February 2006 Archives

The Champaign Unit 4 Schools open house was this evening, 6:00 to 8:00; so we visited two more.

One of them was Barkstall, the shiny new (where 'new' means '8 years old') school on the far southwest side of town. It was nice, I suppose: bright, spacious, clean, more & better equipment than the other schools. But it left me with a bad feeling somehow. It felt...sterile, flavorless.

I'm sure it's a very nice school. (What do I know about schools? I graduated twenty-two years ago.)

The other school was Robeson, which wasn't so shiny or new, but seemed to have a bit more warmth & personality. (Though the Peace Builder program made me bilious. "I am a Robeson student. I am [a] Peace Builder." Pop-psych horse[censored].)

We have until the end of March to pick three schools. Some time after that, we find out which (if any) Jake will attend.

News.com says:

As rumors unfurl about a new gadget upcoming from Microsoft, the company's Origami Project is starting to take shape as a very small tablet computer, one perhaps affordable enough to appeal to mainstream consumers.

I suppose this means Microsoft is abandoning the Pocket PC.

I'm not surprised. Windows CE was supposed to be a ruthlessly stripped-down version of Windows, squeezed into the limited hardware of a handheld device, but it was a little too stripped-down - for instance, it allows no more than 32 processes running at one time - and people wanted real Windows instead. Tablet PCs were nice, but too big, too heavy & too expensive. Something bigger than a Pocket PC, but smaller & cheaper than a Tablet PC, and running regular Windows, might be just the thing.

Apparently, Microsoft is aiming for a $600 price for Origami devices, so I don't suppose I'll be buying one any time soon.

Coding up a CityDesk article that generates a Movable Type import document isn't very difficult. I did it a year ago, but ran into a problem with post titles: in CityDesk, daybook articles had names like 2004-01-01, but Movable Type insisted on constructing post titles from the first line of the post.

Yesterday, I happened to think about it again, and decided to use the day number for post titles: the old daybook had only one post per day, so there wouldn't be any conflicts. And the archive urls would be reasonable, too: Daybook/2005/01/31.html, that sort of thing.

The only hard part - and it was more tedious than difficult - was fixing up the image links, and the links to other daybook entries. But that didn't take long. (It was a purely mechanical translation: Daybook.Old/nnnn/Images to Daybook-Images/nnnn, Daybook.Old/yyyy/yyyymmdd.html to Daybook/yyyy/mm/dd.html. I could have written a perl script or something to do it for me, but I'm lazy.)

So the entire daybook - all 2,610 entries - now resides within Movable Type. How nice. Once I work up the courage, I'll delete it from my CityDesk database.

(I had to delete the category archives, though: trying to cram all 2,000+ entries from the General category into a single page caused mysterious server errors.)

Finished reading Patton: A Genius for War, by Carlo D'Este.

It took me fourteen weeks and a day to finish this book (825 pages: there's another 150 pages of notes, but I skipped those). I'm slowing down in my old age.

Went on a day trip to Indiana on Wednesday, to do a little research into the Akers clan.

First stop: Dailey Chapel Cemetery, in southern Parke County. It's probable that my grandfather, Orval (not "Orville"!) Akers and his parents William & Lina Akers are buried there, and I wanted to get some pictures. Here's a nice one:

Dailey Chapel Cemetery

(Microsoft's Digital Image Library 10.0 does automatic panorama stitching. Very cool.)

The road leading from US41 up to Dailey Chapel is an alarmingly steep grade, with a half-dozen hairpin turns, a hundred-foot-deep ravine on the south side and no guardrails. Anyone fool enough to attempt that road at night, or in poor weather, is unlikely to survive.

The church is still active, which is nice, but the cemetery isn't as well-maintained as I'd like. Last year's leaves are still on the ground, and quite a few gravestones are damaged. (One, toward the back, is so eroded that there's no sign it ever had words engraved on it. Very sad.)

Second stop: the Clay County Genealogical Society Library, in Center Point (population 294). I wanted to find out more about Luke Akers, who came to Clay County from Franklin County, Virginia in 1830, to test my hypothesis that he's related somehow to William Akers. But the "Akers family history" mentioned on the library's web site turned out to be a scant two dozen typed pages in a three-ring binder, mostly transcripts of census records and other people's family histories: quite a disappointment.

The librarian was helpful, but a little overwhelming. Here's a transcript of the 1850 census. Here's a history of Clay County. Here's a cemetery reading. Here are some marriage records. She didn't give me time to actually read any of it, or to record proper source citations. I don't suppose very much of it will prove useful.

But I did find an obituary for Orval Akers' brother Ray, who died in 1974, so my library visit wasn't a complete bust.

Managed to sneak our state return past the e-file monster; the we have accepted your return email arrived a few hours later. All that's left to do is send in the TaxCut e-filing fee rebate forms, and think about what to do with all the lovely money that's to be refunded to us.

Thinking of Alison, hearing in my mind Chris Rea:

And the years go past
Just like the old song says
The pain with time has healed
It couldn't last

But oh a friend
Like a fool mentions your name

A reply from TaxCut Technical Support:

I understand that you have concern regarding unable to file your state because of the errors you get.

The suggested fix was to put a zero in box 12 of the 1099-R. Hm...tried that last night, didn't work then. Just to be thorough, I tried every possible combination of blank and zero in boxes 10 and 12; none worked.

Further experimentation revealed that leaving boxes 10, 12 and 11 blank would get past the e-filing error check. So I believe I will do that.

Poking around in Google Earth just now, I was surprised to learn that the Giza pyramids are on the west bank of the Nile, not the east bank. I don't know where I got the idea that they were on the east bank.

(There's also a golf course less than two hundred yards northeast of the pyramids. You never see that in any of the tourism brochures.)

Yesterday, Al-Askariya Mosque (in Samarra, Iraq) was bombed, presumably by Al-Qaida terrorists.

The Shiites - unable to restrain the murderous rage that seems to be the national sport in that part of the world, and just a little confused as to where they ought to direct their wrath - immediately began reprisals against the Sunnis. The body count is over 100, and still rising.

Gandhi said, "I am prepared to die, but there is no cause for which I am prepared to kill." I have the gloomy suspicion that if everyone in Iraq who agreed with that statement were gathered in one room, the room would be empty.

Wil Wheaton goes for high score in the overuse-of-jargon competition:

I finished tenth, one off the final table, when I made a great call with A9 against QT when I flopped a pair of nines and he pushed. Sadly, he paired his queen on the turn and I didn't catch up on the river.

Wil's web site needs a show me everything except the poker posts option (similar to the skip the computer posts option for which the loyal readership here have long clamored).

The Illinois Department of Revenue web site is back online, so I've been looking at Publication IL-1348: Electronic Filing Error Reject Codes, Tax Year 2005. Apparently our state return is tripping over error 0125, which is:

For each Form 1099-R that is present, Payer Name Control (SEQ 0015), Payer Name (SEQ 0020), and Payer Identification Number (SEQ 0050) must be present on the Form Record. The SSN (SEQ 0060) must be present and equal to the Primary SSN/ITIN or the Secondary SSN/ITIN on the IL-1040 (SEQ 0010 or SEQ 0030). Illinois State Income Tax Withheld (SEQ 0240 or SEQ 0280) must be less than State Distribution (SEQ 0255 or SEQ 0300).

Now we're getting somewhere. Maybe. Publication IL-1346, Electronic Return File Specifications and Record Layouts, Tax Year 2005, says of SEQ 0255:

Numeric. Required when State Income Tax Withheld - 1 is present.

State Income Tax Withheld - 1 is certainly present, but it's zero. Meanwhile, the IRS publication Instructions for Forms 1099-R and 5498 says:

If state or local income tax has been withheld on this distribution, you may enter it in boxes 10 and 13, as appropriate. In box 11, enter the abbreviated name of the state and the payer's state identification number. The state number is the payer's identification number assigned by the individual state. In box 14, enter the name of the locality. In boxes 12 and 15, you may enter the amount of the state or local distribution.

So it sounds like the preparer of the 1099-R should have left box 10 blank. Silly preparer. The question now is how to e-file our state return without modifying the 1099-R (which would probably invalidate our federal return). Perhaps a quick email to the TaxCut tech support people is in order.

Poor Jennifer, she has a cold.

"I hope I don't give it to Jake & Sam," she says.

Jake had a cold last week - which is where Jennifer probably caught the one she's got - so I think he's safe. Sam & I are as yet uninfected.

(I haven't caught a cold yet this winter. I thought it was the flu shot protecting me, but Sam's doctor said the other day that it's been a fairly mild winter, illness-wise.)

Trying to finish up our taxes this evening. There are problems. In particular, we have a Form 1099-R on which box 10 contains 0.00, while box 12 is blank: which seems to choke the Illinois e-file system. The preparing-to-file page in TaxCut screams, You must fix these errors!, and won't go any further.

I have a theory on why this might be happening, but to be sure I need to see the e-File protocol documents at http://www.iltax.com/ - which, alas, seems to have dropped offline in the last half-hour.

I believe I will go ahead and e-file the federal return, and deal with the state return later.

Sam was in his high chair, having a bottle; I was sitting at the table, working through a bowl of oat bran cereal (that had boiled over in the microwave, then set up much like concrete); Jake was eating his own breakfast (pancake on a stick, milk). I had the WRI laptop out, checking on the nightly builds (total disaster).

Jake is fascinated by the trackpoint thingy on the laptop. He pokes at it with his finger, and watches the mouse cursor move around the screen. When he finished his breakfast, I fired up MS Paint and let him draw a picture. When he finished:

Can we print it?
I'm sorry, we can't print from this computer.
Let's email it!
Okay, I'll send it to Mama, and she can print it later.

That's not the sort of conversation I could have had when I was four.

...in the PowerBall lottery, but it wasn't me.

CNN said the lump-sum payout, after taxes, will be approximately $124,000,000. I don't know what I'd do with that much money. I couldn't possibly spend it all. Buying some land and building a nice house on it might take $1,000,000, if I get really extravagant; that leaves $123,000,000.

Jennifer says she'd set up some kind of charitable foundation. That sounds like a good idea.

Sam had his six-month checkup today. The doctor examined him carefully, then certified that Sam has the usual number of arms, legs, fingers, toes, etc. (and they're all growing in the right places).

Four vaccinations today. Poor Sam, he didn't like that very much.

According to the WRI Employee Handbook, one of the perks of being a full-time employee is a free Mathematica mug. (This is a new policy. WRI used to give its employees free t-shirts, which - while attractive enough - were never available in my size.)

So I fired off an order for a mug. $4, quoth the online store. Um...it's supposed to be free, isn't it...?

I'm also eligible for a copy of Mathematica. The latest version (5.2) would probably run on six-year-old nessus, but what would I do with it? There's not much call for higher math at Stately Rice Manor, I'm afraid.

Update: My mug was delivered less than 90 minutes after the order was submitted. I didn't have to pay $4, either. Now that's service.

Messed about with Gallery quite a bit today. Some thoughts:

Storing the 2048×1536 original and an 800×600 version really eats up the disk space. (And resizing images on the server side tends to call down the wrath of the Memory Hog Killer. Best to resize images on the client side, I think.)

The default theme for Gallery is serviceable, but I need to figure out how to customize it.

I like the security features of Gallery - I can create private photo albums, visible only to particular people (e.g., the grandmas). I like the commenting feature: the grandmas can get in their 2¢ about pictures they like. But Gallery also seems to be a bit of a resource hog. Maybe 2.1 - coming Real Soon Now - will be better?

Lots of these in the resource logs for Pair's automated process monitoring system:

Feb 18 2006 22:56:59 KILL Memory hog PHP

Maybe there's some way to tell Gallery not to exercise Pair's servers quite so hard. If not...I suppose I'll have to switch to something else: Coppermine, probably, since that's what Pair recommends.

Update: I'm sure that the Pair web site used to recommend Coppermine for photo galleries, but I can't find any mention of it any more. Very strange.

Mama & Papa failed to notice that Sam's first tooth has appeared; Aunt Amy had to point it out to us.

No wonder he's been drooling so much lately. (I figured he just enjoyed drooling.)

Just back from a visit to the Children's Discovery Museum over in Normal. Natalie & Ryan were there, along with Amy, Scott, Norm & Barb (and of course Jennifer & me). A splendid time was had by all, modulo the occasional minor injury.

Getting Sam to and from the car without freezing him proved relatively simple: dress him warmly, zip him into a fleece bag (that's attached to the car seat), then cover him with a quilt. I'm not sure he even noticed that he was outside.

NOAA says the temperature in Champaign is a balmy 1° as of 8:00am.

Why, yes, I do plan on wearing shorts today. Thanks for asking!

Once upon a time, there was a company called Eazel. Their business plan was:

1. Create a file manager, named Nautilus.
2. Give it away for free.
3. (A miracle occurs.)
4. Profit!

Alas, Eazel never made it past step 2, and went under in May of 2001. Their web site lingered for a few years afterward, serving as a portal for the open-source version of Nautilus.

I had occasion to visit htt://www.eazel.com/ this evening; it's apparently been taken over by a Madrid software company.

NOAA reports that the temperature fell from 60° at 3:00pm to 30° at 9:00pm. Rumor has it the overnight low will be somewhere in the single digits.

Winter's not over just yet.

NOAA reports the temperature in Springfield is 64°, but only 30° in Quincy. Current radar shows a narrow but intense line of storms just crossing I55, heading southeast.

It seems likely to reach Champaign just in time to interfere with everybody's drive home after work. Thanks bunches, weather.

Woke up with a nasty headache this morning. The usual morning caffeine binge hasn't shifted it, either. Perhaps stronger medication is in order.

Surprisingly warm this morning: 55° as of 9:00am, according to NOAA. No sunshine, though: the cloud cover is low & thick, and driven northward by a brisk wind.

NOAA also reports: Bloomington, 46°; Peoria, 42°; and Moline, 30°. So I don't think the good weather will last very long.

I was a little leery of upgrading to 3.2, given what happened to Wil Wheaton when he tried to upgrade, but in the end it was quite painless: I copied the new files to the server, made sure all the settings were correct in the configuration file, let the database upgrader do its thing, and it all just worked. No drama, no data loss.

The installation instructions are much improved over 3.15, too. This time around I understood where on the server I'm supposed to put everything, so it's much more organized than it used to be. (Which will in turn simplify upgrading to whatever comes after 3.2.)

Had the notion to upgrade the daybook from Movable Type 3.15 to 3.2, but thought I should first do a little tidying-up: the few times I've added pictures to daybook entries, I was never quite sure where on the server to put them. So I've been thinking they should be collected and properly organized.

As it turns out, there are only eight images (out of nearly a thousand daybook entries), and they're all pretty much where they ought to be. But I did find quite a few files & directories left over from my (half-hearted, unsuccessful) attempt to move the old daybook from CityDesk to Movable Type. I deleted all of it.

Time to upgrade, I think.

The HR dept. just called: one or another insurance premium has gone up 96¢, so beginning next payday my paychecks will be that much smaller.

Scandal! Outrage!

(I don't know why I still call them 'paychecks'. It's been at least sixteen years since I got a paycheck that was a real, cashable check. It's all direct deposit now.)

The winter olympics are in progress, over in Turin, Italy.

The CNN medal tracker tells me that 75 medals have been awarded so far, but I couldn't put a winner's name to any of them. I just haven't been paying attention.

From this morning:

Jacob: Papa?
Papa: Yes?
Jacob points to a puddle of milk, newly spilled on the kitchen counter.
Papa: Ah. There's been a milk incident.
Mama: What? What's wrong?
Jacob: I didn't throw up!

Jacob's been drinking out of regular cups (albeit small plastic ones) instead of his tippy cups. So far it's gone reasonably well. This morning's milk incident involved a tippy cup, but the lid wasn't on it yet.

NOAA reports 54° at 3:00pm. Lots of sunshine, but also rather windy.

The forecast says we're to have a few more days of unusual warmth, with some rain thrown in, followed by another cold snap: Friday's high is supposed to be in the upper 20s.

That will be quite a shock from mid-50s.

Poking around in the iTunes music store just now, I found Jeff Wayne's Musical Version of the War of the Worlds, a 1978 album based on the H. G. Wells novel.

It was in the Standup Comedy section.

The iTunes people might want to fix that....

Messing about with Gallery, which is a very nice online photo album thingy. The plan is to get all the picture pages out of CityDesk, since CityDesk has been abandoned by its publisher, Fog Creek.

Ran into an amusing problem: the How Do I Install Gallery 2 page says:

The best way to install Gallery and stay up to date if you have shell access to your webserver is to use CVS.

...but when I tried that, I got this:

cvs checkout: [20:44:20] waiting for mindless's lock in /cvsroot/gallery/gallery2/...

Poor cvs has been waiting nearly fifteen minutes for this lock to clear. One imagines people across the planet, trying to install Gallery the "best" way, stuck waiting for mindless to get his cvs client un-fubar'd.

Sam & I were up a little late last night - he doesn't always fall asleep right after the last bottle - so we watched a little television together.

On Comedy Central, they were showing the South Park movie: hilarious, but also blisteringly profane & vulgar, full of all those words you can't say on television (unless you're HBO, or PBS).

Well, this will be watered-down a bit, thought I, expecting lots of bleeped-out dialog and removed scenes. There were none. Apparently the FCC rules, like Cinderella, disappear at midnight.

(A few channels away, Bravo was showing Terminator 2, from which all cussing had been neatly excised.)

Around the time Jacob started walking, we put doorknob covers on all the doors we didn't want him to get through (the ones leading to rooms full of dangerous things).

He's old enough now that we don't need doorknob covers any more, so we removed them this morning.

There seems to have been some kind of reaction between the doorknob covers and the doorknobs: half of them are covered with some kind of nasty, sticky goo. We'll have to find some way to clean them. The usual household chemicals don't seem to work. Perhaps we should try bleach?

(When Sam's big enough, we'll have to re-secure all the dangerous doors - with a different brand of doorknob cover.)

Brought up the MovableType admin page just now, and found nine comments awaiting approval: spam, every one.

Delete.

Update: Two more comments - spam - were waiting when I checked after lunch. I deleted them, and then closed comments on the post they were targeting.

Now go away and die, spammers.

According to Indiana Source Book, Vol. 1, edited by Willard Heiss (and abstracted here), county courthouses in nineteenth-century Indiana had an alarming tendency to catch fire: 1814 (Knox), 1826 (Dearborn), 1833 (Parke), 1839 (Dubois), 1843 (Miami), 1850 (Sullivan), 1851 (Clay), 1859 (Noble), 1864 (Jasper) and 1880 (Madison); plus a fire of unspecified date in Brown County and several fires in Johnson County.

That's going to complicate my genealogical researches.

For the first few hours of today, I thought it was Friday. It wasn't until I got to work that I realized my mistake.

The new sump pump - installed last Friday afternoon by the indefatigable Norm - hasn't been running these last few days.

Maybe the crawlspace is dry now, we hoped.

Maybe the new pump is broken, too, we worried.

The truth of it was rather embarassing: sometime Friday afternoon, the circuit breaker for the sump pump got turned off. I turned it on this evening, and the pump is running just fine.

Oops.

CNN says:

Hurricane Katrina leveled [Senator Trent] Lott's 154-year-old waterfront home in Pascagoula, Mississippi, last August. The insurance giant [i.e., State Farm] says the storm surge destroyed the home, and since Lott didn't have flood insurance, he isn't entitled to a big payout.

Congresscritters spend their entire careers voting on bills they haven't even read; is it any surprise that Senator Lott purchased an insurance policy without reading the fine print?

(Insurance policies are truly wondrous documents. They spell out in excruciating detail, using language that has withstood decades of legal challenges, exactly what is and is not covered. Against such an edifice, even the wrath of a Senator will spend itself in vain.)

Update: CNN has issued a correction: Senator Lott did have flood insurance, just not enough to rebuild his house - which means he has even less cause for complaint.

Opened the garage door this morning, and found a FedEx truck in the driveway, delivering the scanner I ordered Friday night.

I didn't pay for next-day shipping, either.

This is the time of year when parents have to decide which school their kid(s) will attend in the fall. It's an adventure.

Champaign has a School of Choice program, which can best be summarized as:

• If you live in the rich part of town, your kids go to the spiffy new school (Barkstall);
• If you live in an older part of town, your kids go to the school closest to your house;
• If you live in a newer part of town, but not where the rich folks live, there's no telling which school your kids will end up in.

The general rule is that 82% of each school is reserved for kids who live within 1½ miles of it; everybody outside the 1½ mile limit gets to fight over the remaining 18%.

For a K-5 school with total enrollment of 400 students, that works out (400 ÷ 6) × 18%, or about twelve seats: not very encouraging.

P.S. For those who - like me - find the site navigation at http://www.champaignschools.org/ to be annoyingly misdesigned, here are links to the Illinois State School Report Cards for the Champaign elementary schools:

Barkstall
Bottenfield
Carrie Busey
Dr. Howard
Garden Hills
Kenwood
Robeson
South Side
Stratton
Washington
Westview

We had a half-hour tour of one of these - never mind which one - this morning. There's another tour this afternoon, two more next Monday; and two evening tours. So we'll be visiting the six most promising schools, from which we'll choose three; in April the School of Choice computers will tell us which - if any - Jacob gets to attend.

And the winner in the last unplayed song on the iPod competition is Old Folks Ascension, from Music from "The Body", by Roger Waters & Ron Geesin.

When it finishes, I will have listened to all 7,349 songs in my iTunes music library. It only took a year....

This year's tax software - I pity anyone still trying to fill out tax forms by hand: our federal return, with all worksheets & ancillary materials, runs to sixty-one pages - tells me that "reparations received as a victim of persecution by Nazi Germany" aren't subject to Illinois state income tax.

Seeing as how V-E day was 6,662 days before I was born, I doubt that I qualify for any reparations. (Though if there are any individuals or nations out there harboring secret guilts that can only be assuaged by cash payments to yours truly, feel free.)

The New Horizons mission page tells me that the New Horizons probe's closest approach to Pluto is only 3,447 days away.

CNN says:

Tens of thousands of angry Muslims marched through Palestinian cities, burning the Danish flag and calling for vengeance Friday against European countries where caricatures of the Prophet Mohammad were published.

CNN also says:

A conservative advocacy group that urged a boycott of NBC's recently canceled drama about a pill-popping priest turned its wrath Thursday to an upcoming "Will & Grace" episode that it says will mock Christ's crucifixion.

There must be millions of Muslims around the world who don't get out the mask & AK-47 at any provocation, no matter how trivial; who are more than a little embarrassed by the lunatic fringe of their religion. But they never seem to get any airtime on CNN.

Two different home repair jobs this afternoon:

1. Norm - sporting a new goatee - came over from Normal to replace the sump pump (since his useless son-in-law couldn't do it himself). The new one turned out to be pretty much a drop-in replacement for the old one, which simplified matters. The new one ran for a long time when we turned it on, and the lake that used to be in the crawlspace is gone now. How nice.
2. Mr. Cable Guy stopped by in the middle of the sump pump project to find out why we've been getting so much snow. The cable inside the house was fine; but everything between the house and the main junction box out back (in the neighbors' yard) was completely shredded. It's all been replaced now, and the televisions are getting a nice clean signal - even on those high-numbered channels we never could watch before.

In the last month, we've have quite a parade of people through the house, fixing various problems: a fella from Orkin, to prevent further visits from Mr. Mouse's friends & relatives (Mr. Mouse himself having had a lethal encounter with well-known dominatrix Mistress Gluetrap); another fella to fix the garage door opener; the crawlspace waterproofing people (who would have drained our crawlspace and our bank account with equal efficacy); the ever-helpful Norm, to replace the sump pump; and Mr. Cable Guy.

Let us hope that we can get through the rest of February without having anything else break.

Woke up with a medium-intensity headache this morning: just enough to be annoying.

The roads were wet this morning (overnight rain, I suppose). Low-angle sunshine reflecting off wet pavement made for some headache-amplifying glare on the drive to work.

Fortunately, my office windows face west, so I have a few hours before the sun can get to me again.

According to the (genealogically indispensible) General Land Office Records web site, the first Akers to buy land in Indiana was Stephen Akers, who purchased the west half of the southeast quarter of section 29, township 14 north, range 4 west of the second principal meridian, in Putnam County, on September 1, 1826.

Over in Clay County, Luke Akers bought 80 acres on January 4, 1831. I might be descended from him; I'm trying to arrange a road trip to Clay County to test my hypothesis. Maybe next week....

According to Carol Ealey's web site, various Akerses (is that a word?) are buried in Dailey Chapel Cemetery, Florida Township, Parke County, Indiana:

AKERS   Lina L.          1878   1954   w/o William L.
AKERS   Margaret MOORE   1848   1924   w/o T.
AKERS   Orval M.         1897   1943
AKERS   Timothy          1841   1899
AKERS   William L.       1873   1940

Dailey Chapel Cemetery is supposedly located "Sec 7 Off Highway 41 on CR 600S". I'll have to pay a visit sometime soon.

(I'm sure I mentioned this in the daybook once already, but I can't find it. Apologies for any duplication.)

CNN says:

The iPod players are "inherently defective in design and are not sufficiently adorned with adequate warnings regarding the likelihood of hearing loss," according to the complaint, filed Tuesday in U.S. District Court in San Jose, California, on behalf of John Kiel Patterson, of Louisiana.

I suppose the fork I used to eat dinner last night is also inherently defective, in that stabbing myself with it could cause serious injury. Perhaps all forks everywhere should be adorned with adequate warnings.

The listen to all 7,000+ songs in the iPod project is nearing completion: only 189 songs remain unplayed.

It turns out that I have no fewer than five copies of the Rush song Tom Sawyer in my music library: the original, from Moving Pictures, plus another from every live album Rush has released since then.

I know it's your biggest (only?) hit, fellas, but please, give it a rest.

I predict forty-six more days of winter.

iTunes has the first Strawberry Alarm Clock album (the one with Incense and Peppermint, which is the only song of theirs I've ever heard).

I've spent enough money this week. I must resist this new temptation.