months, reducing this month's bill to only twice as much as Virgin Mobile would charge us (instead of four times).

At Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

We spent the morning at Ripley's Aquarium of the Smokies. There's a particular route you're supposed to take through the building, but we missed a turn early on and ended up going through backwards.

It's a very interactive place: there's Touch-A-Ray Bay, where you can reach into a tank full of mantas and touch any that come within range; and a similar tank full of horseshoe crabs. Jake didn't want to get anywhere near either of them.

There's also a big tank with a glass-roofed tunnel through it, and a moving walkway so you can see sharks & other kinds of fish. (There were signs every few feet, identifying this or that species, but I didn't really pay attention.)

No, none of the pictures I took were even close to in focus. Thanks for asking!

Driving to Erlanger, Kentucky.

We took US 441 north out of Gatlinburg, which took us through Pigeon Forge: home of Dollywood, the cleanest amusement park in America. (I thought that honor went to Disneyland…) We didn't stop.

At Sevierville, US 441 turned west—but we continued north on TN 66 to I40. Then I40 west to the I640 bypass around Knoxville, then I75 northbound.

It's about 180 miles on I75 from the Tennessee state line to the I275 bypass around Cincinnati; and for most of it, it rained. Not big thunderstorms, just enough rain to make driving No Fun At All.

But we made it, and ended up at the Holiday Inn in Erlanger, Kentucky: very posh lodgings, a pleasant reward after a difficult drive. We had dinner in the hotel restaurant; I splurged on the ($25) T-bone special: very tasty.

Driving to Gatlinburg, Tennessee.

Every gas station in eastern Tennessee has a Krispy Kreme display rack, usually full of gooey (yet still tasty-looking) donuts. We bought one box of six, just outside Huntsville, but thereafter resisted the temptation.

Our route to Gatlinburg: I565 to US 72, then up the Tennessee River valley to I24. Near mile 160 on I24 there's a rest stop on an island in the middle of a lake. Nice view, but a strange place for a rest area.

I24 dips into Georgia for about four miles, before heading north into Tennessee again. I vaguely recall travelling on this stretch of highway thirty or so years ago: “Hey, we're in Georgia! No, wait, we're back in Tennessee!” Very confusing to a ten-year-old.

At Chattanooga, I24 feeds into I75, which we took east for a while. Traffic was so bad that I got off the highway at Athens and worked my way over to US 411. It wasn't much better.

At Maryville we turned onto US 321 eastbound; at Wear Valley we turned south onto TN 73. The idea was to take a brief excursion through the Great Smokey Mountains National Park, and to shave a few miles off the remaining distance to Gatlinburg. It was a reasonably flat road, no major upgrades or downgrades (except a big one at the end), but very twisty & curvy with a twenty-foot drop on one side or the other (to some river whose name I don't recall and can't seem to find out) and no guardrails.

Jennifer doesn't like roads like that.

We stayed at the Best Western Twin Islands Motel, mainly because it was next door to the Ripley's Aquarium, which we wanted to visit. It was an adequate hotel, but nothing spectacular. At least it was relatively cheap ($67 for the night).

Our room had two doors: one facing the parking lot, and another leading to a balcony (shared with all the other rooms) overlooking a small (but noisy) river.

At the Space & Rocket Center, Huntsville, Alabama.

Poor Jake—shortly after our arrival at the museum, there was a Colonic Event of sufficient magnitude as to require both a new shirt for Jake (hastily purchased from the gift shop) and a request for the museum maintenance staff to clean up the bench we changed him on (since the restrooms have no changing tables—get a clue, people!).

After that, things went fairly well, except that the pictures I took inside the museum were, each and every one, blurry & useless.

We wandered around the inside exhibits until 11:00am, then retired to the IMAX theater for a movie on the International Space Station. Jake was very unhappy about sitting in the weird reclining IMAX seats, so we moved to the wheelchair platform at the top. Everything looked a little warped from that vantage, but it was a good movie.

After the movie we had lunch in the food court. “Food court” turned out to be a code phrase for “absurdly over-priced, really bad food”. But it was the only eatery available, so we grumbled, paid, and choked it down.

After lunch, we went outside to look at the rockets. Jake turned out to be more interested in the play area than the displays, so Jennifer stayed with him while I wandered around taking pictures. This time I think I got a few good ones.

Our hotel room faced the museum, so we could see the Saturn V replica and the other rockets from our window. We put Jake's rollaway bed there, so he could see them. We called it his astronaut bed.

At Paducah, Kentucky.

Jake & I dropped Jennifer off at Hancock's of Paducah, so she could do a little shopping; then we headed up the road to Metropolis, to see the Giant Statue of Superman.

It wasn't all that giant, more like ten or twelve feet tall. It was draped in black, for Christopher Reeve. We walked around a bit, took a few pictures, then back to Paducah to pick up Jennifer.

We visited the Museum of the American Quilter's Society, which was very nice. There were a few quilts with rocket ships on them; Jake liked those.

Driving to Huntsville, Alabama.

“The Land Between the Lakes” is a very popular phrase in western Kentucky; one is left with the impression that the land between the lakes extends a considerable distance beyond the lakes in question (which are Kentucky Lake and Lake Barkley).

We stopped for gas somewhere near Fort Campbell, and were buzzed by a C-130 while filling up.

Hint for travellers: if you're entering Nashville from the northwest on I24, and you want to leave Nashville to the south on I65, don't take the highway 155 bypass. When 155 reaches I40 on the east side of town, it becomes a regular city street. I65 is six miles of city traffic away.

A better route might be to punch through the city center: I24 east to I40 west to I65 south. (Just don't try it during rush hour.)

At Huntsville.

Our hotel was next door to the Space & Rocket Center, so when we arrived we sneaked over there first to have a look around. (It was after closing time, but the parking lot was still open.)

Jake was sleeping, so we stopped the car with his window facing the Saturn V replica then woke him up. He was sleepily impressed.

Driving to Paducah, Kentucky.

Our route: I57 to Effingham, US 45 south to Vienna, I24 east to Paducah. The purpose of the US 45 diversion was to pick up a few more signs for the county signs project.

I managed to get reasonable pictures of Shelby, Effingham, Clay, Wayne, Gallatin, Saline and Williamson. The last few were taken right at sunset, which was a bit of a problem. I did the best I could.

US 45 clips the southeast corner of Williamson county, so there's a sign for Johnson county less than two miles past the one for Williamson; but it's in a wooded area and was too dark. (It's also in front of some kind of cement lawn decoration store.)

Poked around a bit in the Virgin Mobile web site (http://www.virginmobileusa.com/) this afternoon, reading up on their Pay as You Go plan. I am intrigued: no activation fees, no monthly fees, no termination fees. No roaming charges. Just 25¢/minute for the first ten minutes of each day, 10¢/minute thereafter; feed your account at least $20 every ninety days to keep it active. No free phones, either—but then, they never were free: the costs were just buried in the monthly charges.

So, a brief comparison:

Even with the top-of-the-line phone ($150), Virgin is much cheaper than Verizon. But who needs a $150 telephone? The cheap one ($50) works just as well.

I see two drawbacks: first, coverage away from cities and/or interstate highways is a bit spotty (no coverage in Carmi, for example); second, I'm about twenty years older than Virgin's target demographic (their web site is heavily illustrated with hip twentysomethings, with nary a middle-aged cheapskate to be found).

The overwhelming majority of our cellular usage is long-distance calls made from home. With a sensible long-distance plan on the home phone, we could switch to Virgin and save a bundle. Our Verizon contract expires in nineteen days. Hm…

On the phone with Jake's Grandma & Grandpa this evening. Jake struggles with the notion that nodding yes in response to a question doesn't work very well over the telephone.

“Where's my November picture?” quoth Grandma.

There you go!

The 'softies are tweaking their message about Money 2005. Now it says:

Microsoft Money for Windows Mobile-based Pocket PCs is coming soon!

I don't care what you call it, just ship the [censored] thing. Thank you.

According to the Write-In Tally Sheet on the Champaign County Clerk's web site, Rob Raguet-Schofield, described in the News-Gazette as “Champaign software engineer” and author of several contributions to the Mathematica Information Center, got exactly one vote, in the 32^nd precinct.

Did Rob vote for himself? Or did somebody else vote for him?

It could be worse: of the other fifteen write-in candidates, five—Lawson Mitchell Bone, Michael Anthony Peroutka, Scott Doody, Marcus Hester and Orlando McDowell—got zero votes.

Twenty-nine years ago, we had Francisco Franco, who stalled at 99% dead for long enough that people started making jokes about it; now, it looks like Yasser Arafat will suffer a similar fate. Report vary: he's dead; he's alive, but brain-dead; he's just undergoing tests.

Perhaps he's already dead, but no one will admit it until his successor has a firm grip on power.

Looks like another four years of George Bush, once the election judges in Ohio finish counting the votes—including the provisional ballots, of which there are about a quarter-million. Deciding which of them to count, and then counting them, might take a few days.

Interesting: last month, the Money 2005 AddOns page said:

Microsoft Money for Pocket PC 2005 is coming soon!

But now it says:

Microsoft Money 2005 for Windows Mobile Pocket PC is coming soon!

The discreet insertion of Windows Mobile into the product name is, I suspect, Microsoft code for Pocket PC 2002 users get chumped.

Just got some spam, titled “Claim your free iPod”. Sorry, vermin, I never signed up for the free-iPod pyramid scheme.

Phone call from Mr. Doctor's office: my cholesterol is still 130. Hah.

CNN has awarded Ohio to Bush (or maybe the voters had something to do with it?), and Kerry has conceded. The 2004 election is over. (The 2006 campaign begins first thing Monday morning.)

It's odd that there was no October Surprise this time. I was sure something would happen…Osama bin Laden captured, major terrorist attack, something. But nothing happened.

Geekness:

I've been thinking about media-center pcs lately. Something in a small, quiet box that would sit under the television and take the place of our aging, not-very-reliable vcr. With an 80GB disk, so we can record more than five hours of video at a time. What would it cost to assemble something like that?

More than a new vcr, I suppose.

Dinner at the Courier with Jennifer and Jacob: a bowl of chili and a trip to the salad bar, very tasty.

Paid a visit to the Sigma Designs web site (http://www.sigmadesigns.com/), to look for new drivers for the RealMagic Hollywood Plus MPEG decoder card in nessus; found version 2.4.1, which seemed new, so I downloaded everything.

Turns out I already have 2.4.1. The drivers work, but Windows Media Player doesn't recognize them: so I can't use WMP to play DVDs. Sigma includes a DVD player application, which is nasty. It sort of works, but the image is very shaky.

And for some reason, when a DVD is playing, most text—especially in Notepad—is also transparent to video (which makes it rather difficult to read). With 64K colors to choose from, they had to pick black. Thanks bunches, Sigmoids.

I'm inclined to uninstall everything, throw away the decoder card, and watch DVDs on the living-room television.

Election Day Special: as of 9:55am CST, with 0% of precincts reporting, George Bush and John Kerry are tied at zero electoral votes. It's a dead heat, too close to call, isn't this exciting?

This election, like 2000, will be decided in the courts. Voting is not a precise activity, so there will always be a level of uncertainty in counting the results. In some states, the uncertainty will exceed the difference between the first and second place vote counts: and it will be pretty much impossible to state with mathematical certainty who the real winner is.

But there must be a winner—somebody has to take the oath of office next January—so the election officials will pick one, as best they can. The loser will of course run to the nearest judge, bleating I wuz robbed!

Cloudy today, but it looks like we're done with rain for a while.

The National Archives has a nice Electoral College page at http://www.archives.gov/federal_register/electoral_college/. Very informative.

I've encountered any number of people lately who think the Electoral College should be abolished in favor of direct election of the President & Vice President; so far, none has shown much understanding of how the Electoral College works and why it was designed that way, so their arguments—typically just the (fallacious) appeal to common sense: of course we should elect the President the same way we elect the local dog-catcher, why do it any other way?—fail to persuade.

I would make only two changes to the Electoral College:

• Treat it as a purely mathematical exercise. There's no need for electors to be actual human beings, who meet in Washington to cast their votes in a sort of shadow election. The electoral votes can be determined from the popular vote with simple mathematics. Leave the eighteenth-century ritual in the past, where it belongs.
• Award electoral votes by congressional district. The current statewide winner-takes-all method skews the results in states like Illinois, where the population is distributed unevenly: downstate votes don't count for much when compared to the Chicago juggernaut.

11:09am, and with 0% of precincts reporting, the election is still tied at zero electoral votes each! The tension is overwhelming!

Those zany mathematicians, you can never tell what they'll find interesting enough to name after themselves: in this case, the Frobenius Problem, which sounds like something from Mad Magazine but is really about…postage. Hence, its alternate name, the Postage Stamp Problem:

Given stamps of (positive integer) denominations a₁, a₂, … a_n, what is the smallest positive integer that cannot be represented by a combination of stamps?

It's been twenty-one years since my last math class, so I have no idea even how to begin solving such a problem. Perhaps this means I am stupid.

3:41pm: with 0% of precincts reporting, it's still a dead heat, with Bush & Kerry tied at zero electoral votes. I just can't stand the suspense. Soon my brain will liquefy and run out my ears.

I met Jennifer and Jacob at Parkland after work, so we could vote. Jake helped.

A curious thing: there were no recorded-message telephone calls from either side this time. In 2000, we were getting one or two a day toward the end. This time, nothing.

CNN seems to be predicting a win for Bush, even though polls on the west coast are just starting to close. That's one annoying thing (among many) about newsdroids: sometimes you have to wait and let the news happen for a while before you get anything worth reporting, but the average newsdroid is temperamentally unable to do that.

According to the White County Historical Society web site (http://www.rootsweb.com/~ilwcohs/), the Mary Smith Fay Genealogy Library in Carmi has a Maurer family file. I must get down there & have a look at it sometime.

There's a Sturm file, too.

Tor Books (http://www.tor.com/) has reissued Glory Road by Robert A. Heinlein, in a nice hardcover edition. Perhaps they will work through the rest of Heinlein's books, and I can replace the my collection of decades-old (and somewhat tattered) paperbacks.

And the fourth volume in the Ender's Shadow series from Orson Scott Card is apparently titled Shadow of the Giant, and is scheduled for publication next March.

Rain last night; overcast this morning. A rather dreary day.

The Bureau of Land Management General Land Records Office web site (http://www.glorecords.blm.gov/) has a nice online database of land patents; it will tell me, for instance, that on March 1, 1848, Joel Bramlet bought the NE¼ of the SE¼ of Section 1, Township 5 South, Range 9 East of the 3^rd Principal Meridian (try saying all that ten times quickly!).

It would be nice to have some kind of map generator, to which I could feed information like Joel Bramlet's land purchase, and from which I could get detailed maps, e.g., who owned what in White County on a given date.

Microsoft has Visio, which is more a diagramming tool than a map editor; and MapPoint, which is a map editor; as they each cost $300 I doubt I'll be buying either any time soon.

There's also SmartDraw (http://www.smartdraw.com/), but it's pretty much the same thing as Visio, hence not terribly relevant.

The US Geological Survey (http://www.usgs.gov/) has an incomprehensible list of software, most (all?) of it free. There's no telling whether any of it does what I want, because there's no telling what any of it does.

Perhaps I will download the MapPoint 2004 trial version, and play with it a while.

[The MapPoint 2004 trial version isn't a download, and it isn't free. Never mind…]