January 2006 Archives

Epson has a new scanner, the Perfection 3490, with all sorts of built-in doodads for scanning negatives: only $99 from Amazon.com.

But it's a USB 2.0 device. (Everything is a USB 2.0 device these days.) It will (probably) work with the USB 1.1 ports in nessus, but at one-eighth speed.

There are add-in cards that provide USB 2.0 ports, and even combo cards that have USB 2.0 ports and FireWire ports. One of those would be very useful in nessus. But buried in the fine print for these cards is the disturbing phrase: "Requires PCI 2.2".

Hm...what's in nessus? The manual doesn't say, the BIOS doesn't say, Windows XP has no idea. The motherboard in nessus is an ASUS P2B-D2; the Asus web site implies that PCI 2.2 is supported, but never actually says it does.

The P2B-D2 uses the Intel 440BX chipset; Intel has a nice Mature 450 and 440 Chipset Families page - Mature? Is nessus eligible for AARP membership? - that says the 440BX chipset is PCI 2.1 only.

No PCI 2.2 → no USB 2.0 → no new scanner for me.

Pity me, pity me.

The Clay County Genealogical Society (that's the Clay county in Indiana, not the one in Illinois) says they have an Akers family history volume in their library.

I must get over there one of these days & check it out.

(Luke Akers was one of the earliest settlers in Clay County, having moved there from Virginia in 1830. I have no idea if I'm related to him, but it's an interesting possibility.)

Thick overcast this morning, but not uniform: there are dark, ominous patches that in a warmer month would have me expecting thunderstorms; elsewhere the sky is bright enough I almost expect blue sky to peek through at any moment.

Today's forecast calls for snow. No sign of it just yet.

But it is raining: just started, moments ago.

Way back in 1985, I bought a Nikon FE2. In 1994, I sold it and bought a Nikon 8008. The 8008 suffered an unfortunate hardware failure on Christmas Day, 2003; I'm too cheap to pay $50 to fix it, so it's been sitting idle ever since. We use the digital cameras instead.

I took somewhere between one and two thousand pictures between 1985 and 2003. I have all the negatives, in a binder in the closet. (They seem to be holding up well, despite years of neglect.) It would be nice to get digital copies of all these, but there are problems.

Option 1: have the one-hour photo people crank out a stack of photo CDs for me. At $10/CD + 50¢/image, that would cost rather more than I'm prepared to spend.

Option 2: buy a negative scanner attachment for our scanner (an Epson Perfection 636U, purchased in 2000). But the 636U is an ancient, obsolete, no longer supported model, and Epson doesn't sell accessories for it any more. Amazon.com has one negative scanner available, for $88: also more than I feel like spending.

Option 3: buy a new scanner. Scanners these days cost about twice as much as the 636U negative scanner, and they're all USB 2.0 devices. Nessus has USB 1.1 ports. They'll work with USB 2.0 devices, but at greatly reduced speed.

Option 4: wait for tomorrow's Lotto drawing, and hope for the best.

My eyes are a bit raw this evening, my nose is a bit stuffed up. I think I'm catching a cold. Sam seems to have the same symptoms, as does Jennifer. (So far, Jacob remains uninfected.)

We're out of Nyquil, too.

Today's newspaper had an article about dextromethorphan, one of Nyquil's active ingredients: the state legislature, having made it pretty much impossible to buy Sudafed - because the only people who buy Sudafed are drug dealers cooking up methamphetamine in their basements, and we've got to protect the children - is now targeting dextromethorphan. It seems people are buying it over the internet and using it for recreational purposes.

I have the gloomy suspicion that by year's end Nyquil will be under lock & key, just like Sudafed and morphine. (At some point, people will start cooking up cold remedies in their basements, since they won't be allowed to buy them.)

I downloaded the shareware version of Doom from c|net, installed it on nessus, then downloaded ZDoom from http://www.zdoom.org/ and dropped it into the Doom directory.

Now I can play Doom on nessus. Seems to work pretty well, too.

(I never was very good at Doom. I had to use the cheat codes to get anywhere. Doom 2 was even more difficult. I never even tried Doom 3.)

Jeff Duntemann just posted a comment to one of my old entries about him (Just trying to be helpful, from last May).

iTunes is selling early episodes of South Park, only $2 each, so I bought "Cartman Gets an Anal Probe".

Downloading a 21-minute video takes a while, even with DSL. And iTunes 6.0.2 is even worse than iTunes 6.0.0 at playing videos on nessus. The extra 256MB of memory didn't help at all.

I suppose I could buy the DVD set, only $32 from Amazon.com....

EarthLink, the ISP we used in the bad old days of 56K dialup, whom we dumped like a dead rat the minute DSL became available, is trying to put on a human face with http://blogs.earthlink.net/:

My name is Dave Coustan, and I'm EarthLink's newly hired full-time blogger. This thing you seem to be reading is a new blog called Earthling. You'll find two kinds of entries here -- some about what goes on at EarthLink, and some about things that interest me on the web.

Sorry, "Dave" - I was an EarthLink customer for too long. The name EarthLink will always mean corporate behemoth, indifferent to its own incompetence. No happy-talk weblog is going to fix that.

A fella from Overhead Door Co. of Champaign stopped by this morning to examine the patient; he found a broken gear, somewhere in the bowels of the machinery. One new gear (and $90) later, all is well.

I signed up for a LiveJournal account (at the cheapskate level - i.e., free): http://patrick-rice.livejournal.com/

I don't know why I did. I don't intend to ever post anything there. (That's what this is for.) I suppose if I ever post a comment on somebody else's LiveJournal page, I'll be able to use my real name instead of posting anonymously.

Probably I'll just delete it in a few weeks and/or months, like I did with the all the other online foolery - Orkut, MSN Groups, MSN Spaces, GMail, Hotmail, etc., etc., blah blah blah - I've toyed with over the years.

(My first choice was http://pat-rice.livejournal.com/, but that was taken. I don't know who it belongs to.)

Because a broken sump pump just isn't enough excitement, the garage door opener has apparently blown a gasket: push the button, the motor starts, the door doesn't move.

Bleagh.

Last month, when Mr. Orkin Man came to visit, he said, "You've got some water in your crawlspace. You really should get that looked at."

So this morning the cheery & polite Nick from Woods Basement Systems came to visit. He said, "Yup, you've got some water down there. And it looks like your sump pump has died." He tried to sell us the Christo Waterproofing System - i.e., wrap the entire crawlspace in plastic.

Only $7,000. Um...no, thanks.

Plan B is to replace the sump pump, install drainage pipes along the wall, and run a new outflow pipe out into the back yard: only $2,000.

Home Depot sells new sump pumps for $100 - $200.

Hm....

People say you that on Windows you can mount the iPod as a FAT32 disk, and use the regular Windows defragmentation tool on it.

This works, but it's dog slow.

So, on the theory that a non-fragmentatious iPod won't drain the battery quite so fast, I tried an alternative approach: use the iPod Updater package to reinitialize the iPod, then use iTunes to copy down all 7,347 songs.

This works, but it's also dog slow: squeezing 28GB of data through a FireWire 400 channel takes hours. It started at 11:30am, and as of this writing has transferred 6,140 songs. I'm hoping it will finish sometime in the next hour.

Tomorrow we'll see whether all this geek foolery improves battery life any.

Jake likes to make up knock-knock jokes:

Knock, knock!
Who's there?
Banana!
Banana who?
Banana I got eaten!

He's got quite a sense of humor, he does.

I play way too much Age of Empires. It's mindless & addictive. Surely there are better things to do with my time.

But simulated violence & mayhem are so much fun.

(Memo to those of the loyal readership who also bought the $5 Age of Empires CD-ROM from Amazon.com: look in the \DOCS\AGEOFEMP directory for a bunch of Word documents explaining the technologies available to each civilization.)

A few years ago, I tried Alton Brown's Overnight Oatmeal recipe (from Good Eats), and it ended badly: instead of a tasty breakfast, I got a potful of carbonaceous sludge. I tried a second time: same result.

Maybe Alton used a smaller crock pot, I thought. Santa must have been listening, because last month he brought me a 1½-quart crock pot: the perfect size for Overnight Oatmeal.

Before going to bed last night, I whipped up a batch and left it cooking. This morning, I had...carbonaceous sludge.

I grow weary of wasting food, so I think from now on I'll stick with cooking my oatmeal in the microwave. Maybe we can use the tiny crock pot for cheese dip or something....

The USPS slipped in a rate hike last week; as we still have a dozen or so 37¢ stamps left of the roll we bought last year, I needed some 2¢ stamps.

There's a stamp vending machine at the grocery store, but it was sold out. Fortunately, there's another one at the post office, and it was well-stocked.

It turns out you have to buy 2¢ stamps in packs of forty, which means I wasted fifty cents or so...unless I stick twenty 2¢ stamps on one envelope. It's tempting, I must say.

Seems one or another asian spam outfit has found the daybook: there were two new comments in the awaiting-approval queue this afternoon, both of them spam from one or another Korean and/or Australian IP address.

Movable Type supports IP address banning, but not very well. I guess I'll just have to delete the spam as it comes in.

I've been exercising the iPod pretty vigorously these last few weeks, trying to get the Never Played playlist down to zero. Currently it stands at 918 songs, with a total running time of just under three days.

Another month or so, and I will (probably) have listened to all 7,348 songs in my iTunes music library. I doubt that I'll run around town bragging about it, but I imagine I will enjoy a certain quiet satisfaction.

The temperature has fallen steadily over the last twenty-four hours, from 54° yesterday afternoon to 28° now.

There's a frosting of snow on rooftops & cars, but the roads are clear.

I wouldn't mind one or two big blizzards this winter, provided the refrigerator & pantry are full, the power stays on, and we don't need to go anywhere until the plows have done their work.

Just now, the cell phone rang: a woman, sounding vaguely twentysomething.

"Hi, Dad, it's me," she said.

Um...sorry, wrong number....

CNN says:

Some 3.5 million of today's Ashkenazi Jews - about 40 percent of the total Ashkenazi population - are descended from just four women, a genetic study indicates.

I've seen quite a few of these articles, where scientists study the mitochondrial DNA of various populations. We're supposed to think that - in the case of the Ashkenazi Jews - 40% of the present-day population is descended from these four women and nobody else.

But that's not how it works. Mitochondrial DNA is inherited only from the mother, so it can't tell you anything about paternal lineages. And finding one - or four - common lines doesn't tell you very much about the original population, two thousand years ago.

I wonder if anyone's done a proper statistical analysis: given an initial population of p breeding pairs, c children per pair per generation (boys & girls equally likely), what is the probability after n generations that a given mitochondrial DNA line will die out?

It would never be reported by CNN if it were, I'm quite certain.

When I first started doing genealogy, I used Family Tree Maker. After a while, I switched to Personal Ancestral File. I'm thinking it might be time to switch again: inexplicably, and rather annoyingly, PAF seems to prefer 8.3 filenames (a limit that became obsolete when Windows 95 shipped, eleven years ago). If I open "Pat Rice.paf", the PAF title bar says PATRIC~3.PAF.

I guess the Mormons are still using Windows 3.1....

...laughing at messages like Total download size: 335MB, which is the combined size of the (free) Express Editions of Visual C# 2005, MSDN 2005 and SQL Server 2005.

They didn't run too well on nessus when I tried them back in November, but I had the notion that an extra 256MB of memory (nessus is up to 768MB now, which seems extravagant for a six-year-old machine) might improve the user experience a little.

At 93KB/sec, it should take about an hour to download all of it.

In last night's EMAIL: from Cousin Kristen, a bunch of scanned pictures of various Akers relations. Seems like they all have nicknames: Skeet, Uncle Bud, Aunt Punky, Nanny. It makes me smile. I never knew the Akerses were so...whimsical.

My collection of scanned pictures - most of which came from other people, as I didn't take any pictures myself until 1985 - is getting rather large. And disorganized: I must bring order to the chaos, someday.

Just now, though, Jake & I have a date to play with some Lincoln Logs.

The temperature's been falling all day (to 33° as of 4:00pm); the rain turned to snow a few hours ago, and is starting to stick to cars & rooftops. The streets are still clear, though.

Perhaps I should go home now, before it gets any worse.

No sunshine & 55° today - instead, it's heavy overcast, 42° (as of 9:00am) and a weak, drizzly rain.

I left my umbrella at home.

Lots of sunshine, temperature 55°.

Alas, I'm at work. I can only look at the nice day happening outside my office window, not go outside and enjoy it directly.

The Hindustan Times says:

The Pre-conception and Pre-natal Diagnostic Techniques (Prohibition of Sex Selection) Act was first put in place in 1994 and amended in 2002 to make sex determination of assisted pregnancies also illegal. A three-year imprisonment and a fine of Rs 50,000 for the person who seeks sex determination is the punishment while the doctor stands to lose his/her registration as a medical practitioner.

It seems that a great many people in India are aborting girl fetuses (or "foetuses", as they spell it over there), because they'd rather have sons than daughters.

This brings to mind various words: short-sighted, sexist, idiotic, dangerous. What are all those millions of boys going to do, when they grow up and realize that their chances of marrying are just about nil due to the shortage of women?

1.85GHz dual-core Intel processor, 1GB memory, 100GB disk, 1440x900 display, SuperDrive, etc., etc.

I want one. Somebody buy one for me. Right now!

(No, I'm not going to buy one for myself. They cost $2,500.)

Turns out one of the cow-orkers has known Mr. Peterson for a long time, so we had a chat about him.

Faced with a lengthening list of civil & criminal cases against him, Mr. Peterson apparently fled the country sometime last year, taking with him enough cash to guarantee a comfortable exile.

I guess I can stop stalking him now.

Sam's new hobby: making a strange honking sound whenever he's in a good mood.

It sounds like he's having a life-threatening respiratory event, but he's just playing with his voice.

Silly little guy.

Over the weekend, I drove past the address given in the Notice of Hearing on the Secretary of State Securities Department web site; it seems Mr. Peterson's house is for sale.

But wait, there's more:

The Champaign County Circuit Court has a very nice Circuit Clerk Case Query System. Searching the records for Anthony Peterson turns up a dozen civil cases, going back to 1994: orders of protection, dissolution of marriage (two different marriages), that sort of thing.

Searching for criminal cases turns out a few interesting items as well: disorderly conduct, domestic battery, possession of cannabis, etc.

There's a pageful of speeding tickets, too.

It seems likely that there are several different Anthony Petersons involved here; at least one of the speeding tickets was issued to an Anthony Peterson from Chicago, and some cases have Anthony C. Peterson instead of Anthony G. Peterson. So it's entirely possible that the one I'm stalking didn't do all the nasty things in the court records.

Even so, I'm wondering whether Mr. Peterson is behind bars somewhere, or has fled the country....

The listen to everything in the iPod project has reached James McMurtry. The song Hands Like Rain begins thusly:

Slowly crawling 'cross the floor
Comes a shadow through the window
From the house next door
Dust specks dance in the last of the light
One more evening passing

What an image - solitude, emptiness, loss. It's a beautiful song, but not a happy one.

(He's got a new album out: Childish Things, released last September.)

Sam & I watched Dirty Jobs last night, during the 11:00pm bottle. (It was on TiVo, so there's no telling when it was actually broadcast.)

The Discovery Channel has apparently decided that words like hell and damn are unacceptable, so they've been blanked from the audio. They're still in the closed-captioning, though.

Sometimes the censorship gets a little weird, e.g., when the host - Mike Rowe - said, "You've got to have _____ to run this machine. Golf balls, that is."

One of Jacob's bedtime stories tonight was Where the Wild Things Are, so Jennifer & I were having fun with the song Wild Thing, by the Troggs.

Turns out it's on iTunes, only 99¢. So I bought it.

(http://www.troggs.com/ seems to have no connection to the band. It belongs to a surf-gear shop in Northern Ireland. I didn't know it was possible to surf anywhere near Ireland, let alone that enough people would be doing it to support shops selling surf gear.)

I had the notion that Lotto numbers could be considered as coordinates (am I the only one who remembers when that word was punctuated coördinates?) in six-dimensional space, and I could calculate the distance between the numbers we play (via subscription) and the winning numbers.

The Lotto web site has winning numbers online, going way back; I grabbed the set for 2005 and did a little Excel foolery. It turns out the closest we ever got to the big prize was 6.164, on November 26th. (Which by a curious coincidence was long-lost brother Mike's birthday.)

We didn't win anything that time. The three times we did win ($3 each - don't spend it all in one place!) the distances were 35.581, 28.758 and 6.708.

(The upper bound on distance is 125, which is the distance from [1,1,1,1,1,1] to [52,52,52,52,52,52]. The greatest possible distance would have to be somewhat less, since there can't be any repeated numbers in the coordinates.)

In today's mail: the first tax-related item of the year, a card from the Illinois Deptartment of Revenue that says Important: Tax Document.

So far as I can tell, the only important information on it is a number that will let us file our Illinois return online without paying the usual "convenience" fee.

I'm starting to get really annoyed with the wireless keyboard & mouse on nessus. There's some kind of interference affecting the mouse, so it doesn't move and button clicks don't register. Fooling with the channel selector helps, a little, but only temporarily.

It's hard to play Age of Empires with a gimpy mouse.

The keyboard is nice, but the 'softies decided that twenty years was quite long enough for the standard function key definitions: so they changed them all. Alt-F4, instead of closing the current window, opens a new one. There's an F-Lock key to restore the standard behavior, but it's not sticky. Every reboot, you have to press it again, or the function keys are completely fubar'd once more.

I might have to go back to a standard-layout wired keyboard....

Got my hair cut today; it's quite short now. (The beard is gone, too.)

This is probably the first time it's been my idea to have my hair so short: before now, I only cut it for job interviews, for those lucrative fast-food jobs in high school, or - going way back now - because my mother made me cut it.

I just got tired of it. (That, and Sam kept pulling it.) Now Jennifer giggles whenever she sees me.

The 512MB DIMM from Champaign Computer worked very nicely in nessus, but nessus only saw half of it: apparently the P2B-D2 motherboard doesn't support high-density DIMMs.

I suppose I should have checked that before buying one. Oops.

So I returned it this morning, and ordered three 256MB low-density DIMMs instead. Alas, they only had one; the others will arrive one of these days.

My current memory stockpile: two 128MB PC100 DIMMs, one old 256MB PC133 DIMM, one new 256MB PC133DIMM. Of the first three of these, at least one is bad. I'm tempted to install both of the 256MB DIMMs, and see what the memory tester makes of them. Perhaps nessus will end up with a gigabyte of memory.

That would be nice.

CNN has an article headlined Researchers Discover Largest Prime Number.

I guess we can stop looking now, hm?

The Windows Memory Diagnostic thingy reported quite a few (i.e., thousands) of memory errors when testing nessus. Time for new memory, I suppose.

(If you go to Best Buy and ask for a pair of 256MB PC100 SDRAMs, they laugh at you. They do have a few lonely PC100 & PC133 packages, but they're way overpriced. "Nobody makes this stuff any more, it's hard to get." It's all PC2700 these days, with a little PC3200 mixed in. Fortunately, the nice people at Champaign Computer still carry a reasonable selection of PC100 & PC133 memory. They'll probably laugh at me, too, but their prices are about a third of what Best Buy charges.)

Nessus was fine for a few days, after the dismantling & dust bunny removal; then it started crashing again.

It crashed on me a half-dozen times last night; and Jennifer reports three more crashes today (plus a nasty paper jam in the inkjet printer).

I have the Windows Memory Diagnostic tool, which is supposed to be pretty good at spotting bad memory. I'll run it tonight, and see what it says.

A minor saga about the Windows Memory Diagnostic thingy:

You can't run a memory test while Windows is running, so it isn't something you install on your computer. Instead, the WMD installer creates an iso image of a bootable CD that contains the actual WMD program. Boot from the CD, and the utility runs automatically.

Unfortunately, Windows XP doesn't know how to burn iso images. Microsoft suggests installing the Windows Server 2003 Resource Kit Tools, which includes a cdburn utility.
I tried several times to download it, but the image was truncated and/or corrupted, every time.

Lucky for me, there are lots of machines at WRI that know how to burn iso images, so that's what I did.

Anthony G. Peterson has an office on the fourth floor of the Trade Center building; on the door is a scary-looking Notice of Abandonment, in which the building management says Since you've skipped town, we're going to sell your stuff & re-rent your office.

Meanwhile, the Illinois Secretary of State web site has a scary-looking Notice of Hearing:

Said hearing will be held to determine whether an Order should be entered which revokes the salesperson registration of Anthony G. Peterson (the "Respondent") in the State of Illinois and/or granting such other relief as may be authorized under the Act including but not limited to imposition of a monetary fine in the maximum amount of $10,000 pursuant to Section 11.E.4 of the Act, payable within ten (10) business days of the entry of the Order.

The Illinois Department of Corrections Inmate Search Page lists three Anthony Petersons, but none of them is from Champaign.

I wonder what's going on with Mr. Peterson....

Sam had a little rice cereal this evening, mixed into some formula. He was very enthusiastic, and didn't have any trouble with the spoon.

He's still working on swallowing, though. Most of it ended up on his bib. (First time he's ever worn a bib, if memory serves.)

Yes, we took pictures.

NOAA says the temperature was 57° at 8:00am. There's a line of thunderstorms coming from the west, and we're under a tornado watch until noon. A few minutes ago, we heard thunder.

In January? Crazy weather....

Left nessus running overnight, defragmenting the C: drive; there were no problems.

I guess it was just dust bunnies behind the recent unpleasantness. Must remember to clean the computer more often....

I went to bed at 11:45pm last night. I figured the new year would arrive whether I was awake or not, and getting enough sleep is more important than watching the calendar roll over.