Just wasted almost two hours playing Age of Empires. It is very addictive.
(Yes, I won, by annihilating the enemy. I killed all their soldiers, destroyed all their buildings, then killed all their villagers. Ah, victory.)
July 2005 Archives
Jake's grandparents came down from Arlington Heights today, for a visit with their grandson. They brought presents for everybody, which was very nice. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
One of Jake's presents - a big styrofoam airplane - is already lodged at the top of a tree in the back yard. Oops. Perhaps the wind will knock it loose one of these days.
Most of the presents were for me (since it's my birthday in a few days): lots of books, lots of CDs, a pedometer, even the extended edition of Return of the King.
As if that weren't enough, today's mail brought the copy of Age of Empires I bought a few days ago, and another book (from the Book of the Month Club) that I'd completely forgotten having ordered.
(You know you're a geek when you get a bunch of CDs for your birthday, and the first thing you do with them is feed them to iTunes. These may never get played in a real CD player....)
The Forgotten English calendar tells me that today is the Feast Day of St. Lupus, patron of those afflicted with stomach ailments. I have two reactions to this:
- People with stomach ailments most likely aren't interested in feasting.
- Imagine the newly-canonized St. Lupus' disappointment upon getting his assignment. "Stomach ailments? Can't I have something like Patron of Lost Causes, or Protector of Those Lost at Sea?"
(The Catholic Forum Calendar of the Saints web site tells me that no fewer than twenty saints have been crammed into July 29th, like fratboys packed into a telephone booth.)
Trying to get up to speed on writing cgi scripts in Python, as part of the recently-revived wiki project.
I keep checking the python.org web site, hoping to find something useful, but all their cgi pages date from 1998 or so and don't answer any of the questions I have.
I might have to go buy a book or something.
Update: Found a link to the CGI RFC Project, whose goal is to "clearly and concisely codify 'current practice' of CGI/1.1 usage on the Web as of 2000." Er...as of 2000? Five years ago? Slackers.
Head hurts, neck hurts, feeling a bit sleepy, etc., etc., whine whine whine. And the only thing I had to drink last night was...water.
Pity me, pity me.
Rather cloudy this morning, but I can see patches of blue sky here & there.
Much cooler than yesterday, too: only 69° as of 10:00am.
Hm...Amazon.com has Age of Empires for only $5.32.
I wasted a lot of time playing Age of Empires, years ago. I suppose if I bought a new copy I'd just waste more time, and regret it afterward.
But it's tempting.
Update: I resisted temptation for almost twelve hours, then gave in.
Update #2: Amazon.com says to expect delivery on August 4 - 18. I'd be amused if it showed up on my birthday.
The storm arrived earlier than I expected: just before 7:00pm, the sky darkened most alarmingly, the wind picked up, and the temperature began to fall. I went outside with the camera and took numerous pictures.
Apparently a tornado was spotted on the far side of town, heading east. No word yet whether there was any damage.
The temperature fell 14° between 7:00pm and 8:00pm. Sputnik also recorded about half an inch of rain. (I watered the tomato plants anyway, just in case.)
Radar shows a second line of storms - though not so fierce - following behind the first, so we'll probably get more rain before morning.
Apple has upgraded the Mac mini line, and lowered their prices.
The configuration I want - 1.42GHz CPU, 80GB disk, 512MB RAM, built-in wireless & Bluetooth - used to cost $875, but now it's $700.
I want one. Too bad yesterday's Lotto numbers were no good at all.
A while ago, Jennifer & I ordered some flowers from a web site. They were nice flowers, and it's hard to beat the convenience of sending flowers without even leaving the house.
However: the spuds running the web site seemed to interpret my purchase as meaning Yes, please send me lots of spam! I sent a message to their unsubscribe address, and got this reply:
We have received your e-mail request to be removed from our e-mail offers and newsletters. As a valued customer, we are disappointed that we will be unable to send you future promotional opportunities with [company name omitted].
That second sentence needs work. Who's the valued customer, me or them?
Radar shows a large storm system, stretching from Chicago to the Texas panhandle and moving slowly eastward.
It's raining in Peoria right now (according to the radar, anyway), but the path of the storm suggests it won't reach Champaign for quite some time (if at all).
That's too bad. A little rain would be nice.
Watched the entire launch on NASA TV. Very cool.
There was a camera on the external tank, which provided an interesting perspective (especially when it came time to jettison the tank).
Ever since Challenger was lost in 1986, watching a shuttle launch has been a little nerve-wracking. When something unusual happens - and something unusual always happens - I wonder: is it supposed to do that? Or is that tiny little weirdness the first sign of disaster?
But Discovery is in space now, after an apparently flawless launch.
Watching NASA TV's video feed.
Launch is officially in nine minutes, but actually in about fifteen minutes. This is due to the amusing doublethink of having countdown holds built into the launch schedule: they know that when the countdown reaches 9:00, they're going to hold for eight minutes (or whatever).
Why not just add that time to the official countdown?
Checked the tomato plants this morning. There are some dead branches, and overall they still look pretty sad, but they're not dead yet.
Some branches look almost normal, and three more tomatoes are turning color. (If the blossom-end rot stays away, we might quadruple our harvest. Remarkable!)
I gave them another good soak. Perhaps they'll look better this evening than they did yesterday.
Here it is:
Yup, that's our total for the year: one [censored] tomato. I picked it because it was mostly ripe, and didn't have any blossom-end rot.
Also because I don't think we'll get any more from the long-suffering tomato plants. My neglectful watering has finally killed them, alas.
I did water the tomato plants yesterday morning. I should have watered them again yesterday evening, or perhaps this morning, but I didn't. When I went out to check them just now, they were pretty much fried.
I gave them a good soak, and a dose of plant food, but I don't really expect them to recover this time. Poor plants, they deserved better.
(Jennifer says she's afraid to eat any of it. Given the quantity & variety of chemicals I've dumped on it over the last two months, it's hard to disagree.)
All day, there's been a little red arrow in the corner of my Firefox window: critical updates are available.
But when I click on it, it doesn't find any updates, critical or otherwise. I get Firefox found the following available updates followed by an empty list box.
Silly firefox.
CNN says:
The former drummer for the Doors won a permanent injunction on Friday preventing his bandmates from using the rock group's name while touring with a revamped version of the legendary 1960s act.
The funny thing is that the injunction also requires Ray & Robby to turn over all profits from the Doors of the 21st Century tours to the original Doors partnership - of which they are both members.
Nice windfall for John, though.
Had a look at Jed Smock's web site this evening, for the first time in quite a while. Interesting news from Brother Jed: his daughter Evangeline is joining the Army.
Jed says:
Our oldest daughter, Evangeline (20), has joined the Army. She will report for duty right after our School of Evangelism in early September. She will be trained as a warrior and will study to be a Chaplain's Assistant. She wants to go to Iraq to be where the action is.
Where did that come from?
Today's high: 93°, according to sputnik; 91.9°, according to NOAA.
(NOAA also reports that as of 9:00pm the temperature was 82°, and the dewpoint was 80°. Looks like we might get some rain tonight.)
Interesting:
- Champaign: temperature 92°, dewpoint 81°
- Bloomington: temperature 98°, dewpoint 72°
- Moline: temperature 102°, dewpoint 68°
Apparently it's the humidity here in Champaign that's keeping the temperature (relatively) down.
Forecast high: variously "upper 90s", 102°, 103°.
Actual high: 92°, so far.
Jennifer - the only one who's gone out today - reports that the streets & shops are deserted.
(Well, yes, I was out for a while this morning, mowing the last unmowed bit of the back yard, but that hardly qualifies as going anywhere.)
NOAA reports: temperature 87°, dewpoint 80°, as of 11:00am.
Sputnik's numbers are slightly different: temperature 88°, dewpoint 77°, as of noon.
Today's forecast calls for a high somewhere around, if not over, 100°. We're all staying inside today.
I've been going through the various printouts I have of 1910 census pages (all from White County, Illinois), updating my genealogy database.
The 1910 census is much harder to read than 1920 or 1930. Maybe it's just that the enumerators in 1910 had miserable handwriting, tiny and scribbly; but I wonder if technology has something to do with it. Were the 1910 census pages filled in with a fountain pen?
(Wikipedia reports that the ballpoint pen wasn't invented until sometime in the 1930s. There goes that theory.)
Well. Money seems to be working now, on the X30 and on the desktop. No lost transactions. The secret incantation to achieve this state of bliss:
- Dock the X30;
- Uninstall Money for Pocket PCs, from the X30 and from the desktop;
- Undock the X30;
- Delete the desktop Money database (since after the last "synchronization" it's missing the last thirty days of transactions); restore from backup (you do have a backup, don't you?);
- Reinstall Money for Pocket PCs, but do not launch it;
- ActiveSync will - finally! - do the right thing, and copy the last thirty days of transactions to the X30 instead of deleting them from the desktop;
- At this point, cursing the mind-boggling incompetence of the chimps who wrote Microsoft Money is optional, but recommended.
It's working now. I didn't get anything useful or interesting done on the computer this evening, but at least I managed to repair all the damage I did with the foolish A06 ROM upgrade.
I'll be more careful next time, I promise.
I've been trying to synchronize the Money database on the X30 with the desktop database. It isn't working.
What usually happens is that ActiveSync deletes transactions from the desktop database. Which means I get to restore the desktop database from backups - which takes a long time; Money 2005 is wretchedly slow - and try another variation on the procedure.
This time for sure....
Turns out the A06 ROM doesn't work very well. The consensus on the Dell message boards is that A06 only works with newer revisions of the X30 hardware, only nobody knows exactly where the dividing line is between 'older' and 'newer'.
Mine is on the wrong side of it, that much is clear.
Symptoms:
Money 2005 for Pocket PCs stopped working. It synchronized with the desktop easily enough, but the application itself can't seem to get started: I get the Money menu bar, but a big empty space where the data is supposed to be.
The processor speed option page no longer displayed the current clock speed.
Rumor has it that A06 also breaks Bluetooth, reduces battery life, and causes tooth decay in small children. So, back to A05. Much foolery later, Money for Pocket PCs still doesn't work. Guess I'll have to reinstall it.
Microsoft says that the next version of Windows will not be called Windows 6.0, nor Windows 2006, nor even Windows XP 2.0 - instead, it's Windows Vista.
Silly name, if you ask me. (Not that anyone did, mind.)
Radar shows a rather fierce-looking storm system just east of Champaign, stretching into Indiana. Lots of red in the image. I expect this one will spawn quite a few tornadoes before it's done.
There's quite a light show going on outside: the sort of display we used to call "heat lightning", though heat has nothing to do with it.
Ran two loads of laundry through the machines this evening; #2 is in the dryer now. No problems so far.
Mr. Bodine extracted 85¢ in change from the dryer while he was dismantling it. It runs much more quietly now than it used to.
Mr. Bodine came to look at our dryer this afternoon. After completely dismantling it, he poked around a bit inside, then announced: "The belt is fine."
It might be that the motor is going bad, but he said that seemed unlikely. Current suspicions are that the idler pulley - which isn't an actual pulley at all, just a curved piece of metal with a plastic coating - is wearing out, and increasing the load on the motor just enough to cause it to cut out.
So the plan is to replace the idler pulley (with a real one), and see whether that helps. If not, it will be new-motor time: about $175, I think he said. Ouch.
Turned on the dryer this morning, just for a test; the drum spun right up.
Perhaps the belt (or whatever) has weakened to the point that it can't tumble a full load of wet laundry? One hopes Mr. Bodine will solve this little mystery, when he arrives this afternoon.
Sputnik recorded about .43 inches of rain last night, between 1:00am and 3:00am.
Jennifer says she was awake during the storm. I apparently slept through it.
Dell shipped a ROM upgrade last month for the X30; I don't check the Dell web site very often, so I didn't find out about it until today. (They should send announcements, or something.)
Upgrading the ROM image is a rather tedious process. Backup the system, do the upgrade, restore from the backup, synchronize with the desktop, deal with Outlook's fubar'd synchronizer (is there any part of Outlook that isn't fubar'd?), etc., etc., blah blah blah.
Personal Vehicle Manager 2005 (a splendid program) had some synchronization issues after the upgrade, but that was fixed by deleting the old database on the X30, creating a new one, and re-synchronizing.
Sometimes I think that ActiveSync and the whole synchronization thing just aren't very well thought-out. Perhaps the 'softies are working on something better - or perhaps they've lost interest in Pocket PCs now that they have Tablet PCs to play with.
Finished it this evening.
Very interesting...but it has that middle-book-of-the-trilogy feeling of incompleteness. There are scenes & clues in this book that exist only to set up book seven, which is a little irksome.
(Yes, somebody dies. No, I won't tell you who it is.)
Called around a bit today, looking for somebody to fix our dryer (which stopped working last night):
- Sears: You will use our computerized voice-recognition menu system. No, you may not speak to a human being. $59 to walk in the door, earliest appointment a week from tomorrow.
- Lichti Appliance & Refrigeration Repair: Grumpy receptionist. $69 to show up, earliest appointment next Monday.
- Bodine's: No receptionist, the number in the phone book is apparently for Mr. Bodine's cell phone. Friendly fellow, bit of a twang in his voice. $25 to show up, probably $70 more for parts & labor (assuming it's a broken belt, which is the leading theory at this point); earliest appointment tomorrow afternoon.
Looks like we have a winner in the fix-our-dryer sweepstakes.
NOAA reports temperature 84°, dewpoint 75°, as of 10:00am.
The sun is rather fierce as well. When I go outside, I can feel the sunburn happening. Ouch.
I'm on page 398, and hoping to finish by the weekend.
At this point, all I will say is that the word snogging appears more often in this book than in any other I've read.
(I bought it at the grocery store on Sunday: they had a display rack right by the door. If it had said Only twice what you'd pay at Amazon.com! I might have reconsidered my purchase. But the lure of instant gratification was too much for me.)
Dosed pretty much every plant in the back yard with Sevin this evening, in an attempt (most likely futile) to keep at bay the ravening hordes of Japanese beetles.
They're eating everything. It's very discouraging.
Also bought some tomato food at Prairie Gardens today, and sprinkled a bit on the long-suffering tomato plants in barrel #2. Perhaps they'll perk up a bit; otherwise, I'll have wasted another $4 on this year's zero-yield tomato crop.
(I've dumped so many toxins & miscellaneous chemicals into barrel #2 that it probably qualifies as a Superfund cleanup site. So if someday soon you see bunny-suited federal agents poking around the back yard, that's what they'll be doing.)
Sputnik recorded a high of 87° this evening - right about the time I was outside, mowing the lawn.
I felt rather overheated by the time I finished, but cooled down quickly enough once inside the pleasantly air-conditioned house. (We have one of those programmable thermostats, which more or less leaves the air-conditioner off when we're not here. This saves enough money on the power bill that we can afford extravagantly low thermostat settings when we are here.)
Jacob, upon arriving home from daycare this evening, walked into the room and announced:
I had a cot incident today.
Apparently one of the daycare ladies was carrying a cot, and collided with him. Poor Jake.
Joel Spolsky keeps saying:
New York is the kind of place where ten things happen to you every day on the way to the subway that would have qualified as interesting dinner conversation in Bloomington, Indiana, and you don't pay them any notice.
...which could mean that New Yorkers are oblivious to what's going on around them; was probably intended to mean that in New York, wonders are commonplace, so the worthy-of-notice threshold is set a notch higher than elsewhere; but is hard not to interpret as those poor Midwesterners live such drab, empty lives, it doesn't take much to impress them.
The rain has stopped. The clouds aren't so dark any more.
Apparently the radar was just a tad misleading.
Now it's raining.
The sky is very dark just now. The wind, which had been from the south, is now from the northwest. Every now & then, I hear thunder. A little while ago, I saw a few lightning flashes off to the north, but none since.
No rain yet.
Radar shows a long line of pretty intense thunderstorms, stretching from east-central Missouri, through Illinois and Indiana, across Michigan and into Ontario (for which, alas, NOAA provides no radar coverage).
The whole system is drifting slowly southeast. The part that's headed for Champaign looks particularly nasty, and - given the speed & direction of the storm - will likely take some time to pass.
More rain for the tomatoes, I suppose - and no lawn-mowing tonight.
CNN says:
A Colorado congressman told a radio show host that the U.S. could "take out" Islamic holy sites if Muslim fundamentalist terrorists attacked the country with nuclear weapons.
The idiot...er, congressman...in question is Tom Tancredo, a Republican from Colorado.
Perhaps Rep. Tancredo hasn't noticed that, for the last four years, we've been fighting a war on terrorism, not a war on Islam. It's the terrorists who say the war is against Islam. Is Rep. Tancredo saying that he agrees with them?
Turning Mecca into a radioactive crater wouldn't accomplish anything, except to turn pretty much the entire world against us.
With all the rain early last week, I stopped watering the tomato plants: they were getting quite enough already, I figured.
But the last rain was a quarter-inch on Friday evening.
By the time I looked out the window this morning at the long-suffering tomato plants, they were quite distressed. Or possibly deceased. Either way, the leaves were without exception limp and shriveled.
I gave them a good soaking, just in case they weren't completely dead, but at this point there seems little hope.
Hm...Alan Parsons has a web site: http://www.alanparsonsmusic.com/. (Google's #1 hit for Alan Parsons is http://www.alanparsons.com/, which appears to be a fan site.)
He has a new album, too: A Valid Path, released last year.
And he's on tour: tonight's show is Lansing, Michigan.
I bought Try Anything Once, back in 1993, and then lost track of Mr. Parsons. I suppose I thought he'd retired, or stopped recording albums, or something. It's nice to learn that he's still active.
(Funny how people just keep soldiering on, even when I'm not paying attention. It's almost enough to make me question my position as Center of the Universe, About Whom All Else Revolves.)
iTunes reports that my music library contains 7,113 songs, of which I've listened to 3,071: approximately 44%.
Hm...make that 3,072: Nostradamus by Al Stewart just finished.
I imagine there are people in the world who stayed up until midnight to buy a copy of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, then spent the rest of the night reading it, but I'm not one of them.
I might buy a copy today, if I'm in a bookstore that has copies & isn't too crowded.
P.S. There is no truth to the rumor that the recent shuttle launch was delayed so the astronauts could buy copies of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince to read in space.
Reading about singleton classes in Python. Very interesting. Google returns 84,000 matches for "python singleton". The winner seems to be the Borg class:
class Borg(object):
_state = {}
def __new__(cls, *p, **k):
self = object.__new__(cls, *p, **k)
self.__dict__ = cls._state
return self
Might prove useful, someday.
After years of frustration & disappointment with Microsoft Money, I'm wondering whether Quicken would be any better.
Money's big problem is that it's slow. Dog slow. Plate tectonics slow. Slow enough that if the developers were any good at all they'd be too ashamed to release it. (But if they were any good at all, Money wouldn't be so slow.)
When people complain that it's slow, the 'softies always say, "Maybe you need a faster computer." Maybe the 'softies need to learn how to write database applications, hm?
So: Quicken. Looks nice, seems to do pretty much everything I need. There's even Pocket Quicken, which - unlike Money for Pocket PCs - looks to be a full-featured application, not just a bare-bones data-entry program.
There are drawbacks, though. One of them is price: Quicken retails for $80 (or $65 at Sam's Club), and Pocket Quicken for $40. (Sam's Club generally has Money for $25 or so.) Another is that Quicken can't import everything from my Money database. In particular, loan accounts and budgets cannot be imported.
I'm not inclined to rush out and buy Quicken, but I suppose I'll keep it in mind when the time comes to retire Money 2005.
Watched a History Channel documentary last night, about Samuel Byck. Very interesting.
Way back in 1974, Mr. Byck decided to assassinate Richard Nixon, by hijacking an airliner and crashing it into the White House. He managed to shoot his way onto an airplane, but never got it off the ground. He committed suicide after being wounded by a police officer.
(It seems the History Channel special was a ripoff of a 2004 movie, The Assassination of Richard Nixon, which itself would never have been made if not for the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001.)
Normally, a hangover like the one I've got this morning is the result of considerable alcoholic overindulgence the night before, but last night I had nothing stronger than a chocolate shake from Sonic.
Just lucky, I guess.
The basil and purple sage, which seemed immune to all the insect trouble we've had this year, are now infested with Japanese beetles.
No bugs on the tomatoes, but they're not looking very good. I picked another slightly-red, mostly-rotten one this evening, and threw it on the compost heap.
There's a vine of some sort - cantaloupe, probably - growing out of the compost heap. There's something that looks a bit like a gourd hanging off it: not quite the same as last year's mystery melon, but close.
A surprise cloudburst opened up over town a little while ago: a quarter-inch of rain, according to sputnik. No thunder or lightning, just a good, hard rain for half an hour or so.
Radar says there's nothing else coming our way, though St. Louis is getting soaked just now.
(I never did finish mowing the lawn. Some of it is quite high now.)
My day so far:
- Stare at screen.
- Write some code.
- Delete code in disgust.
- Go to step 1.
Must think. Must write code. But can't quite manage it.
An announcement from the spuds managing Jennifer's Roth IRA: they have increased their account termination fee to $95.
That's not an early-termination fee, either. No matter when or why you close your account, they'll skim $95 off the top before cutting your check.
That's the sort of thing Bob Brinker likes to call a shark attack.
(Looks like Mr. Brinker's radio show, MoneyTalk, is available online: only $4.95/month. Or I could just turn on the radio every Saturday afternoon, and hear it for free.)
On the way home this evening, Jennifer, Jacob & I stopped at the Illini Mattress Company, to shop for a new bed.
Unlike last Sunday, this shopping experience was rather pleasant. Jake had fun bouncing on all the display models, while a friendly & helpful fella talked to us about beds (and listened when we talked to him). I didn't get any feeling of being manipulated, of being pushed to buy something I didn't want. (It didn't hurt that their prices were about $300 less than the other place - and no delivery charge, either.)
So we bought a new bed from them: should be delivered shortly after next Wednesday.
The rain - another ¼ inch today, thank you Dennis - seems to have perked up the tomatoes a little.
The leaves are starting to uncurl, here & there on the plants, and I think I see some new growth.
So maybe there's hope for them after all.
Our new answering machine arrived today: only two days after we ordered it. It works nicely.
It came with two handsets (even though I ordered, and was charged for, the package with only one). I put one in the kitchen, and the other is in the closet (since the base station can only handle four handsets).
It would be nice to know what went wrong with the old answering machine, but I don't suppose I'll ever find out. Some vital component didn't survive the last power cycle, I imagine. (Jennifer thinks she broke it. Silly Jennifer.)
The word from NASA is that today's launch of Discovery has been scrubbed:
Today's Return to Flight launch of Space Shuttle Discovery has been postponed due to an issue with a low-level fuel cutoff sensor located inside the External Tank. The sensor protects an orbiter's main engines by triggering them to shut down in the event fuel runs unexpectedly low.
Better luck next time, fellas.
P.S. Wondering about the title? Click here.
Met Jennifer at Za's for lunch today. It was...interesting.
At Za's, there are no waiters. Instead, they have a stack of order forms: you fill out the form while waiting in line, then hand it to the cashier.
Later, your food appears at one of the (several) pickup counters, around the corner from the cashier. There are no trays: you get a plate with your food on it, and that's all. If you ordered more meals than you have hands, you get to make two trips (and hope that nobody runs off with your lunch while you're gone).
And these people have the chutzpah to keep a tip jar next to the register. (They should tip me, since I'm doing half their job for them.)
Still, the food is pretty tasty.
The restaurant was very crowded today. Long lines, much waiting. The kitchen staff managed to lose our orders (both of them); the manager was most apologetic, had us re-order (i.e., fill out the forms again), brought our food to the table (i.e., just like at a real restaurant) - and refunded our money.
That was nice of him.
I don't know if today's overcast & drizzliness is still from the remnants of Hurrican Dennis, or if it's just normal weather.
Either way, it's a rather gloomy day.
Genealogy society meeting tonight; Wilson Zaring spoke about the Draper Manuscript Collection, which sounds pretty interesting, genealogically speaking:
The collection as a whole covers primarily the period between the French and Indian War and the War of 1812 (ca. 1755-1815). The geographic concentration is on what Draper and his contemporaries called the "Trans-Allegheny West," which included the western Carolinas and Virginia, some portions of Georgia and Alabama, the entire Ohio River valley, and parts of the Mississippi River valley.
The Draper Collection is enormous: four hundred ninety-one volumes, or one hundred twenty-three spools of microfilm. The nearest complete set is at the Illinois State Historical Library in Springfield, but the LDS Family History Centers can order individual spools (for $3.50 each, I believe).
There's an Illinois Volume. One of these days I'll have to get over to Springfield and see what's in it.
Sputnik has recorded nearly constant rain over the last twenty-six hours: 1.35 inches altogether.
I suppose that, technically speaking, the drought is still on: Illinois is still running quite a rain deficit for the year. But outside, everything is a bit waterlogged.
Just as the newsdroids couldn't resist Ivan the Terrible last year, I'm sure they'll find Dennis the Menace irresistible when discussing the recent hurricane. I haven't seen it in print yet, but it seems inevitable.
Here in Champaign, as of 10:00pm the remnants of Hurrican Dennis have produced less than a tenth of an inch of rain. Disappointing.
Poor Jennifer: she's been using Pair's WebMail interface to check her mail, but outgoing messages have the wrong email address on them. As a result, the quilt guild mailing list has been rejecting her postings.
That was relatively easy to fix: you just have to tweak the WebMail options a little.
In other news, the spammers have compromised my Pair Networks account mailbox: not the one I actually use, the one that ends with patrick-rice.net, but rather the one that ends with pair.com, that they created when I first signed up for their hosting service...um...two years ago? Three?
Fortunately, I don't use that mailbox for anything (not even for communication with Pair). I just reconfigured it to discard all mail that comes to it. Take that, spammers.
Stopped at Prairie Gardens on the way home from work, to see if they had any magic dust that would cure the blossom-end rot currently afflicting the tomatoes in barrel #2.
They didn't.
There were various soil-preparation powders, but they all seemed to say, "Work into soil three months before planting." Seems kinda dumb to be selling the stuff now, but that's just me.
Radar shows rain in Champaign County. Mysteriously, the line of showers has developed a hole right over Champaign, as if we had one of those Star Trek force-field domes over us.
Shields down, Lt. Worf. We need the rain.
Fun with TerraServer: two Blackbirds, on display in Palmdale, California.
Since the TerraServer image was taken (1994), Palmdale has built the Plant 42 Heritage Airpark on the site, and added quite a few aircraft (with more coming as they can afford it).
It sounds like an interesting place to visit. Alas, Palmdale is a little too far for a roadtrip. Perhaps in ten years or so, when we do the drive-to-Disneyland thing.
Motorola said I would find the MD481 for sale at the Wal-Mart in Savoy.
The Wal-Mart in Savoy does not carry the MD481.
In fact, the Wal-Mart in Savoy doesn't seem to carry any Motorola telephones.
Thanks bunches, Motorola.
Cloudy this morning: the northern fringes of Hurricane Dennis, according to the weatherdroids.
Dennis is also sending some rain our way. At this point, it's still south of I70, but heading north. The forecast calls for rain tonight.
The lawn will be happy.
Something bad happened to it while we were in Ohio last week. If it answers a call, it never hangs up. People trying to call us lately have been getting a lot of busy signals.
Sorry about that, everyone.
I've been looking for a replacement answering machine (a Motorola MD481), but haven't had much luck yet. Motorola says to try Wal-Mart, or Amazon.com. Perhaps I'll do that tomorrow.
(Why do I want the exact same model again? Because we have a lot of handsets that work just fine, but only with the MD481. I'd rather not replace all of them, too.)
There were four reddish tomatoes in barrel #2 this morning; they're gone now, because I looked more closely at them and discovered that the bottom half of each one had pretty much rotted completely away.
A little googling turned up a fact sheet from Ohio State University: Blossom-End Rot of Tomato, Pepper, and Eggplant:
Blossom-end rot is not caused by a parasitic organism but is a physiologic disorder associated with a low concentration of calcium in the fruit. Calcium is required in relatively large concentrations for normal cell growth. When a rapidly growing fruit is deprived of necessary calcium, the tissues break down, leaving the characteristic dry, sunken lesion at the blossom end. Blossom-end rot is induced when demand for calcium exceeds supply. This may result from low calcium levels or high amounts of competitive cations in the soil, drought stress, or excessive soil moisture fluctuations which reduce uptake and movement of calcium into the plant, or rapid, vegetative growth due to excessive nitrogen fertilization.
All I can say is, thank God for grocery stores. If we had to rely on my gardening skills to put food on the table, we'd starve.
Supposedly, blossom-end rot is easy to cure - they probably have the necessary concoctions at Prairie Gardens - but at the moment I'm more inclined to pull up the plants in barrel #2, put everything out on the curb next garbage day, and pretend this year's tomato crop never happened.
Went shopping for a new mattress today (the old one being in bad enough condition that everybody wakes up with a sore back); there were problems.
Mr. Salesman - who bore an uncanny resemblance to Dabney Coleman, minus the beard - tried to sell us box springs, even after we told him we just wanted a mattress. And it seems the particular model we wanted isn't kept in stock: they have to order it. "Order by Sunday, get it on Wednesday," quoth Mr. Salesman.
It seemed he wanted us to hurry up & buy the full $1,200 set, without thinking too much about it. Sorry, I thought about it anyway, and now I'm thinking we'll look someplace else.
(Jacob, at least, had fun bouncing on the display beds.)
Sometime when I wasn't paying attention, Microsoft released new versions of most of its home-software line: Digital Image Suite 2006, Encarta Premium 2006 and Money Deluxe 2006. (No sign of Streets & Trips 2006, though.)
I might get the new version of Money, but only if Money 2006 for Pocket PCs is in the box. Not coming soon, in the box, so I can upgrade nessus and the Axim at the same time, not three months apart like last year.
Encarta 2006? I use Encarta 2005, sometimes, but there's a screw loose somewhere in the internals: the dictionary, which would be most useful, never seems to work for very long. I don't know what the problem is; the Microsoft Knowledge Base is no help, either. So maybe I'll upgrade, maybe not.
Digital Image Suite 2006? I can't imagine any features that would make the new version worth the $100 price tag. Maybe next year, 'softies.
Update: Numerous posts in microsoft.public.money say that Money 2006 is 1) considerably slower than (the already-glacial) Money 2005; and 2) does not include Money 2006 for Pocket PCs. The 'softies are apparently pulling the same stunt as last year: advertising on the outside of the box something that isn't in the box.
Got out the hand saw this morning, and amputated a few of the lowest limbs from the small pine tree in the back yard. Most of them were mostly dead already, and the rest had a tendency to get in the way during lawn mowing.
Pine trees are very sticky & aromatic when attacked with a saw. Considerable effort was required to get the black gunk off my hands.
After that, Jake & I raked up a few piles of pine needles, for later bagging. Now, instead of a carpet of pine needles, we have various patches of bare dirt. Perhaps we should have raked up the needles before they killed the grass. (I'll make a note of that for next time.)
Now we have three bags of yard waste to go out with this week's trash. Last week, we had four. I think we're done for a while.
Stopped at Dodds Park (on the way home from Sam's party) to check out the Animal Planet Expo.
It was very crowded and scorching hot (92°), so we didn't stay long. If the temperature had been ten or fifteen degrees cooler, and half the people there had stayed home instead, it would have been more fun.
Still, there were games for Jake to play, and animals to look at (though I wondered whether the heat was causing them harm). There was even some kind of animal theater show, but the line to get into that was about half a mile long.
After the Parade of Lights disaster of 2002, we instituted a new policy: no parades when the temperature is below freezing. Perhaps we need a similar policy for summertime: no animal expos when the temperature is above 90°.
Some friends threw a party today for the not-yet-born Samuel: tasty food (pizza!), swimming, games, the works. It wasn't a baby shower, but then it wasn't just a regular party, either. It was a little of both, and everyone had a good time.
Baby Sam got a bunch of presents: a clothesline with baby clothes pinned to it. Jake got a present, too: a flute. Thank you, everyone.
(No pictures: I left the camera at home. Sorry.)
The tomatoes in barrel #2 are still alive, though the leaf curl seems to be getting worse. Two tomatoes are starting to change color, which is encouraging. (I just hope all that Sevin powder washes off. I like tomatoes, but not if they're contaminated with cholinesterase inhibitors. I don't want my cholinesterase inhibited - I'm still using it.)
I picked up another jug of Sevin at Prairie Gardens this evening. (They had a huge display, close to the door. It seems we're not the only ones with unwelcome insect visitors.) The plan was to kill the Japanese beetles on the apple tree in the back yard, but when I checked it this evening there were no beetles. Where did they go? I gave the tree a thorough soaking anyway, just in case.
All this happened shortly after sunset (following a brisk game of squirty guns with Jacob), so I got to see this week's planetary alignment: a crescent moon (only two days old), with Venus just below it. Very pretty.
Only five days left until the next Space Shuttle launch: STS-114, a visit by Discovery to the International Space Station.
The official countdown for shuttle launches begins with the clock at T-43 hours; due to various holds built into the schedule, the countdown has to begin sixty-nine hours and fifty-one minutes before launch in order to reach zero at the right time.
Only in government work can you promise to deliver something in forty-three hours, deliver it twenty-seven hours late, and not be considered to have missed your deadline.
Found myself at http://guidanceautomation.net/ just now.
"What's guidance automation?" I wondered.
Followed a few more links to a page titled Introduction to the Guidance Automation Toolkit, and read:
The toolkit is designed to simplify integrating reusable code into applications allowing architects to automate development activities that developers would usually have to perform manually; often by following a series of instructions. By using the toolkit, architects can also ensure that repetitive and often error-prone activities are performed in a consistent manner, streamlining and accelerating the development process.
I have no idea what any of that means. I must be stupid.
Mowed a little more of the back yard this evening: the grass is so high (due to my procrastination) that the poor little mower just can't cut very much of it on a single charge.
So for the last three days I've been on a mow, charge, repeat cycle. I might finish tomorrow. (If I mowed the lawn more often than once a month, I wouldn't have this problem. But I'm lazy.)
Barrel #1, which has a dozen holes drilled in the bottom of it now, drains nicely. The sludge seems to be drying out. I think we're going to buy another bag of dirt (to replace what was mysteriously lost during the tomato debacle), and then try again with something else.
Whatever no-see-ums that gobbled up the tomatoes in barrel #1 have yet to make an appearance (or would that be a disappearance?) in barrel #2. On the other hand, the plants in #2 do have a nasty case of leaf curl. Various gardening web sites have suggested this is due to the aboveground part of the plant growing faster than the roots: once the roots catch up to the leaves, the latter will uncurl.
Unless there's some kind of root damage - say, from inadequate drainage coupled with overwatering - in which case barrel #2's future is no brighter than #1's.
In other news, Japanese beetles have infested our apple tree, which is looking very miserable now. I think tomorrow I'll pick up some Sevin at the garden-supply store and wage a little chemical warfare.
Pixies deposited a box of chocolates on my desk at work yesterday morning: truffles from the New Pioneer Co-op. Also, a note: Thank you again for the OED!
Very tasty. And the box included a Guide to the Chocolates: how to tell what's inside from the squiggles on top.
Thank you, pixies.
(Funny how subjective the difference between annoying clutter and valued reference work can be....)
I installed iTunes 4.9 the other day. The big feature in this version: support for podcasting.
So I thought I'd see if there were any podcasts worth subscribing to. It turns out that On the Media, a weekly radio show which I sometimes manage to catch on NPR, has a podcast.
I downloaded one episode. Perhaps I'll listen to it tomorrow.