In the Carmi Times obituaries today:
Gladys Chapman Hines, 95, Carmi, died Friday morning, March 31, 2006 at Wabash Christian Retirement Center in Carmi.
She was married to Walter Hines, who was the father of Beulah Hines, who was the third wife of Robert Chastain, who was married (briefly, 1973 - 1978) to Dorothy Dean, my great-grandmother.
Small world....
Sputnik tells me that the high temperature for today was 71° - the first time this year it's been so warm.
Not one doctor visit today, but two: I had a 2:30pm appointment with Nurse Practitioner Maggie, and Sam had a 3:00pm appointment with Dr. On Call. (Funny name for a doctor.)
Maggie poked at me for a bit, and decreed: bronchitis. Now, in addition to the eyedrops (for pinkeye), I have a bottle of Biaxin pills. Yes, the same stuff that made Jacob puke like a geyser a few years ago. I hope it doesn't do the same to me.
Dr. On Call looked at Sam, and said it might be his pinkeye coming back, or he might have a cold. He's back on his eyedrops for a week or so.
(Further complicating the day: Mr. Explorer was over at Norris Tire & Auto, getting some new tires. So I took the bus from there to the clinic & back.)
If we put Sam on the floor, he can lift himself up on his hands and shuffle himself around. He tends to just pivot in place, as if his feet were attached to the floor. He tries to push with his feet, but can't quite manage it. Looks like he'll be crawling soon.
He's fascinated by tags, too. Jennifer's had to cut off all the tags from his stuffed animals, because he tries to eat them. Silly boy.
Jake: He says his leg doesn't hurt, and he's stopped limping.
Sam: His eyes are fine (he had pinkeye last week), his nose isn't running nearly as much as it was on Monday, and he seems to be in a better mood.
Jennifer: Somewhat sleep-deprived, but otherwise healthy.
Me: Nose is drying up, pinkeye is improving, but I've picked up a cough in the last day or so, and I think I might be getting an ear infection.
I filled out my juror qualification questionnaire this evening. I told them I would vote to convict anyone whose name includes the letters Q, X or Z, regardless of the testimony.
That was a joke.
I filled it out properly, and it will go out in tomorrow's mail. Perhaps this means I'll be summoned for jury duty one of these days.
It's a bit unsettling to think that I might be asked to decide the fate of some defendant in a criminal case. That's more responsibility than I want to have.
Last week, Sam had pinkeye.
This week, it's my turn.
I have a 10:45am appointment with Nurse Practitioner Maggie, who doubtless will prescribe eyedrops or something. In the meantime, I'm even more scary-looking than usual.
Update: Maggie says my temperature's a little low, my blood pressure's a little high (most likely due to the Dayquil I took this morning), and - yes - I do have pinkeye. She gave me a cute little bottle of tobramycin, two drops in each eye, four times daily. I'll still frighten small children afterward, but at least I won't have pinkeye any more.
I have moved all Jake & Sam pictures to the new Photo Gallery page. All new pictures will go there.
The old pages will go away, one of these days.
The loyal readership (all three of you) are encouraged to update your bookmarks....
Update: The photo gallery has moved to Flickr.
Jake fell off a chair on Friday; ever since, he's been limping a bit and complaining that his leg hurts.
We called his doctor on Saturday; Mr. Doctor wanted x-rays. The only x-ray machine available on weekends is in the emergency room, so that's where Jennifer & Jacob spent a big chunk of Saturday morning and afternoon. The ER doctor said there's nothing broken, no swelling, no discoloration. Stay off it, take some Tylenol, you'll be fine.
This morning, Jacob said his leg still hurts, so off to the doctor we all went. Mr. Doctor examined Jake, looked at the x-rays from Saturday, and said: no broken bones, possibly some minor trauma to the calf muscle. (Mr. Doctor used the polysyllabic Latin name for it; alas, I have quite forgotten what it was, and am too lazy to look it up.) Go easy on it, take some Tylenol, you'll be fine in a few days.
Poor Jake.
In other health news, Sam & I are fighting off colds. Poor Jennifer is exhausted from taking care of the rest of us.
Lately, I've been seeing more and more news items like these:
Man divorces his wife while asleep:
A Muslim couple in India have been told by local Islamic leaders they must separate after the husband "divorced" his wife in his sleep, the Press Trust of India reported.
Hundreds push for death of Christian convert:
Hundreds of people protested in a northern Afghan city following reports that a man who faced a possible death penalty for converting to Christianity would be released, officials said.
(I imagine televangelists here in the US are milking the latter story for all it's worth.)
In yesterday's mail: a letter from the Champaign County Circuit Court.
Egad, thought I, my nefarious past has at last caught up with me.
Not yet - instead, it was a Juror Qualification Questionnaire. I suppose if they like my answers I'll be called in for jury duty.
With Xcode installed & happy, it was fairly simple to set up DarwinPorts. I couldn't find a prebuilt version for Intel macs, so I downloaded the source distribution and built it on the iMac (which was renamed "mork" last night). With DarwinPorts running, installing subversion was as easy as
sudo port install subversion
svnadmin create /svn
svnadmin load /svn <repository
...and there was all my python code, ready for checkout. How nice.
Almost forgot: today is R. Lee Ermey's birthday.
Jennifer and I had a little date this evening: the grandparents came over from Normal to watch the kids, and we went to see V for Vendetta.
Interesting movie. Different from the book, in various troubling ways. (I think that's inevitable: in a book, even in a graphic novel, there's room to fill in the gaps, to explain the major characters a little more, and to have minor characters and scenes. All that texture and background has to be left out to produce a two-hour movie.)
They left out some of V's best lines, though:
Poor dominoes. Your pretty empire took so long to build. Now, with a snap of history's fingers, down it goes.
...or...
...but let us raise a toast to all our mad bombers, all our bastards, most unlovely and most unforgivable. Let's drink their health, then meet with them no more.
I enjoyed it, but I think Jennifer might have preferred Brokeback Mountain.
I signed up for a free online-only Apple Developer Connection membership yesterday evening.
The membership agreement was long, full of inscrutable legalisms and displayed in very small type so as to discourage anyone from actually reading it before clicking on I Agree. I laughed at the paragraph forbidding me from using Xcode to develop nuclear weapons.
I hadn't planned on it, fellas.
Xcode 2.2.1 is an 823MB download; even with DSL, that takes a while. I started the download around 10:00pm (Thursday night, this was). It finished sometime before midnight, but I was otherwise occupied (i.e., with Sam, who despite the late hour was more rowdy than sleepy) and didn't get back to it until this evening. It installed, it runs, it looks very nice - and I have no idea what to do with it. But now that I have it, I'm one step closer to having subversion up & running.
How nice.
(A previous attempt at this entry was eaten this morning by web gremlins. The foregoing is but a pale shadow of the original's eloquence & wit.)
Long ago (1986?), there was a song, I Don't Mind at All, by Bourgeois Tagg. I liked it, I meant to buy the album, but never did. The band broke up, their (two) CDs went out of print, decades passed....
Apparently both Bourgeois Tagg albums were recently reissued, and Amazon.com has them. (iTunes, alas, does not.)
And the name "Bourgeois Tagg" apparently comes from the two fellas in the band: Brent Bourgeois and Larry Tagg. I never knew that.
I want to move my Python wiki project from nessus to the iMac (currently named patrick_rices_imac, which name will be changed to something less silly just as soon as I figure out how), which means I need to install subversion (client and server) on the iMac.
The recommended source for the OS X version of subversion is DarwinPorts.
To install anything from DarwinPorts, Xcode (the OS X development environment) must be installed first.
Xcode can be downloaded - for free, which is nice - from Apple, but only for Apple Developer Connection members.
Fortunately, an online-only Apple Developer Connection membership doesn't cost anything. This is a good thing, as recent purchases have left the computer-toys piggy bank quite empty.
So tonight I expect I'll sign up for an ADC membership, and begin unwinding this particular stack of prerequisites.
I thought I was over the cold I had last week, but I seem to have suffered a relapse: since yesterday I've been sniffling & sneezing, and blowing my nose about every ten minutes.
Pity me, pity me.
Sam, on the other hand, is doing much better. He still howls whenever Jennifer doses him with the eyedrops. (I'd help, but he howls even louder when I do.)
Found a link the other day to the Microsoft Expression site. The marketroid-speak on the main Expression page says:
Microsoft Expression takes the many sides of your creative personality to all new levels. Professional design tools give you greater flexibility to create sophisticated applications and content. Innovative technologies enable faster and richer interface development for Windows applications or the Web. Compatibility between products increases all levels of your personal productivity.
Expression has three parts: Graphic Designer, Interactive Designer and Web Designer. (Such catchy names they've chosen! The marketing dept really earned their pay this time!)
Graphic Designer is another drawing program, presumably the replacement for PhotoDraw, which itself was the replacement for Microsoft Image Composer. Image Composer was nasty, PhotoDraw was even worse; I don't hold out much hope for Graphic Designer.
Interactive Designer does...something. It's an application interface designer, but what does that mean? Does it generate code? Does it talk to Visual Studio somehow? Who knows? Perhaps my confusion is a sign that I'm old & out of touch.
Web Designer seems to be a replacement for FrontPage. It can manage static and/or ASP.NET web pages. If you don't want static web pages, and you're not using a Microsoft web server, too bad. Web Designer won't help you.
And it looks like Expression will only run on Windows Vista, which makes it doubly irrelevant to me.
One of Sam's many battery-powered noisemakers plays a melody that is - I think - Beethoven's Für Elise. I thought it might be nice to hear the song played on real musical instruments, so I looked it up on iTunes.
They have two hundred and six different performances. That's almost as many as Louie, Louie, and far more than I feel like sifting through to find one I like.
I've lived forty-two and a half years without a copy of Für Elise; I suppose I can muddle through without it a while longer.
Update: It turns out that I already have a copy of this song: it's on the soundtrack to A Charlie Brown Christmas, which I bought from iTunes last year.
I've been running a subversion server on nessus for a while now, to hold various programming projects (that never go anywhere). I had the notion this evening to move subversion over to the iMac; there were problems.
I downloaded the latest release (1.3.0) from http://subversion.tigris.org/, and ran the configure script. No C compiler, it said, and stopped.
OS X is Unix, so there should be a C compiler around here somewhere, right? Alas, I am too ignorant of OS X to find it. Maybe I have to install it? Or download it from Apple? XCode is apparently free; maybe that's what I need.
Must investigate further.
Update: Apple's web site has a page, Installing the Subversion Software, that recommends getting subversion from http://darwinports.opendarwin.org/. I'll have to try that sometime.
The final tally: 4,006 in favor; 7,079 opposed. All the improvements the school district had planned to make - including two new schools - will have to wait.
As disappointing as this result is, it's even more disappointing that only 11,000 people bothered to vote on it. Surely there are more than 11,000 parents in Champaign. (Uncharitably, I suspect that putting the referendum on the back of the ballot caused more than a few voters to miss it.)
The snow started falling around 2:00am last night, but the big storm we'd been promised for most of a week never did materialize. Instead, we got an inch or so of wet, slushy snow.
The roads are wet but generally clear. Parking lots are slushy but passable.
Today is Primary Day: in addition to the usual suspects, today's ballot includes the big $66 million school-improvement referendum. I wonder how the weather will affect voter turnout, and what effect that will have on the referendum.
Trying to get the Jacob photo gallery set up. It's proving difficult. The pictures on the old page are the wrong size (the new standard is 640 × 480), but to resize them I have to find the originals.
The digital camera pictures are pretty well organized, but the scans are complete chaos. I can't find anything.
My INTP nature is outraged by this. There must be order. Files must have sensible names, and must reside in tidy directory structures. It must be possible to find pictures when they are needed.
Alas, it won't happen tonight.
Poor Sam, he's picked up a case of pinkeye from somewhere.
He's got some eyedrops that are supposed to clear it right up; but Sam, like Jake, hates eyedrops. He screams, he kicks, he waves his arms & whips his head from side to side. So getting the medicine into his eyes is rather tricky.
(I suppose this means the rest of us will be getting pinkeye soon. Bleagh.)
Weatherdroids have been in a tizzy all day, tracking the big storm coming in from the west. (Eighteen inches of snow in Nebraska, according to rumor.)
10:51pm, and there's still no snow outside. Later tonight, quoth the weatherdroids. Three to eight inches by morning, quoth the weatherdroids.
Sure would be a shame if I had to stay home from work tomorrow.
The forecast calls for one to three inches of snow, beginning Monday night.
Egad.
Began the (laborious) process of migrating the Illinois Counties project over to the new photo gallery.
There seems to be a bug in Gallery, involving multiple file uploads: if you select several files for upload, specifying captions for them, the captions get applied to the wrong files. At a guess, the captions are being passed as a php list parameter, which is assumed to match the order that files are uploaded but doesn't.
Fortunately, it's easy to batch edit photo captions, so they've all been fixed.
Next up is copying all the location data (latitude, longitude, altitude). This was a problem during the Gallery 2 experiment: it didn't let me enter unicode character entities. Or something like that.
(The grandmas would rather I get the Jake & Sam photo galleries squared away first. As Jerry Pournelle says, I'm dancing as fast as I can.)
Things we did today:
(Five years ago - Saturday, March 31, 2001 - Jennifer & I had plans: lunch at the Original Pancake House, followed by the train show at Lincoln Square. But Jacob decided it was a good day to be born, so off to the hospital we went instead: and Jacob was born at 3:43am Sunday morning - forty-three minutes after the switch to Daylight Saving Time.)
Brought home a copy of my bookmarks & RSS feeds from work, so I could import them into Safari, the OS X web browser. It was...interesting.
After twenty years of MS-DOS and Windows, all my habits & expectations are backwards from how OS X does things. I feel like I've gone to England, where they drive on the other side of the road.
Still, the iMac is a happy little machine.
Looking through my archives, I found this item from 1996:
Bob Dole looks like he belongs on the balcony at Lenin's Tomb, face locked in some rictus intended to resemble a smile, waving mechanically as the SS-20s go rumbling by.
He's got the eyebrows for it, surely. Or are those strips of electrical tape?
I used to be quite active in various newsgroups, when I was young & obnoxious....
Today's word is mucus trooper:
An employee with a cold or the flu who insists on showing up for work.
That's me - I've had a bit of a cold these last few days, but haven't stayed home. I don't think I've infected any of my cow-orkers, though.
Converting my email archives from Outlook 2002 to the OS X mail application (unimaginatively named Mail.app) is proving difficult and tedious.
It seems my Outlook .pst file has a little damage - no doubt picked up during one of the many times Outlook wedged and/or crashed on me over the years - and O2M doesn't like that. It doesn't have anything intelligent or useful to say when it hits a corrupt message - it just gives up and says it's finished, with no hint that an error occurred.
Silly software.
But soon I will have everything copied over, and won't have to use Outlook for anything ever again. How nice.
I seem to have picked up a cold somewhere. I sniffle, I blow my nose, I sneeze (explosively).
Jennifer is getting over a bout of bronchitis. Poor Jennifer. Sam's been coughing a bit, but doesn't seem sick.
Jake, who was afflicted by one virus or another pretty much constantly throughout 2001 & 2002 (thus has a battle-hardened immune system) remains healthy.
I'm trying to move my email archives from nessus to the iMac. It's proving dificult.
My oldest archived mail - from the early 1990s, before I switched to Outlook - imported without a hitch. But nothing that runs on OS X can read Outlook's .pst files.
Various web sites suggested that I install Mozilla Thunderbird on nessus, let it import my .pst file, then transfer Thunderbird's mbox files to Mail. It didn't work: Mail read the files happily enough, but decided each one was a single message.
In the end, I paid $10 for a copy of O2M, which - supposedly - can generate mbox files from .pst files. It's running now - and just loves to bring the conversion process to a screeching halt by popping up various stupid message boxes.
Soon we will know whether it really works.
There's a storm cell northwest of Champaign, big enough that its far side just brushes the outskirts of Bloomington. It's heading northeast at quite a clip, and has spawned at least one tornado.
Fortunately for us, we are not in its path.
FedEx dropped off my new toy yesterday: an iMac, one of the new Intel machines.
It's very posh.
It was very easy to set up, with one big exception: the wireless network password is the same eight-digit hexadecimal number as on Windows - but you have to stick a dollar sign on the front. No dollar sign, and the password doesn't work. Saved by Google, once again....
Currently I'm copying my iTunes music library - all 30GB of it - from nessus to the iMac. Squeezing 30GB of data through an 802.11b wireless network takes a long time. I'm guessing it will finish sometime tomorrow.
Update: I got tired of waiting, so Jake & I went to Best Buy for a network cable. Copying my entire music library will now take about two hours (if that long).
The Vladivostok News has a web site: http://vn.vladnews.ru/. Alas, Internet Explorer chokes on it, and FireFox brings up a mostly-blank page, so my hopes of keeping up with events in my favorite Russian city have - for now - been dashed.
(Factoid of the day: Vladivostok means 'lord of the east'.)
On the roof of the former Chancellor Hotel, just north of Wolfram Research World Headquarters, there is a goose, a great big Canada goose, walking around.
Back and forth it walks, on the roof of the elevator machine room, occasionally craning its neck.
Why is it up there? What is it looking for? Why isn't it floating in a pond somewhere?
Watched a tv documentary the other day about the Palm Islands:
The Palm Islands, also referred to as The Palm Dubai and The Palms, are the three largest man-made islands in the world, which are being built on the coast of the emirate of Dubai, in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). Its concept was announced in May 2002 and the three resort islands are expected to maintain Dubai's position as a premium tourist destination. The Palm Islands is also the self-declared 'Eighth Wonder of the World'.
The documentary didn't say anything about building three of them, nor about building resort hotels on them.
(I don't think I'd want to vacation there. Even if Dubai & the UAE are friendly toward the US, they're awfully close to a great many members of the death-to-America club. Sorry, guys. Nice islands, though.)
CNN says:
A new online music service called La la Media Inc. aims to offer full-length CDs for $1 by letting members trade used physical discs, in a new twist on the popular but legally challenged practice of online song swapping.
These people are doomed. Yes, it's entirely legal to give away, rent or sell the physical CDs - but not if you've kept a copy of the music for yourself. Whether you keep the CD and distribute the MP3, or the other way around, it's still a copyright violation.
I'm sure they'll be hearing from the RIAA lawyers any day now.
Update:
The La La web site says:
I ask you to do your part by doing the right thing: remove songs from your iPod or PC if you've agreed to send the CD to another member.
They're still doomed. That sort of wink wink nudge nudge don't do anything illegal, kids defense didn't work for Napster, and it didn't work for Grokster. It won't work for La La, either.
It's a bright, sunny day, too (now that the fog has burned off). The glare from all that sunshine makes me wish I'd brought my sunglasses.
Alas, they're at home.
March is the month when I get impatient with winter, and eager for spring. I pay close attention to the data from sputnik, looking for that first 70° day of the year, and whining on days when the high is only 69°. So be prepared for a lot of that over the next few weeks.
In between other (more important) activities, I managed to install Gallery 1.5.2 on the web site. It's much faster than 2.0. Looks nicer, too.
No pictures yet. These will return presently.
I have removed Gallery 2.0. It's just too slow, and Pair's memory hog killer keeps killing it.
The plan is to use Gallery 1.5.2 instead, but installing that will take a little time. Apologies to the loyal readership....
I am holding Sam, who is sleeping. There is...an odor emanating from Sam's diaper.
If I change him, he'll wake up. If Sam wakes up before he's ready, he gets really cranky.
If I don't change him, the toxic vapors will scorch my sinuses and leave me unable to smell anything ever again.
What to do, what to do....
Reading web pages just now - instead of doing something useful - I found a mention of My Son, the Box, a (beat-up cardboard) box set containing all (but one) of Allan Sherman's comedy albums, plus a big pile of extras.
Long ago, I had a vinyl copy of My Son, the Nut; I've been looking for it on CD for about twenty years. How nice that it's finally available.
Too bad it costs $140.
Poking around in iTunes just now, I stumbled across the Dead Milkmen, and couldn't resist dropping 99¢ on Punk Rock Girl.
(This is why iTunes just recently sold their 1,000,000,000th song: at 99¢/song, impulse purchases are quite painless. The record companies don't understand this, and want to raise prices to $2/song. They're morons.)
Here is a fundamental truth of the universe:
I call it the Law of Motorcycles.
After a pleasant lunch (Fiesta Café, steak fajitas, very tasty), we ran some errands:
At that point, everybody was getting a little tired and cranky, and Sam was about due for a bottle, so home we went.
I'd heard vague rumors that a movie of V for Vendetta was in the works; apparently it's further along than I thought, since it will be in theaters on the 17th.
Apple has trailers on their web site. (Alas, they don't play on poor, antiquated nessus. Dual 550MHz Pentium IIIs aren't what they used to be.) There's an official movie site also.
Suddenly I'm cough not feeling so cough cough well. If I don't feel any better in, say, two weeks, I might have to stay home from work....
Online banking says that our federal income tax refund was deposited today. How nice.
Last Sunday, I started reading Burning Tower, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle. It's very slow going.
There's something about this book - and its predecessor, Burning City - that just bothers me. The parallels to twentieth-century Los Angeles are too obvious: the Lords → rich people; the Lordkin → street gangs; the kinless → everybody else. Every now & then, the gangs riot - excuse me, I mean the Lordkin are possessed of Yangin-Atep - and the city burns. The rich people Lords are safe in their enclaves, but the middle class kinless suffer.
And using anagrams for character names - Etiarp, Dargramnet, Toronexti - only ensures that whenever a new character comes along, I stop reading and start thinking of anagrams. It's...unwise for an author to discourage readers from reading his books.
I think I will put Burning Tower back on the shelf, and read something else. Perhaps it needs to age a few years to become readable.
If I enable wireless networking on the Axim X30 - usually it's disabled, to save power - I can connect to the Movable Type admin pages. They don't render so well on the X30's tiny screen, but it's readable. In a pinch, I could post daybook entries from anywhere there's an open wireless access point.
But there's something in the Movable Type editor page that chokes Pocket Internet Explorer. The page comes up, but there's no editor. (I imagine Pocket IE's JavaScript support is inadequate.)
I had hoped that this might be fixed in Movable Type 3.2, but it isn't.
Update: I found an article on MSDN that says:
In general, Pocket Internet Explorer supports the Internet Explorer 3.02 Document Object Model.
IE 3.02 was released in 1996. The X30 is running Windows Mobile 2003. Why is Pocket IE so out of date? In all the tens of thousands of people working for Microsoft, is there anyone responsible for maintaining Pocket IE?
Anyone?
Bueller?
Online banking says that our state income tax refund was deposited today. How nice.
I'm terrible at answering EMAIL: any message that would require more than about thirty seconds to answer will linger in the inbox for weeks, until finally the shame is too much for me - but then I just file it away (amongst the 100,000+ messages in my archives), instead of replying.
I never write letters, either. Twenty years ago, I had the time & energy to blather for a half-dozen pages, but - alas! - no longer.
But every once in a while, I do manage to get some email sent (hi, Karen!), so I'm not completely hopeless.
