There was a photographer from the Bloomington Pantagraph lurking in the bushes behind us yesterday, as we watched the Memorial Day parade, and he took this picture:
It was on the front page of today's Pantagraph. Left to right: Ryan (in the stroller), Grandma Barb, Jennifer, Jacob (almost visible, sitting on the ground in front of Jennifer), Norm (sitting on the ground next to Jacob), and me.
Everything's fine - but we still don't know if it's a Samuel or an Emily. The doctors may or may not schedule a fourth ultrasound, so we may not find out what we're getting until the kid's actually born.
How...old-fashioned.
Up early, for the Bloomington Memorial Day parade (which started at the unconscionable hour of 9:00am). Natalie was marching in this one, so Jennifer & Jacob made a big sign that said NATALIE YOU ROCK and waved it when she went by.
After the parade, we all headed to Grandma & Grandpa's house for a bit of a picnic. It was quickly discovered that the connection between swinging a bat and smacking your cousin in the head is not as obvious to four-year-olds as their parents might have hoped. Lunch was from Jimmy John's, the only place that answered the phone.
Pictures were taken, but they're still in the camera.
Got out the new sprinklers, since May seems likely to end with only 25% of its usual rainfall; ten minutes later, one of them had been stepped on. It doesn't work too well any more. Guess we'll buy a different kind of sprinkler next time - maybe one of the oscillating ones.
Also put down some Happy Lawn Granules, since the grass hasn't been looking very happy this year. The weeds are happy, but we'd rather they weren't. The Happy Lawn Granules are supposed to take care of them, too.
Cleaned out the closet in (what will soon become) the baby's room. Sure was a lot of junk in there.
Especially noteworthy was a boxful of old notes & papers from my college classes, twenty-two years ago. I had a tendency to write really snotty comments on homework & quiz papers, even on exams. It's a wonder I didn't lose points for having a bad attitude.
Also found: the notebook in which I recorded gas purchases for the Mustang. On November 24, 1984, I paid $20 for 13.344 gallons of premium: which works out to $1.50/gallon. Last Friday I paid $1.89/gallon for regular (i.e., the cheap stuff).
But now the garbage can is full, and pickup is still quite a few days away. Where will we put our regular garbage?
Apparently, the Sherriffs in Douglas County are too busy chasing bad guys to maintain their web site: if you go to http://sheriff.co.douglas.il.us/, all you get is a site statistics report and a directory with two pictures in it.
I wonder who D. Howard or I. Endsley are....
While moving stuff from the big file cabinet to the small one, I found an unlabeled floppy disk in the latter. I had to see what was on it, so into the computer it went.
A single 1.3MB file, named 'Jake', no extension. Contents mostly binary, with no obvious file-type signatures inside. Some of the text parts look like HP LaserJet escape sequences; I'm inclined to send it to the printer & see what happens.
Update: My guess was right, it's a print-to-disk file, from the quilt block software Jennifer used to have. (It was on the Inspiron 3000, which died years ago.) Apparently in January of 2001 she was thinking about making a name quilt for Jacob.
Bad: finding grocery-store receipts from 1996 mixed in with your old bank statements.
Worse: realizing that you've been buying the same groceries every week for the last nine years.
I took one of those online personality tests just now. My result:
You are the Spiteful Loner, the personality type that is most likely to go on a shooting rampage.
Your exact opposite is the Televangelist. Other personalities you would probably get along with are the Capitalist Pig, the Smartass, and the Sociopath.
WRI's holiday policy being somewhat more generous than that of Jennifer's employer, I occasionally have a day off when she doesn't. Usually I spend it doing genealogy, but this time I decided to go county-sign hunting.
My route: I72 to Springfield, northwest on Route 125 to Rushville, north on US 24 to Peoria, north on Route 29 to Sparland, then east to I39 and homeward (with a stop in Normal to pick up Avanti's for dinner, as suggested by Jennifer, who is very tolerant of her husband's strange hobbies).
Random notes:
Streets & Trips reports that I drove just over 360 miles today. And all I have to show for it are four more pictures over on the Illinois Counties page.
(That, and a great big ding in Mr. Explorer's windshield, courtesy of a rock kicked up by a passing car, somewhere on McLean County road 1600E. Supposedly, this is covered by my car insurance. I've been paying premiums for twenty years: time for a claim, I think.)
It was in the news recently that the fellow who voiced Tony the Tiger, in all those Frosted Flakes commercials, had died. That's sad, I thought, then turned my attention to other things.
Turns out the fellow's name was Thurl Ravenscroft, and he had quite a career doing voices for Disney cartoons (and for characters in numerous Disneyland rides).
He also sang You're a Mean One, Mr. Grinch in How the Grinch Stole Christmas. I didn't know that.
Over on Jeff Duntemann's web site, he has this tag:
<img src="mainhead.gif" width="484" height="200">
Unfortunately, mainhead.gif is 505×200 pixels, not 484×200. Most browsers automatically resize the image to fit, but that tends to mangle the text in it.
I sent Mr. Duntemann email about this, a few weeks ago. No reply, and no change to the image tag.
Today I feel somewhat improved from yesterday, though a nap would be nice.
The daycare ladies met me at the door this morning: "Jacob can come in," they said, "but you and your germs have to stay outside."
Got started on my medication - the cephalexin capsules smell really bad - and have been watching television.
I figure I'll have to go to work tomorrow, because nobody will believe two sick days just before a four-day weekend.
Nurse Practitioner Maggie looked me over and pronounced: ear infection, right side; strep throat. Medications were prescribed.
Perhaps I'll feel better in a few days.
I stopped at the grocery store on the way home, for a little self-medicating with Dr. Ben & Mr. Jerry's Finest Home Remedy. Also some ginger ale, kitchen wipes, a light bulb for the front entryway, some fizzy water for Jennifer, a new tin of tea, and...probably some more stuff I've forgotten. (I should have used a cart. Instead I had to carry all that around in one of those baskets.)
Temperature 99.8° this morning. Throat still hurts, worse than yesterday.
Mr. Doctor is too busy to see me today, but Nurse Practitioner Maggie had some free time at 9:45. So I have ninety minutes or so to goof off before going to get practiced on.
Jake is pretty much back to normal, so now it's my turn.
My symptoms: sore throat & fever, same as Jacob. At 5:00pm the thermometer said 102.2°, which seemed bad enough; but we checked again after putting Jake to bed, and it was up to 104°.
I showed the reading to Jennifer. "A new record!" I announced with pride. She was not amused.
So now I'm sitting at the computer, a cup of ice water close at hand and cold washcloths draped over various parts of my body. So far I've managed not to drip on the keyboard.
I figure I'll call the doctor tomorrow. 104° should get their attention....
This evening during dinner, Jake draped a towel over his head, meowed, and announced that he was Darth Kitty.
The Carmi Times reports:
William Henry Heil, 93, Carmi, died at 2:30 a.m. Wednesday, May 18, 2005 at Rosewood Care Center in Swansea.
He was the husband of Rena Gillihan, daughter of Everett Gillihan and Mary Ann "Mollie" Maurer; Mary Ann Maurer was the daughter of Jacob Maurer, Sr., my great-great-grandfather.
I don't suppose that makes Mr. Heil my great-uncle or anything, though.
The BBC says:
Two Star Wars fans are in a critical condition in hospital after apparently trying to make light sabres by filling fluorescent light tubes with petrol.
Well, duh.
Perhaps other morons fans will jump into volcanoes so they can suffer full-body lava burns just like Darth Vader.
Everyone would gather
on the 24th of May
sitting in the sand
to watch the fireworks display...
(I tried to find Lakeside Park once, on the way home from Toronto in 1989. Alas, the directions in my copy of The Rush Fan's Guide to Toronto were unclear, and my quest ended in failure.)
Here's a disturbing sentence from Microsoft, about its new MSN Search product:
Desktop Search is so fast that it makes organizing your documents, messages, and other items into folders practically unnecessary.
With Microsoft, it's a short jump from unnecessary to forbidden. Perhaps Longhorn will completely hide the file system from users, and not allow them to create subdirectories at all. Instead, user documents will be presented using the object soup model that the Newton had ten years ago.
(Microsoft will of course present this as a new thing, in keeping with their nobody ever invents anything but us policy.)
The only problem is that I like subdirectories. After twenty years of practice, I'm pretty good at using them to keep my files organized.
In the mail: a letter from the Secretary of State, informing me that my driver's license expires this August, and I am eligible for the Safe Driver Sticker Renewal Program.
I guess this means they've officially forgotten that speeding ticket I got in 1989. (45mph in a 25mph zone - specifically, St. Mary's Road between Fourth and Lincoln.)
The letter says I can renew by phone, online, or by mail. The first two add a "small" service fee to the $10 renewal fee; renewing by mail does not. Guess which one I'll be using.
Jacob reports that his throat doesn't hurt any more. His appetite seems pretty much back to normal as well.
He & I are staying home this afternoon, where through the wonders of VPN I am attempting to get some actual work done.
Jacob's staying home again today: not quite recovered from his illness, poor little guy.
The daycare ladies report that quite a few children are out sick today (though not the one who was throwing up on Friday: he's better now).
This afternoon we had a shredding party: Jennifer, Jacob & I, emptying our file cabinets of old documents as part of the wider project of making room for the new baby.
(No, we aren't going to keep the baby in the file cabinet. Thanks for asking!)
There was a surprise tucked away among the old bank statements: a Citibank ATM card. It was valid from February, 1992 through February, 1994 - or would have been, had I not closed all my Citibank accounts when I left Chicago in mid-1991.
I suppose I'll have to cut it up.
Jacob slept more last night than he did the night before: so did Mama & Papa, and there was much rejoicing come morning.
(Or not. Papa woke up with quite a headache.)
Jacob seems a bit more spry than yesterday; he even ate some breakfast. The antibiotics must be starting to work.
Bad night for all concerned. Jacob's sore throat kept waking him up. Mama & Papa did their best to get him back to sleep, but weren't always successful.
This morning, Jacob & Papa went to see the doctor.
Not Jacob's regular doctor: he doesn't work weekends. And this one, despite having seen Jacob on quite a few weekends over the years, and even once in the emergency room, showed no glimmer of recognition (of either of us).
The five-minute strep test came back positive, so Jake is back on amoxycillin for the next ten days.
Apparently whatever Jake has is going around, because Mr. Doctor also prescribed amoxycillin for somebody else this morning. I know this because he got the papers mixed up, and handed me a prescription for somebody named Karsten. Fortunately, the pharmacists were more awake & on the ball than Papa (or Mr. Doctor, for that matter) and got everything sorted out.
Ian McDiarmid, who plays Senator Palpatine / Darth Sidious in The Phantom Menace, Attack of the Clones and Revenge of the Sith, played the same role in Return of the Jedi, twenty-two years ago.
Wire News reports on Spore, a new game from Will Wright, creator of Sim City, The Sims, etc., etc.:
Starting with single-cell organisms, players work on designing life with ever more complexity. As the game progresses, players must figure out how to take creatures from individual animals to small tribes and then to cities, whole planets, solar systems and galaxies.
I don't think I have the...patience...to simulate the evolution of the entire universe.
I used to have a copy of SimEarth, long ago. I never figured out how to play it. Each game usually ended with my losing interest and pelting the new-born planet with asteroids until there was nothing left. Spore seems like SimEarth warmed over & made even more complicated and harder to play.
No, thanks.
Poor Jacob, sent home from daycare for having a fever & a sore throat.
There seems to be a new disease making the rounds. The daycare ladies report that several of the parents are also sick; and according to Jennifer one of the other children was busy throwing up when she arrived to take Jacob home.
Let us hope that Jacob's symptoms are limited to the ones he already has....
Managed to finish mowing the back yard this evening: it only took three days. Next time, I probably shouldn't wait until the grass is six inches high.
Shortly afterward, another belt of thunderstorms grumbled through. No need to water the tomatoes tonight, I think.
Thunderstorms last night, beginning around 2:00am and continuing until morning.
The rain has stopped, and the cloud cover seems to be breaking up. We might get some sunshine this afternoon.
In the mail: a letter from the Buffalo Grove High School Reunion Committee, inviting me to the 25th reunion (which will actually be the third reunion, following the ten- and twenty-year reunions) to be held at some bar in Mt. Prospect on October 8th (of this year).
Um...no, thanks. Too expensive, too far away, too few people there I'd remember. (I'm still traumatized over my failure to recognize Patty Feit when she said hello at the 20-year reunion.) I'll limit my participation this time around to the "people we couldn't get hold of" list.
CNN says:
Advertisers and gaming companies are betting that in-game advertising is on the verge of becoming a medium that soon will rival television, newspaper and Internet spending. Gamers already spend as much time playing as surfing the Web.
If enough people stare at anything long enough, somebody else will try to stick a few advertisements on it.
I wonder how often the Vatican has to fend off requests to add a few Pepsi logos (or Coke, not that there's any real difference between the two) to the Sistine Chapel. And I'm sure that many a skin-mag model has been pressured to get a few tattoos before the big photo shoot.
For a few years during the early 70s, we - that is, Mom, Al, Mike & myself - spent just about every summer weekend at a campground somewhere near Winamac, Indiana.
I was feeling nostalgic today, so I thought I'd look for it on TerraServer. It was easy to find: just follow the river north from Winamac until you get to the state park.
There's a nice picture of it here. It looks like the river was pretty well out of its banks when this was taken. (One hopes all the campers were pulled to higher ground.)
The campground lies entirely within an old loop of the Tippecanoe River. The pond on which we drove (frighteningly leaky) paddleboats follows the old channel.
I suppose it might not be a campground any more - it's been thirty years, after all.
I've been very negligent this year about keeping the back yard mowed. In some places, the grass is about six inches high: a nice jungle for the rabbits & baby birds to play in.
I did manage yesterday to push the mower around a bit; judging by how far I got before the battery was completely drained, it'll take about a week to finish the entire yard.
Cloudy today, and getting warmer: NOAA reports 80°.
There's a line of showers - not really strong enough to qualify as storms - just crossing the Mississippi from Iowa. Perhaps they'll reach Champaign sometime tonight.
Anthony Lane wrinkles his aristocratic nose at a vulgar entertainment called Revenge of the Sith.
CNN says:
A remake of the shortlived 1970s occult series "Kolchak: The Night Stalker" is also among the three new dramas and two comedies ABC said Tuesday it will introduce in the fall.
I used to watch Night Stalker, way back when. It started out well, but went downhill quickly: the writers ran out of monsters for Kolchak to battle. Toward the end, he was fighting malevolent swamp weed creatures & such - which could only be killed by following some absurdly overcomplicated procedure. When the moon is full, take a sharpened stick from a willow tree and poke the swamp creature just there, and it will die. And if you don't get everything exactly right, you won't kill it - you'll just make it mad.
But the yellow Mustang convertible was pretty cool.
Last week, Newsweek ran a story claiming that military personnal at the Guantanamo Bay detention center desecrated the Quran, by - among other things - flushing a copy down a toilet.
Protests & riots broke out across the Muslim world; in Afghanistan, fifteen people died.
Then Newsweek retracted its story. "Um...sorry, didn't happen, never mind," quoth the editor. I imagine the fifteen people who protested themselves into an early grave would feel rather foolish just now, if they weren't dead.
Last year, we planted oregano & chives in the box garden. They were quickly overwhelmed by the tomatoes & carrots, so we moved them to the ground next to the box.
They promptly died.
Except they didn't, apparently, because they've come back this year. The chives are looking quite happy, all bushy & green with fuzzy purple flowers. The rabbits - which eat everything else (hm...haven't seen the neighbor's kids lately...) - have ignored them.
Jennifer says, "Well, they are perennials."
Our shiny new faucet:
...expertly installed yesterday by Jake's long-suffering Grandpa Norm, who's always being roped into our home-improvement projects.
I lingered nearby, asking questions, except when I was just in the way. This is called "helping", and it's cute when you're four years old: less so when you're older.
(Note the careful framing of the image so as to exclude the piles of dirty dishes in the sink.)
The Carmi Times reports:
Verner "Tiny" Brashier, 87, Carmi, died at 10 p.m. Friday, May 13, 2005 at Wabash Christian Retirement Center in Carmi.
Verner was a brother of Raymond Arthur Brashier, who was married to Lena Felty, granddaughter of Sylvanus Felty, my great-great-grandfather.
Interested in enormous suspension bridges?
Then http://www.hsba.go.jp/ is the site for you!
I was particularly impressed with the Tatara Bridge, a 1,480m cable-stayed span. That's almost 200m longer than the Clark Bridge in Alton.
There's a lot of rah-rah at http://www.microsoft.com/windowsmobile/ about Windows Mobile 5.0, just released (or announced, or something) last week.
There's also Windows CE, which is a different thing entirely, except that Windows Mobile includes a customized version of Windows CE. This gives the 'softies endless opportunities for finger-pointing and runaround whenever users of their software have a problem or a complaint. "Oh, that's a bug in Windows CE, you'll have to talk to them about it," etc., etc.
Dell has promised an upgrade for the Axim X50; alas, I've got an X30. No upgrade for me, it seems.
The Tehachapi Loop is an ingenious solution to a difficult railroad construction problem: how to gain 77 feet in altitude in a very short distance while maintaining a 2.2% grade.
The solution: have the line loop back on itself.
Longer trains will pass over the entrance tunnel before their back ends have passed through it.
There's a nice essay at http://www.tehachapi.com/loop/, and TerraServer has a picture.
Jeff Duntemann was in town (well, all right, in Urbana) yesterday: seems one of his nephews was graduating from the big U.
(Lots of cute Bichon Frise pictures on Mr. Duntemann's site, for those of the loyal readership who may be into that sort of thing.)
There's a gravestone in Reib Cemetery, north of Carmi, that reads: Sohn von Jakob & K. Maurer geb. 28 Juli 1879 gest. 3 Juni 1880. But it doesn't give a name.
Jacob and Katherine Maurer had three sons who died in infancy: Benjamin, George and Samuel. There's a less well-preserved gravestone elsewhere in Reib Cemetery that seems to belong to George and Samuel, so this one might be Benjamin's. But Benjamin is listed in the 1880 census as being 7 months old on June 1, 1880, which differs from the gravestone by three months.
The census is notorious for errors in birth dates - for example, Reuben Maurer is 33 in the 1920 census, but only 38 in the 1930 census - so perhaps it can be disregarded?
Genealogy can be a maddeningly untidy process sometimes....
Stocked up on gardening supplies at Prairie Gardens this afternoon: basil, purple sage, two kinds of tomatoes, two pumpkin plants, various flowers, two lawn sprinklers, a claw thingy (for digging in the dirt), a watering wand & a big bag of potting soil.
That should keep us busy for a while.
The two-hour series finale of Star Trek: Enterprise was on this evening, except it turned out to be two completely unrelated episodes run back-to-back. The second one was the real final episode.
I'm not surprised that what's-her-name (the one whose character ran around in an orange catsuit, just like Nana Visitor did on Deep Space Nine) described it as "appalling".
They didn't end the series with a story about the Enterprise characters. Instead, they brought a few Next Generation sets out of mothballs, signed on Jonathan Frakes and Marina Sirtis to reprise their Next Generation characters, and told a story about Commander Riker watching a holodeck simulation of the last mission of the original Enterprise.
I imagine fans of Enterprise have been left feeling rather cheated.
(Brent Spiner's voice also appears, but it's unclear whether he phoned in a new performance or the producers recycled some old dialog from Next Generation.)
CNN.com reports that satellite NOAA N Prime is scheduled for launch in 2007.
That's the one that fell off its turnover cart in 2003 because the spuds trying to turn it over didn't notice that some other spuds had removed all the bolts holding it onto the cart.
Result: satellite fall down go B O O M.
Apparently they think they can have it fixed & ready to launch by 2007. We'll see.
The U.S. Naval Observatory's Date of Easter page tells me that in 2001 Easter was on April 15th, which means Good Friday was also Friday the 13th.
It won't happen again until 2063.
I've been using Mozilla FireFox as my default web browser for a few weeks now (at work, anyway, where I am more inclined to experiment with new software). It's worked pretty well, until this morning: something about the Java site-menu app on the DSRTech web site caused FireFox to delete my user profile.
All my bookmarks, up in smoke.
Guess I'll switch back to Internet Explorer, which - despite its many flaws & annoyances - has never lost my bookmarks.
Update: My FireFox user profile has mysteriously reappeared, with no hint from FireFox as to where it went nor why it returned.
In today's mail: The Crystal City by Orson Scott Card, which I ordered from Amazon.com a week or two ago.
The other day I saw signed copies for sale on Mr. Card's web site, only $3 more than I paid Amazon. Oops.
It's been about six months since the great telecom reorganization, when among other changes we switched our cellular service from Verizon to Virgin Mobile, so I thought I'd see what the other phone companies are doing.
[censored]ing their customers, it looks like.
They're still charging outrageous monthly fees (anywhere from $40 to $200) and emphasizing the buckets-o-minutes you get. Of course, you'll be flat broke after paying the monthly fees: you won't be able to afford any leisure-time activities besides talking on the phone, so you'll need all those minutes.
Pay-as-you-go plans are starting to appear. Cingular has one that is very devious: 10¢/minute, plus a $1 charge for each day you use your phone. 10¢/minute sounds very good, but those $1 charges really add up: if you make a one-minute call every day for a month, that's $33. Compare that to Virgin Mobile's pay-as-you-go plan, which would charge only $7.50 for the same set of calls.
I do covet, a little, the fancy phones you get with the expensive plans - but not so much that I'll pay $900/year to get one.
White County has a web site now: http://www.whitecounty-il.gov/.
The County Clerk page has a picture of the office staff, who have been most understanding & helpful with my genealogical researches over the last few years.
Sputnik recorded a temperature drop of 17° (from 84° to 67°) between 5:00pm and 6:00pm this evening, along with winds up to 30mph.
Jennifer & I were outside mowing the lawn during that. It was nasty. (Not quite to the level of pure dag nasty evil, but definitely well into nasty territory.)
All evening, thunderstorms have been nattering along just south of us, close enough to see & sometimes hear; but that system appears to be breaking up now. A new cluster, weaker but much larger, is moving in from the west. The leading edge has already reached Piatt County, and should reach Champaign by midnight.
Maybe it's time to turn off the computer.
(I'm very disappointed in the Weather Channel. All I want from them is the local forecast, with up-to-date radar images, every ten minutes. "Local on the Eights," as they always promise [but seldom deliver]. I don't want Storm Stories or celebrity meteorologists [yes, I'm talking about you, Mr. Cantore]. I don't care what you do with the other eight minutes, but I want two minutes of every ten devoted to the local forecast.)
Snooping around in the Ancestry.com message boards, I found some discussion of the Aldridges (aka Alldredge, plus innumerable variants) of Posey County, Indiana.
Next time I'm in Mt. Vernon I'll have to look into that.
Bill Gates is starting to look old - and I think I see the beginnings of a combover:
Steve Ballmer has no such vanity; Bill Gates should do likewise.
Jacob woke up around 1:30am last night, desperately unhappy about something. (Exactly what it was, he never said.) It took half an hour to get him calmed down & back in bed. Poor little guy.
My neck hurts a bit this morning: must've slept crookedly last night.
My sneakers are disintegrating. I am trailing chunks of rubber wherever I go. I was supposed to buy new shoes last February, but never did. Oops.
Today's forecast calls for afternoon thunderstorms. My umbrella is, as usual, safe & dry out in the car.
Sunny day, clear sky except for a few cumulus near the horizon; NOAA reports 87°.
Good day to stay inside.
From a recent conversation with Jacob:
Papa?
Yes, Jacob?
Is Darth Vader a super-villain?
Yes, he's dag nasty evil.
Dag nasty evil?
That's right.
It's been cloudy all day (so far); the rain, however, held off until I was walking back to work with my lunch.
The first Friday in May is No Pants Day. Alas, I didn't learn about it until today.
Maybe next year.
NOAA recorded a high of 86° today, between 4:00pm and 5:00pm.
Jake & I happened to be outside at that time, playing in the sprinkler. Jake was really enjoying himself, until the sprinkler suffered an unfortunate accident (I think it got stepped on) and the game was over.
I unscrewed the ex-sprinkler (it still works, but it points straight down; we need a wider coverage area than that) and tried to get Jake interested in watering the grass seed Jennifer put down a while ago. Jake was more interested in chasing Papa around the yard and getting him all wet.
He sure did cackle every time Papa got soaked.
We were supposed to buy our tomato plants today, but never got around to it. Maybe sometime this week.
Over to Normal on Saturday, for Ryan's 2nd birthday party.
The big hit of the day was a water table: fill it from the garden hose, play with the little boats, the waterwheel, etc., etc. (Definitely an outside toy.) All the kids - Ryan, Natalie, Jacob - had a grand time with it.
I took about sixty pictures, a few of which were good enough to mail out. We took the scenic route home, nipping over to Carlock to photograph the Woodford County sign there. (The county sign project is up to fifty-five: only forty-seven left to go.)
After lunch (Dos Reales, very tasty - very crowded, too), we went shopping at Home Depot for a new kitchen faucet. It's very posh, but installing it is going to be difficult: turns out we have copper pipes under the sink, not nylon tubing. And the faucet didn't come with the proper connectors for attaching to copper pipes.
Oops.
Zanzibar was in the news recently - it seems they're happy to receive non-Muslim tourists, but they'd prefer a little decorum: more modest clothing, fewer public displays of affection, that sort of thing.
Which made me think of the John Brunner novel, Stand on Zanzibar.
Dividing the surface area of the island of Zanzibar (640 square miles, according to Encarta) by the current world population (6,439,880,596, according to the U.S. Census Bureau's U.S. and World Population Clock) works out to a space almost exactly twenty inches square per person: about the size of a large pizza.
(The one foot by two statistic quoted in Stand on Zanzibar works out to a world population of 8,921,088,000. I don't think we'll reach that by 2010, though.)
Drove past a fire station on the way home from work today, and was surprised to see five fire trucks parked there. The station garage holds only two, and there didn't seem to be any multi-alarm fires in progress nearby, so it's unclear why they were there.
I feel like I'm living in a children's book:
Here is one fella named Pat.
Pat drives to work and sees two garage sales.
Pat sits at his desk and tries to fix three broken builds.
Pat resists the urge to throttle four of his co-workers, who can't seem to commit working code.
Pat drives home and sees five fire engines.
Passed two garage sales on the way to work this morning, which is two more than usual.
Friday seems a strange day to hold a garage sale: most potential customers will be at work.
Wikipedia says:
El cinco de mayo is a national holiday in Mexico. It commemorates the victory of Mexican forces led by General Ignacio Zaragoza over the French expeditionary forces in the Battle of Puebla on May 5, 1862.
The funny thing about Cinco de Mayo is that it's not really much of a holiday in Mexico. (Independence Day is September 16th, not May 5th.) Back in the 1960s, college students in California - some even of Mexican extraction - latched onto it as a convenient excuse for a pre-finals booze-up (as if college students needed an excuse for a booze-up).
I'm not Mexican, and I don't drink, so Cinco de Mayo doesn't mean much to me.
Saw a headline on CNN.com just now, "The Real Paris Hilton".
My first reaction: there's no such thing. Paris Hilton is a media construct - sort of like Pee-Wee Herman, except that there's no Paul Reubens behind the mask. With Paris Hilton, the mask is all there is.
Dropped a Mother's Day card in the mail this morning. One hopes it will arrive by Sunday.
(Mother's Day is a fine example of holiday creep. According to the Wikipedia entry, Mother's Day in the United States began as an anti-war protest, then mutated into a temperance protest, then became a day for honoring motherhood and mothers everywhere; now it's been taken over by greeting-card publishers and florists, who needed some way to boost revenues in the post-Easter slump.)
Pair's servers are somewhere in the Eastern time zone (Pittsburgh, I think), but I'm in Central. Fortunately, MovableType has a configuration option to deal with that.
Unfortunately, MovableType ignores this option when generating RSS feeds. My aggregator keeps showing my posts with timestamps an hour later than they were actually written.
I suppose this might be fixed in MovableType 3.16, but installing 3.15 was so painful that I'm still working up the courage to tackle the upgrade process. Maybe next week.
Mr. Doctor says: 46 pounds & 42½ inches, which puts Jacob in the 90th percentile for height and weight. He's a big guy, is our Jacob.
No vaccinations this time, fortunately.
Pointed Microsoft Digital Image Library at my digital camera archives this evening; it's chewing through all 5,702 items, generating thumbnails. It's been doing this for about half an hour now, and isn't finished yet.
I sure hope it's caching them somewhere.
(Microsoft has a research project, MyLifeBits, the goal of which is record digitally everything you see, hear and do. It only takes a terabyte or so per year, according to the 'softies. Given their apparent problems organizing a mere 2 gigabytes of digital camera pictures, I'm not hopeful that they can organize five hundred times as much data in any reasonable amount of time. Perhaps when we're all running eight-core 64-bit processors with 64GB of memory and 128TB of disk space.)
Sunny, with big fluffy clouds drifting eastward. NOAA says 52°, which is a mite chilly. Today's high was supposed to be nearer to 60° than that.
The nice people at 37signals, who released Basecamp a while ago, have just announced a smaller & cheaper personal edition, called Backpack.
Like Basecamp, Backpack looks interesting; but - also like Basecamp - it's hosted on 37signal's servers, which means I won't be using it. I already have a web hosting service; I don't need another one. If I can't install & run it on Pair's servers, I don't want it.
The digital camera folder on nessus contains - in its various subdirectories; I'm not completely disorganized - 5,752 files, occupying 2.36GB of disk space.
I had occasion this evening to wonder whether there were any pictures of Newman Cemetery among them. Finding out was more difficult than I'd expected: the pictures are organized by date, so unless I know from other sources when I was in White County it's very hard to find any cemetery pictures.
I have a copy of Microsoft Digital Image Library; in theory, I could use that to organize my pictures: tag pictures with keywords, normalize the file names, add captions, ratings, etc., etc. But, geez, who's got time to do that to almost six thousand pictures?
(Years ago, I read about a famous photographer whose habit was to takes scores of pictures every day. He did this for years, but hardly ever bothered to develop any. When he died, he left thousands of rolls of undeveloped film in his studio. His heirs and/or fans were trying to find money to pay for developing it all. I wonder how that turned out....)
After a brief respite, the ads on MSNBC.com are getting more intrusive: interstitials, overlays, etc.
If MSNBC gave me the option of paying for access to a no-annoying-ads version of their site, I'd have a real dilemma. As it is, they don't, and CNN.com beckons....
Stopped at Prairie Gardens on the way home from work, and bought:
Jacob helped mix the topsoil and sand, and load up the barrels. Jennifer mixed in some compost. It's a family gardening project.
Next weekend we'll go buy some plants, and get this year's garden underway for real.
It's been a nice vacation, but - alas! - it is over.
The May picture is up on the Jacob's First Year(s) page. Unfortunately, Grandma's web browser isn't very good at realizing when its cache is no longer valid, so I expect a where's-my-picture phone call anyway, probably around Tuesday.
This year's garden project has begun, with the purchase of two half-barrels from Prairie Gardens, along with two bags of cypress mulch, one bag of sand and four bags of topsoil: $50 so far, and we haven't bought any plants yet.
I had to return the first pair of half-barrels: they were jammed together so tightly that I couldn't get them apart. (Yes, I tried beating them with a hammer. It was cathartic, but futile.)
The barrels are set up in the back yard, with about four inches of mulch in the bottom of each. The next step (probably tomorrow) is to mix the sand & topsoil and shovel that in on top of the mulch. Four bags of topsoil isn't enough; I'll probably pick up some more on the way home from work tomorrow.
