Over on the CityDesk Technical Support Forum, there used to be a post that said (more or less), "Now that you're done with FogBugz 4.0, is there any news about CityDesk 3.0?"
It stayed up for a few days, then disappeared. I can only assume that Joel wearied of deleting all the grumpy responses ("You guys promised to ship CityDesk 3.0 by the end of 2003 and still haven't delivered. What's the deal, Spolsky?") and just killed the entire thread.
H&R Block, publishers of TaxCut, are offering a $15 rebate to people who e-file their federal returns. Just write your Declaration Control Number in the space provided, mail in the form, and wait for your check to arrive.
The Declaration Control Numbers generated by the IRS are fourteen digits long, but the space provided on the rebate form only holds thirteen digits. Oops.
Mail from the TaxCut e-filing system: our state & federal returns have been accepted. How nice.
More snow showers, beginning around 4:00pm: great big fluffy snowflakes, which Jacob tried to catch on his tongue. (I don't know whether he succeeded.)
No new accumulation, though.
I didn't get Three Degrees when it launched a few years ago, and I don't get MSN Found now.
I guess I'm supposed to think the six bloggers on MSN Found are real people (instead of actors hired by some ad agency), and I'm supposed to be interested in them (despite the general aroma of deception emanating from the site), and I'm supposed to figure out (on my own, thereby doing the ad agency's work for it) that MSN Search will tell me everything I want to know about them.
I guess I'm just not hip enough.
(Question: if your viral marketing campaign generates a lot of buzz, but the buzz is all this is the lamest thing I've ever seen, is the campaign still a success?)
I had a dream last night, in which I traveled back in time to visit Jacob Maurer. (Alas for my Nobel Prize hopes, the dream did not specify the precise mechanism by which this was accomplished.)
He lived in a big house, with columns in front like a southern plantation. I asked him where he had been, what he had been doing, between 1864 (when he came to America from Germany) and 1877 (when he first appears in the White County courthouse archives); instead of answering, he handed me a book about building railroads in Alaska. The index said Jacob Maurer was mentioned on page 103, but the alarm went off before I could find the page.
Somehow I doubt that the real Jacob Maurer ever lived in a house like that, or had anything to do with Alaskan railroad construction. But it was an interesting dream.
A bit of snow this morning, mostly on roofs & lawns. The roads are wet but otherwise clear. NOAA says:
LIGHT SNOW WILL COME TO AN END ACROSS LOCATIONS ALONG AND WEST OF I-57 BY 900 AM...WITH AREAS FURTHER EAST SEEING THE SNOW CONTINUE FOR ANOTHER HOUR OR TWO. ACCUMULATIONS WILL GENERALLY BE AN INCH OR LESS. MOTORISTS ARE ADVISED TO USE CAUTION ON AREA ROADWAYS THIS MORNING...AS TEMPERATURES DIPPING BELOW FREEZING WILL LIKELY LEAD TO SLIPPERY CONDITIONS.
Plans to celebrate the end of winter by packing away the long pants have been - alas - postponed.
After years of resistance to electronic filing of our income tax returns, we have joined the bandwagon. The process was relatively painless, except for the $32 in e-filing fees. (E-filing saves the IRS time & money, so why are they charging for it? Are they trying to discourage people from using it?)
The big question: will the Illinois Department of Revenue disgorge our refund in five to seven weeks, as promised, or make us wait until September again?
Found myself at the State Farm online accounts registration page just now. It was most disturbing.
The page has an animated welcome image, and an audio track: "Welcome to the State Farm blah blah blah...". (I turned it off, because I hate web sites with audio tracks.) But the image - a cheery-looking fellow in business clothes - didn't stop. His head kept moving from side to side, and every now & then he'd blink his eyes. I guess I was supposed to feel as if I were talking to a real human being, instead of reading a web page.
But it wasn't very smooth animation, it was more like the creepy & weird Go Baby cartoons on the Disney Channel.
The most bizarre misspelling I've ever seen: aisty, which is what the waiter wrote on the check at lunch yesterday.
Apparently, that's how they spell 'iced tea' on his planet.
Looking at possible replacements for SharpReader, which is a bit lacking in the feature department; various people have said nice things about NewzCrawler and FeedDemon. Both look nice, and don't cost very much.
Perhaps I will buy one, one of these days.
Poking around in my email archives just now, I found this:
Date: Mon, 15 Apr 1996 10:23:46 -0500 (CDT)
Subject: The high price of gasoline
Does anyone know if there's a real reason why gas prices
are so high? (As opposed to simple greed in preparation
for high demand over the summer.)
As it turns out, I filled up Mr. Blazer twice in April of 1996: on the 6th, I paid $1.38/gallon; on the 24th, I paid $1.39. These days, the cheap stuff goes for $1.94, and they don't advertise the expensive stuff (it would scare away the customers).
People still grumble that gas is too expensive, and people still respond that it costs more in Europe. Nothing changes.
Took Jake for a haircut today. He seemed to enjoy it, even giggling a bit when the clippers tickled.
No pictures. Sorry, grandmas.
iTunes sent me a receipt for the free Moby sampler I downloaded the other day.
Why bother? It was free.
Jacob has been his usual rowdy self this evening, though a bit quiet. Maybe he's sleepy, from skipping his nap this afternoon. (The daycare ladies are diligent about naptime - I'm not surprised, it's their only break of the day - but this afternoon it was Papa's watch, and Papa is not so diligent.)
He's got some eyedrops, to cure his (still elusive) pinkeye. Poor little guy, he doesn't like eyedrops: he wriggled & cried most piteously this afternoon when I dosed him. (The instructions call for two drops, four times a day. If he's still talking to us when this is over, it'll be a miracle.)
I do not want one of these:
The Grossan Hydro Pulse System produces a gentle, pulsating (not steady!) stream to cleanse & moisturize the sinuses, remove foreign matter, crusts, and other undesirable materials, and massage the cilia of the nose and sinuses to their normal, healthy state. A Hydro Pulse treatment is gentle, pleasant & soothing, and leaves you feeling clear and fresh.
I think I'd rather have a cold than a saline irrigation of my nasal passages. Ick.
CNN reports that the Nielsen people, along with other survey-takers & pollsters, have a problem: people with cell phones. More specifically, people whose only telephone is a cell phone. It seems the phone spammers' beloved autodialers aren't allowed to call cell phones.
Poor phone spammers, so cruelly oppressed!
It pains them that so many people are beyond their reach, so there's talk of amending current legislation to allow phone spammers to waste your cellular minutes, run up your phone bill, and let you experience the joy of saying, "Hello? Hello?" to nobody (because the autodialer kinda sorta called more people than it had pollsters to interrogate them with) while driving in rush-hour traffic.
Just think - before, phone spammers could only interrupt your dinner; soon, they'll be able to kill you, by distracting some moron in the next lane.
Poor Jacob, sent home from daycare for having pinkeye and a fever (neither of which is detectable by his Papa).
Nice afternoon for it, anyway: 50°, sunny.
I wonder if any professional bloviators - wasn't that a movie about Howard Hughes? - are working on essays comparing Hunter S. Thompson and the Pope, and their very different responses to age & infirmity.
MSNBC said this in a recent article about the Pope's health problems:
John Paul has consistently brushed aside any speculation, often declaring he would carry out his mission until the end. His steadfastness is viewed by many as a powerful example of Roman Catholic teaching about the value of life, even in the face of intense suffering.
From an article on Hunter S. Thompson:
"He wanted to leave on top of his game. I wish I could have been more supportive of his decision," [his wife] said. "It was a problem for us."
He could have just retired...
There's a scuba shop in the strip mall next door to WRI. The license plates on their truck read MRSCUBA, which I can't help but read as Mrs. Cuba.
The pattern-matcher in my head is greedy, it seems.
35° as of 9:00am, with a forecast high of 44°.
The trees in the back yard are starting to bud out. This seems a bit early to me, but I'm not a tree: what do I know?
I didn't know this: after the Thompson Twins disbanded (sometime in the late 1980s), Tom Bailey & Alannah Currie (two-thirds of the Twins) formed a new band, named Babble, and released a few albums.
iTunes has one of them, Ether from 1996.
(Tom & Alannah also got married; they have two children.)
A recent exchange:
Hey, Jake: butt.
Butt's not a very nice word!
Well, you just said it.
You said it first!
I'm so immature sometimes.
Long ago, I subscribed to the Red Hat People rss feed, but quickly discovered that Red Hat people hardly ever post anything: they've managed exactly four posts since the beginning of the year.
Two of the four showed up just today; and one of them contained a link to a Red Hat Knowledge Base article, How do I stop the "Schmoo" attack on my Firefox browser? Hm...never heard of the Schmoo attack, maybe I should check it out.
I got this instead:
Red Hat Knowledgebase is a library of tips, troubleshooting advice, and current information updated daily by Red Hat technicians. Individuals with a redhat.com login are granted limited access. Red Hat Enterprise Linux subscribers are granted full access--with expanded categories and advanced search capabilities.
And people who don't have a redhat.com login are granted no access at all. That's Red Hat - emphasize that their software is free and open, then arrange things so that any attempt to acquire or use (or just learn about) the free and open software requires cash payments to Red Hat.
(Would it be childish to point out that Microsoft's knowledge base is free to all comers? No logins, no limited access, just a huge compilation of free & open information.)
Over at blogs.msdn.com, Arul Kumaravel has posted a brief summary of Monad, Microsoft's new shell & scripting system (which hasn't shipped yet; Real Soon Now, honest!).
Gack. What a nasty, ugly language it is. It combines the ugliness of bash with the ugliness of perl, and allows - encourages - you to write things like:
"{0:M}" -f $(get-date)
They seem to be positioning it as an administration interface to Exchange, rather than a general-purpose scripting language, but even so: why waste time inventing yet another language?
There's an old saying:
One kind of fool says, "This is old, and therefore good."
Another says, "This is new, and therefore better."
See if you can guess which kind works at Microsoft.
Update, 25 April 2006: It took the 'softies a while, but they finally noticed the Monad / gonad problem. Monad is now to be called PowerShell.
"Catchy name, sir."
MSNBC has an article about ancient micro-organisms plucked from 32,000-year-old ice and revived:
"They immediately started swimming when the ice melted," Hoover told LiveScience, adding that the cryopreserved bacteria were instantly ready to eat and multiply.
It made me think of Han Solo in the carbon-freeze. Are they now the oldest living things? Should they get credit for time spent in cryo-suspension?
Former bubblegum pop star Debbie Gibson, who these days is going by the more grownup-sounding Deborah, has a pictorial in this month's issue of Playboy magazine.
Um...why? Is this supposed to make me buy her latest album?
For decades, women have been trying to revive moribund careers by posing nude in Playboy. It never works. I don't know why they keep doing it. Desperation?
MSNBC reports that John Paul II is back in the hospital. The article reads like the first draft of an obituary, which doesn't instill much hope for His Holiness' recovery.
(I suppose the Pope has been so sick for so long that the major media outlets all have obituaries ready & waiting.)
iTunes has free downloads: Single of the Week, that sort of thing. This week they're offering a seven-minute sampler from the coming-soon Moby album Hotel.
When Jacob was a baby, Jennifer & I watched a lot of VH1 during the 2:00am feedings. One of the songs I remember from that time is We Are All Made Of Stars, by Moby. After three years, I couldn't tell you anything about the song, other than that I remember liking it.
So I downloaded the sampler and gave it a listen. Very nice.
Monday evening, I ordered a few items from Amazon.com (The Runes of the Earth by Stephen R. Donaldson and Why Is There Air? by Bill Cosby, in case anyone's wondering); I went for the free shipping, because I'm cheap.
Expected ship date February 26, for delivery March 2 - 6, quoth the order-confirmation email. That'll give me time to finish the book I'm reading now, thought I.
Their estimates were a bit off: the package shipped yesterday morning, and was delivered to the house just after 2:00pm today. It makes me wonder why the Amazonians even bother offering (let alone charging extra for) second-day shipping, given that their free-because-it's-dog-slow shipping option is just as fast.
Microsoft is taking heat for having patented the IsNot operator (which invention, curiously enough, required the combined brainpower of no fewer than three people).
I think I will patent the IsToo operator, negotiate a cross-licensing agreement with Microsoft, then collect licensing fees from third graders.
"Is not!"
"Is too!"
ka-ching!
21° at 6:00am; only 32° as of 10:00am. A bit cloudy, but the sun is getting through.
From Fog Creek: a CityDesk News article, titled CityDesk Crashes Attempting to Close Template Window or HTML Window. Apparently Windows XP HotFix KB897781, included in the February update, is to blame.
I have KB897781 installed on nessus, and have had no problems with CityDesk. Perhaps that's because I use HTML View exclusively. I knew there was a good reason for doing that.
Amusing article over at Mobile PC Magazine. For the record, I own / have owned these:
Twelve out of a hundred: not a very good score, I'm afraid.
Shortly after waking up this morning, I realized that my subconscious music library was looping on Brewer & Shipley's 1970 hit, One Toke Over the Line. This puzzled me, because:
Funny old subconscious. Perhaps I will fire up the iPod and send some Frank Zappa tunes chasing after the unwelcome Mssrs. Brewer & Shipley.
Wil Wheaton and I have the same GPS receiver, the eTrex Legend. But I don't have a Cadillac.
I think I've done everything correctly so that people with TypeKey signons should be automatically approved for commenting. Alas, it doesn't actually work.
NASA has set May 15th for the launch of Discovery: the first mission since Columbia was lost over Texas in 2003.
The new rules: daylight launches only, so the tracking cameras can record any potentially-deadly debris strikes; and all flights will dock with the space station, in case the orbiter is irreparably damaged during liftoff and the astronauts must await rescue.
Which leads to an interesting question: if that happens, what will become of the damaged orbiter? Even with the EDO modifications, the cryo tanks that feed the APUs will only last thirty days or so. By the time NASA can get a second orbiter docked, the first will be cold & dark. Are there procedures in place to safely power down an orbiter in-flight? Are there procedures to recharge the cryo tanks and power up the orbiter, once the damage has been repaired?
If not, are they going to leave the thing hanging off the space station like a tumor? Or will they jettison it to an uncontrolled re-entry over some convenient ocean?
I heard on the radio this morning that today is Presidents' Day. This came as something of a surprise, as I'd thought Presidents' Day was last Monday. Which leads to a funny story...
I didn't check the mail last Monday, figuring there'd be none due to the holiday. So Monday's mail sat in the mailbox overnight. For the next three days, we checked the mail before the regular delivery: but we saw mail from the day before, that had been in the box overnight, and brought that in instead. It wasn't until Thursday that we figured out what was gong on.
(Where does the apostrophe go, anyway? It's a holiday dedicated to two different Presidents, Washington and Lincoln, or perhaps to all Presidents collectively, so I have gone for the plural possessive.)
Thick overcast this morning: the sort that looks like it might produce a weak drizzle at any time, but nothing more intense than that.
Temperature only 35°, which is rather disappointing.
Wondering what Lawrence Summers said that got everyone so worked up? A transcript has been released.
Perhaps all the people who wrote opinion pieces based on what they thought he said, or on what somebody told them he said, would like to revise their previous remarks?
40° and raining, here in Champaign.
Jacob is watching cartoons in the other room. He's learning how to use the remote, which may or may not be a good thing at his age. Poor Jennifer had to go to work: important projects, immovable deadlines, that sort of thing. And I am puttering around on the computer, feeding James McMurtry CDs to iTunes. (Now importing: Candyland.)
This is the time of year when I get impatient with winter. It's been cold enough for long enough: now I want a little warmth and sunshine. Alas, the forecast for this week holds little of either.
Valentine's Day being over, the grocery stores have rolled out their Easter candy: Cadbury Creme Eggs, very tasty. (Also those ghastly sugar-coated styrofoam bird things, which I refuse to eat.) I picked up a box at the grocery store this afternoon, and forgot about them until just now.
One of them will be my bedtime snack.
(Also at the grocery store: Lime Coke. Lime? Whose idea was that? I bought a bottle, couldn't taste any difference from regular Coke.)
Various reasons:
With CityDesk, I have to be sitting at nessus to post new entries. I can write entries elsewhere, mail them home, then copy & paste from Outlook to CityDesk; that's how most of the daybook has been written over the last few years. It's awkward, and I hate the time delay. With Movable Type, I can blather from anywhere there's a web browser, and it shows up immediately.
With Movable Type, the loyal readership can leave comments. (I trust they will use this power responsibly.)
I still want the full-featured wikilog thingy, but have (finally) accepted that neither buying a commercial product, nor downloading a freeware version, nor even writing one myself, is likely to happen any time soon.
So here we are. It looks a little different than the old daybook, and it works a little differently, but give it a chance.
Much grumbling & unhappiness from my mother about the new daybook.
Sorry, Mom.
I've decided: Movable Type is good enough. All new material will be posted here.
Jacob is still sick, still home. He's not acting very sick, but every afternoon his temperature shoots up to 100° or 101°. Poor little guy.
Whatever illness he's got (and I've got), everybody else in town also has. Doctors are very busy.
Cold this morning: 24°.
Still experimenting with MovableType. Last night's project: a CityDesk template to produce the MovableType import format. After a few iterations, CityDesk was producing something that MovableType would accept; but I seem to have dropped a delimiter somewhere, as all the imported entries end with a row of dashes.
I need to figure out how to tell MovableType that the imported entries have no title. The importer generates a title from the first few words of the entry, which I do not want.
Even so, I still think the Daybook will be migrating soon. Perhaps I should start writing new entries there, and deal with migration issues later?
Jennifer reports that Jacob's temperature stayed down all day, so tomorrow it's back to daycare for Mr. Jake.
Another day at home with Jake. He's still running a bit of a fever. (So am I, for that matter.)
Yesterday was a pretty nice day: high 62°, sunny, etc. Jake & I missed it, alas, being inside with our colds; and the temperature this morning is a mere 30°.
Winter's not over yet.
Microsoft announced Internet Explorer 7 the other day. People immediately started asking whether IE7 would fix all the problems that IE6 has (broken CSS support, minimal PNG support, etc.).
The 'softies did not respond. Instead, they promised that IE7 would be even more secure than IE6. Well, yes, it needs that too; but PNG transparency would be nice…
Feeding more CDs to iTunes. Today's list: 20 Golden Crates by the Macc Ladds, followed by the Fresh Aire series from Mannheim Steamroller.
“To warn you, we tried. Listen, you did not. Now screwed we all will be.” —Episode III: A Lost Hope.
Jake & I feel better today, but we're staying home anyway due to the 24-hour no-fever rule imposed by the daycare ladies.
I imagine I'll spend the day feeding CDs to iTunes.
A conversation with Jacob:
I'm tired.
You're tired?
I'm tired of doing laundry.
As are we all, son. As are we all.
I didn't know this:
Robert E. Lee was born on January 19, 1807, so certain southern states—Arkansas, Mississippi, and perhaps others—have decided to combine the state holiday Robert E. Lee Day with the federal holiday Martin Luther King Day.
That just seems rude. Strange that I haven't seen anything in the newspapers about it.
As predicted, CNN is running their own I was fired for blogging article. They trot out the same four examples as all the other stories, too:
Of all the hundreds of thousands of people with jobs and web sites, they could find only four who got sacked for something they wrote about the former on the latter?
Why is this news?
Valentine's Day, and we are all sick: I've got a bit of a fever (100.3° last night) and a nasty cough; Jennifer's got the same cough; and Jacob's been sent home from daycare with an as yet unidentified illness.
They're fighting off germs in Arlington Heights and Normal, too. It's just been a bad winter all around.
There's a big orange splat on my office window, as if somebody spat a mouthful of Orange Nehi against the glass. But it's on the outside, six stories off the ground.
It doesn't look like the result of an Avian Colonic Event. But what is it?
Jake has a bit of a fever, but no other symptoms. He's certainly not acting very sick. Me, I have a bit more of a fever (101 point something-or-other), and am feeling generally miserable.
Jake & I are staying home tomorrow. Perhaps by Wednesday we'll all feel better.
Cool web site: the Baby Name Wizard's Name Voyager (http://babynamewizard.com/namevoyager/lnv0105.html). Type a name, see its popularity rise and fall over time.
Numbers:
Time to load up on Nyquil and go to bed.
Rain today. Better than snow, I suppose.
Jim Mischel (a friend of Jeff Duntemann) is also looking for something to replace CityDesk (see his January 18 entry). He mentions ExpressionEngine, which I hadn't heard of before, and which looked very interesting—until I saw the price: $150.
No, thanks.
It looks like I'll be switching to Movable Type, one of these days. I just need to figure out how to migrate the existing daybook entries (however many hundreds of them there might be). It took me several months of off & on effort to finish the FrontPage to CityDesk migration; let us hope CityDesk to Movable Type will be easier.
Managed to install Movable Type last night. (The instructions could use just a little work: at no point in the process do they give an explicit list of which files go where. You just have to figure it out.) I've been messing with it a bit today.
It looks nice, actually. I'm a bit surprised.
It might even be possible to import the Daybook, though it would require considerable foolery to coax CityDesk into generating the appropriate format.
Sunny today, and relatively warm: 37°.
The newsdroids have picked up on the I was fired for blogging story. MSNBC has an article; can CNN be far behind?
On the other hand, way back in 1998 Jamie Zawinski posted on his web site an essay titled, my employer can [censored] me, and nothing particularly bad happened to him.
(http://people.netscape.com/ still exists, and still has a few links. But it's a ghost site.)
More from the phrases you don't want in newspaper articles written about you file: MSNBC reports:
A Texas woman indicted last month for allegedly giving her husband a lethal sherry enema said he was an enema addict who did it to himself, a newspaper reported Thursday.
(Dumb question—why sherry? Normal wine-snob considerations like bouquet, flavor, etc., couldn't have mattered much; why not just go with straight-up grain alcohol?)
Alas, Jack Chalker has died.
I feel a little guilty now for trashing Shadow of the Well of Souls, two years ago (June 21, 2003).
Hm…I grumbled about Gordon R. Dickson's The Forever Man in 2000, and he died in 2001. Perhaps my negative reviews have a subtle yet nefarious power over famous writers.
A bit more snow overnight, and a little bit of ice on the more sheltered roads. It's supposed to warm up this weekend, which will be nice.
The McDonald's next to WRI now accepts credit cards. One wonders what took them so long. On the other hand, I no longer need cash to buy McBurgers.
I'm doomed.
Downloaded the latest version of Movable Type (3.1.5, I think) yesterday: I think I'll give it another try. The thirteen-page installation instructions don't seem quite so outrageous any more.
I've got to get out from under CityDesk. Publishing the site takes forever. And CityDesk has been abandoned by Fog Creek: no new versions, which means creeping incompatibilities. At some point, Windows will mutate sufficiently that CityDesk won't run on it any more. Best to find an alternative before that happens…
Jennifer's at a quilt guild meeting tonight, so Jake & I have the house to ourselves.
A bit of snow overnight: half an inch, or less. The roads were pretty clear on the way to work.
Lots of web-site chatter about Mark Jen, former Google employee. After an impressive display of bad judgment his first week on the job (complaining about his compensation package, dropping hints about company financials before their official release), it seemed that he'd managed to patch things up; but it was not so: two days after saying Google was pretty cool about all this he was sacked.
Perhaps in his next job, he will be more aware of the consequences of annoying his boss.
Most of these I was fired for blogging stories are really I was fired for doing something dumb that annoyed my boss stories. Such as the flight attendant who posed for (mildly) racy pictures—in uniform, on board a company airplane.
How about a little judgment, people?
Ever since we pulled the plug on Netcom…er, MindSpring…er, EarthLink…mail at home has been blissfully free of spam. The vermin found the patrick-rice.net domain shortly after I created it, and for a year or two I was getting five or ten spam messages every week. Then I changed the default mail handling to discard anything not sent to an actual mailbox. Goodbye, spam.
Alas, I still get spam at work: I posted to too many newsgroups, back in the '90s.
Research night at the library: I looked up Ida & Oscar Saltzman, and Benjamin & Josephine Sturm, in various censuses.
There was considerable intermarriage between the Alldredge and Sturm families; but I can't prove any connection between James Clinton Sturm (who married Arrena Alldredge) and any of the other Sturms who married Alldredges.
It's rather frustrating.
Cold this morning. The fog is gone, leaving rather thick overcast. Weatherdroids are calling for snow tonight.
Interesting: the Kentucky Offender Online Lookup (aka KOOL, just like the cigarette), http://www.corrections.ky.gov/kool.htm.
Seems like most states are putting their offender databases online. Good for snooping & schadenfreude, bad if you're trying to put your criminal past behind you…
(There's also http://jail.lfucg.com/services/offenders/, which is an offender database from the Division of Community Corrections, Lexington, Kentucky.)
MSNBC reports:
A Welsh rugby fan cut off his own testicles to celebrate Wales' beating England at rugby, the Daily Mirror reported Tuesday.
Um…celebrate? I don't suppose any Super Bowl fans celebrated when the game was over. (I certainly hope not.)
Jennifer pointed out the other day that Jacob's little sister (or brother—we don't know yet) doesn't have a page here.
So I have created one: the Code Name 'Emily' page. Not much there yet, but then she won't be born for another six months.
Rain this morning, fog this afternoon—quite thick, but not enough to interfere seriously with the drive home from work.
The snow has all melted, alas.
A curious thing:
Importing a CD into iTunes doesn't slow down nessus very much: I can blather away in CityDesk, or read web pages, or whatever, and everything is fine. The one exception is that launching programs takes a long time, ten or fifteen seconds (or more). If iTunes is running, but not importing a CD, programs come right up.
I suspect the Microsoft AntiSpyware beta is behind this. It has hooks into all sorts of system events, including program launches, so it can intercept spyware. If it's running on the same CPU as iTunes, and if neither of them is flexible enough to switch to the other CPU, that could produce the behavior I'm seeing.
Tried very hard all day to avoid finding out who won yesterday's football game; alas, at 9:35pm I stumbled across some post-game commentary from Ceej and my blissful ignorance was at an end.
Further proof of my total lack of involvement with football: in 1996, the Houston Oilers moved to Tennessee; in 1999, they changed their name to the Tennessee Titans. In 2002, Houston got a new team, the Texans. And I didn't know any of this until I looked it up on http://www.nfl.com/ just now.
I thought the Titans were a team in some Denzel Washington movie, and I thought the Oilers were still in Houston. I'm so out of touch.
The Super Bowl is today. I'm sure there are two football teams involved, somewhere beneath the hype & frenzy, but I couldn't tell you which two if my life depended on it.
I just don't care about football.
Though I did notice that the Super Bowl has mysteriously crept into February. Sometime when I wasn't paying attention, the football season got two or three weeks longer. More time for hype & frenzy, I suppose.
This is also one of those nights when the rest of the world is laughing at us. The Super Bowl is supposedly the world championship of football, but all the teams are from the United States. And outside the U.S., ‘football’ refers to a very different game.
The good news is that beginning tomorrow we have six months or so of no football.
A sample of the stilted, bizarre language in The Worm Ouroboros, by E. R. Eddison:
But the Lord Goldry Bluszco when he was come to his senses and had gotten him up from that great fall, spake to the Red Foliot in mickle wrath, saying, “This devil hath overcome me by craft, doing that which it is a shame to do, in that he clawed me with his fingers up my nose.”
After sixteen days of effort (interrupted by a five-day break to read Ringworld's Children), I have reached page 45 of The Worm Ouroboros. I think it's time to find another book.
Another iTunes purchase: Rhapsody in Blue, by George Gershwin. I'm sure the credit card people are getting annoyed by the steady stream of 99¢ charges; perhaps I should switch to the debit card.
Jake, watching Saturday morning cartoons from his throne:
A Throne of Cushions
He has a lot of fun with those cushions…
Warm today: mid-fifties, or so. The snow is melting rapidly.
Off to the Children's Discovery Museum in Bloomington, to meet Natalie & Ryan (not to mention Amy, Norm and Barb). I carried the camera around for two hours, but only took a handful of pictures (and not very good ones, either).
Somehow I got the idea that today's high temperature would be close to 50°. So I wore shorts today, instead of the (overwarm, undercomfortable) long pants; and dressed Jacob in his Door County jacket, instead of his winter coat.
As of noon, the temperature is 38°. Oops.
Once upon a time, there was a 'softie named Philip Su. Last June, he started a weblog at http://blogs.msdn.com/philipsu/. His July 1st post, Show Me the Money, dished some dirt on the history of Microsoft Money, and as a result got considerable attention.
He wrote a third entry, on July 2nd; a fourth, on July 24th; and nothing since. Four posts in thirty days, then silence.
Reading up on Python, since the imaginary wikilog project (which exists largely in my mind, as opposed to in source files on the computer anywhere) is now (going to be) in Python.
My thoughts on the wikilog project waver between two extremes:
Just now, I'm leaning toward the former.
Had a dream last night, in which I had a Mac mini: I disassembled it, then put it back together—only there was a part left over, some kind of flat orange plastic thing that seemed pretty important.
Oh no, I've ruined my Mac mini, I thought.
I told Jennifer about my dream, and she was amused by my geekiness.
Good news from MSNBC:
An NHL team owner who asked for anonymity said the league is expected to cancel the season either Thursday or Friday….
Let us hope that basketball and baseball follow hockey's lead, and we can enjoy a spring & summer of peace & quiet.
President Bush is on the road for a few days, talking up his plan to save Social Security. He's not going to raise taxes, or reduce benefits: instead, people now in their twenties & thirties will have to wait even longer to retire, and will get less money when they do. But that's not a reduction in benefits!
He's also pushing for partial privatization of Social Security. Under the current system, the government takes your money and gives it to people who have already retired; but under the privatization scheme proposed by the President, the government takes your money, gives most of it to people who have already retired, then invests the remainder in a private account. (Having one of these private accounts will sharply reduce your eligibility for traditional Social Security benefits.) When you retire, the government will take most of the money from your private account and give it to other retirees. You'll get to keep what's left, which will not make up for the Social Security benefits you lost by having the private account.
That will save Social Security, in much the same way as all those (apocryphal?) villages in Viet Nam were saved…
NOAA reports 36° as of 1:00pm. Perhaps the sump pump has thawed out.
[It did.]
Pitcairn Island, 4½ square kilometers of volcanic rock halfway between New Zealand and Peru, population 46 (which works out to 9¾ hectares each), has not one but two web sites: the Pitcairn Islands Office (http://www.government.pn/), which is apparently all the government they need; and the Pitcairn Island site (http://www.lareau.org/pitc.html).
[Correction: the latter is apparently run by a fella in Minnesota.]
The Notes For Visitors page isn't very welcoming. I would paraphrase it as follows:
Even so, if I had the leisure time and disposable income for it, I'd love to spend a month on Pitcairn Island.
The island newspaper, the Pitcairn Miscellany, has its own web site: http://www.miscellany.pn/. (Great name for a newspaper, I must say.) Alas, one must subscribe ($10/year) to get the news from Pitcairn Island.
Useful web site: http://www.metric-conversions.org/. Wondering how many square inches in a hectare? Now you can find out!
The Carmi Times (http://www.carmitimes.com/) reports today that Toni M. Finchem and Ricky Burris were involved in a car vs. truck accident Wednesday afternoon, in Carmi. No injuries; they didn't even have to call for a tow truck. (So ‘accident’ might be an overly grand word for what happened.)
I'm just guessing, but I believe that this Ricky Burris is the son of Gilbert Burris, who was the brother of Fred Burris, who married my grandmother, Vina Sturm, on February 1st, 1936 (which marriage was annulled shortly thereafter).
Small world, or something.
Thinking about backup options for nessus. Five years ago, when I was assembling nessus, the plan was to back up files to the cd burner: a 650MB CD-R seemed luxurious compared to the 100MB Zip disks I was using.
But these days we have gigabytes of digital camera pictures, and even more gigabytes of iTunes music; it would take an entire spindle of CD-Rs to back that up, not to mention the time it would take to shuffle all those blanks in & out of the burner.
A better option would be something like the Maxtor OneTouch, which is a 160GB external disk that plugs into the FireWire port. Backing up one disk to another just seems more sensible. And only $190, too.
Problems re-importing George Harrison's Cloud Nine into iTunes: “An unknown error occurred (0x77686174).” Well, that's certainly helpful.
Alas, it's late (10:05pm). I'll have to try again tomorrow.
[I tried a few more times, and finally it worked.]
Stayed up much too late last night, reading Ringworld's Children, hence rather sleepy today.
Ringworld's Children is a quick read, but a little frustrating. There's a lot of action, but not much plot (i.e., why the action is happening, and why it matters). I'm left with the suspicion that the author is keeping secrets from me.
With 28 pages left to go, the story doesn't seem to be converging toward any particular resolution. But perhaps Mr. Niven will surprise me.
Some time ago, I mentioned to Jennifer that I had watched Super Chicken cartoons when I was young. Jennifer said she'd never heard of Super Chicken, and she was skeptical that such a thing had ever existed.
Lucky for me, http://www.toonopedia.com/ has a Super Chicken page full of useful information (and a picture, too!).
(Also there: Tooter Turtle. Quite a nostalgia trip, is Toonopedia…)
The President and Congress want to throw money at the next of kin of soldiers who die in Iraq: CNN says:
A tax-free “death gratuity,” now $12,420, would grow to $100,000. The government would also pay for $150,000 in life insurance for troops. Veterans groups and many in Congress have been pushing for such increases.
It's to be made retroactive to October, 2001.
I'm cynical enough not to believe the reasons they give for doing this, but can't figure out what they're really up to. Trying to boost morale and encourage re-enlistment, perhaps.
The sump pump is frozen again. This is very annoying.
Finished reading Ringworld's Children, by Larry Niven. He went for the big finish, but didn't quite make it.
And if you've read the various essays, forewords, afterwords, Author's Notes, etc., etc., in which Niven mentions the Ringworld and all the clever ideas sent in by the loyal readership, then you already know everything that's going to happen in Ringworld's Children.
