A recent exchange:
Me: "I'm eating the last Oreo."
Jennifer: "I only ate four of those, you know."
Well, that just means I didn't eat the entire bag of Oreos all by myself, right?
March 2005 Archives
Currently importing the Frank Zappa album Uncle Meat into iTunes. It's taking a long time - over an hour just for disc 1. (This means disc 2 will have to wait until tomorrow.)
All the Zappa albums are taking unusually long to import. Very strange.
I made a few minor changes to my web site - mainly, I deleted some pages that were old, hard to find & quite lacking in useful content - then told CityDesk to publish the updates. Inexplicably it decided to upload the entire site. Even with DSL this takes a while.
What changed? Who knows - maybe I touched a template or something, a month ago, and forgot about it.
Jake doesn't read the Daybook (not yet, anyway) so it's safe to mention that the back of Mr. Explorer is at present completely occupied by one of these:
It would be fun to get it assembled & set up in the back yard in time for his birthday tomorrow, but that doesn't seem very likely.
Yesterday's splendid weather has given way to something considerably less springlike: NOAA reports that the current temperature is 46°, winds from the west at 26mph.
(Never did rain very much yesterday, or overnight, but we did get some lightning & thunder.)
NOAA reports 72°, but the radar shows a broken line of thunderstorms extending south from Galesburg. Presumably they are heading east.
My umbrella is at home, alas.
Jacob requested a piece of toast for breakfast this morning, so I gave him one.
You didn't put any butter on it!
Yes I did, it's right there.
There's no butter!
Yes, there is.
No!
After a while, he settled down and ate it.
Sunny & warm, but a bit windy. Weatherdroids warn that severe weather may pass through later today.
Currently importing the first Yes album (unimaginatively titled "Yes"). Only thirty-six albums left to import (of which five are already in iTunes).
iTunes has been really pushing the new Moby album, Hotel, since it was released last week. I was tempted to buy it, because the sampler sounded really good and I'm too lazy to go to Borders (or Best Buy or wherever) to buy CDs.
But the reviews kept referring to it as a two-disc set, which confused me a little: iTunes lists only fourteen tracks (plus a bonus track), with a running time nowhere near the two-disc range.
It turns out that iTunes is offering only the first disc. If you want the second disc, too bad. (Or go to Borders and pay for disc 1 a second time, since you can be sure that disc 2 is not available separately.)
I'll probably buy Hotel, one of these days - but not from iTunes.
NOAA reports that the current temperature is 70°, which is the first time this year it's been so warm.
I must go outside and enjoy the weather a little.
Sputnik recorded a high of 65° this afternoon, but there was still a bit of post-winter chill in the air. (Maybe the ground still needs to warm up a bit?)
Jennifer, Jacob & I went for a walk this evening, just up and down the block. We have big plans for walking this spring, whenever the weather's good enough for it.
The iTunes re-importation project is up to Quadrophenia by the Who. There are eight albums left to convert, and thirty-two that aren't in iTunes yet but need to be. (Most of those are Frank Zappa albums, which will make the song-shuffle function a bit dangerous.)
I thought the iTunes project would take all year. Looks like I'll be done next week sometime.
Nice day: sunny, high of 62°, etc., etc.
Calculations - ok, a web site I found with Google - indicate that Jacob's 17th birthday will fall on Easter. His 28th and 39th birthdays will also be on Easter, but after 2040, there's a bit of a gap: the next April 1st Easter isn't until 2108.
iTunes uses the GraceNote CD database (http://www.gracenote.com/) to look up information about CDs (track names, etc.). It works fairly well, except for one Pink Floyd song that the GraceNote data-entry folks just can't seem to get right.
Twice now - first with The Final Cut, and now with In the Flesh - GraceNote has offered Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Dessert as one of the track names. Now, I don't doubt that Roger Waters could write a good song about desserts (George Harrison did), but that's not what this one is about.
No, it's Get Your Filthy Hands Off My Desert.
Just back from Easter dinner at the grandparents' house in Normal; Amy, Natalie & Ryan were there also. There was much chaos.
No pictures, though: the camera stayed at home.
Temperature 48°, occasional sunshine. Too bad I haven't been outside since I brought the newspaper in (around 8:00am, that was).
When Jacob woke up this morning, he discovered that the Easter Bunny had hidden eggs - full of candy - all over the house. There was even one up on the ceiling fan. He had fun finding them all.
There was also a Spider-Man car, apparently inspired by our alternate lyrics to the Spider-Man song:
Spider-Man,
Spider-Man,
Drives around in his Spider-Van
It's very noisy, and doesn't run so well on the carpeting, but Jake really likes it.
Finished - around 11:30 last night - reading Touching the Void, by Joe Simpson. An interesting book: two young spuds, ill-equipped, ill-prepared, tackle considerably more mountain than they can handle; disaster follows.
(Mr. Simpson's web site is also a disaster: it's all Flash, and doesn't work very well.)
Gave in to temptation, and bought a one-week pass to the Carmi Times archives. (Only $10.) They have quite a few obituaries that are too recent to be on microfilm in Springfield; I have copied as many as I could find: Gillihan, Felty, Maurer, Sturm, etc., etc.
I have six more days to think of more names to feed their search engine.
This morning, Jacob & I went to the Easter egg hunt at Hessel Park. It didn't go well.
For one thing, there were about ten times as many people there as I had expected, and about one-tenth as many eggs. For another, the hunt started at the stroke of 10:00am, and all eggs were found by 10:03am. We did not arrive until 10:05am (having had problems finding a place to park), so all we got to do was join the huge crowds milling around in the mud.
Fortunately, we met Larry from work, who was there with his wife & two little girls; they shared some eggs with Jake, so he didn't have to leave empty-handed.
Memo to self: next year, show up early.
I keep getting credit-card offers in the mail where the envelope has a pre-printed rectangular smudge on the front: as if there were a real credit card inside, revealed by clumsy Postal Service handling.
Just how stupid do these people think I am? (And if they think I'm that stupid, should they be offering me a credit card?)
The fake smudge, and the Wilmington DE return address, were dead giveaways. I tore it in half, and threw it away.
Item first: this month, the bank sent me two identical statements for my checking account. One wonders why they did this.
Item second: we sent a check to Unicef, back in January, to help the tsunami victims; it hasn't cleared yet. What, they don't want our money?
Item third: this month's bank statement for the joint checking account revealed numerous data-entry errors (committed by me); correcting these increased our balance by a tidy sum. Oops.
MSNBC reports that Russell Stover Candies is selling chocolate crosses for Easter.
They decided not to include a tiny chocolate Jesus, though: someone might have been offended.
Some fella decided to honor the day by dressing up like Jesus - though the jeans & sneakers peeking out from under the robe ruined the effect - and dragging a large wooden cross around town. I saw him and his two (likewise half-costumed) friends near Windsor & Mattis on the way to my dentist appointment this morning, then again later as they trudged past Jarling's.
No, they didn't stop for custard.
Had my semiannual cleaning & checkup this morning; for the first time in several years, Mr. Dentist didn't find anything in need of major (i.e., expensive) repairs. Total cost: $5.86.
They taunted me for not flossing. I promised to do better.
How to ruin a motel clerk's morning: as you hand him the room key, tell him, "Sure is a lot of water on the floor in there. I don't know where it came from. Yeah, the carpet's soaked."
That's what I did yesterday.
The White County Historical Society has a picture of the Carmi Motel, taken in happier times. (It's about ¾ down the page.) "It hasn't changed much at all," they say.
Those Historical Society ladies, they have a wicked sense of humor.
Jennifer and I have been wondering when the next Eco-Challenge will be broadcast.
The USA Network site hasn't been updated since last year's event (which was held in New Zealand), and http://www.ecochallenge.com/ just says, "Sorry, this site is temporarily unavailable. Please check back later."
Has the Eco-Challenge fallen victim to the current glut of reality television?
I was in Carmi on Tuesday & Wednesday, poring over dusty old courthouse records in search of birth certificates for all twelve of Jacob Maurer's children. I found...three. Of the other nine I found no trace at all. Either they weren't born in White County (which seems unlikely), or Jacob Maurer didn't report their births to the county clerk.
Of the three birth records I did find, only one has a name on it: Mary Ann Maurer (aka "Mollie", who married Everett Gillihan). There's one that seems to match John Maurer, but has no name. And the third one doesn't match anybody. It might be George Maurer, who died young, but there's no telling.
Perhaps the librarians have some ideas on how to proceed: I'm stuck.
Apparently the equinox was yesterday morning at 6:33am CST. But the current temperature is 38°, which doesn't sound very vernal to me.
(Incidentally, the equinox is the point in time at which the center of the sun's disc crosses the celestial equator. It has very little to do with the length of the day. In fact, since sunrise and sunset occur when the top edge of the sun's disc crosses the horizon, and both are adjusted for atmospheric refraction, daytime reaches twelve hours some days prior to the equinox.)
The pictures I take these days are all digital, since my Nikon N8008 died two Christmases ago, but I still have twenty years of negatives in the closet (which is probably not the best place to keep them). Most of the good prints are in various photo albums, but many are not. It would be good to have digital copies of everything, but scanning so many hundreds of pictures just doesn't sound like fun.
The local one-hour photo place can make photo CDs; perhaps they can scan my negatives for me. It shouldn't cost much - no developing, no printing. Hm...must ask, next time I'm in the one-hour photo place.
We have food in the house once more, thanks to a pair of shopping trips: Jacob & I went to Sam's Club, for a few bulk purchases (none of which, as it turned out, were actually on the shopping list); and Jennifer went to the regular store for everything else.
Jacob is watching The Lion King on the Disney Channel. Jennifer is in the other room, reading a book. Lasagna is baking in the oven for dinner. I am puttering away on the computer, feeding CDs to iTunes.
The re-importation project has reached Andy Stewart, though I skipped two Al (no relation) Stewart albums and will have to go back for them later. iTunes reports 498 songs still at 192kbps.
Cold today, and cloudy. Not to mention windy. The air is full of moisture, but the forecast holds neither snow nor rain. Mysterious.
Today's adventure: a trip to Lincoln Square for the model-railroad show. Jake liked watching the trains, especially the really big ones that ran on the floor. The tiny ones on tables weren't so interesting: too small, maybe.
(On March 31, 2001, Jennifer and I planned to have lunch at the Original House of Pancakes, then see the model-railroad show; but Jacob decided it was time to be born, so we ended up in the hospital instead.)
Currently feeding Cat Stevens albums to iTunes. (My copy of Tea for the Tillerman has a huge scratch, from the center of the disc all the way to the rim. Fortunately it does not affect playback.) Only 652 songs left to convert; the re-importation project, which was supposed to take all year, should be finished by mid-April.
Places I've been, places I've lived, where I live now:
United States:
Alabama / Alaska / Arizona / Arkansas / California / Colorado / Connecticut / Delaware / Florida / Georgia / Hawaii / Idaho / Illinois / Indiana / Iowa / Kansas / Kentucky / Louisiana / Maine / Maryland / Massachusetts / Michigan / Minnesota / Mississippi / Missouri / Montana / Nebraska / Nevada / New Hampshire / New Jersey / New Mexico / New York / North Carolina / North Dakota / Ohio / Oklahoma / Oregon / Pennsylvania / Rhode Island / South Carolina / South Dakota / Tennessee / Texas / Utah / Vermont / Virginia / Washington / West Virginia / Wisconsin / Wyoming / Washington D.C.
Canada:
Alberta / British Columbia / Manitoba / New Brunswick / Newfoundland / Nova Scotia / Northwest Territories / Nunavut / Ontario / Prince Edward Island / Quebec / Saskatchewan / Yukon
I'm not much of a world traveller, I'm afraid.
Today is the 80th anniversary of the infamous Tri-State Tornado, which killed 695 people across Missouri, Illinois and Indiana. Among the dead were various relatives:
- Barbara Ellen Felty, my great-grandmother;
- Versa E. Felty, Barbara's sister;
- Harold Edward Warthen, Versa's son;
- Wilburn Felty, son of Isaac N. Felty (brother of Barbara & Versa) and Lillie Maurer (sister of my great-grandfather Harry Maurer).
I never knew about the tornado until I was researching Barbara Felty, a few years ago. (You might think a killer tornado would be something families would talk about & remember; not the Maurers, it seems.)
NOAA says 59° at 11:00am. Why am I indoors on a day like this?
Tomorrow morning, a lot of people will be nursing hangovers. Myself, I seem to have one already, which strikes me as just a little unfair: my most recent episode of drinking to excess was nearly twenty years ago.
No, I'm not wearing anything green today. I don't have anything green.
Another familiar name in the Carmi Times obituaries: Beulah A. Chastain, widow of Robert Samuel Chastain, who was briefly married to Dorothy Jane Dean, my great-grandmother.
I don't suppose that makes her any particular relation to me.
The Forgotten English calendar tells me that on this day in 1830, the New York Stock Exchange recorded its lowest trading volume ever: exactly thirty-one shares bought & sold.
Sometimes I wonder why the various stock exchanges still run trading floors: huge rooms crammed with people in color-coded jackets, waving scraps of paper and shouting at each other. It seems so primitive. The stock markets are already 99% computerized - how else could they move two billion shares in a single day? - so why not finish the job?
I suppose having brokers scattered around the country, pecking away at computer keyboards, wouldn't be quite so dramatic as the current spectacle.
40° just now, with lots of sunshine & a forecast high somewhere above 50°.
I almost played hooky from work for a genealogy research trip to Carmi, but decided against it. Maybe I'll put in a proper PTO request for some day next week, and go then. (But will the weather be as nice?)
Last night, I watched a documentary (on the National Geographic Channel) about the sinking of the yacht Trashman, which went down in a storm off North Carolina in 1982. Of the five crew, only two survived. (Mostly by sheer dumb luck, according to the documentary, which pointed out every mistake they made during their ordeal & explained what they should have done instead.)
Turns out one of the survivors, Deborah Scaling Kiley, wrote a book about it: Albatross: The True Story of a Woman's Survival at Sea, only $19 from Amazon.com. But the Library Journal review contained this sentence:
However, the author's overall insights are not especially perceptive.
One can almost hear the fssss of Ms. Kiley's deflating self-esteem.
(It seems Ms. Kiley wrote two books about her experience, the other one being Untamed Seas: One Woman's True Story of Shipwreck and Survival, also available from Amazon.com. That seems like one book too many, unless the second was just a reissue with a new title.)
- There's such a thing as a Dual Disc: one side's a CD, the other's a DVD.
- Bruce Springsteen has a new album, Devils & Dust, to be released on April 26.
- Devils & Dust will be available only in the Dual Disc format.
So long as iTunes can read it, I don't care - though I am a little worried about what effect all that DVD foolery on side 2 is going to have on the price.
NOAA says 44° as of 4:00pm, and there's lots of sunshine.
(This is the time of year when people who live west of their jobs are unhappy: sunshine in their eyes driving to work in the morning, sunshine in their eyes driving home in the evening. I have sunglasses; they're at home. Oops.)
The White County Historical Society used to publish a column in the Carmi Times; these are archived on the Society web site. The last column includes this paragraph:
Recent developments at the library have convinced me that it's time for me to leave. Janet Armstrong is quitting, also, and the librarian has resigned. Now, if I may borrow a phrase from Ray Mitchell, "'Nuff Said."
The librarian and half the staff all quit in the same month, and nobody's saying why? How frustrating....
Their story: nobody told them that we'd disconnected the second phone line, so they kept right on charging us for long-distance service provided thereto. (Which makes me wonder whether somebody's been getting free long distance for the last four months.)
The nice customer service lady kept me on hold for fifteen minutes, but managed to clear the $6.38 charge and close out our account.
(But AT&T has been bought by SBC, so maybe we haven't seen the last of them after all.)
The Internet Explorer team recently said:
Given the strong usage of IE in the corporate space as well as embedded in applications, we have a strong requirement for backwards compatibility with our previous behavior, compliant or not....
On the other hand, the Visual Basic team broke compatibility in Visual Basic .NET so severely that users of Visual Basic 6.0 are circulating a petition, asking Microsoft to continue support for VB6.
Sometimes the 'softies believe in backwards compatibility, sometimes they don't.
Supposedly, http://www.godfrey.org/ has a sizable newspaper collection, online & searchable: over 400 newspapers, over twelve million pages. Only $35/year for full access.
But they won't tell you which newspapers they have until you've paid. And no refunds if you're not happy with the selection.
Given that they're in Connecticut, I doubt that they'd bother with newspapers from White County, Illinois. So they shouldn't expect a check from me in their mailbox any time soon.
Two scenarios:
- I walk over to the IGA to get lunch from the salad bar. I pay with my debit card. By the time I get back to my desk - fifteen minutes, tops - the charge has appeared in my online-banking account.
- I put $700 in car repairs on my credit card. Four days later, the charge still has not appeared in the credit card company's online account-management system.
Why the difference? Are the credit card people really so inefficient, or is there something here I don't understand?
If you enter the MSNBC site through the front door (i.e., http://www.msnbc.com/), the web browser's Back button works fine. But if you come in via a link to a specific article (say, Steven Levy's recent opinion piece complaining that too many white people have web sites & that this is preventing people who aren't white from having web sites of their own), they mess around with page redirects to poison the browser history stack: hit the Back button, and nothing happens.
I suppose they feel very clever for having come up with this.
35°, a bit of clouds drifting eastward. There's a bad smell in the air outside, as if somebody upwind is burning garbage.
Very sleepy this morning.
Finished reading Scatterbrain by Larry Niven.
It's a curious book, equal parts fiction & non-fiction. But the fiction was almost entirely taken from other recent Niven anthologies, and the non-fiction was mostly very short pieces: introductions to other people's short stories, remarks from this or that science-fiction convention, that sort of thing. Toward the end, I got the impression that random chunks of text were being thrown in to meet some page-count target.
Not that any of the writing in the book was bad. It just seemed that not much thought went into assembling the pieces.
The nice people at Carmi - White County High School have put some of their older yearbooks online. The 1956 yearbook contains a picture of Clyde Edwin Maurer, son of Raymond Maurer. Raymond was the son of Jacob Maurer, Jr., which makes Clyde my second cousin once removed (according to the PAF relationship calculator).
Next to Clyde is Allen Keith Maurer, which is a bit of a puzzle. I assume he's related, but I have no idea how. (He's not my late Uncle Keith, that much is certain.)
Vince pointed me at a New Yorker article on SUVs:
According to [author Keith] Bradsher, internal industry market research concluded that S.U.V.s tend to be bought by people who are insecure, vain, self-centered, and self-absorbed, who are frequently nervous about their marriages, and who lack confidence in their driving skills.
Who am I to argue with industry market research?
Though I seem to recall that when Mr. Mustang - my very first car - was due for retirement, back in 1990, I almost bought another Mustang: go with what you know, etc. But I was harboring a secret desire to drive to Alaska, and a Mustang didn't seem the right kind of car for a trip of that magnitude. So I went with Mr. Blazer, who served me well for eight years (then fell apart all at once, like the Bluesmobile).
I never made it to Alaska, but Leland & I did visit Yellowknife in 1993.
I went to http://www.openflow.it/ and read:
OpenFlow is a workflow engine developped by Icube and released as free software. It is based on an object oriented structure, it has a powerful exception handling system and it supports dynamic redesign. These features make OpenFlow much more flexible than other existing workflow engines. OpenFlow supports the open standards (XML/XML-RPC) and the web standards; it facilitates integration between heterogeneous systems thanks to simple access to most of relational databases.
Well, yes, but what does it do?
If an envelope has IMPORTANT MATERIAL - DO NOT DISCARD printed on the front, it's junk mail. Throw it away.
If an envelope has POSTMASTER: HANDLE IN ACCORDANCE WITH POSTAL REGULATION blah-blah-blah printed on it, it's junk mail. Throw it away. (Which is probably what the postal regulation says to do with it.)
If the address is printed in some font that's supposed to look like handwriting, it's junk mail. Throw it away.
If the return address is Wilmington, Delaware, it's a credit-card offer. Tear it in half, then throw it away.
Stayed up too late last night, but finished reading The Runes of the Earth by Stephen R. Donaldson.
It's a good read, and a complex story. There are familiar characters, familiar places, but all changed by time. Even Lord Foul doesn't seem quite so nasty any more. (He didn't call anybody groveler this time, which seems out of character.)
But things haven't changed enough. The seven Covenant books cover approximately seven thousand years of the Land's history - but in all that time, Mithil Stowndown hasn't changed. It's still there, still a tiny village. The language hasn't evolved, the climate hasn't changed, there's been no development of technology (or even of magic).
Supposedly, there are three more books in the series. It will be interesting to see where Donaldson takes his story.
The Drudge Report is still online, still active - but never seems to be quoted by the news media any more. If memory serves, it's been years since the Drudge Report scooped everyone else with a big story.
I don't know what that means. Maybe I'm just not paying attention.
My login at the AT&T Customer Center web site mysteriously remains active, even though we transferred our long-distance service to SBC last November. The Account Summary page says two things:
- Current Amount Due: $6.38
- Our records indicate that you are not currently an AT&T customer.
If I'm not a customer, why do you think I owe you $6.38? Is it because you're a bunch of morons?
I knew there was a reason I stopped drinking coffee & went back to tea: MSNBC reports that
Procter & Gamble Co. on Friday increased the retail price of its Folgers ground coffee by 12 percent because of sustained increases in the cost of green coffee beans.
Snow outside: big, fluffy snowflakes drifting more sideways than downward.
Curiously, I can see blue sky through the snow.
Is http://www.rosie.com/blog/rosie.html really written by Rosie O'Donnell?
It seems too incoherent, in a Kerouacky, illegal-stimulant-fueled stream-of-consciousness sort of way, to have been written by Rosie.
(Memo to Rosie: capitalization & punctuation are not optional parts of the language.)
16 genres, 189 artists, 6364 songs, 26.6GB.
1247 songs still at 192kbps, which means I am 80% done with the re-import project. Reimporting the remaining songs at 128kbps will free up about 2.25GB of space - enough for about 50 additional albums.
It's starting to look like I can't fit my entire CD collection on the iPod after all, even at the lower bitrate. Oops.
Wil Wheaton had a part - "Crazy Walter" - on tonight's episode of CSI. He's been writing about it ever since he got home from the audition, and made the show sound actually interesting.
I meant to watch, but Jake & I ended up watching old NASA videos instead (Jennifer having gone to quilt guild).
Jennifer & I happened to watch an episode of CSI: Miami, some months back. It was nasty: bad story, bad dialog, bad acting, bad stunts. How something like this made it on the air I have no idea.
Perhaps Wil's show was better. Alas, I missed my chance to find out.
In the mail: a statement from AT&T, charging us $6.38 for providing long distance service between December 1, 2004 and March 1, 2005.
We switched to SBC last November, and AT&T was notified of the change, so it's unclear what service they think they provided.
I suppose I'll have some harsh words with their customer service people tomorrow.
I have Mr. Explorer back, a day early: seems the Ford dealer overestimated the time required to do everything. Knocking a few hours off the time also knocked quite a bit off the price: only $700, instead of $1,100.
(Since when does a $700 repair bill count as "only"?)
And there were dark mutterings about the tread depth on Mr. Explorer's tires. Might need a new set by year's end.
Shortly after Dennis Rader was arrested, on suspicion of being the notorious serial killer 'BTK', he lost his job as supervisor of the Park City, Kansas, compliance office.
The reason given for terminating his employment: failure to report for work. Being accused of multiple homicides had nothing to do with it.
(Incidentally, Park City has a web site: http://www.parkcityks.com/. No word on whether the Compliance Office needs a new supervisor.)
30° at 11:00am. And it's snowing.
I neglected to bring a lunch today, so it's out into the weather for me.
P.S. As a rough estimate, today's car repairs will cost approximately $2 for every minute Mr. Explorer is at the Ford dealer. Ouch.
32° at 9:00am, with cheery stuff like rain and/or snow in the forecast.
Mr. Explorer is over at the Ford dealer, having his lower ball joints replaced. (The temptation to indulge in juvenile humor here is tremendous, but I will resist.) After that, they'll do an alignment, the finish up by changing the transfer case oil.
Total cost: approximately $1,000. That's in addition to the $300 on Tuesday. (Now it's going to be even harder to persuade Jennifer that we really really need a Mac mini.)
Everything is fine, the baby is healthy & normal.
Alas, the machine didn't have a vcr, so we don't have anything on tape. They did give us a picture, though.
[I forgot to mention: they couldn't tell whether it's a boy or girl. Maybe next month.]
MSNBC reports:
[Georgia governor Sonny] Perdue, a licensed veterinarian, has agreed to personally neuter a 9-month-old Rottweiler-Labrador retriever mix at an Atlanta animal clinic Thursday, the Atlanta Human Society said Monday.
We are all helpless pups in the hands of a scalpel-wielding government.
Dropped Mr. Explorer off at the Ford dealer this morning, for an oil change. This is always a risky thing to do, as the dealer has a habit of finding something expensive that needs to be done.
This time, Mr. Dealer has suggested the following bonus repairs & maintenance:
- Change the transfer case oil: $50;
- Do something (I didn't catch exactly what) with / to the fuel filter & associated systems: $200;
- Replace the lower ball joints: $800.
So this time, my oil change - normally $35 - will end up costing approximately $1,100. Perhaps this is my punishment for skipping the December oil change.
(Only some of this will get done today. I'll have to bring the car back sometime for the rest.)
NPR ran a report this morning about mercury contamination in Washington, D.C. high schools.
When I was in 8th grade (early 1976, this was), I broke a thermometer in science class. (How did I break it? Never you mind! And no, the bunsen burner on my desk had nothing to do with it.) As I recall, the teacher wiped up the spilled mercury (with a paper towel?), gave me a new thermometer, and class continued.
These days, when a thermometer breaks, they evacuate the entire school and call in an EPA cleanup squad. At least, that's what they do in Washington, D.C.
A pithy observation from TheStar.com, regarding the cancellation of Star Trek: Enterprise:
But then, being a Star Trek fan has never been about having a firm grip on reality.
(It also says Paramount has commissioned a script for an 11th Trek movie, which is a bit of a surprise given the abysmal box-office of the 10th movie.)
The voicemail light was blinking when I got to work this morning. The message:
Hi Mom, I'm at home. Give me a call.
Erm...I'm not your mother, sorry. The number belongs to somebody who isn't on the company phone list, so I have no idea who called, or who they were looking for.
From the Carmi Times:
Funeral services for Lena M. Brashier, 95, Carmi, were held at 11 a.m. Friday, March 4, 2005 at Emmanuel United Methodist Church in Carmi.
Mrs. Brashier was - if I have my facts straight - the daughter of Orlando Felty (older brother of my great-grandmother, Barbara Felty) and Oatha Nibling, which made her my first cousin, twice removed.
Tony Felty gave me her address, some years back, and suggested that I contact her: she had many tales to tell of the Felty family. Alas, I did not.
I created an iTunes smart playlist to tell me how many songs in my music library were imported at 192kbps: 1,431, which means I'm about three-fourths finished with the re-import project.
That's pretty good, considering I was expecting it to take all year.
Re-importing the early Rush catalog. iTunes is zipping through these at a much faster rate than usual, and nessus is happy & responsive while the import is happening.
I have this theory that sometimes the import locks - or simply monopolizes - the IDE bus in some way, preventing all other disk access. That would explain why programs take so long to launch.
IMDB says a movie titled Superman Returns is in the works, due for release sometime next year. The description makes it sound like a sequel to Superman II, which is a little odd: Superman II already has sequels (or sequelæ, for any physicians among the loyal readership), namely Superman III, IV & V.
Perhaps those were such awful films we're all supposed to pretend that they never existed. (I wouldn't know; I stopped at Superman II.)
From the Zemblan: Principles of Jewish Buddhism. I particularly like this one:
- If there is no self, whose arthritis is this?
(Well, yes, I know the Zemblan's real name. But if he chooses not to reveal it, who am I to blow his cover?)
CNN reports that Hans Bethe has died.
(Are there any famous physicists left, besides Stephen Hawking? Has the profession at last resumed its pre-WWII obscurity?)
It's 55° in Champaign just now, but winter is reasserting itself with a cold front coming in from the northwest: 46° in Bloomington, 39° in Peoria, 37° in Moline.
I may regret my choice of clothing when it's time to go home.
Paid a visit to the DNA Lounge video webcast page just now, and saw an actual human being. That hasn't happened in months: their business hours are so late that even if they weren't two time zones away I'd never be awake when they're open.
Today must be a special occasion.
I can't hear the DNA Lounge audio webcasts: Jamie Zawinski won't support Windows Media Player, because he hates Microsoft; I won't install the Real Audio player (which is the only streaming-audio format he does support), because I hate Real.
I don't suppose I'd enjoy it much if I could hear it. Perhaps it's best that I can't.
CNN reports that NASA has graduated another class of astronauts, but has also warned them that they're unlikely to fly any missions before the space shuttle is retired in 2010. The shuttle's replacement won't be ready until 2015, which means this year's class is unlikely to fly any missions, ever.
Two questions:
- If you never go into space, are you still an astronaut?
- How does NASA plan to get to & from the space station between 2010 and 2015? Buy seats on Russian spacecraft?
NASA's current situation seems very much like a death spiral: NASA doesn't get anything done; Congress says, "You aren't getting anything done, we will cut your budget"; NASA says, "We need more money to get anything done"; go to step 1.
Perhaps we can sell the space station to the Chinese, and use the proceeds to fund Social Security for a few weeks.
Spent a few hours at the library this afternoon, looking up Jacob Maurer and his children in the relevant census years (1800 through 1930). I have a bit of a puzzle: the birth dates I have for the twelve children of Jacob Maurer & Katherine Ziegler contradict each other.
If Harry Maurer was born in November, 1882, it's unlikely that Mary Ann (aka Mollie) Maurer was born six months later in May of 1883. And what about the report, in the September 22, 1898 issue of the White County Democrat, that a four-year-old daughter of Jacob Maurer had died? So far as I know, Jacob Maurer, Sr., didn't have any four-year-old daughters in 1898; and Jacob Maurer, Jr., was only 18, hence unlikely to have a four-year-old daughter.
The ladies at the archives suggested a trip to Carmi would help clear this up: Illinois counties were required to collect vital records beginning in 1878, so the information I need should be on file at the courthouse.
On June 22, 2006, I will be as old as Theodore Roosevelt was when he assumed the Presidency after the death of William McKinley; and on March 26, 2007, I will be as old as John F. Kennedy was when he was inaugurated.
I feel old.
Wrote some checks, paid some bills, put a new picture of Jacob up on the web site.
Nice day today: sunny, warm (51° at 10:00am). Might have to turn off the computer & go outside.
A recent exchange with Jacob:
I'm going to pick up Jake & give him a hug!
Put me down! I'm not a toy!
Sorry, Jake.
So: my mother recently pulled the plug on her EarthLink account (goodbye, chimps!), and I needed to remove that particular address (she has several) from my Outlook 2002 contacts list.
There it was, in the Email 3 field. Select, delete, save - and it reappeared. Try again, same thing. Hm. I can't delete an email address from a contact?
Nope, can't be done. You have to go into the Address Book, and delete it there. Then it magically disapears from the contact.
I already knew that Outlook can't talk to IMAP servers without tripping over its own [censored]; and Outlook tends to get bunged up when it tries to manage more than one email address; to its list of deficiencies we can now add stupid design of contacts database.
Good job, 'softies.
Grandparents came to visit today from Arlington Heights. Jake was very happy to see them.
Feeding Hair (the Broadway soundtrack, not the movie; that's next) to iTunes this morning. It's the new record holder for slowest import: 32 songs, total running time 66:33, and the import (which at this writing is nearly finished) looks like it will take just over two hours.
Installed Gallery this morning, as a possible replacement for all the hand-coded XHTML photo pages I've been struggling to maintain for the last few years.
It was easy to install, but the configuration process was a bit overwhelming: there are about nine hundred different options. Most of them don't need to be changed, but you have to examine all nine hundred to find the ones that do.
I need to figure out how to customize the appearance. The default has this rather sickly green background, which has got to go.
A Google search for wix returns some interesting pictures: a bunch of Hooters waitresses (from an IHRA event), and interesting undergarments (from some kind of Japanese bridal site).
That's nice, but I was looking for the Windows Installer XML project web site.
Our state income tax refund has been deposited, only five days after we filed our return.
I always figured the Il