January 2005 Archives

In the mail: the last piece of paper needed to do our federal & state income tax returns. So that's what we did tonight.

We used TaxCut again, for the fifth year. It's quite painless. But we can't actually file our returns yet: we must wait for the final software updates, due in mid-February.

At one point in the process, TaxCut asked for information from our 2003 returns—which is when we discovered that I had neglected to print file copies of our 2003 returns. Fortunately, we still have TaxCut 2003 installed, and the old data files available.

More snow-related male bonding this morning: Jake & I took our snow shovels outside and cleared off the driveway and sidewalks. Jake had a grand time, but Papa was drooping a little by the end.

Snow today, beginning around 7:00am and lasting until early afternoon, about three inches of wet, heavy snow.

Once it stopped, Jake & I went outside to make a snowman: three, as it turned out, of varying sizes.

In the mail: a $30 rebate for Microsoft Digital Image Processing 10.0. It doesn't seem quite fair that the rebate should come to me, since I'm not the one who bought it: it was a Christmas present.

Dear News Media:

I do not want to hear about Michael Jackson's porn collection.

Thank you.

The power went out for a few seconds this evening: just long enough for us to start wondering where we'd put the flashlights.

[Apparently, somebody knocked down a utility pole near Kirby & Duncan. A few thousand people were without power for several hours. We were lucky.]

Mail from a co-worker this morning:

Not sure if all of you are aware that we lost one of our own in the Helicopter crash in Iraq on Wednesday.

Thirty-one people died in that crash. One of them happened to be from Champaign, but they were all ‘our own’.

Jerry Pournelle's web site (http://www.jerrypournelle.com/), while generally interesting & informative, is proof that writers need editors. There's a big difference between Mongolian and Mongoloid, sir.

(Jerry desperately needs to get himself a good weblog tool. He must be wasting considerable time each week setting up the new View and Mail files, copying & pasting reader mail into the latter, etc., etc. Doubtless he could put that time to better use.)

When Mathematica 3.0 shipped, toward the end of 1996, Stephen & the Marketing department went on tour: they bought a beefy, six-wheeled pickup truck and a big trailer, gave each a custom paint job (Mathematica graphics, of course), packed up a bunch of computers, and hit the road.

The trailer is long gone, but the truck is still here. It's in the Trade Center parking lot, most days. The paint job has held up pretty well.

[Correction: there were two MathMobiles, one each for the U.S. and Europe. Pictures can be found at http://www.wolfram.com/news/events/empower.html. No, I don't know what happened to the Euro-Mathmobile. Perhaps it can still be seen on the streets of Oxfordshire.]

In my mailbox at work today: my W-2 form. Assuming Jennifer gets hers today, we can get started on our taxes.

Went to http://www.bestbuy.com/ just now, and got this:

You are seeing this page because
your cookies are currently disabled.

Best Buy's cookies are blocked because I've boosted Internet Explorer's privacy setting to High, and the Best Buy web site has no compact privacy policy that Internet Explorer understands.

Don't try to blame your problems on me, spuds.

15° at 8:00am, but at least the sun is out.

Another entry in the things I don't want list: CNN reports:

Porn star Jenna Jameson is now hawking “moan tones.” For $2.50 mobile phone users can choose from a variety of moans, and sexual noises all recorded by the blond bombshell.

The article is illustrated with a picture of Ms. Jameson. All I can say is…euww. Every visible portion of her anatomy has been chemically and/or surgically modified, and the results are more than a little disturbing. Think Zonker Harris' pro-tanning days, combined with Tammy Faye Bakker's cosmetic excesses, and you'll be close. (Fortunately, the image is cropped just below Ms. Jameson's shoulders, so we are spared any other grotesqueries of appearance she may have inflicted on herself.)

(When I was learning English, ‘blond’ was masculine. Women were blonde. Language evolves, I suppose.)

Still no sign of my Larry Niven books, alas.

Cloudy this morning, with a lot of moisture in the air from yesterday's melting snow. Supposed to cool down today, with a chance of rain, sleet and/or snow later on.

It doesn't start the day well to hear that the 6:30am temperature is the high for the day: it's all downhill from here.

Last week, I ordered a pair of Larry Niven books from Amazon.com, and I've been checking the online order tracker ever since. Today, it finally has some information: my package arrived at the Urbana DHL facility at 6:44am this morning; as of 8:51am, it's out with the delivery courier in Allentown, Pennsylvania. Er…Allentown?

(Were you thinking of that Billy Joel song? You are now!)

Just after noon, a wedge of blue sky came in from the north and split the clouds. Now (2:38pm), the sky is blue, the sun is shining—it looks to be a pleasant winter day (though rather chilly).

A cautionary tale:

Once upon a time, there was a fella named Mark Jen. He worked for Microsoft, until one day he decided to work for Google instead. This meant he had to move, presumably from Redmond to San Francisco, paying all his relocation expenses himself (with the understanding that his first paycheck would include a moving-expenses reimbursement).

He started a new weblog, http://99zeros.blogspot.com/, and immediately started saying rude things about his new employer:

…which led me to thinking about the “benefits” package at Google. As I thought about it, I realized that most of the “benefits” actually seem to be thinly veiled timesavers to keep you at work.

Mr. Jen started at Google on January 17^th. He wrote four posts in his weblog, and then suddenly they were gone. The weblog is still there, but is quite empty: deleted by Google, according to rumor.

Well, duh. Talking trash about one's employer is never a good idea, but it's an exceptionally bad idea one's first week on the job.

Update: it seems Mr. Jen posted some sensitive financial information—no more detailed than Wow, Google sure is making a lot of money but apparently it made the company nervous. So he took it down, or was asked to take it down. Reports vary.

The site is back up, minus the 'sensitive' information, which has already been cached by a half-dozen sites across the internet & will doubtless live forever as Stuff Google Doesn't Want You To Know.

[As of February 8^th, various news sites are reporting that Mr. Jen was fired by Google on January 28^th.]

The Amazon.com order tracker now says that my Larry Niven books "ARRIVED AT USPS" at 10:24am. No mention of Allentown anywhere. But are they going to be on the front porch when I get home, or not?

[They were not.]

On July 31^st, 2002, MSNBC said:

Consumers will be coughing up for all online media content by 2004, according to Factiva CEO Clare Hart….

Didn't happen, did it?

Currently slogging through The Worm Ouroboros by E. R. Eddison. It's a difficult read, full of the stilted language that Orson Scott Card once lampooned with:

(That sort of writing always makes me want to describe low characters in the same fashion: “Fishbelly white he was, and fat”…“Liquored-up he was; yea, verily [censored]-faced.”)

But it does seem to be getting more interesting as I get further into it.

A sunny day, and warming up nicely: 35° as of 10:00am, with a forecast high of 48°.

Installed MediaWiki (http://wikipedia.sourceforge.net/) on the web site last night. There are no links to it yet: at this stage it's just an experiment.

It was an easy install, and it looks very nice. Unanswered questions: How do I import my existing site into MediaWiki? And how do I export pages (as XML) from MediaWiki? Just how customizable are the headers, footers, sidebars, etc., of the standard page view?

(It's a real dilemma: I'm too picky to use anybody else's software, too lazy to write my own.)

For the last month or two, I've been looking for a particular iPod car accessory: a docking cradle with a hinged arm that plugs into the cigarette lighter (does anybody use the cigarette lighter to light cigarettes any more?), the idea being to keep the iPod charged & secure yet still accessible while I'm driving. There was a link to it on the Apple web site, once upon a time, but it's gone now.

I thought it was something from Belkin, or Griffin, but there's nothing on either web site that even comes close.

Today, chasing links from the Socket Communications web site, I ended up at Arkon Resources, Inc. (http://www.arkon.com/). Arkon sells the CM170 iPod Lighter Socket Mount, which is exactly the widget I saw on the Apple site, long ago. And only $40.

I might have to buy one sometime.

NOAA says 45° as of 2:00pm. How nice.

Amazon.com has a Most Wished For list, apparently derived from people's wish lists. Item #18 is the OMRON HJ112 Premium Pedometer; it looked interesting, so I clicked through to have a look.

Glowing reviews, reasonable price, etc., etc. Guess I'll put it on my own wish list. Um…there's a buy this now link, but no add to wish list link. Very strange. Fortunately, the Most Wished For page has both. I didn't see that the first time around.

(The price on the HJ112 went up $2 while I was writing this. I thought I was shopping for a pedometer, but apparently I was playing the commodity futures market.)

Cold this morning, only 24° as of 8:00am. (Better than 7°, I suppose.) But the sun is shining, the wind is from the south, and the forecast calls for highs in the mid thirties. So things are looking up.

There's an interesting opinion piece on the MSNBC web site, written by Melinda Henneberger in furtherance of the ongoing Lawrence Summers media circus. Interesting, yes—but perhaps not for the reasons the author intended.

First, it seems that Ms. Henneberger is responding more to previous media coverage than to anything Mr. Summers actually said (or might believe). There are no direct quotes from Mr. Summers, but a few inflammatory quotes from the New York Times.

Second, having rejected (with considerable outrage) the stereotypes supposedly endorsed by Mr. Summers, Ms. Henneberger presents a few stereotypes of her own:

…the feminine instinct to protect and preserve is also real, as far as I can see, and hard-wired.

It's just another stereotype, albeit a little more flattering. I suppose that when somebody's telling you something you really want to believe about yourself, it's hard to hold onto critical thinking.

Over at http://www.fredoneverything.net/ there's an article that agrees with Ms. Henneberger's we're better than those icky boys stereotypes, but has a somewhat different view of the implications.

Looks like the ice that was blocking the sump pump pipe has melted. How nice.

When I turned the pump back on, it ran once (for a long time). Since then, it has been idle. Perhaps that means there never was very much water in the crawlspace?

The wind has died down, the clouds are gone. The snow, alas, remains, and the temperature is a most unpleasant 15°.

Our plans for the day: to have no plans.

Messed around a bit with Python CGI scripting. The sample code I downloaded from some web-development site somewhere (memory fails me here) seems a bit…sloppy.

I suppose it's just sample code, not a full implementation, and I shouldn't judge it too harshly.

Managed to slice open my left middle finger this afternoon, while helping Jennifer empty the dishwasher: I grabbed for a plastic cup, my hands (which were wet) slipped off the cup, my thumb & middle finger crashed into each other, my (overlong, undermanicured) thumbnail sank rather deeply into my fingertip.

Sure did bleed a lot.

Jake and I ran some errands this afternoon: to Bergner's for some new pillows (since lately I've been waking up with a stiff neck and a scorching headache); to Menard's for some electrical pipe-warming wrap (which, alas, we did not buy: not for use on drains, quoth the label); then to Prairie Gardens for some flowerpots (which we didn't find).

The coming week's forecast calls for highs far enough above freezing that the sump pump pipe should thaw out on its own, without electrical stimulation.

Cold this morning, and very windy. A little snow fell overnight—is still falling this morning, I think—and a fierce west wind is keeping it stirred up.

A good day to stay inside.

One of my Christmas presents last month was a bulb kit: a bag of paperwhite bulbs, some soil, and a box in which to plant them. (Many thanks, Mom & Bob.)

I followed the directions for forcing the bulbs (plant them, leave them in the closet for a few weeks), and they're growing nicely now. One even has some tiny white flowers on it. They've taken over Jennifer's sewing table. (Sorry, Jennifer).

But I don't think I planted them correctly. Some of the bulbs have heaved up out of the soil, and some are growing sideways. I think I was supposed to save half the bulbs for next year.

Oops.

Dropped off Jennifer & Jacob at the Virginia Theater, so they could watch The Magic Schoolbus: very wholesome and educational.

While they were at the play, I sneaked over the library for an hour, to see what could be seen in the 1865 Illinois census. Nothing, as it turned out: the library only has the (microfilm) reel with Champaign county (also Calhoun, Carroll, Cass and various other counties whose names start with C).

With that project thwarted (for now—supposedly I can order the White County reel on interlibrary loan, or perhaps from the Mormons), I decided to have a look at the 1870 census, White County, Carmi Precinct. I started at page 1 (of 94), and scanned all the names. Apparently my scanning rate is one page per minute, as I had just finished page 60 when my hour was up and it was time to leave.

I didn't find Jacob Maurer (who supposedly came to America in 1864, but doesn't appear in any official records until his 1877 marriage to Katherine Ziegler), but I did find Isaac Kello: father of Susannah Kello, who married Benjamin Austin, whose daughter Dolly Austin married Charles Edward Felty, related—somehow—to my great-grandmother Barbara Ellen Felty. Incidentally, Mary E. Austin, daughter of Benjamin Austin and his first wife, Lucinda Emerson, married John Matsel; their daughter Alice Matsel married John Sturm, son of James Clinton Sturm and Arrenna Aldridge.

(Dizzy yet?)

Upgraded Perl (to 5.8.6.811) and Python (to 2.4.0.243) on nessus.

I don't know why I keep Perl around. I never use it for anything. Even at work, where much of my day is spent messing about with various build scripts, the only Perl script I use is a tiny little one to create .zip files. And I could rewrite that in Python in five minutes.

But the wikilog project, which started as PHP, is now (experimentally) in Python. (Really it's not anything yet, as I haven't written any code.)

A bit of snow overnight: just enough to cover the yellow lines in the Trade Center parking lot, and cause my co-workers to lose whatever skill at parking their cars they once may have possessed.

It's not difficult to figure out where the lines are, and not hard to ensure that one's vehicle sits between rather than astride them; but when there's snow on the ground, most people don't bother. (I have a word for such people; it isn't a very nice word.)

Chicago's forecast calls for six to ten inches of snow tonight, with more on Saturday. (How much more is unclear from the NWS storm warnings.) Champaign will catch only the fringe of the storm: one to three inches overnight. Any number of major storms have skipped across the midwest this winter, and each time Champaign has caught only the fringe (or been spared altogether). Lucky us.

Highs in the forties on Tuesday & Wednesday: perhaps then our long sump-pump nightmare will be over.

Had the notion to use the Internet Anagram Server (http://www.wordsmith.org/anagram/) to look for pangrams. It worked, too:

Mr. Jock TV quiz PhD bags few lynx
Cwm fjord bank glyphs vext quiz
Blowzy night-frumps vex'd Jack Q
Veldt jynx grimps waqf zho buck

The question is whether there's a special check for pangrams in the anagram algorithm. I suspect so—re-running the query without the Z takes long enough that the site starts complaining about server overload. (Sorry about that.)

[Obviously there's a special pangram check: normally the Internet Anagram Server returns its results in ALL CAPS, but the pangrams are in mixed case. How foolish of me not to notice that earlier.]

In the news: Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers speaks on “the under-representation of female scientists at elite universities” at an economics conference, people take umbrage, media circus results.

It's interesting to compare the news coverage. The Harvard Crimson article tries pretty hard to find out what Summers actually said, what he personally believes, and whether either can reasonably be considered offensive. For contrast, I found on a central Florida television station's web site an article headlined, “Women Lack ‘Natural Ability’ In Some Fields, Harvard President Says”, which is completely wrong.

Mr. Summers has posted a response to the frenzy:

Despite reports to the contrary, I did not say, and I do not believe, that girls are intellectually less able than boys, or that women lack the ability to succeed at the highest levels of science.

So maybe they won't fire him.

Handy rule of thumb when dealing with the mass media: anybody who brags about being fair & balanced is likely to be neither. Edward R. Murrow did not start his wartime broadcasts with This…is a fair and balanced look at London, did he?

(I wonder if those broadcasts are available online somewhere. A few minutes of googling turned up nothing obvious. The search continues…)

Mail from Microsoft: they want my opinion as regards Streets & Trips 2005. The survey should take no more than 20–25 minutes to complete, quoth the 'softies. As an incentive to participate, I'll be entered into a drawing for…a free copy of Streets & Trips 2005.

Sorry, I've got one already.

Interesting software: Delicious Library (http://www.delicious-monster.com/). It uses your webcam to scan the UPC barcodes of books, DVDs, etc., and assembles a local database of information about your collection.

Alas, it's OS X only. No Windows version.

After we win the Lotto (tomorrow, definitely) and I've bought myself a tricked-out Powerbook, I'll buy a copy of Delicious Library and get started on my new library database.

My current library database, in case anyone's wondering, has a long and curious history. After two or three false starts written in BASIC (ever try to implement a recursive height-balanced binary tree insertion algorithm in BASIC?), sometime around 1987 I bought Cornerstone, an MS-DOS database program from Infocom. (Infocom was a game company with ambitions of getting into the business software market: Cornerstone was their first, and only, attempt.)

I used Cornerstone until late 1994, when I upgraded to Windows NT 3.5 (the first usable version of NT). Cornerstone just couldn't get along with NT's DOS subsystem, and kept crashing with some sort of drive A: error. Fortunately, I had Access 2.0 lying around. (In those days, I had a compulsion to buy every product Microsoft released—and the disposable income and/or indifference to mounting credit-card debt to almost keep up.)

So I dumped my data from Cornerstone into a set of quoted, comma-delimited text files, imported these into an Access database, then somewhat laboriously recreated all the interconnections between the tables. (I seem to recall writing some BASIC code to help out. It would have been easier to run a bunch of queries in Access, but it never occurred to me that I could do that. Oops.)

Since then, I've upgraded Access a few times (mainly by buying new versions of Office). It's up to Access 2000 now. At some point, I bought myself a Visual Basic for Access book, and learned enough to add a few forms to the database. Nothing very fancy, though.

And there it stands: an eighteen-year-old database that has run on MS-DOS 3.1, 3.3, 5 and 6; on Windows 3.x, NT, 2000 and XP; and on Cornerstone and Access 2.0, 95, 97 and 2000. It's a bit clunky, it has some unfortunate design choices, but it gets the job done.

The day after Inauguration Day 2005 seems just a little early to be pushing candidates for the 2008 election, but http://www.rice2008.com/ is already online: Condoleezza Rice for President.

Everyone says the Democratic candidate in 2008 will be Hillary Clinton. (I guess we can skip the primaries, then.) If Condoleezza Rice is the Republican candidate, that will certainly make for an interesting campaign.

Today is Inauguration Day, the official start of George W. Bush's second term as President (which puts him one up on his father). Washington, D.C. is crammed with parades and parties (officially known as ‘balls’, which doubtless will inspire a load of juvenile humor), as the Republicans celebrate four more years in power.

I voted for Kerry.

Looked at MoinMoin (http://moinmoin.wikiwikiweb.de/) for a bit this afternoon, thinking it might be useful for the wikilog project. It's a huge mass of Python code, plus a great many other random files of unclear purpose. The installation instructions run for forty-six pages.

Quite an enthusiasm-dampener, that was. Anything needing that much explication can't be what I'm looking for.

Cold today (30°), with heavy overcast. The weatherdroids have been saying freezing rain, sleet and/or snow Real Soon Now for the last twenty-four hours; no sign of it yet.

The sump pump drain pipe is still frozen. I'm inclined to take the hacksaw out and lop off a bit more.

[Woe is me: I struggled for twenty minutes to lop off two feet of pipe, only to discover that there was three feet of ice inside. Looks like our only option at this point is to wait for a warm spell. Too bad there aren't any in the forecast.]

Got a wrong number on the cell phone this evening: somebody in Indianapolis, looking for Jenna. Sorry, no Jenna here.

More impulse buys from the iTunes music store: King Tut by Steve Martin, and Dead Skunk by Loudon Wainwright III.

I'm still working up the courage to buy an entire album. Digital music, like e-books, just seems too ephemeral. I have CDs that I bought twenty years ago that I still listen to. Will my iTunes purchases remain viable for as long? It seems unlikely (especially given Apple's traditional disregard for backwards compatibility).

I was reading about the iTunes DRM just now. It's a bit like the Microsoft Reader activation scheme, but with one big difference: iTunes allows you to de-authorize your computer. As you buy new computers, your music collection goes with you. MS Reader, on the other hand, has no notion of de-activation. Once you've activated your fifth computer, you're done. Buy a sixth computer, and all your DRM'd e-books go offline forever.

Apple understands its customers; Microsoft does not.

Finished reading Driftglass, a collection of stories by Samuel R. Delany. I'm sure I read the title story earlier this year, but I can't think of where. It's not in any of the books I read.

Very mysterious.

The (somewhat faded) receipt tucked into the (somewhat stiff & yellowed) paperback tells me that I bought it (for $2.95) on July 27^th, 1984—which means it sat unread on the shelf for just over twenty years before its number came up.

That's a new record, I believe.

(Also purchased on the day: The Greek Myths parts 1 and 2, by Robert Graves; also, apparently, a hardcover of some kind, as the receipt shows something that cost $19.95. I've no idea what it might be.)

[The database tells me that the story Driftglass is also in Worlds of If, an anthology edited by Frederik Pohl that I read in January, 2003. So I have read it before, just not very recently. Funny thing, memory.]

Cold: 0° last night, only 15° at noon.

The forecast calls for a brief warmup beginning tomorrow, followed by some crummy weather (four to six inches of snow), followed by more cold.

And Spring is yet two months away, alas.

Following links just now, I ended up at http://virtuelvis.com/, and saw the following banner plastered across the top of the page:

Warning: You are seeing this notice because you are using the Internet Explorer browser from Microsoft, or a derivative browser such as Avant Browser. Your browser has several extremely critical security holes. Upgrading to either Opera or Firefox is strongly recommended.

CSS styling on this site will be enabled in a modern browser.

Browser bigots are so tedious.

The issue here isn't whether Internet Explorer has security flaws, nor even which web browser best supports CSS 1 & 2. No, the issue is whether site authors should code their sites to work only a particular browser, attempt to force their readers to use that browser, and insult any visitors who use some other browser.

I might switch from Internet Explorer to FireFox, someday; but it won't be because Elvis told me to. I don't take orders from losers.

Internet stalking:

Marian Brinkerhoff, whose extensive (if somewhat problematic) genealogical research was recently mentioned here, has a granddaughter Kary, who was married in Omaha last June. Or so says an article on the Lovell Chronicle web site (http://lovellchronicle.com/).

By a curious coincidence, there's a Marian Brinkerhoff right here in Champaign: she's a secretary (level IV, whatever that means) in the Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering at the University.

As of 2:00pm, the temperature is 18°, which is warmer than it's been for the last few days but still far from warm.

It's been pointed out that the Mac mini isn't the first itsy-bitsy computer: the folks at Cappuccino PC (http://www.cappuccinopc.com/) have been selling tiny Windows boxes for years now.

The Mocha P4 7043 Junior looks nice. And only $419. (If you want a CPU, memory, a hard disk, or a CD-ROM drive, the price goes up a bit.)

Google released Picasa 2.0 today. Still free, too.

But I think I'll stick with the software I have (which is Microsoft Digital Image Suite 10).

(I seem to recall hearing recently that there's a new version of OnFolio as well, but there's nothing about it on the OnFolio web site.)

The Telecom Reorg of 2004 is (somewhat belatedly) complete: this evening I called SBC and cancelled our second phone line, then called EarthLink and cancelled our dialup service.

“Whatever you do,” I said to the SBC fella, “Don't give the main number out to anybody calling the second number. For the last five years, we've been giving that number to people we don't want to talk to.” He laughed, and assured me it would be so.

The EarthLink fella tried really hard to sell me something, anything, that would keep money flowing from us into EarthLink's coffers. No, thanks. I've resented EarthLink for years, now I finally have a chance to be rid of them forever.

Goodbye, chimps.

The low last night: 0°, according to sputnik. Not as bad as -5°, but not exactly pleasant, either.

The daycare ladies are taking the day off, so we decided to have a long weekend ourselves. It's too cold to go anywhere, so I imagine we'll just loaf about the house all day.

That would be nice.

Dumb word of the day: neurotypical, coined by autistic people to describe people who are…not autistic. Sometimes it's a joke, as in the Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical, http://isnt.autistics.org/; other times it seems a little meanspirited.

People love to come up with words that don't mean anything beyond “not like me”, apparently as a way to push onto other people the (perceived) stigma of being different. So we get words like textile (i.e., not a nudist), cager (i.e., not a motorcyclist) and neurotypical.

What a waste of brainpower.

Upgraded iTunes to 4.7.1 this morning. It seems to import CDs a little faster than 4.7, which is a good thing.

CNN reports that Airbus (http://www.airbus.com/) is about to unveil the A380, a double-decker commercial airliner with maximum capacity of 800 passengers.

Imagine the body count when one of these monsters goes down.

No spelunking in the crawlspace today. How nice.

Invited one of Jacob's daycare friends to the movies: specifically, to see Racing Stripes at the Savoy 16. Much fun was had by all.

On the subject of movies, AP reports from Connecticut:

State Rep. Andrew Fleischmann is proposing legislation to force movie listings to print the time the previews start, and when the movies start.

Sounds like a good idea to me. I grow weary of ten minutes of commercials before each movie.

Meanwhile, over at http://www.familysearch.org/, one Marian Brinkerhoff of Powell, Wyoming, has provided submission number 48674-1217100193701, which comprises 2,041 individuals, including numerous Maurers. I looked at her data this evening. It was…interesting.

She has Jacob Maurer, Jr., marrying in 1884, at the age of 2; and Arthur Maurer born in 1891—when his father, Harry Maurer, was nine years old.

Well, I suppose that's remotely possible, biologically speaking. But rather unlikely.

I seem to have picked up a bit of a sunburn today. Exactly how is something of a mystery, as I was never outside for very long. Perhaps when I was cleaning off the car this morning, before going to the grocery store? (I left it out yesterday, thinking I'd need the space for the crawlspace adventure. As it turned out, I didn't.)

3° outside as of 10:00pm. Supposed to hit -5° overnight. Not a good night to be roaming around outside.

Today's excitement: a trip into the crawlspace, to reattach the sump pump outflow pipe, which detached itself sometime in the night. (It was working yesterday evening; I checked.)

Bolting the thing back together once every year or so works, but I'd prefer a more permanent solution. The leading candidate is some kind of warming wrap, probably electrical: just enough to keep it above freezing. One hopes such things exist.

I was ranting the other day about CityDesk, which isn't very well suited to what I'm doing with it. Publishing updates takes a good ten minutes or so.

I'd write something myself, I said, in PHP or even Python, but that takes more time and effort than I have available.

My correspondent asked: Why not just use Movable Type?

A few reasons, I suppose. It's written in perl. Installing it looks to be a pain. To get support you have to buy the $70 Personal Edition. It generates ugly HTML. I have many prejudices regarding XHTML coding, and commercial packages are unlikely to conform to all of them.

So I (reluctantly) continue with CityDesk, while looking for (and occasionally, half-heartedly, attempting to create) an alternative.

Finished reading A Short History of Nearly Everything by Bill Bryson. The end came as a bit of a surprise: I hadn't counted on there being so many pages of footnotes, source citations and index, hence was expecting another chapter or two.

Cold this morning: 7° at 8:00am. The slush that preceded yesterday's snow has frozen solid. The roads are clear, but parking lots are treacherous.

Three days after I mentioned Bread in the daybook, CNN reports that Jimmy Griffin, one of the founding members of the band, has died.

In other news, the people of Turkey have taken collective umbrage at the fourth season of Fox Television's somewhat-overwrought series 24: it seems the villains this time around are from Turkey.

Google turned up a statement from the Assembly of Turkish Americans Associations (which name strikes me as just a little redundant). The ATAA is annoyed by the whole terrorism thing, but even more annoyed that the 24 writers think Turkey is part of the Middle East.

I can't find anything at http://www.turkishembassy.org/, though. Perhaps the Ambassador is above taking part in such disputes.

Scientists are excited: this morning, the Huygens probe managed a soft landing on Titan and returned two hours of readings & images before going silent. (It was expected to last only a few minutes.)

There's already a few pictures up on the Cassini-Huygens mission web site (http://saturn.jpl.nasa.gov/): one taken during the descent, and another taken on the surface.

I always have a little cognitive dissonance looking at pictures like these. On the one hand, it's a bunch of rocks & dirt. I can look at rocks & dirt in the back yard, up close, any time I want. On the other hand, it's Titan, billions of miles from Earth and utterly alien.

(Titan is also the home of the mind-controlling slugs of Robert A. Heinlein's novel The Puppet Masters. So far, Huygens hasn't seen any.)

Finally got around to installing the Microsoft AntiSpyware beta (having downloaded it a while ago). Very nice. (No, it didn't find any spyware. It didn't even complain that I had changed my Internet Explorer home page to about:blank. Some spyware utilities do, which is very dumb.)

Temperatures are passing through normal on their way to a few days of arctic chill: the temperature was 60° at midnight, and has been falling ever since (to 35° as of noon). Just now (12:16pm) it's close enough to freezing that the rain is changing over to snow (which will enliven the drive home, I'm sure). Tonight's low is supposed to be near zero.

The folks in Inuvik, Northwest Territories, Canada, have spiffed-up their web site (http://www.inuvik.ca/) and upgraded their internet connection: the pages load much faster than they used to.

(Current temperature in Inuvik: -30°C, which is -22°F. Brrr…)

The Dempster Highway, which is the only road to Inuvik, has its own web site: http://www.dempsterhighway.com/ (though really it's just a redirect to somewhere in http://www.yukoninfo.com/, which seems like cheating to me).

I want to drive the Dempster someday, though I'm a little leery of any road whose tourist guidelines include “bring a few spare tires” and “bring a gascan”.

NOAA says:

SNOWFALL AMOUNTS OF 2 TO 4 INCHES ARE EXPECTED OVER THE REGION THROUGH 6 PM THIS EVENING.

Yes, indeed, the drive home is going to be…interesting.

The drive home wasn't so bad after all: the snow stopped before the roads got too sloppy.

The question for tonight is whether the sump pump pipe will freeze up (again) as the temperature falls. There's a lot of water out there…

Tried to stick a knife in our EarthLink account this evening; there were problems. After much fruitless wandering among the EarthLink online account management maze, I found this gem:

To protect your identity and account security, EarthLink only accepts cancellation requests by telephone. If you would like to cancel your account, please call 1-888-EARTHLINK. We apologize for any inconvenience that this causes, and we hope you will appreciate our attempt to protect your privacy.

I should have known the chimps would find one last way to annoy me.

Thunderstorms last night. The power dropped for a few seconds after a fairly close lightning strike, but there was no damage.

This morning, the temperature is 57° as of 9:00am.

No genealogy society meeting this month: instead, they're hosting a research night at the library, tonight from 6:00pm to 9:00pm.

Broke down and paid $4.95 for a month's access to http://www.consumerreports.org/ so I could read their electric shaver reviews. Now I feel a little cheated.

For one thing, all the models they reviewed in November, 2002 have since been discontinued. There's no telling how closely the current models resemble any of those that were reviewed, so the reviews themselves are pretty much worthless.

For another, electric shavers (like some people I know) need to have their heads replaced, more or less yearly. The cost of a replacement head would just about pay for a year's supply of razor blades, so there's no real cost savings in going electric. There's also lubrication, battery replacement, etc., etc., that drive up the cost.

The only plus: it sounds like shaving doesn't take quite so long with an electic shaver as with a razor. But given my usual state of semiconsciousness first thing in the morning, I doubt I'd put the extra time to any profitable use. I might as well spend it shaving and waking up.

So I don't think I'll be getting an electric shaver any time soon.

(And I must remember to cancel my consumerreports.org subscription before the end of the month, otherwise they'll charge me another $4.95.)

Called all the grandparents, to tell them our big news: another grandchild is on the way. There was much excitement.

(Two children. One's mind boggles. What will be different? What will be the same? In seven months, we will begin to find out.)

Spent an hour at the library this evening, looking up Gillihans in the 1880 census and telling the librarians about Jacob's baby brother-or-sister. There was much excitement.

Thick overcast today. Not much sunlight. Rain, sometimes. But at least it's unseasonably warm: 39° as of 10:00am, with a forecast high somewhere in the forties.

Even warmer tomorrow (in the fifties), then tomorrow night the deep freeze returns. I'm not looking forward to that.

On August 28^th of last year, I was exactly 15,000 days old. Alas, I wasn't paying attention, and so the milestone passed without fanfare. (We took Jake to Day of the Dozer, over in Bloomington.)

Other milestones:

• May 14^th, 2005: I will have spent one third of my life working at Wolfram Research.
• March 12^th, 2006: I will have reached the age Elvis was when he died.
• May 27^th, 2007: I will be 16,000 days old.

Perhaps I should add these to my Outlook calendar, so I don't forget them.

Nipped out to the local bookstore to look for a copy of the Consumer Reports buyer's guide: I wanted to read a few reviews of electric shavers, to help me decide whether I want one. I found the 205 Buyer's Guide, but—alas!—it has nothing about electric shavers, beyond an index entry referring me to the November 2002 issue.

I don't subscribe to Consumer Reports, and even if I did I wouldn't have a two-year-old issue lying around. (Ten years ago, I would have. I kept everything. I don't do that any more.) Supposedly it's on the web site, but you have to subscribe to the magazine to get access to the archives.

Geekness: today Apple announced the Mac mini, 85 cubic inches of computer for only $499.

I want one.

1:30pm, and it's raining.

Thunderstorms this evening, with lightning & everything. Very unusual for January.

Meanwhile, the Ancestral Home (i.e., Carmi) is dealing with rising floodwaters: the Wabash, the Little Wabash, and various ancillary creeks & rivers are all way beyond flood stage. A few people in east Carmi (near the Little Wabash) had to evacuate.

The Carmi Times web site, http://www.carmitimes.com/, has a few pictures.

iPod update: 5391 songs, 29.79GB. Just added: The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars by David Bowie. Next up: a few Bread albums.

From the Dept. of Careful-What-You-Wish-For: CNN reports:

When [14-year-old Nick Waters'] church asked what he wanted for Christmas, Nick, who cannot talk and was born with no arms, slowly typed his reply with his feet: Lots of Christmas cards. Ten thousand of them.

More than two weeks after Christmas, he has more than 130,000 cards—and they are still coming.

What Nick & family are about to discover is: they'll never stop coming. The kid-who-wants-cards meme is irresistible.

Years from now, chain letters will circulate about poor Nick Waters, whose only wish is for as many Christmas cards as he can get, and well-meaning people will oblige.

In desperation, the family will release a counter-meme: Please, we have enough cards, you can stop now. It will have no effect. Like Craig Shergold, they'll have to leave town and make arrangements with the post office to forward all Christmas cards to the local recycling center.

Cloudy this morning, and a little warmer: 33° as of 10:00am. The trees have lost their ice (as well as quite a few branches), and the snow is almost gone.

We're to have a few days of warmer weather before another storm hits on Wednesday, bringing (in order, as the temperatures fall) rain, ice & snow. How much of each we can expect is still unclear.

The iPod project stands at about 10% complete, and has already increased the iPod's free space by nearly a gigabyte.

Currently listening to Ammonia Avenue by the Alan Parsons Project. The lower bitrate seems to impart a hint of fuzziness to higher-frequency instruments (trumpets, etc.), but maybe I'm just imagining that. It's not like I have perfect hearing, or any real musical sense, after all.

Tired today. Didn't sleep so well last night, woke up feeling moderately wretched. (All things in moderation, even wretchedness.) A little breakfast, a little coffee, a little ibuprofen, and I feel better.

Tried to find out what's happening with the InstallShield vs. Wise lawsuit, which was big news eighteen months ago (and was mentioned here on July 8^th, 2003); found myself defeated by the impenetrable maze of federal judiciary web sites.

Since 2003, InstallShield was bought by Macrovision (the folks who brought copy-protection to VHS videocassettes—thank you so much, fellas), and Wise was bought by…er…somebody I'm too lazy to look up right now.

Perhaps the new owners weren't interested in wasting any more money on lawyers. We can only hope.

[Wise was acquired in December, 2003 by Altiris. No, I've never heard of them either.]

Grandparents visiting today.

The anemometer on sputnik thawed out this morning, after being frozen solid since Wednesday's ice storm. The rain gauge recorded about a tenth of an inch, but that was all melting ice: no rain today.

Today's high: 39°.

I have weather pictures, but they're still in the camera. Perhaps someday they'll show up here.

Planted the paperwhite bulbs—a Christmas present from Mom & Bob (thank you very much)—today:

They're in the closet. Seems it must be dark & cold for them to sprout.

Norm replaced the garbage disposal (the old one having been broken for the last two years—see October 3, 2002); Barb, Jennifer & Jacob went shopping; Clementine ran around; I hovered near the disposal project, pretending to be useful.

It only took about an hour.

The ice from Wednesday's storm still coats the trees, which have been dropping branches (and severing power lines) ever since. With a few noteworthy exceptions (e.g., the intersection of Duncan & Windsor), the roads never did ice up much.

Weatherdroids say by Monday the temperature will be pushing 60°. That should put a quick end to the ice.

[The fella they've got doing the morning weather reports on NPR this week—it isn't either of the regular fellas—sounds like a droid. It would not surprise me to learn that he really is one.]

This is why iTunes is cool:

Tomorrow is the 189^th anniversary of the Battle of New Orleans, so I had the notion to listen to the song by Johnny Horton:

Oh, in 1814 we took a little trip
Along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississipp'
We took a little bacon and we took a little beans
And we caught the bloody British in the town of New Orleans…

iTunes has a half-dozen Johnny Horton albums, several of which have The Battle of New Orleans. And since it was only 99¢, I bought it. I might also pick up North to Alaska and Sink the Bismarck one of these days. At 99¢ each, why not?

iTunes: almost anything you might want, at impulse-buy prices. That's pretty cool.

Just a bit of snow overnight, not even enough to cover the streets. But yesterday's ice hasn't melted yet, and some roads haven't been salted. The drive to work was interesting.

Years ago, I bought a laser pointer: a $5 throwaway from Office Depot (or some such). For a few weeks, I had fun making jiggly red dots on faraway objects. (There's nothing like trying to light up something two hundred yards away to reveal just how twitchy your hand really is.)

For the more serious laser connoisseur, the folks at Bigha (http://www.bigha.com/) have the Jasper, billed as the most powerful laser you can own without a permit, only $129. I can't imagine what I'd do with such a thing—though I can imagine plenty of more interesting ways to spend $129.

Bigha is in the news because some yutz in New Jersey bought one of their pointers and started tagging airplanes with it. The FAA takes a dim view of that sort of thing, and Mr. New Jersey is now charged with a variety of federal crimes.

(Inexplicably, Bigha also sells recumbent bicycles: $3,400 for the cheap one, $4,100 fully tricked-out. Laser pointer not included, alas.)

Re-importing (at a lower bit rate) Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band this evening, it occurred to me that on June 18^th, 2006, Paul McCartney will be sixty-four.

The Sgt. Pepper CD was (purposely) issued on the twentieth anniversary of the LP's release, which means I've had mine for almost seventeen years.

…and then one day you find
ten years have got behind you…

I feel old.

Cold this morning, and raining: a bad combination.

11:30am, and the rain has (apparently) stopped. But the temperature is right at 32°, and it looks like the trees are icing up. Roads and cars are as yet unaffected.

CNN reports that President Bush is in Illinois today, specifically Collinsville, near St. Louis. Today's sound bite: excessive jury awards in medical malpractice cases.

I don't think this is what God had in mind when he was talking to Moses:

As was mentioned earlier, there are varied opinions amongst the Poskim which shaving instruments are permitted to be used to cut a particular area of hair growth.

(From http://star-k.com/kashrus/kk-mitzvos-shavers.htm.)

Now, this is just weird: http://www.openvmshobbyist.org/, the OpenVMS hobbyist program:

The OpenVMS Hobbyist Program is a program from HP and OpenVMS engineering that enables OpenVMS enthusiasts throughout the world to obtain OpenVMS Operating System Licenses and over 100 OpenVMS layered products for their VAX, Alpha or Itanium hardware for Individual use and education.

I suppose there are people in the world who have VAXen sitting idle in their basements, and a longing in their hearts to mess about with thirty-year-old minicomputer operating systems; I'm not one of them. (We don't even have a basement.)

There are still CP/M fans out in the world, too…

4:30pm, and the temperature is still 32°. Supposedly, the roads are starting to ice up now. Just in time for the drive home from work. Yay.

In the inbox tonight: a message from Verizon Wireless: Your online statement for January is ready! I don't know what would be on it, given that we switched our cell phones to Virgin Mobile at the end of November.

Foggy this morning.

Jake doesn't quite understand fog yet; he keeps asking if there's a fire somewhere.

Apparently there's another storm coming out of Texas: this one is expected to track north of Champaign, but a little closer than the Christmas blizzard. We'll get rain, possibly freezing rain, depending on the exact storm track.

Oh joy.

Curious musical fad: mashups, which is taking two unrelated songs and merging them. It sounds rather a lot like the xenochrony that Frank Zappa was doing (with his own music) fifteen or twenty years ago. (Frank died in 1993, but still has a web site: http://www.zappa.com/.)

In the inbox:

Your MSN Group, Pat Rice's Group, has had no activity in the last 90 days. As a convenience to our users, we periodically delete groups that have become dormant. We hope you'll consider coming back. It's not too late!

Um. Do I really want to keep this? It's full of advertisements (understandably, since I'm not paying for it): very ugly.

I think I'll let the MSN garbage collector sweep it up.

Having given up on my MSN Group, it seemed like a good idea to delete my Google Group (which I never used for anything anyway), and my MSN Space (likewise useless & neglected).

[Deleting the MSN Space turned out to be more difficult than I expected. First, I had to log in—but which of my (two) Passport accounts did I use to create the space? The login process didn't work very well until I remembered to enable cookies for msn.com and passport.net, but after that it was just a matter of trying each passport in turn to see which would enable the space's admin functions.]

Also deleted my GMail account (with nary a message sent or received in the four months of its existence). When I logged in to do the deed, I discovered that Google had rewarded me with six GMail invites. I suppose I should have invited a half-dozen people before deleting myself, but I didn't.

Also deleted the Coppermine install from my space on Pair's servers: it was ugly & too confusing. Maybe I'll write my own image-gallery web application. (Right after I finish the PHP+MySQL wikilog project.)

My online existence seems just a little tidier now.

My eyes are better now, after only a day of antibiotic ointment. (Yes, I'll finish the entire course of treatment. Thanks for asking!) But I'm still dealing with some kind of cold / sore throat / sinus infection combo platter. It's more annoying than anything else, but I worry about passing it on to Jennifer or Jacob.

Rain this morning.

WRI is closed today, but a surprising number of people are here anyway (including me, to make up for my absence last Thursday). At least one—an executive, no less—forgot it was a company holiday, and tried to schedule meetings.

Called Mr. Doctor this morning, about my ever-so-attractive case of pinkeye (more properly pinkeyes, as both are now affected). He's booked solid today, alas. He might call in a prescription for me, or I might have to wait until tomorrow.

Mr. Doctor's office called. They're not supposed to prescribe medication for me until I've established a relationship with Mr. Doctor, but they're going to do it anyway—probably because the earliest establishment meeting they could schedule with Mr. Doctor is in March.

So today I get some pinkeye ointment, and two months from now I get to meet Mr. Doctor. I have the gloomy suspicion that by then he will have left the clinic, and I'll have to start the establish process all over again with another randomly-chosen doctor.

(What is it about Champaign, that all the doctors are leaving? And, given the rapid staff turnover, why do the local clinics persist in the illusion that I can have some kind of personal relationship with a doctor? It's never the same doctor twice. It may be good service, but it's hardly personal.)

Interesting: WikiML, http://advogato.org/proj/WikiMl/, “a project to handle so called ‘wiki text’ as a full citizen Markup Language equivalent to a subset of XHTML.”

Alas, WikiML hasn't reached V₁ yet: the links all point to empty “under construction” pages.

Weird rumors are flying that opening Windows Media Player files (.wmv, .wma) can infect your computer with spyware. Given Microsoft's recent troubles with malicious .jpg files causing Big Problems in the GDI+ subsystem—for the gory details, see Knowledge Base article 833987, “Buffer Overrun in JPEG Processing (GDI+) Could Allow Code Execution.”—using .wmv as a spyware vector isn't as far-fetched as it might sound.

There's a nice analysis over at edbott.com. Short answer: if your system is up to date, and you read dialog boxes before clicking OK, you're safe.

To my list of debilitations & infirmities we can now add a raging case of pinkeye, which developed overnight. I vaguely recall waking up a few times, wondering why my eye wouldn't open. Now I know.

It's not so bad today. I can open my eye, I can see out of it. But it stings a bit, and I'm a little more scary-looking than usual.

Dismantled & boxed up the Christmas tree this morning (having packed up the decorations yesterday); now we need to find somewhere to keep it for the next eleven months or so. I imagine it will end up in the garage, with the old one (which needs to go away sometime).

Jennifer and Jacob are off to the Discovery Museum in Bloomington, while I loaf at home.

The grocery store is increasingly desperate to unload their leftover Christmas candy. As of today, the prices are being lowered manually: somebody goes out with a magic marker, crosses out the old price and writes in a new (lower) one.

Cheap candy has a certain appeal, but what would I do with two or three pounds of Twix mini-bars? (Eat them, of course, which would make me quite ill.)

Having decided that importing my CD collection at 192kbps was a waste of disk space, my project for the new year—and it will take all year, I'm sure—is to re-import everything at the standard 128kbps.

I don't remember iTunes taking quite so long to import a CD. I wonder what's slowing it down.

Jennifer says there's an over-the-counter pinkeye remedy, but Mr. Grocery Store Pharmacist had never heard of such a thing. My suffering continues.

Well, now. At 192kbps, the Alan Parsons Project album Tales of Mystery and Imagination comes in at 62,092,002 bytes; at 128kbps it's only 41,618,436. Extrapolating wildly, this means that re-importing the 469 albums in my library at the lower bitrate will free up approximately 10GB—which should be plenty of room for the rest of my CD collection.

Money 2005 comes with a number of freebies, including free credit report monitoring. Money 2004 had this, too, but it didn't work; this time around, the 'softies appear to have gotten their act together. So I signed up. The result:

Your credit rating ranks higher than 99.34% of U.S. consumers.

I feel superior.

A message from Jake:

Happy New Year!

(Note the rather unsubtle product placement in this shot. Kraft should pay us for the free advertising.)

From a conversation with my mother:

How's your head?
I'm thinking of having it removed. I don't use it much, and it frightens children.

I'm so witty.

Foggy today. Not so warm as yesterday (only 39°) but the forecast calls for the temperature to rise overnight to 55° by sunrise tomorrow.

Crazy weather.

I have a cold. It is more annoying than incapacitating; even so, I'd be happier without it.