December 2005 Archives

Bought some fancy new IDE & floppy cables to install in nessus, on the theory that the old ones were failing. Alas, the new cables were just too big to plug both into the motherboard at the same time.

I suppose I'll have to return them.

But when I opened up the case, I discovered that nessus was full of dust. I used up pretty much an entire can of air cleaning it out. I imagine that's the real cause of nessus' recent problems.

While I had the case open, I removed the DVD decoder card. (A RealMagic Hollywood Plus, or some such.) It never did work very well, and I haven't used it in years.

One little oopsie: I changed the DVD-ROM drive from master to slave on the second IDE chain (the CD burner went the other way). This caused Windows to think they were entirely new devices, so they got new drive letters, D: and E:. This pushed the second hard disk from D: to F:, which was rather annoying. But a few minutes in Disk Manager and all was as it had been.

I think I'll leave nessus running overnight (both disks are seriously fragmented and in need of tidying-up); if it's still sane come morning, I will declare it cured.

Nessus has been powered down for a few days now. I'm reluctant to turn it on, for fear that its current minor disk and/or memory problem will get worse.

I did buy a new set of cables from the local computer store (Computer Deli, a pleasantly geeky sort of place); perhaps installing them will fix nessus.

If not, the next step is to replace the memory. A 256MB PC100 SDRAM thingy runs about $54 these days. (The PC133 model is $9 cheaper, and there's a 512MB PC133 SDRAM thingy for $89. I wonder if those would work in nessus.)

If that doesn't work, I'll have to replace the system disk, which will be a huge pain.

In the meantime, most things that require a working computer - email, Quicken, Age of Empires, etc. - aren't getting done. It's very frustrating.

Not only is there an International Earth Rotation and Reference Systems Service, but they have a web site: http://www.iers.org/.

Foggy this morning; apparently there's a dense fog advisory in effect.

And we heard thunder outside a few minutes ago, while Sam was having his first bottle of the day.

Crazy weather.

From the event log on nessus:

Application popup: UpdReg.EXE - Entry Point Not Found : The procedure entry point UnhandnedExceptionFilter could not be located in the dynamic link library KERNEL32.dll.

Lately, nessus has been spewing an ever-expanding set of ever more scary-sounding error messages. The misspelled function name is particularly troubling, as it suggests memory is being corrupted somehow.

Is the system disk going bad? Is one of the memory modules failing? Is it time to reinstall Windows, replace the disk and/or memory, or just buy a new computer? (Not that I feel like spending money on a new computer just now....)

Have I finally brought down Windows by installing & uninstalling too much software?

Update: Here's another one:

Event Type: Error
Event Source: Disk
Event Category: None
Event ID: 11
Date: 12/27/2005
Time: 9:36:53 PM
User: N/A
Computer: NESSUS
Description: The driver detected a controller error on \Device\Harddisk2\D.

Microsoft says:

This problem is typically caused by a failing cable that connects the drive to the computer.

New cabling is certainly cheaper than a new disk, or new memory (or a new computer, for that matter). Perhaps tomorrow I will go cable-shopping.

Several of these in the event log on nessus:

A page that should have been constant has changed (expected checksum: 21de8f82, actual checksum: 21de8f02, database 4, file 'C:\Program Files\Microsoft SQL Server\MSSQL.1\MSSQL\DATA\MSDBData.mdf', page (1:156)). This usually indicates a memory failure or other hardware or OS corruption.

Looks like nessus might need a new disk pretty soon. Time to make sure I have good backups....

Coming in May 2006: The Adventures of Commander Zack Proton and the Red Giant, by Brian Anderson, illustrated by Doug Holgate.

I went to high school with Brian, twenty-five years ago. I haven't seen him since I showed up, unannounced, on his doorstep in July of 1993. (I imagine this was a bit of a surprise for Brian, as his doorstep is just over 1,000 miles from mine. And rather inconvenient, as his second child had just been born. He was nice to me anyway.) I haven't written him in years - not even email.

But I knew he was trying to break into writing. It's nice to hear he's having some success.

It's been forty-two hours, more or less, since Sam last tossed his cookies (onto Papa, at about 12:30am on the 24th).

This afternoon, Jennifer & briefly discussed adding a new page to the web site: the BarfClock, who in the family was the last to throw up and how long ago it happened.

We decided that might be a little too much information for the loyal readership.

CNN says:

But as this holiday season nears an end, the [poker] industry's luck seems to be running out as boxed sets of cards and chips are discounted, ratings fade for some poker-themed television shows and shares of a poker-linked stock slump.

I never did understand the mania for poker. (Wil Wheaton can't seem to write about anything else these days.) It's just a card game, and a rather ill-tempered one at that: the whole point is to take other people's money.

I'll be happy when the poker fad has blown over.

CNN complains:

Stores were counting on strong demand on Saturday to make up for solid but unspectacular sales so far this holiday season. The Saturday before Christmas has become the busiest shopping day of the year as consumers hold out for last-minute discounts.

Perhaps merchants should try harder to be profitable all year long, instead of using Christmas to make up for operating at a loss January through November.

In my stocking this Christmas morning: Amarantine, by Enya.

I note with some amusement that this album clocks in at 45 minutes, ten minutes longer than its predecessor, A Day Without Rain. Fans complained that the latter, five years in the making, had too few songs on it.

"But they're good songs," Enya said.

We are all home today, probably the first time ever we haven't spent the day somewhere else.

Sam is doing much better. He didn't throw up at all yesterday, and he slept all night (from 10:00pm until 9:00am). It's been 90 minutes since his first bottle of the day, and (so far) he's kept it down. And he's much more active & chatty than he's been.

We're hoping that with a few more days of peace & quiet he'll be back to normal.

Frank Morgan and Lionel Barrymore are not the same person.

I seem to have trouble distinguishing them. (Jennifer doesn't.)

"My desire for clean data does not extend to Dumpster-diving."

The loyal readership are invited to guess:

1. Who said it, me or Jennifer?
2. What were we talking about?

Somebody has sold my email address: in the inbox tonight, not one but two pieces of spam, from American Satellite & Entertainment.

I suspect the TiVo people, since AS&E sells TiVo boxes.

I forwarded their spam to most of the email addresses on the AS&E Contact Us page, appending variations on STOP SENDING ME SPAM. I think I referred to them as VERMIN once.

Update, 12/26: Mail today, claiming to be from one Michael Jasper, network administrator for American Satellite & Entertainment:

This is a confirmation that you have been removed from our email list.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

I think it was Jesus who said, "Now go, and sin no more." Words to live by, Mike.

Courtesy of WRI's silly vacation policy (i.e., use it or lose it), I am on vacation until the end of the year.

I sorta kinda promised to keep up with email while I was away, and deal with any crises that may arise - VPN is quite handy for that sort of thing - but the cow-orkers shouldn't expect much more than that until January.

Just now, I think I'll go to bed. Sam & I were up until about 2:00am last night, so I've been a little sleepy today.

Sam's had quite a few bottles today, with no mishaps since the first one. We've been gradually increasing the percentage of formula, and he's been keeping it all down.

He seems to be more active, and in a better mood, both of which are quite welcome after the last few days.

He's still having a bit of intestinal tumult (which assaults the ears as well as the nose), and every now & then he drools a bit and makes urp noises; but - fingers crossed - no barfing.

Tomorrow we're going to try regular formula again.

The purple food coloring in Pedialyte - added by the manufacturer in obedience to the unwritten rule that everything grape-flavored must also be purple - doesn't stay purple as it passes through the digestive tract.

No, it turns bright green. This makes diaper-changing a little more festive than it usually is.

Sam had a bottle of regular formula this morning, no Pedialyte. Alas, he didn't keep it down for very long.

Today's doctor advice: go back to the half-formula, half-Pedialyte mixture, since that seemed to work, then try formula again tomorrow.

Things have been very messy lately. We're running low on clean towels.

Sam slurped down five ounces of formula & Pedialyte (that is, 2½ ounces of each, mixed together) about an hour ago; so far, he's kept it down.

He seems quite spry now.

I thought he was sleeping, so I put him in the crib; alas, he sleeps no more. (It sounds like he's playing with his pacifier.) Guess I'll fish him out again, and we'll go watch trashy television (helpfully recorded for us by the TiVo) until he really falls asleep.

Last night, that didn't happen until after midnight....

Poor Sam, still throwing up. Today he can't even keep the Pedialyte down.

Poor Sam, threw up his 8:00am bottle this morning.

Jennifer's been giving him Pedialyte all day. He's been keeping it down, which is encouraging. I think tomorrow morning we're going to try the formula again.

Poor little guy. He's too little to be sick....

When I arrived at WRI World HQ this morning, I had slightly over 1300 messages waiting in my inbox, due to an overnight process that had gone spectacularly awry.

Argh.

CNN says:

A group of 40 people dressed in Santa Claus outfits, many of them drunk, went on a rampage through Auckland, New Zealand's largest city, robbing stores, assaulting security guards and urinating from highway overpasses, police said Sunday.

I laughed when I read this, which probably means I'm a bad person.

On a whim, sneaked over to http://www.fogcreek.com/CityDesk/ to see what was new with CityDesk.

Nothing, as it turns out. The latest entry in the CityDesk News list is from last May.

The CityDesk half of http://patrick-rice.net/ is quite stagnant. Occasionally I post new pictures of Jacob and/or Samuel, every few weeks I upload some new weather graphs, and two or three times a year I might add some pages to the Genealogy section, but in general the site is moribund.

My iPod contains approximately 7,200 songs. I used to think that was an impressively large music collection, until Jamie Zawinski mentioned (rather casually) that his music collection is somewhere around 19,000 songs.

He also managed to listen to all 19,000 of them in "about five months". Assuming four minutes per song, that works out to just over eight hours of music, every single day for five straight months.

I guess the man likes his music.

NOAA says the temperature's up to 33°. The roads are clear now, but still wet. Even the parking lots are clearing up.

The sky is a featureless gray. The cloud cover isn't quite low enough to qualify as fog, but the trees over at Hessel Park are somewhat obscured.

Listening to Uncle Meat Film Excerpt by Frank Zappa, from the Uncle Meat CD; suddenly a woman's voice rises to the top of the mix, asking:

Where's the prostate gland?

Er...why do you ask, ma'am?

A little snow overnight, followed by freezing rain this morning. The roads were a little uneven: some were clear, but a little wet; others were slushy & icy.

But everybody made it to where they needed to be.

(The Giant Rat of Sumatra, which has been perched outside the Chancellor construction site for the last few days, is nowhere to be seen.)

SBC has updated their Terms of Service for DSL customers. As with most such agreements, it boils down to:

1. You (the customer) have no rights.
2. We (the Company) have no obligations.

But they took three dozen paragraphs to say so. I was amused by this one:

IMMEDIATELY DISCONTINUE USE OF THE SERVICE AND CONSULT YOUR PHYSICIAN IF YOU EXPERIENCE ANY OF THE FOLLOWING SYMPTOMS WHILE USING THE SERVICE -- DIZZINESS, ALTERED VISION, EYE OR MUSCLE TWITCHES, LOSS OF AWARENESS, DISORIENTATION, ANY INVOLUNTARY MOVEMENT, OR CONVULSIONS.

Well, now. SBC expects their DSL service to cause convulsions? Or is this just a little keister-covering from the SBC Legal Dept. on the off-chance that one of SBC's customers might have convulsions while sitting at the computer, and try to pain & suffering a few million from SBC?

(I've yet to hear a reasonable explanation for lawyers' whimsical approach to capitalization. Random paragraphs rendered in ANNOYING CAPITALS don't impress me, and they don't intimidate me. They just make the spud who wrote them look like a dork.)

A fire engine & ambulance just pulled up in front of the Jerry's IGA across the street from WRI World HQ.

I wonder what's going on....

Update: 3:45pm, and the fire engine is gone. The ambulance is still there.

Update #2: 3:50pm, and the ambulance is leaving. No lights or siren, which is either good news or very bad news.

...I'll take the Dirty Harry Tour.

We've been tearing the house apart these last few days, looking for a Barney book that Jacob checked out from the library. We looked everywhere, with no luck.

The plan was to keep renewing it until we could find & return it, but that won't be necessary: according to the library computer system, it's already been returned.

Guess that's why we couldn't find it....

Sam slept in his crib the last two nights. He seems to sleep better there than he did in the bassinet. Perhaps this is because the latter is for babies under three months and fifteen pounds, neither of which is true for Mr. Sam any more.

He's also taking six ounces of formula, most of the time. He's spitting up a bit more than he used to, usually on Mama but never quite so spectacularly as Jacob did.

And he's been practicing his yelling. It's a bit surprising that such a big sound can come from such a tiny guy....

Sometime when I wasn't paying attention, Microsoft released ActiveSync 4.1.

(What happened to ActiveSync 4.0?)

Unfortunately, all the zippy new features of 4.1 seem to require Outlook 2003, Windows Mobile 5.0 and/or Microsoft Exchange 2003; I'm not using any of those (and don't expect to, ever), so I think I'll stick with ActiveSync 3.8.

Thirty years ago, I was in eighth grade at River Forest Junior High School, in Hobart, Indiana.

My history teacher that year was supposed to have been Don Niksch, but when school started he wasn't there. Turns out he had stomach cancer, and died from it in November, 1975.

I remember some of Mr. Niksch's family came to the classroom one day, shortly after he died. "We just wanted to look at his room," they said. Even in my shallow, self-absorbed twelve-year-old-ness, that made me a little sad.

(The Social Security Death Index tells me that Mr. Niksch was born on July 3rd, 1916 - twelve days before my maternal grandfather, Herschel Maurer. Funny old world.)

There's a ten-foot-tall inflatable rat sitting on the other side of Kirby Avenue, near the construction site that used to be the Chancellor Hotel.

Mr. Rat is surrounded by a bunch of fellas carrying signs. I don't know what the signs say, so there's no telling who the fellas are. Perhaps they're union members, protesting the use of non-union labor on the Chancellor project.

Must remember to check the newspaper tonight. What editor could resist running a picture of a giant inflatable rat?

Was reading Jeff Duntemann's web site just now; he has a new crusade:

If you want my money, you'll call it "Christmas".

Seems he's offended by bland, generic phrases like "the holidays".

The problem is that December is knee-deep in holidays and/or holy days: Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa and probably more that I'm too lazy to look up just now. Merchants want to trivialize & commercialize all of them, not just Christmas.

That's why everything is "the holidays" now. But I don't think Mr. Duntemann would be any happier if all the trivialization & commercialization were refocused exclusively on his holiday, the way it used to be. He'd just grumble about that instead.

(Reading the Official Kwanzaa Web Site, I get the impression that Kwanzaa celebrations have mutated a bit over the last few decades, and the fella who began Kwanzaa is just a little peeved by this: there's a whiff of No, no, you're not doing it properly! here & there.)

Michael Covington says:

It was [C.S.] Lewis, for instance, who pointed out that it is the atheist, not the Christian, who has to believe that nearly all the religions of the world are dead wrong. Christians merely believe that the other religions are less complete or less accurate.

Lewis divides the vast tapestry of religious thought into three easy pieces: atheists, Christians, and people who think they are neither atheists nor Christians but who in reality are mere incomplete or inaccurate Christians.

A curious notion.

Let's see now:

• Shortly after breakfast, Jake announced that he didn't feel so well. Shortly after that, he threw up. Unfortunately, the notion that throwing up is best done into the toilet has not taken firm root, and so there was much cleaning-up to be done. In two different rooms. And a few times, Papa didn't get out of the way quickly enough: so he needed cleaning as well.
• Shortly after his 11:00am bottle, Sam had a huge meltdown. My attempts to calm him while still playing Age of Empires only made him more irate.
• Jennifer's car, apparently annoyed at having been left in the garage for so long, refused to start when Jennifer tried to leave for some errands.

But everything's better now: Jake says he feels much better, Sam is sleeping, and Jennifer's car is running nicely once more.

I even won a glorious victory in Age of Empires.

Several inches of snow have fallen since lunchtime, and it's still coming down.

I find myself wondering whether there's a snow brush in Mr. Explorer.

Probably not.

This will make clearing the windows an interesting experience - all the more so because my gloves, like the snow brush, are safe & warm at home.

Oops.

The readme for Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite says:

If you have installed previous versions of Visual Studio 2005, such as Beta 2 or Community Technical Preview (CTP) builds of Visual Studio Team Suite, Visual Studio Standard or Visual Studio Professional, then you must uninstall in the exact order shown below before beginning to install any version of Visual Studio 2005...

...followed by a list that's twenty-three steps long.

Update: The 'softies have posted an updated readme on the Microsoft web site. The list of hoops one must jump through is now twenty-five steps long.

Just got out of a (rather lengthy) meeting, during which the long-predicted snow began.

Looks to be about an inch on the ground already.

Noticed an unsightly bulge this morning on Mr. Explorer's left rear tire, up near the rim. Cellulite? Aneurysm?

The nice people at Norris Tire & Auto - who still remember me from all the times I brought Mr. Blazer in for repairs, back in 1998 - said, "Impact damage. The sidewall is separating and air is getting through. You need to replace that, or it'll blow. The rest of them don't look so good, either."

Paying for new tires is painful, but not as painful as sitting on the side of the road waiting for a tow truck; so I said, "Let's replace two of them, and deal with the other two later."

Half an hour later, Mr. Explorer had shiny new tires, and my checking account was $234 lighter.

(I've no idea how long Mr. Explorer's tire aneurysm was there before I noticed it. It's been weeks since I had any curb encounters....)

But the National Weather Service insists it's coming:

SNOW IS EXPECTED TO SPREAD INTO EAST AND SOUTHEAST ILLINOIS DURING THE LATE MORNING AND EARLY AFTERNOON HOURS. AT THIS TIME...IT APPEARS THAT THE HEAVIEST SNOW WILL OCCUR FROM MID AFTERNOON THROUGH EARLY EVENING. TOTAL SNOW ACCUMULATIONS RANGING FROM 4 TO 6 INCHES ARE ANTICIPATED BY LATE THURSDAY EVENING... WITH THE HIGHER AMOUNTS FROM BLOOMINGTON TO DANVILLE.

I'll believe it when I see it, fellas.

Not even much in the way of cloud cover.

At least it's warmer than yesterday: NOAA says 17° at 8:00am.

Sputnik recorded a low of -0.9° at 7:00am this morning; the official low was -4°, a new record. (The high was only 16°.)

(No, I didn't wear shorts to work today. Thanks for asking!)

Tomorrow's forecast - which was rather awkwardly phrased - seems to call for three to six inches of snow by Friday morning.

Winter doesn't officially start for another two weeks....

When I started working at Wolfram Research - Tuesday, June 11, 1991, the day after the series finale of Twin Peaks - the company internet domain was wri.com. This was back when short domain names had prestige: they meant you had staked your claim earlier than everyone else.

In early 1996, it was decided - I assume by Stephen, though as a tiny cog in the globe-spanning machineries of Wolfram Research I am not privy to such debates - that wri.com was no longer adequate: and so wolfram.com was born.

The two domains have run in parallel ever since.

That's changing: an announcement this evening from the IT folks (who used to be the sysadmin folks when WRI was a younger & smaller company) says:

...we will no longer be delivering email to most wri.com addresses.

That won't affect me very much. For the last few years, the company spam filter has been eating most mail sent to me at the old domain. (Every now & then, some gets through. I don't know why.) Now it won't even get that far.

Will it bounce, or go straight into the bit-bucket? The IT folks do not say. Either way, those among the loyal readership who want to send me mail at work are encouraged to update their address books.

The IRS has an online withholding calculator: answer all sorts of questions about your situation & finances, and it will tell you how to fill out a W-4 form to optimize your withholding.

I'll probably dig out the necessary paperwork tonight and give it a try, though my expectations are low: I've yet to find a tax calculator that gives correct (or even sensible) answers. Money 2005 is always nagging me that we're not withholding enough, even though we get a big refund every year; and TaxCut always wants us to fill out forms to make quarterly tax payments, even though we don't need to.

One of Jennifer's friends - who, being Canadian, ought to have known better - recently asserted that Prince Edward Island does not have a bridge connecting it to the mainland.

Yes, it does, and here's its web site: http://www.confederationbridge.com/.

So there.

My current cell phone - we're supposed to call them "wireless" phones now, but old habits are hard to break - was activated on November 30, 2004; the all-calls timer tells me that since then I have made 170 calls totaling 273 minutes and 28 seconds.

That works out to about 44 seconds per day.

Just learned that Carhenge has a web site: http://www.carhenge.com/.

Jennifer & I stopped there on our way back from San Francisco in 1996. I took quite a few pictures, but - alas! - most did not turn out, due to the combination of unfamiliar equipment (i.e., disposable camera) and difficult lighting (i.e., just before sunset).

Sputnik recorded a low of 5.8° this morning at 8:00am, and a high of only 18.6° at 3:00pm.

Why, yes, I did wear shorts today, mainly because I didn't check the temperature before getting dressed. It wasn't nearly as unpleasant an experience as I thought it would be.

That doesn't mean I'll do it again tomorrow, mind.

Ceej had a link to http://www.trixieupdate.com/, which is an obsessively detailed record of young Trixie's life.

I liked the 24-month sleep record. Trixie went from two naps per day to just one, sometime around sixteen months.

Alas, we have no such records for either Jacob or Samuel. We're just slackers, I suppose.

New toys from Microsoft: Windows OneCare Live, which according to the web site is:

The things you should have to help protect your PC, but probably don't because they're such a hassle — stuff like virus scanning, firewall settings, tune-ups, and file backups—all delivered to you in a friendly, easy-to-use package that runs quietly in the background.

It's free, but only because it's still in beta. When it's released, there will be a subscription fee (to be determined).

Still, sounds pretty cool.

I just bought the Trans-Siberian Orchestra album The Lost Christmas Eve from iTunes; it's downloading now.

Why? Because of the Carson Williams video currently making the rounds.

I'm just a trendoid, I guess.

(Wondering how the light show was created? Mr. Williams explains here.)

Mysteriously, the desktop & Start menu icons on nessus went all wonky this evening: instead of the old familiars, I got a bunch of can't-find-the-right-icon placeholders. (But only on my account. Jennifer's and Jacob's accounts were fine.)

There is much advice from the net on how to fix this:

• Change the desktop theme, then change it back. (Didn't work.)
• Change the display color depth, then change it back. (Didn't work.)
• Delete the IconCache.db file. (Bad idea on XP SP2, which doesn't automatically regenerate it.)
• Various other increasingly weird options, that I wasn't willing to try.

In the end, I installed the TweakUI power toy from Microsoft, and used its Rebuild Icons option. Worked like a charm.

Microsoft's icon caching subsystem doesn't work very well. It's always losing icons, failing to notice when icons change, and every once in a while just eating its own head.

I'm sure Windows Vista will be no better: fixing broken old code has never been a high priority at Microsoft.

Our house is nice enough, but the fixtures in it leave something to be desired: they're all rather ugly & cheap-looking fake brass, and they burn through light bulbs with annoying speed.

The light hanging over the kitchen table was the worst of the lot: three of the five sockets didn't work at all, and the other two were unreliable. It had a tendency to destroy light bulbs, so that the glass part came loose from the metal part (which then had to be extracted from the socket with pliers).

That's the one we replaced this afternoon, with a nice brushed-metal item we picked up at Menards yesterday. Installing it was pretty easy, except for the part where Jennifer had to run out to the hardware store for a wire stripper. ("You sent your wife out for a stripper?" Yup, and she brought back a really good one!)

It's been up for an hour or so, and hasn't fallen off the ceiling, caught fire, or electrocuted anybody: we must have installed it properly.

Sam's been spending more time in his crib lately. Soon he'll be sleeping in it, instead of in the bassinet, but we're not quite to that point yet.

Sam is a very vocal little guy. He's got something to say about nearly everything. Just now he's having a conversation with the mobile hanging over his crib.

I tried to get some video of this, but it seems there's no more effective way to silence Mr. Sam than to point a camcorder at him. (Must remember that the next time he's having a meltdown....)

A little more snow last night: less than an inch, just enough to refresh what's left from Wednesday night's snowfall.

I've been on vacation this week (burning up some excess vacation days so I don't lose any at year's end), so I missed today's company meeting and Stephen's speech; but the online banking web site shows an unexpected deposit: this year's bonus, for which everyone's been secretly hoping.

I suppose we'll just do something practical with it, like save it. Or replace the kitchen floor. But I think I'll skim a little off the top and buy some toys....

Paid a visit to http://www.annualcreditreport.com/ just now, to have a look at my credit report: TransUnion, Experian and Equifax make a lot of money selling personal information to anyone with a dollar, so I thought I should know what they're telling people about me.

TransUnion thinks I work for COLLEGE TEACHINGCORPORATION, and they have our last car loan listed twice under two different account numbers, but aside from that their report is pretty accurate.

All the financial-advice people say to rotate through the three reporting agencies, requesting a new report every four months. That means it's Experian's turn in April, and Equifax's turn next August.

CNN says:

Tropical storm Epsilon strengthened into a record 14th hurricane in the Atlantic Ocean on Friday - two days after the 2005 season officially ended.

Crazy weather....

It used to be that Sam yelled only when he was unhappy about something.

Lately he's begun yelling when he's happy, too.

Given that happy & unhappy are pretty much the only emotional states Sam has - he's only three and a half months old, after all - it makes for a rather noisy house.

Another entry in the list of things I don't want: "exclusive celebrity navigation voices" from http://www.navtones.com/.

Instead of the standard synthesized female voice giving you directions, you can have Mr. T telling you where to go, or Dennis Hopper, or some other celebrity.

Uh...no, thanks.

(Does Mr. T still qualify as a celebrity? The A-Team was, what, twenty years ago?)

This morning's surprise: about two inches of fluffy white snow, the first significant snowfall of the season.

I'll have to get some pictures of it before it melts.