June 2005 Archives

NOAA reports: temperature 89°, dewpoint 68°, as of 2:00pm.

It rained a little this morning. At least, there was rain here at Wolfram Research World Headquarters; Jennifer & Jacob, who are at home today (just a few miles away) didn't get any rain.

If you have concrete to get rid of - say, because you dug out a pair of old clothesline footings a few years ago, rolled the concrete into the garage, and have finally grown weary of looking at and/or tripping over them (which is my situation) - then take it to the Urbana Concrete Recycling Center, 3060 N. Oak St., Urbana (355-1307).

I haven't actually gotten rid of our concrete debris, but at least now I know where to take it.

Read a little just now about the Gumstix single-board computer (about which, there is more at http://www.gumstix.com/).

It's tiny, just 83mm×36mm×15mm, but manages to run the Linux kernel and support Bluetooth. Only $200.

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

...just go outside. NOAA reports temperature 87°, dewpoint 75°, as of noon.

Radar shows a few nasty-looking storm cells, but nothing very close to Champaign.

(The NOAA data is always two hours old, which is rather annoying. Surely their systems are completely automated, and they can push updates faster than that. And the Current Conditions page for Champaign gives times in EDT, in which zone Champaign does not reside. Harrumph.)

Grokster is in the news, having been spanked recently by the Supreme Court. Their one and only product, also called Grokster, is:

...an advanced peer to peer file sharing program that enables users to share any digital file including images, audio, video, reports, documents, etc.

But don't share anything that doesn't belong to you, wink wink nudge nudge.

File-sharing applications, and the companies that publish them, remind me of head shops. (Remember them?) Back in the 70s & 80s, head shops mainly sold drug paraphernalia; as this was (generally speaking) illegal, they put a few bags of tobacco in the display case, and pretended that that's what the customers were smoking in all those water pipes they sold.

No one believed them, and no one believes Grokster's cover story.

In the front yard, the trees are being devoured by Japanese beetles.

In the back yard, one of the tomato plants is being devoured by...something. I can't see any bugs on it, but the leaves are disappearing rapidly. It's been suggested that the culprit is the tomato hornworm.

But I fear the plants in that barrel were done in by the storm last week. Numerous branches have withered & died.

We won't be getting 700 tomatoes this year....

Went on a two-day road trip, touring the southern tip of Illinois and stopping to take pictures of various highway signage, for the Illinois Counties project.

Counties visited: Bond, Clinton, Washington, St. Clair, Monroe, Randolph, Perry, Franklin, Jackson, Williamson, Union, Pulaski, Alexander, Johnson, Massac, Pope, Hardin, Gallatin & Saline.

Temperatures were in the 90s today & yesterday, which rather discouraged me from getting out of the car.

Jennifer & I were talking this evening about the Doors song Light My Fire.

"There was this cover version," I said, "by some vaguely Spanish fella whose name I just can't come up with."

"I remember him," said Jennifer. "A blind guy, with an acoustic guitar."

A few seconds with iTunes provided a name: José Feliciano. And a few seconds with Google provided a web site: http://www.josefeliciano.com/. (Turns out he's Puerto Rican, not Spanish.)

(It seems a little odd that the web site of a blind musician should have been designed with so little regard for accessibility, but this one was.)

Checking the calendar a little further out than usual, I see that June 2, 2006 is payday at dear old Wolfram Research.

Unfortunately, the mortgage payment is due the day before.

Paid a visit to the Home Depot this afternoon, to get some windowshades for the kids' rooms. (Kids...that means more than one...egad....)

They're very thick, and block the sunlight quite well. Perhaps Jacob will sleep later on the weekends now.

(They were relatively easy to install, too, which was a nice boost to my self-esteem.)

Today's forecast: high 96°. The lawn needs mowing - between yesterday's rain, and my having run the sprinkler for almost two hours on Thursday, it's very happy right now - but I think I'll wait a few days.

It's supposed to cool off toward the end of the week. Maybe I'll mow a little then.

Messed around a bit this morning with the Axim's wireless networking; there were problems.

I managed to connect to the MovableType main menu page for the Daybook, thinking to write an entry from the Axim, but there's something about MovableType's HTML that kills Pocket Internet Explorer. No errors, no warnings - it just goes away.

No mobile Daybook entries for me, alas.

• 129 years since Custer's defeat at the Little Bighorn.
• 6 months to Christmas. (I'm surprised the stores haven't put up their Christmas displays yet.)
• 6 years since Jennifer & I were married. Happy anniversary, my love.

The high today was 95°, which lasted from shortly after 3:00pm until a surprise thunderstorm opened up over Champaign about two hours later. According to the weather channel radar, the storm cell appeared out of nowhere, directly over the city. Five miles in any direction, there were clear skies.

Sputnik recorded a temperature drop of 19° between 5:00pm and 7:00pm, along with ¾ of an inch of rain and wind gusts up to 29mph. (The tomato plants are looking rather beat up just now, but I expect them to recover.)

The temperature is creeping up again: 79° as of 9:00pm. Air conditioning is a wonderful thing.

Finished reading The Crystal City, by Orson Scott Card.

Halfway through the book, I began to wonder whether Card was actually going somewhere with this story; by the end, I had my answer: no, not really. Throughout the book, Alvin keeps asking: Why am I here? What am I supposed to be doing? It's a bad sign when even the characters in the book are complaining about it.

It was rather jarring to encounter two characters named Moose and Squirrel; I've heard of Rocky and Bullwinkle, but who in early 19th century America would have? It turns out they were named after fans who won a "be a character in my next book" contest Card ran a few years back.

Franchise fiction. Bah, humbug.

Around 9:00pm, Jennifer, Jacob & I all went outside to check out the planetary alignment: Mercury, Venus and Saturn, all within a 2½° circle.

Alas, there was quite a bit of haze near the horizon. Venus was very bright, but Mercury was barely visible and I never did find Saturn.

Supposedly, tomorrow evening they'll be packed even closer together. Let us hope that the sky clears enough that we can see all three.

When I bought my LaserJet IIIP - thirteen years ago, more or less - it didn't come with enough memory to print an entire page of high-resolution graphics. Memory expansion cards were available, but expensive, and I never did buy one.

Occasionally, I run across software that overflows the IIIP's memory when it tries to print. Microsoft's tax software (TaxSaver, I think it was called) was one; Streets & Trips 2005 is another.

Hm...I sense a pattern here....

Fortunately, the inkjet printer doesn't have that problem, so I got my map printouts after all.

CNN says:

A third North Carolina hospital said Wednesday that it received barrels that were supposed to contain a cleanser for surgical instruments but instead contained hydraulic fluid.

Apparently, some elevator repair people needed to drain the hydraulic fluid from an elevator. Rather than find more sensible containers to hold the hydraulic fluid, they used some empty soap containers they found.

Various hospital administrators then played not-in-my-department with the palletful of hydraulic fluid, until finally it was returned to the distributor (the soap distributor, that is).

Nobody at the distributor noticed that the containers had been opened, nor that they didn't contain soap any more; instead, they shipped them back to the hospital in response to a new order for soap.

Only when surgical instruments started coming out of the washing machine feeling "a little greasy" did anybody catch on that there was a problem.

The personal-injury lawyers are going to have so much fun with this.

The thirty-foot stretch Excursion seen yesterday at Mr. Ford Dealer was just observed heading south from the intersection of State & Kirby.

There's some writing on the driver's door, but I couldn't read it from my office window. So the mystery remains as to who owns this monster.

Kelo v. City of New London, Connecticut (docket #04-108) is a disturbing case:

What protection does the Fifth Amendment's public use requirement provide for individuals whose property is being condemned, not to eliminate slums or blight, but for the sole purpose of "economic development" that will perhaps increase tax revenues and improve the local economy?

The Court's answer? Not much. All it takes is some hand-waving about "economic development" and private property can be taken at any time, for any purpose.

Here's an idea - let's tear down the homes of Justices Stevens, Kennedy, Souter, Ginsburg & Breyer - the authors of the majority opionion - and put up a few mini-malls instead.

Oral arguments in the case are online here.

Update: CNN says:

A critic of the U.S. Supreme Court's ruling that governments may seize private property for economic development is suggesting the process be used to replace Justice David Souter's New Hampshire home with a hotel.

The newspaper says the New Madrid fault cut loose with a magnitude 3.9 earthquake yesterday morning.

As usual, I was asleep.

I always sleep through earthquakes. It's very frustrating. Why can't they happen during the day, when I'm awake?

Mr. Explorer is over at the Ford dealer, having a 1st Class Experience (the new Ford dealer's favorite slogan; it's posted everywhere) and getting his oil changed.

Also in the shop: an Excursion, transmogrified into a thirty-foot-long stretch limousine. Rather funny-looking, it was - though I have to wonder what it would be like to ride in it.

I also asked the service guy to take a look at the switch panel on the driver's door: one end of it has come loose, so the thing is flopping like a diving board. That makes it a little tricky to open & close the windows.

I have the gloomy suspicion that changing the oil will cost $35, but fixing the floppy switch panel will cost $900: "Yeah, we had to replace the entire door." AUGH.

Update: Mr. Ford Dealer says, "That bezel is broken right off. But Ford doesn't make that part any more, so we can't replace it. Sorry." Better than paying $900 for an oil change, I suppose.

One of the tomato plants has two very tiny green tomatoes on it.

Last year, our first tomato harvest was on July 17th; we'll see how long it takes this year.

Jacob is very fond of his super-soaker water gun. Most every evening after dinner, he asks Papa to come outside & play with the squirty guns.

It's hard to turn down an invitation like that.

This evening, there was a special watery bonus: once our super-soakers were empty, we watered the tomato plants (which are very happy), then I set up the sprinkler for Jacob to run through.

When it was time to come in, he was completely soaked. He was also covered in sand, having gone from the sprinkler to the sandbox; we had to hose him down again before we could let him in the house.

The calendar tells me that the Summer Solstice was at 1:46am CDT this morning.

I was asleep.

Friday's forecast calls for a high of 97°. Ouch.

Over at Fog Creek they've been talking up Project Aardvark, "where summer interns get to design & develop a real application!"

People wondered - hoped! - it would turn out to be CityDesk 3.0, or some kind of zippy online version of CityDesk; but it isn't.

No, it's SidePilot:

SidePilot allows people to help their friends, relatives, and customers fix their computer problems by temporarily controlling their computers via the Internet. It costs $9.95 for a day pass, or you can try it for free for five minutes.

...or you can just use the Remote Assistance feature built into Windows.

Poor Jacob: Papa told him to turn off the television & present himself for tooth-brushing.

But I'm watching Dora!
Turn off the television and come here, please.

Oh, the injustice!

There followed much protesting, some kicking & screaming; even a timeout. But in the end, teeth were brushed, sneakers were put on, and off we went to daycare.

My very own holiday, how nice.

The big present: a set of super-duper squirt guns, one each for Jacob, Papa & Grandpa. We chased each other around the back yard for a while and got soaked.

Jake cackled whenever he got sprayed. He was also greatly amused whenever anybody else got sprayed (which happened to Papa rather a lot).

Norm, Barb & Clementine came to visit today.

Poor Norm probably expected to play with his grandson. Instead, he built some shelves for Jennifer (which project included a trip to Home Depot and to Menard's, since Home Depot didn't have the necessary shelving), repaired our rocking chair (which broke a few weeks ago) and - just when he thought his labors were over - reassembled the crib.

If we keep working him this hard every time he comes to visit, he won't want to come visit any more....

Things that happened today:

• Woke up with a rather sore back: seems I've been sleeping on my back too much lately. (It's better now.)
• Housecleaning, so the grandparents (who are coming to visit tomorrow) won't know what slobs Jake & I are.
• Lunch at Steak & Shake. Very crowded, with baseball players. (Steak & Shake was in fact our second choice; our first choice, Culver's, was too crowded with...baseball players.)
• Genealogy, at the library. I have now examined all 385 pages of the 1920 census of White County, Illinois. Lillie Felty (neé Maurer) does not appear.
• Bath night for Jacob, who protested mightily: It's not bath night! It's not!

Now it's time to mess about on the computer until tonight's Lotto numbers are posted. I don't want to wait until tomorrow to see how much we've won.

Finished reading Maps in a Mirror, by Orson Scott Card: all the short fiction he had written, up to 1990 or so, with commentary.

It's a big book: 675 pages. I started reading it in Missouri, two months ago, and only this evening managed to finish it.

I read more slowly than I used to, I suppose.

Another recall from Ford: not tires this time, but the cruise-control deactivation switch (the widget that turns off the cruise control when you step on the brake).

CNN says:

Inside the switch, a thin film barrier separates brake fluid from the switch's electrical components. Investigators say fires can occur when the film cracks and brake fluid from the master cylinder seeps into the electrical side of the switch.

That sounds bad enough, but there's more: the electrical side of this switch is powered up, even if the cruise control is off - and even if the car itself is off. So it can burst into flame pretty much at any time.

The current recall does not extend to Mr. Explorer, but according to CNN he's got the same switch as the recalled models.

And there's no response from http://myford.fordvehicles.com/. Too many customers checking for recalls all at the same time.

I was just at the Days Inn web site, reserving a room for...never you mind exactly when it's for. When I got to page 4 of the process (i.e., "All Done"), a fake chat window came up over the main page:

Hi, I'm Jessica! Would you like to chat about free gas cards? Just type HI to get started!

You are a computer, not a human being, I typed.

Blah blah blah free gas cards! blah blah blah.

What is the capital of Assyria?

Blah blah blah gas cards, free! blah blah blah.

Please fondle my bum.

Blah blah blah cards for gas, free! blah blah blah.

My HOVERCRAFT is FULL of EELS.

I am a real person, lol.

Go away, you simulacrum.

And then I closed the window. I hope she doesn't get mad and cancel my reservation.

In the mail: this month's telephone bill. It's considerably lower than usual, mainly because SBC neglected to add any charges for our DSL service (which, obviously, continues to work).

Mysterious. Perhaps they're planning to charge us double next time?

I've been wondering:

Who was the first person to refer to the Roman Empire as "the Roman Empire"? Was it one of the Emperors?

I wanted to read an article on Salon.com just now. They have a system whereby people too cheap to subscribe (e.g., me) are forced to sit through a full-page animated advertisement before getting through to the article.

Generally, I ignore the ads: I cover the web browser with some other window & check back in a minute or two. But I was slow today, and my peripheral vision picked up a few details from today's ad. It was from Microsoft, something about Windows Media Center Edition. One of the big features: skipping commercials.

I wonder if Windows Media Center Edition can help me skip Salon.com commercials....

CNN says that Congress is toying with the idea of raising the retirement age even further, from 67 to 69.

If they raise the retirement age two years for every calendar year that passes, they'll never have to pay full Social Security benefits to anyone. The system will be saved!

I'm very amused by the semi-official slogan of the Social Security Administration: "Social Security is an economic compact among generations." I'd say it's more a means for Congress to confiscate young people's money and use it to buy votes from old people.

The day just keeps getting better:

Customers in the northwest portion of Illinois American Water's Champaign District service area are being asked to boil their water today as a precautionary measure after a brief power outage caused a temporary drop in water pressure in their neighborhood.

That's the second boil order in the last two weeks, and the third one in the last six months. Seems the water company just can't keep the power on at their pumping station on north Mattis.

Losers.

It's a pleasant day outside: temperature around 70°, clear sky. A bit humid, but not oppressively so.

Too bad I'm at work, where the temperature in my office is 81°.

Update: It's cooled off a bit: 75° as of 10:30am.

Thunderstorms last night, beginning around 1:00am. Almost two inches of rain, according to the radio weatherpeople.

That should keep the tomato plants happy for a while.

Update: Sputnik recorded 1½ inches of rain between 1:00am and 3:00am, nearly all of it in the first hour.

The temperature dropped 21° (86° to 65°) between 7:00pm and 9:00pm. Some rather scary-looking storm clouds came through as well, but we didn't get much rain: less than a tenth of an inch.

I guess I should have watered the tomatoes after all.

The Michael Jackson trial is over. Find something else to talk about now.

Thank you.

Poor Jacob, sent home from daycare a little early, for being "pale" and not wanting to go outside (where the temperature is around 90°).

He seems spry enough now.

(Jacob's latest obsession: the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. He's convinced that they're on television, somewhere, sometime, but he just can't find them.)

Seems I'm not rid of Consumer Reports after all: even though I've sent a half-dozen please-unsubscribe-me messages, even though I've changed the email address on my Consumer Reports web site account to ihatespam@consumerreports.org, I'm still getting Take our new car survey! spam.

Go away and die, you vermin.

I've had a Newton since Christmas, 1995 - it was a present from my mother & Bob (thanks again). I used it happily until I bought a Philips Nino in 1998; since then, I've been careful to replace the batteries every six months or so, to avoid the heartbreak of data loss.

On the other hand, one might argue that the data in my Newton was lost from the day I entered it, as there never was any way of getting it back out again. (I bought the Newton Connection Kit, but never installed it: it was a DOS program, and I didn't think it would work under Windows 2000 or XP.)

Alas, I waited too long this time, and the Newton is no more. I put fresh batteries in it, but it won't even power up.

CNN says:

Guitarist David Gilmour, drummer Nick Mason and keyboard player Richard Wright will be on stage with bassist Roger Waters for their first public performance since they played at London's Earls Court in 1981.

That's...interesting, but not particularly exciting. I suppose it means there will soon be another live album from Pink Floyd, which hasn't released any new material since The Division Bell in 1994.

(Roger's releasing a new album this fall - an opera. In French. You don't suppose this reunion is just a ploy to drum up a little free publicity?)

Sneaked out to the movie theater last night, while Jennifer & Jacob were at a pool party, to see Revenge of the Sith.

One thing puzzles me: there's a scene (toward the end) showing the Death Star under construction. But in episode IV, which starts roughly sixteen years after episode III, the Death Star is referred to as the Emperor's new weapon.

Did it really take sixteen years to build? Then why didn't the second one (in Return of the Jedi) take that long?

Just up the road from Reib Cemetery (in White County, Illinois) is St. John's Church. In the (presumably) adjacent cemetery is buried Jacob Burkhardt, Jr., brother of Barbara Burkhardt, who married Sylvanus Felty. That makes him my great-great-granduncle.

I've been to quite a few cemeteries in White County, but not this one. Next time I visit the Ancestral Home I'll have to rectify that.

I keep getting letters from the insurance company:

Based on information from your physician, the following service(s) has/have been authorized, for the above named member for the above dates of service....

Authorization...is not a guarantee of payment.

Excuse me? If you haven't decided yet whether to pay for it, then what exactly have you authorized? What's the difference between an authorized but uncovered expense and a merely unauthorized expense?

Medical insurance is a simple thing: I go to the doctor; the doctor wants to be paid; I give the doctor some money; the insurance company gives the doctor some money. But insurance companies can't resist obfuscating the process.

On my way out the front door this morning (to fetch the newspaper), I found a package: the camcorder battery I ordered from Amazon.com the other day. It was most likely delivered on Friday, which means it was sitting out in the weather for two days.

Oops.

The directions say to initialize the battery with a sixteen-hour charge, which means no videotaping today. Maybe tomorrow.

The Champaign County Genealogical Society is having their annual(?) conference today.

Having failed to register early enough for the cheap rate, and being reluctant to cough up $45 (the at-the-door price), I won't be going.

Maybe next time.

Software tells me I'm due to take Mr. Explorer in for an oil change.

Whenever I do that, it ends up costing me $300. Or more. This time, it might be a new set of tires; last time, Mr. Ford Dealer muttered darkly about insufficient tread depth on the current set.

So I can't say I look forward to oil changes. (Not that I ever did, I suppose.)

Sputnik recorded about ¾ of an inch of rain this evening, between 5:00pm and 7:00pm. The grass should be happy for a while.

The WRI company picnic was this evening, at Hardy's Reindeer Ranch. Like last year, it was too hot; unlike last year, it rained. (There was a huge anvil cloud east of Rantoul. The wind seemed to be coming from that direction, which worried me a little, but the storm itself smeared off to the north.)

All the fun activities for kids were over by the time we got there. (Shades of the easter egg hunt three months ago.) Poor Jacob really wanted a pirate telescope, but we never did find one for him.

We had dinner, we lingered until the ice cream truck arrived, we picked up some ice cream & went home.

While watering the tomato plants last night, I noticed a number of small yellow flowers on each. I guess that means we'll have some tomatoes in August.

The iPod just came up with this amusing juxtaposition:

First, from Jesus Christ Superstar:

Don't let me stop your great self-destruction
Die if you want to, you misguided martyr
I wash my hands of your demolition
Die if you want to, you innocent puppet

Then, from Still Crazy After All These Years:

Some folks' lives roll easy...

If I'd been drinking coffee, I would have snorted some out my nose.

Driving to work this morning, I saw a group of seven people in wheelchairs - the racing kind, low-slung with the rear wheels canted inward at the top and the front wheels stuck way out in front - coasting down a hill together.

Was it a race? A wheelchair tour of Champaign? Some kind of cross-country ride for charity, like the Pink Ride?

Unless it makes the paper today, I don't suppose I'll ever know.

Sputnik recorded .07 inches of rain during the recent cloudburst. NOAA radar says the big storm front has reached Champaign (and is some way past it now); Jake and I heard thunder a few times, but there's been no rain.

Maybe it won't rain after all.

According to Anne Bancroft's obituary (in today's paper), she was 35 when The Graduate was made.

That's seven years younger than I am now.

Just now, a surprise cloudburst opened up over our part of town. Radar shows a tiny but intense storm cell, heading vaguely northeast.

Radar also shows a huge mass of nastiness coming from the west. It's just crossing I55 - Lincoln, Springfield and Carlinville are getting soaked - and will probably get here sometime this evening.

Looks like I won't be mowing or watering the lawn tonight....

We're going to need a working camcorder once baby Samuel is born, so I've been shopping around for replacement camcorder batteries. (The ones we have are pretty much worn out.)

JVC will sell us a BN-V507U battery (good for one hour of recording) for the low low price of $90; the BN-V514U (two hours) is only $120.

On the other hand, Amazon.com sells a BN-V514U equivalent for only $17.50. Gee, that's a tough choice.

Wil Wheaton says:

...I feel like my blog is dangerously close to crossing the line from "this interesting thing happened to me" to "come with me while I take a [censored] in the woods."

I don't think too hard about the Daybook. I write whatever I feel like writing, and don't worry much whether anyone besides me will ever read it. The idea is to have fun, and maybe remember a few things worth remembering.

P.S. I never take a [censored] in the woods, so there never will be any daybook entries about it.

Poor Jacob, staying home from daycare again.

He's quite spry, actually, though he's still coughing. Just now he's out watching cartoons.

Wandering click-click-click through the www this evening, I ended up reading this paragraph from paulp:

On the final hand of the bellagio, all-in preflop, I flopped a set and dewey tomko flopped a flush draw. I laughed and said, "Action flop, just like online!" KIDDING. I WAS KIDDING.

I have no idea what this means....

Sputnik has recorded less than a quarter-inch of rain in the last nineteen days. It's been twenty-four hours since we watered the front yard, forty-eight since we watered the back yard.

So why did the sump pump just go off? Where's the water coming from?

Neil Peart has a web site: http://www.neilpeart.net/. It's all Flash, which is evil.

On the Links page, there's a "Download Illegal MP3s" link; click on it, and you get a message from Neil: You make me sick! One wonders whether anyone clicks on that link expecting to receive "illegal MP3s".

Geddy Lee has a web site, too: http://www.geddylee.net/. It used to be an advertisement for his solo album, My Favourite Headache, but there's nothing there now except a Flash intro page that doesn't actually go anywhere.

I can't find a web site for Alex Lifeson. It doesn't seem like something he'd be interested in, anyway.

Watched Steve Jobs' WWDC 2005 Keynote this morning. (Mathematica is featured rather prominently, so watching it counts as work-related research.) Very slick.

I think maybe I still want a Mac Mini after all - but only if they lower prices to encourage people to buy now rather than wait for next year's Intel machines.

Jacob & Mama are staying home today: he's still sick. Sort of, anyway: except when he's coughing up a lung, he seems fine.

He'll be going back to Mr. Doctor today, to see if it's still just a cold, or - as we suspect - it's turned into bronchitis.

I am tired of web sites - such as www.checksinthemail.com - that tell me this:

This website requires "cookies" to be enabled in your web browser.

Cookies are enabled, you morons. The problem is with your web site, which doesn't have the compact privacy policy that I've configured Internet Explorer to require before letting you create any cookies.

Fix your problem, and don't try to make it sound like I've done something wrong. Thanks.

Apple says:

At its Worldwide Developer Conference today, Apple announced plans to deliver models of its Macintosh computers using Intel microprocessors by this time next year, and to transition all of its Macs to using Intel microprocessors by the end of 2007.

Buying a Mac Mini today guarantees unhappiness: by the end of 2007, if not sooner, nobody will be selling software for PowerPC machines.

So, Apple: never mind about the Mac Mini. I'll get back to you in 2008 or so.

Sputnik reports 88° as of 2:00pm.

Poor Jacob, sent home from daycare for having a temperature of 102.3° (which, now that he is home, is pretty much undetectable).

He's watching Scooby-Doo videos, while Papa exercises the WRI VPN a little.

The June, 1952 issue of Popular Mechanics had an illustrated article about Robert Heinlein's new house. Somebody's scanned in the article, and put it online at

http://www.nitrosyncretic.com/rah/pm652-art-hi.html

I was surprised at how small the house was: only 1150 square feet.

Sputnik recorded a high of 91° today. (As of 10:00pm, the temperature is still 83°.)

Jake & I hit the Home Depot this afternoon, for some new lawn sprinklers: the kind that spin around, instead of waving from side to side. They work nicely, and Jake enjoys running in the water just as much as he did with the old sprinklers (which have all gone to sprinkler heaven).

Weatherdroids are starting to use the word drought in their forecasts. The lawn is getting very dry & crackly. Usually, by August our lawn is a dustbowl; this year, we must be more diligent about keeping it watered.

Unplugged the modem this evening; it's on the floor, until I get around to stuffing it into the closet somewhere. We've had DSL for six months now, and we cancelled our EarthLink account four months ago: what do we need a modem for? There's nobody to call.

Still, we might need it again someday, so I won't get rid of it.

Also re-rerouted some cables, so the monitor is now plugged directly into the video adapter. Back in 2000, I thought that a 550 MHz Pentium III wasn't fast enough for real-time DVD decoding, so I added a Hollywood Plus decoder board, from Sigma Designs. It never did work very well - Sigma's DVD player software was just nasty - and had the drawback of mangling the video signal all the time, not just when doing video overlay. And it turns out that a 550 MHz Pentium III is perfectly capable of real-time DVD decoding: the DVD XPack from Intervideo runs nicely on nessus, and even integrates with Windows Media Player so I don't need a separate DVD player program. (It also turns out that I never watch DVDs on the computer, but that's a separate issue.)

The Sigma card is still in nessus - removing it would be work - but the video signal now reaches the monitor unmolested by it. As a result, the screen is wonderfully sharp: black text on a white background is crisp, no bleeding or smearing. Even Jamie Zawinski's web site, with its hideous green-on-black color scheme, is readable again.

So: I had the notion to sign up for the two-week free trial membership in Ancestry.com, mainly to poke around a bit in their census data.

Ancestry.com is notorious for spamming its customers, so I wasn't about to give them my real email address; instead, I created a new one just for them.

It turns out that an email address isn't enough to start a trial membership: they want a credit card number, too. They promise not to charge it until the trial period is up. That's a little suspicious.

Even more suspicious: buried in the membership terms & conditions is some fine print to the effect that there are no refunds given to people whose memberships began with the free trial period.

The Ancestry.com business model depends on their customers forgetting to cancel the free trial memberships they've signed up for. Which pretty much kills my interest in their service.

The real test will be if I get any spam on the throwaway mailbox I created for the trial membership. I suppose I'll leave it active for a while, as a test.

After a late lunch at O'Charley's (chosen so that Jacob could get a yellow balloon), we went furniture-shopping at the new Slumberland. The place is poorly named, as very little of it is devoted to beds and sleeping.

We found a very nice dresser for baby Samuel (also known as Sam-I-Am), so that's one thing checked off our getting-ready-for-the-baby list.

I'll have to put down the back seat to fit it into the car, so bringing home our purchase will have to wait until I can go back by myself. (The alternative is to pay $50 to have it delivered. I think I'll deliver it myself, and keep the $50.)

Sputnik says the temperature outside is 90°, with winds out of the southwest at 12mph (gusting to 25mph).

A brief cloudburst - .04 inches of rain - came through just as I was outside cleaning lint out of the dryer vent. Fortunately for me, the vent is in a pretty well sheltered area of the house, so I didn't get too soaked.

iTunes reports that my music collection contains 4,731 tracks that have never been played, which is just about two-thirds of the total.

At the rate I'm going, it'll be next year before I've managed to play everything. (Why is it so important that I listen to all 7,000+ tracks in my music library? Good question!)

On a whim, I asked the Yahoo people search page for people named Hall living in Lake Station, Indiana. When I lived there, thirty years ago, the town was named East Gary, and my best friend Russell Hall lived next door to us, on Allen Street.

Turns out there's a Russell Hall living on DeKalb Street, about a half-mile from Allen Street. I wonder if he's my former best friend.

I don't suppose I'll do anything to find out, though, just in case he is.

One of Jacob's friends from daycare had a birthday party this afternoon. (I remember the last one; it doesn't seem that a year has passed since then.)

No swimming pools, this time, though they would have been quite welcome: the temperature was close to 90° the whole time.

The recent closet excavations also turned up the score sheets for all those placement tests I took in high school: the PSAT, SAT & ACT. Also found: scores from the GRE I took in 1987. (What a disaster that was!)

Now I have the notion to create a Test Scores page, to go with the Transcripts page. This is turning into a boring stuff about a time in my life that ended twenty-two years ago collection, but it's a fun little project to occupy my free time.

A few months back, I wanted to read reviews of electric shavers. I had the notion that an electric would be better than what I'm using now.

ConsumerReports.org claimed to have lots of reviews online, but they wouldn't let me see them until I paid $4.95 for a one-week membership. I paid, I read, I was disappointed, I cancelled my membership.

Ever since, they've been spamming my inbox. Subscribe to our magazine! Subscribe to our web site! Take our car survey! Every time, as instructed, I responded with "unsubscribe" in the subject line. I even got a few confirmations that I wouldn't be getting any more spam.

But the spam hasn't stopped coming. In the inbox today: Take our car survey! Instead, I responded six times with "unsubscribe" in the subject line, then logged on to the account-management page of consumerreports.org and updated my personal information:

Pat Rice
123 GoAwayAndDie Please
Champaign, IL
ihatespam@consumerreports.org

Feel free to flood your own mail server with Take our car survey! spam, you losers.

If you take eight boxes of cancelled checks out of the to-be-shredded basket, dump them on the floor, then kick them around for half an hour, it makes a great big mess.

...is "environmentally sound exterminator".

Since when is exterminating anything environmentally sound?

CNN says:

In April, Alex and Justin Zivojinovich accepted plea agreements to serve 12 months' probation and pay court costs. The agreement called for each to plead to a single misdemeanor charge of resisting arrest without violence. Adjudication was withheld, meaning there will be no formal conviction if they successfully complete probation.

...as a consequence of events in Ft. Myers, Florida, New Year's Eve 2003: seems Alex & Justin got a little too rowdy at a Ritz-Carlton New Year's Eve party, and hotel security weren't particularly gentle in asking them to settle down.

With the criminal case out of the way, Alex has filed a civil suit against the hotel, accusing them of all sorts of mopery & dopery (with a little skullduggery on the side), asking unspecified monetary damages for pain & suffering, mental anguish, etc., etc., blah blah blah.

Um...first off, don't get drunk in public, even on New Year's Eve. If you're already drunk in public, don't rush (heh) the stage as soon as the house band takes a break. If you're already on the stage, and hotel security asks you to get off, don't start a fight with them. Because if you start a fight with hotel security, you'll have nobody to blame but yourself when they win. And they will.

Is that so difficult to remember?

Madame Physician says: Jacob's throat is fine, and his ears are fine. He's probably got a cold, or allergies, or both. And the Official Doctor Thermometer said his temperature was quite normal. Treatment: Dimetapp and Vicks VapoRub. (Is there anybody who reaches adulthood without getting slathered with Vicks VapoRub at least once?)

I'm beginning to doubt the accuracy of our thermometer. Seems like it always reads high....

Things I gave away today:

• The Lost Treasures of Infocom, parts 1 and 2, to Dæv.
• The Compact Edition of the Oxford English Dictionary, to Lynda, who was thrilled. ("How much do you want for this?" she asked. "You could give me chocolate," I said. So now I have a bag of Snickers bars.)

Still looking for a home:

Sinai and World War 3, a pair of old SPI games that I bought sometime in the late 1970s. (Why, no, I never played them. Thanks for asking!) The whole wargame craze seems to have fizzled out, replaced by a mania for computerized game consoles, but there has to be somebody in town who'd be interested in these. I'd hate to throw them away....

Jacob is off to the doctor this morning. My prediction: a sinus infection (recently spread to one or both ears), drainage from which is irritating his throat, causing the cough. Treatment: another course of amoxycillin.

Poor Jacob, he's probably consumed a gallon of amoxycillin since he was born. At least he's (usually) a good sport about taking medicine.

Hm...there doesn't seem to be any way to set the default category for new posts. I grow weary of selecting 'General' every time. The whole point of software is to remember things like that for me.

Harrumph.

Cloudy today. Look