April 2006 Archives

I uninstalled Pocket Quicken from the Axim X30 this morning. I docked the X30 (mainly to recharge the battery, which was running low), and the Pocket Quicken synchronization refused to work. I rebooted the X30, I ran validation on the desktop Quicken data file; no validation errors, but no synchronization, either.

I haven't used Pocket Quicken in a few weeks, because I stopped using Quicken on nessus: instead, I've been using the Mac version of Quicken that came with the iMac. (It's no better than adequate. I'm hoping Quicken 2007 will be better - and will run natively on Intel-based Macs.) So I decided it was time for Pocket Quicken to go away.

Synchronization works better now. (And rather more quickly.)

I get the feeling that there isn't much common code between the three platforms (Windows, Windows CE, OS X) Quicken supports. They don't look the same, they don't work the same, they can't even read each other's data files.

Come on, Intuit. Cross-platform development isn't that hard. Especially for a simple three-tier application (database, logic, presentation) like Quicken.

Sam had his first bath in the kitchen sink tonight. I think he enjoyed it.

He's big enough now, and pretty good at sitting up; and table baths are so messy: water gets everywhere. So we put one of those suction-cup bathtub mats in the sink, added a inch or two of water, then plopped Mr. Sam in.

Sam was a bit frightened at first, but once he figured out he could splash people everything was fine. (Sink baths are so messy: water gets everywhere.) We gave him a few squirty bath toys to keep him distracted, and the fancy faucet we - that is, Jennifer's father - installed last year was just the thing for rinsing.

Jake's first sink bath was November 18, 2001, when he was seven and a half months old. Sam's eight and a half months old, more or less. Is the age difference significant? Was Jake early, or was Sam late?

(Jake's last sink bath was September 17, 2002, which suggests Sam will make his jump to the big tub sometime next February.)

The door handle on the microwave oven came off in my hand today. Oops.

Originally, the handle was held on by two screws; sometime before we bought the house, the top one broke off. (It's curious how much incidental damage this house suffered, and how little of it we noticed, before we bought it. I plan on inspecting our next house much more thoroughly before signing anything.) Six years later, screw #2 failed: and we have an unhandled microwave.

We can still get the door open, but it's rather tricky.

A new handle costs $30, more or less. A new microwave - which would be preferable - costs somewhere upwards of $250.

I suppose we'll be going to Sears tomorrow for a little microwave-shopping. It would be nice to get one that matches our new stove, but apparently Kenwood doesn't make microwaves any more.

Last year - March 15, to be precise - I watched a television documentary about the yacht Trashman, which went down in a storm off North Carolina in 1982.

This year, it's the Discovery Channel: an episode of their new series I Shouldn't Be Alive is devoted to this unfortunate ship and her hapless crew.

I wonder how the two survivors feel about the endless series of programs explaining what they should have done....

Funny song, from Jonathan Coulton:

Code Monkey get up get coffee
Code Monkey go to job
Code Monkey have boring meeting
with boring manager Rob
Rob say Code Monkey very diligent
but his output stink
his code not functional or elegant
what do Code Monkey think
Code Monkey think maybe manager wanta write goddamn login page himself
Code Monkey not say it out loud
Code Monkey not crazy just proud

I suppose I used to be a code monkey, fifteen or twenty years ago, but I'm too old now. Instead, I've aged into one of those weary & cynical types that the code monkeys look down on.

Yesterday, I picked up a box of DVD-R blanks (each in its very own fancy plastic video box, just like at Blockbuster); the idea is to use the iMac to burn DVDs of Jake & Sam videos for distribution to the grandparents.

They turned out to be from Verbatim, which pried loose an old memory:

Just about 28 years ago, floppy disks - 5¼ inch, single-sided, double-density 180KB floppies, that is - sold for about $5 each. I remember walking a mile or so down to the local computer store (I could have taken the bus, but somehow that never occurred to me) to buy one - just one, that being all I could afford - for the high school's computer (an Apple II).

That was a Verbatim disk also.

Then: 1978, 180KB, $5; or, approximately 2¾¢ per kilobyte of storage.

Now: 2006, 30 × 4.7GB, $24; or, approximately 0.0000002¢ per kilobyte.

(Does anybody still use floppy disks for anything? It's been so long since I've needed one that I don't really know whether nessus' floppy drive still works. The iMac doesn't even have one.)

Jake, Sam & I went to the Octave Chanute Aerospace Museum this morning, for another look at the airplanes. The grandparents came over from Normal, and managed to find the place despite my rather inadequate directions.

They've moved everything around since the last time we were there. The main hangar is half-empty now; apparently, some of the planes go outside for the summer.

After the museum, we had lunch at a Red Wheel restaurant. (Chicken salad, very tasty.) Sam had lunch, too, but he was very squirmy and distracted through the whole thing. I think we got more food in him than on him. I hope we did....

Installed a demo version of Reunion 8 this evening. Supposedly, it's the best Mac genealogy program there is. (It also seems to be the only Mac genealogy program there is.)

Looks nice. I could use it, I think. Too bad it costs $90, won't synchronize with the Axim X30, and isn't available (yet) in an Intel version. (The PowerPC version runs pretty well under Rosetta.)

MSNBC says:

Chinese clone mad cow-resistant calf

It's nice to know that the Chinese have cloned a cow-resistant calf. Too bad it's insane....

There's a certain...aroma? stench? vile miasma?...in my office, coming from the new Walgreens across the street.

My efforts to breathe have so far been successful, but only barely.

P.S. I wanted to use the word "wafture" in this entry, in the belief that it had something to do with smells wafted on the breeze; alas, it does not.

The mystery hole in the parking area underneath the north wing of the Trade Center - which has lost all its mystery, now that I know a generator's going there - is obscured with forms & rebar; concrete, presumably, to follow shortly.

I've missed my chance to get a picture of the interesting geological strata revealed by the excavation. Oops.

The new Walgreens, going up on the northwest corner of Neil & Kirby, is getting its roof today: quite a few workers are up there, sloshing tar around. I can't see the tar, but I surely can smell it.

The new hotel, also going up across the street, is getting a new roof: some kind of metal-frame box thing that's going to sit on top of the existing roof. Maybe the idea is to make the old building slightly less boxy-looking.

The temperature was 55° at 6:00am, but it didn't stay there: clouds rolled in, it started raining, and the temperature dropped to 39° by 11:00am. It's gone up a few degrees since then, but I don't think we'll get back into the fifties today.

But now that the rain has stopped (or at least paused for a while), the lawns and trees outside my office window are a particularly vivid shade of green. So there's some consolation for the crummy weather.

The kids next door came over this afternoon, to ask Jacob to come out & play; so Jake and I went outside to play the bubble game: I blew bubbles, the kids chased them. (This is a good game for lazy grownups, as the kids do all the running around.)

For a long time, it seemed like they didn't want to have anything to do with us, which was a little sad. It's nice that they've finally decided we're ok. (Or maybe their parents have finally decided we're ok.)

In today's mail: a flyer from Cingular:

Finally - Your Credit History Doesn't Matter!
You Can Get a Wireless Phone!

Apparently, they think my credit history is so wretched that nobody else is willing to give me a cellular phone (when did they become "wireless" instead of cellular, anyway?), and I'm so desperate to get my hands on one that I'll sign up for their GoPhone plan before noticing what a ripoff it is: the money you put in your pay-as-you-go account expires. If you use your phone, they charge you for it; if you don't use your phone, they take your money anyway.

No, thanks. I believe I'll keep the phone I have.

Dinner yesterday was at Steak & Shake; Jennifer used the phone camera to take a cute picture of Jacob wearing a Steak & Shake paper hat.

I meant to upload it here, but apparently MovableType 3.2 won't let me upload files outside the local site directory. I don't want to put images in there: I want to be able to delete & regenerate the entire local site directory at any time, without worrying about losing any image files.

So the Daybook resides in .../Daybook, while the images are in .../Daybook-Images. MovableType 3.1 had no problems with this arrangement, but 3.2 is not so flexible.

It's too late tonight to deal with this. Maybe tomorrow.

The reason I was using the Generic Postscript driver on nessus to talk to the Epson printer on mork - no, there were two reasons: first, the web sites I checked all said to use it; second, I couldn't find "Epson Stylus Photo 785EPX" in the driver list when going through the Bonjour network printer setup wizard.

The web sites were wrong: Generic Postcript doesn't work, at least not for me.

And the reason I couldn't find the driver is that I was looking under Epson. It's under EPSON, and it works just fine.

Except for one little thing: the gizmo that monitors the ink cartridges, paper, etc., insists on trying to monitor the remote printer. It can't, presumably because it's not a local printer. So I can print from nessus, but every time I do a rather annoying printer monitor window pops up, complaining that it can't communicate with the printer.

If I turn off monitoring, I lose access to the printer. AUGH.

Investigation continues....

Dug out the printer manual, to see whether the nozzle-cleaner and printer test pages could be invoked from the printer console (since Epson never updated their software for OS X); they can.

The ink nozzles were a little dirty, and the ink cartridges are running low (black is at 13%, color is 25%), but after a quick nozzle scrub (and doesn't that sound lewd) printing from the iMac works pretty well.

I wonder if there's some way to tell Windows specifically that it's a Macintosh printer, since "generic postscript" doesn't seem to work.

MSNBC says:

In a move to make the freely distributed Linux operating system a stronger alternative to Microsoft Corp.'s Windows, a group of major Linux distributors announced Friday they have united on a standard set of components for desktop versions of Linux.

Remember UnitedLinux? Now we have the Free Standards Group, trying to do the same thing: standardize Linux, and push Microsoft off the face of the earth.

Didn't happen with UnitedLinux in 2002, won't happen with FSG in 2006.

Hm...the icons in the Finder's Applications window on the iMac are all wrong. iChat (which I've never used) has the Quicken icon; iMovie has the iCal icon; iCal has no icon; etc., etc.

How did that happen? And how do I fix it?

Update: I logged out, then logged back in; all is well. I hope it doesn't happen again....

Grandparents drove down from Arlington Heights today, to visit the grandchildren. A splendid time was had by all, though Jake's frisbee did end up in the neighbors' yard. (Perhaps they'll toss it back over the fence sometime....)

Pictures were taken, though none with the digital camera. Instead, we used Jake's disposable camera, so we won't get to see the pictures for a while. (How...twentieth-century....)

CNN says:

More than three years after the last "Star Trek" movie crashed at the box office, the venerable sci-fi franchise is being revived by the director of the upcoming "Mission: Impossible" sequel, Daily Variety reported in its Friday edition.

I don't know whether to be happy that there's going to be another Star Trek movie, or unhappy that the spuds responsible for the Mission: Impossible movie franchise are going to be involved in it.

The first Mission: Impossible movie would have been all right, except for the unforgivable sin of making Mr. Phelps the villain; the second was a generic Hollywood action movie, full of generic violence & mayhem, tagged with the Mission: Impossible title just to cash in on whatever viewer interest and goodwill were left after the first one; I don't suppose I'll bother watching the third.

I surely do hope that these people don't do to Star Trek what they did to Mission: Impossible....

MSNBC says:

In other states such as Florida and California, executions have been delayed while courts ponder whether lethal injections cause excessive pain.

Killing a person is never going to be a neat, tidy & painless process. Trying to make it so seems a bit hypocritical.

Perhaps this interest in minimizing the suffering of the condemned is a way of sneaking up on the real issue: whether the death penalty is a good idea at all. (Or maybe it's just that defense lawyers have found a new argument for their appeals, and they're milking it for all it's worth.)

United States Patent Application #20060070095:

An apparatus and method is disclosed for preventing a viewer from switching from a channel when an advertisement is being displayed on the channel. The apparatus and method comprises an advertisement controller in a video playback device that prevents a viewer of a direct (non-recorded) broadcast from switching channels when an advertisement is displayed, and prevents a viewer of a recorded program from fast forwarding the recorded program in order to skip past advertisements that were recorded with the program. A viewer may either watch the advertisements or pay a fee in order to be able to change channels or fast forward when the advertisements are being displayed.

That's just ridiculous. A television that won't let me change channels whenever I want? Who'd buy such a thing?

(The USPTO web site generates huge & crufty URLs for search results, which is why there's no link here to the patent application. At least there's a option to search by application number.)

The mystery excavation in the parking lot under the north wing of the Trade Center building is the site for a new generator, to power the mighty computing engines of Wolfram Research, Inc. (Apparently our computing engines are just too mighty to plug into the wall.)

The generator apparently requires a solid foundation: there's a deep (but narrow) trench dug around the perimeter of the hole, which - I assume - will soon be filled with concrete.

Until then, it offers an interesting view into the history of the Trade Center site. Below the pavement is a few inches of crushed stone, a second (rather thin) layer of pavement, more crushed stone, a thick layer of sand, and then black dirt.

I'll have to get a picture of that before it's covered up....

(In the mid-1980s, before the Trade Center was built - back when State Street stopped at Kirby - I lived just west of here, in a mangy apartment on Valley Road. Alas, I didn't pay much attention to whatever might have been on the Trade Center site, and I have no pictures, so I can't say where that second layer of pavement might have come from.)

Unfortunate place name of the day: Middelfart, which is a town in Denmark. It's not quite as bad as a certain town in Austria, but still good for a juvenile cackle or two.

Stopped at Best Buy on the way home from work, and bought a SanDisk ImageMate 12-in-1 Reader/Writer thingy for the iMac: it plugs into a USB port, and has four slots into which no fewer than twelve different kinds of memory card can be plugged.

(Myself, I think the industry should be embarrassed that there are twelve different memory card formats. It's the whole VHS-vs.-Beta thing all over again, only six times worse.)

The idea is to use it to get pictures out of the cameras: instead of plugging the camera into its own USB cable - of course the two cameras use different connectors; it's the manufacturers' way of squeezing just a few more dollars out of the helpless consumer - I can just pull the chip and plug it in.

It's a USB 2.0 device, too, which means it's about forty times faster than the camera's USB 1.1 interface. Not only does iPhoto upload videos without complaint, it uploads them so quickly that I didn't even see it happen. Blink and you'll miss it.

We - Jake was with me - also picked up a new color ink cartridge for the printer, but I didn't get a chance to install it. Maybe tomorrow.

Interesting factoid of the day:

[C]affeine...is metabolized by the polymorphic cytochrome P450 1A2 (CYP1A2) enzyme. Individuals who are homozygous for the CYP1A2*1A allele are "rapid" caffeine metabolizers, whereas carriers of the variant CYP1A2*1F are "slow" caffeine metabolizers.

I think I know a few people in the latter category....

Apparently we had thunderstorms last night. I slept through them, but Jennifer and Sam did not.

Still trying to print from nessus to the printer on mork. Still no joy in Mudville.

Somebody's web page suggested creating the network printer (on the Windows side) with the wrong driver (i.e., the same Generic Postscript driver that other web pages say is the only one that will work), then changing it to the real driver (i.e., Epson Stylus Photo 785EPX).

It sounded vaguely plausible, so I tried it. My test page did cause paper to emerge from the printer - but, alas, it was covered with gibberish (probably the OS X printer driver's best guess at rendering the Epson printer control language).

In desperation, I tried changing the printer driver (again, on the Windows side) to Generic Text. My test page did print out, and it did bear a passing resemblance to text - but either it was scrozzled, or the ink cartridges have run out of ink.

Perhaps tomorrow I'll stop at the local Best Buy for a new color cartridge, and try printing again.

Tried again this evening to get network printing to work; again, problems.

First, I went to System Preferences → Sharing, and turned on Windows Sharing. (Apparently Printer Sharing, which was alread enabled, isn't sufficient to share printers with Windows machines.) No luck.

Second, I installed Bonjour for Windows 1.0.3 (released today!) on nessus. This seemed to work: the network printer setup thingy on nessus saw the printer on mork, and notepad printed to it without incident. The print queue on mork shows a completed job, "untitled - Notepad".

But nothing came out of the printer.

AUGH.

Update: Looking in the printer error log - which is rather deeply buried, but can be found if you work at it - I found:

E [17/Apr/2006:21:32:37 -0500] [Job 2] cgpdftoraster unsupported colorSpace: colorSpace = 4, colorOrder = 0, bitsPerColor = 8

That doesn't look good....

Once upon a time, microprocessors ran in real mode, operating systems ran in real mode, and nothing was protected from anything else: a malicious program could do pretty much anything it wanted (including, on certain early-model IBM PCs, burn out your monitor by monkeying with the display card).

So microprocessors developed the notion that some code could be trusted, and some could not: protected mode, supervisor mode, that sort of thing.

Some time later, operating systems started making use of all this new security. "Safe at last!" everyone said.

But - on Windows, anyway - it turned out to be too much trouble to run securely. Most people run with full administrative privileges, all the time. Once again, malware has full access to the machine. (Monitors are safe, though.)

The new solution: virtual machines, neatly encapsulated pretend computers. If malware destroys one of them, it doesn't matter: the real machine underneath is still safe. To control all these virtual machines, and keep malware from escaping, the deep-thinker squad has created the hypervisor. "Safe at last!" everyone said.

Apparently there's some kind of hypervisor interface that the operating system talks to. This seems a little odd: the whole point of virtualization is that the software can't tell the difference between virtual & real. If, on the other hand, it's not only possible but necessary to distinguish real from virtual, it's not a very virtual machine, is it?.

Which sort of implies that malware can escape: first by compromising the operating system, then by attacking the hypervisor.

Not safe after all, alas.

Maybe if we virtualize the hypervisor....

Lots of sunshine, just a few clouds, not too warm.

Yesterday, though, we did have a bit of weather: around 3:30pm, the sky began to darken, and we could hear thunder in the vicinity (some of it quite loud & full of picture-rattling low-frequency sound).

The sirens went off just after the rain started, so we gathered up the kids and headed for the bedroom (the walk-in closet thereof being the closest we can get to the "interior room, away from windows" usually suggested in National Weather Service warnings). Jake and Sam played on the floor, while Jennifer and I watched the radar on television.

Some pea-sized hail fell for a few minutes, and a few rather thick bands of rain passed over, but aside from that the storm was uneventful. Apparently the Savoy 16 lost power, briefly, but we had nary a flicker in our part of town.

Update: A later post on the above-linked site leaves me wondering whether it was the Savoy 16 that lost power, or some other theater. Perhaps the newspaper can clarify matters....

Plugged the inkjet printer into the iMac today. There were...no problems. The iMac said, "Hello, Epson Stylus Photo 785EPX, nice to meet you." I didn't even have to install drivers or anything like that. I plugged it in, I could print.

Next step: printing from nessus, over the network. Alas, there are problems. The iMac just isn't visible from nessus, by any method I can think of. Research continues.

After lunch (Real Hacienda, taco salad, very tasty) today we all headed over to Lake of the Woods in Mahomet, for their easter egg hunt.

It was warm (82°), crowded, and a little disorganized, but I think Jake had a good time. Unlike last year, Jake actually got a few easter eggs (full of candy and small plastic toys). Jennifer took some nice pictures, too.

I pitied the poor spud running around in the bunny costume. Whoever it was must have been near death from heatstroke before it was over.

iTunes reports that my music collection stands at 19 genres, 257 artists, 653 albums: 7,453 songs, one music video and two episodes of South Park.

But there's no Led Zeppelin to be found. It's puzzling.

(iTunes doesn't carry Led Zeppelin. Another mystery....)

Jacob:

• Cobaj
• Jaboc
• Mister
• The slug

Samuel:

• The bug
• Sambone (the hambone)

...etc., etc.

...trying to debug code that only runs at the end of a half-hour build process:

1. Think.
2. Write some code.
3. Start the build.
4. Wait half an hour.
5. (Build dies due to stupid mistake.)
6. Go to step 1.

AUGH.

Was just poking around in the online account management thingy at Pair.com, to create a new genealogy-only mailbox for myself (since I surely do not want my main email address to end up posted to the genealogy society web site once I am officially installed as Lord High Treasurer - whenever that happens), and I noticed that my mailbox quota at Pair has been increased: it started at 50 mailboxes, which seemed excessive; then it was boosted to 75, which seemed extravagant; now it's up to 800.

That's right - if I wanted to, I could create eight hundred mailboxes for myself.

Who needs that many mailboxes? What do they do with them?

Suddenly it's hip to refer to vulgar or profane words as bombs: there's the f-bomb, the n-bomb, and probably others I'm too old & unhip to have heard about.

"Bono just dropped the f-bomb on live tv!"
"Quick, hit rewind!"

...and so on.

When did this bit of juvenile slang first contaminate the language?

Quite a bit of lightning, too. Apparently the thunder was loud enough to keep poor Jennifer awake, but the rest of us slept through it.

I'm starting to see green in the treetops over at Hessel Park: the trees are leafing out nicely. If that's a word.

Molly E. Holzschlag says:

I'm absolutely certain that I blog for myself. My blog is the all-me, all-the-time station. That's its purpose, and if zero, ten, or ten thousand people read or stopped reading, it wouldn't matter.

That's just as true for me and the daybook. It's nice that friends & family read my blather (the non-computer posts, anyway), but I'd keep blathering even if they all stopped.

NOAA reports 84° as of 3:00pm.

The first really summery day of the year, and I'm at work. Pity me, pity me.

While waiting for my build to finish (sure is taking a long time, too):

Dæv says:

This self-published and lightly-fictionalized diary is no masterpiece, but its meticulously detailed chronicle of a Midwestern summer semester spent inside computer terminal rooms and out among aimless college-town freaks captures the world I lived in better than anything else I've ever read. John Conner isn't me, but he's like an awful lot of the people I knew on PLATO at the U of I.

Hm. Sounds interesting.

Mr. Konrath has a web site, http://rumored.com/, and his own online bookstore at http://www.lulu.com/jkonrath. The paperback edition of Summer Rain is only $17; I'd buy it, but I figure I've spent too much money lately on books & toys for myself.

(Incidentally, LuLu.com was mentioned in the daybook, on October 25, 2005.)

Celestial Seasonings sells a product called Good Nite Cleanse Wellness Tea:

Good Nite Cleanse is a 100% natural herb tea that helps you feel regular again. This soothing blend starts with senna, an herb known for centuries for providing gentle relief. Senna usually works in 6-12 hours, so try a cup at bedtime for relief in the morning. Peppermint, chamomile, ginger and fennel lend a wonderfully warming and calming flavor, while helping to settle your stomach.

Note, however, that:

These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration. This product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease.

So which is it, Celestial Seasonings? Does your product have some medicinal value, or is it all this Drink our tea, [censored] like a rhino! talk just empty marketroid-speak?

Either way, I think I'll avoid Good Nite Cleanse Wellness Tea.

A neat rectangle of pavement has been removed from the parking area underneath the north wing of the Trade Center building, and the ground beneath is somewhat disturbed.

Utility workers, fixing a broken pipe?

FBI agents, looking for Jimmy Hoffa?

Who can say?

NOAA reports 73° already. The sky is clear, with a bit of haze near the horizon. Humidity is low. I believe today's forecast calls for a high on the far side of 80°: the first such of the year, if it happens.

Saw this in a WRI mailing list:

For the rest of this year, DON'T purchase ANY gasoline from the two biggest companies (which now are one), EXXON and MOBIL. If! they are not selling any gas, they will be inclined to reduce their prices. If they reduce their prices, the other companies will have to follow suit.

...followed by the usual plea to "pass this message on".

As a general rule, chain letters are bogus. Chain letters with words in ALL CAPS are even more so. And a boycott of Exxon and Mobil is unlikely to succeed, for a variety of reasons:

• It's impossible to get enough people to join the boycott. Exxon and Mobil wouldn't even notice unless ten million people suddenly stopped buying their gas.
• It's difficult to know where a gas station gets its gas. It might make boycotters feel better to buy from Joe's No-Brand Filling Station, but maybe Joe buys from the local Mobil distributor.
• If by some miracle the necessary millions do manage to avoid buying from Exxon and Mobil, and prices start falling at Exxon and Mobil stations, what will happen? The boycott will be broken by people who can't resist cheaper gas.
• If by an even greater miracle the boycott holds, and the other oil companies see no drop-off in business despite their higher prices, what incentive do they have to match Exxon and Mobil?

There's only one way to spend less on gas: buy the most fuel-efficient car you can get, and drive it as little as possible. You'll never get a chain letter begging you to do that....

Sam decided to stay awake after his last bottle, and play with Papa for a few hours. Fortunately for me, his last bottle was at 9:00pm, so I was in bed by midnight.

Sam likes to sit on the floor and play with Jake's old baby toys. Mostly he just chews on them....

I wonder if Jennifer knows about LostPedia:

This wiki was set up in order to keep track of the numerous mysteries, facts, and theories surrounding ABC's hit series Lost. We would like this wiki to evolve into a free and open directory of knowledge about Lost.

She's a Lost fan....

(I've watched an episode or two of Lost. It's interesting, but there's only so much time in a day, and I'm overbooked as it is.)

CNN offers this example of muddled thinking:

Undocumented Mexican immigrant Ana Sanchez and her children wore shirts that read: "We are not criminals."

Hm...you're in this country illegally, but you're not a criminal?

One imagines a new defense for those accused of breaking & entering: "I admit it wasn't my house, and the owner hadn't invited me in, but I was just washing the dishes. I'm not a criminal."

Disturbing concept of the day: dhimmitude:

Dhimmitude is the status that Islamic law, the Sharia, mandates for non-Muslims, primarily Jews and Christians. Dhimmis, "protected people," are free to practice their religion in a Sharia regime, but are made subject to a number of humiliating regulations designed to enforce the Qur'an's command that they "feel themselves subdued" (Sura 9:29).

Way back in the 1970s - in seventh-grade geography class, River Forest Junior High - I read a tourism brochure from South Africa. It described apartheid as an enlightened policy, one that allowed the races to exist in harmony. It left me feeling a bit confused, that something so wrong could be presented as a good thing. (And I wonder now whether the teacher knew what he was giving his students....)

Reading about Sharia, and dhimmitude, leaves me with exactly the same feeling. A legal system in which some people have rights, and others do not, is wrong. I don't care how ancient & revered it is.

Sam fell asleep around 9:00pm last night (or was it later?). Usually he has a bottle around 11:00pm, but this time he skipped it. We worried that maybe he'd wake up hungry at 2:00am, but he slept until morning without incident.

He's eating more baby food, so maybe he's ready to give up that last bottle. If so, Mama & Papa will be very happy: staying up until midnight (or later, if Sam gets an attack of the midnight rowdies) makes it hard to get up in the morning.

The phone rang this afternoon, while I was in the garage setting up the new mower: it was Carolyn from the library, canvassing the genealogy society membership for a new treasurer (the old one having resigned).

Sure, I'll give it a try, I said.

I believe I'll send away to London for one of those barrister's wigs they wear in courtrooms, and demand that everyone address me as Lord Treasurer.

There are pictures in the camera that I want to get out. Various people are expecting copies of them, either on CD or by email.

But the necessary cabling didn't move out to the living room with nessus, and I haven't figured out yet how to upload pictures to the iMac.

Very frustrating....

Spring is here, and lawns across town have awakened: on the way home from work Friday I passed a half-dozen freshly-mowed lawns. (Even the people next door have shamed us with their prompt attention to this chore.) Our own lawn could use a go-round with a mower, but the itty-bitty electric mower we've been using for the last six years has grown too feeble & decrepit for another season's use.

So this morning we went to Sears for a new mower. We wanted a more robust model than the electric: self-propelled (which means gas-powered), 6.75hp, 22-inch deck. They had a nice one for only $300 or thereabouts. (We weren't the only ones shopping for a new mower: the lawn & garden section at Sears was quite crowded.)

I managed to get it assembled, oiled and fueled without breaking it, injuring myself or burning the house down; then we had a practice session in the back yard (so any accidental lawn destruction would not be visible to the neighbors).

The new mower is very nice, and made short work of the entire back yard. Perhaps keeping the yard tidy this year will be easier than it's been.

Jake & I drove up to Arlington Heights today, to visit the grandparents and pick up a few birthday presents. (None for me, though: my birthday isn't for another four months.)

We got back rather late: 10:30pm.

Just now - 12:09am - Jake and Jennifer are sleeping. Sam is not, and so neither am I. At least I got to see real live human beings (three of them!) on the DNA Lounge webcam....

Update: Sam fell asleep about ten minutes after the preceding was written. And the DNA Lounge seems quite crowded now (12:37am CDT, or 10:37pm PDT).

Two fellas from Krueco came to the house this morning, to check the furnace & air conditioner. Not that we were having problems with either of them; it was just an annual checkup, a little preventive maintenance, that sort of thing.

It was Jennifer's idea. She's much more conscientious about such things than I am.

They cleaned the furnace, replaced the filters, replaced a mumble-mumble on the air conditioner (he told me what it was, but I've since forgotten) and topped off the freon (or whatever non-ozone-hostile refrigerant is currently mandated by federal regulations).

It cost $200, but apparently we've signed up for the service club: they'll come back again in the fall for another furnace / air conditioner tuneup, and (if I understand the arrangement) we won't have to give them any more money.

It's nice to know our fourteen-year-old air conditioner is still operational. Summer is coming....

Finally, the iMac is on my desk: I washed away the dust bunnies, removed a few more extraneous cables, and now I can compute in comfort.

I still need to set up the inkjet printer & scanner, but that shouldn't take too long.

Eric Alterman displays his lack of understanding:

Finally, what the **** is the big deal about Macs running Windows? They already ran Windows. I taught in a classroom in Brooklyn in September 2004 that was completely equipped with Macs running Windows. What's the big deal today?

Except for early versions of Windows NT, Windows won't run on PowerPC machines, and that's all Apple was selling in 2004. I imagine the Macs that Mr. Alterman saw in 2004 were running Virtual PC, not Windows.

The big deal with Boot Camp is that Intel-based Macs can run Windows natively, not in emulation. Perhaps that distinction is more than Mr. Alterman can comprehend. Or perhaps he just didn't bother to do any research or fact-checking before writing today's column.

P.S. Um...Eric? The whole using-asterisks-to-pretend-you're-cussing schtick just isn't working. It makes you look like a dork. Give it up.

P.P.S. Hm...the Intel-based Macs come with some kind of PowerPC emulator, for OS X software that hasn't been ported to Intel processors. Could I use that to run Virtual PC on mork? Then I'd have a Pentium emulating a PowerPC emulating a Pentium. And down the rabbit hole we go....

The rain stopped a few hours ago, and the cloud cover has been gradually lifting ever since. It's thin enough now that the sky is getting a little brighter, though there's no blue to be seen.

Alas, radar indicates a second line of storms coming in from the southwest. It will be raining again, fairly soon.

Pixies left a box of Ubuntu Linux CDs in the breakroom closest to my office, so I snagged one today while microwaving my lunch.

I don't know what I'll do with it, though. It probably wouldn't run on the iMac, and I don't think Jennifer & Jacob would appreciate my installing Linux on nessus (even as a dual-boot option).

Ubuntu does include a bootable CD, so you can try it out without touching the disk. It might be fun to mess around with that, sometime, and see whether the Linux folks are getting any closer to a usable desktop OS.

Disturbing medical condition of the day: holoprosencephaly:

Holoprosencephaly is a disorder caused by the failure of the prosencephalon (the embryonic forebrain) to sufficiently divide into the double lobes of the cerebral hemispheres. The result is a single-lobed brain structure and severe skull and facial defects.

...e.g., Cyclops, the one-eyed kitten. Euwww.

Over the weekend, our old stove - vintage 1992 - started losing its marbles: without warning, and for no obvious reason, the control panel would start chirping & beeping. Pushing the Oven Off button would silence it, for a while. Then it would start up again.

This presented something of a dilemma: pay somebody to fix the stove, or spend a bit more and buy a new one? A quick call to Lichti Appliance - who fixed our dishwasher some months ago - revealed that a repair call would cost $70 plus parts and labor, so we decided to get a new stove instead.

We thought about getting one of those ceramic-top electric stoves, because they seemed so easy to clean; but in fact they're quite delicate. You have to use a special cleaner on them, and spilling food on them - especially anything with sugar in it - can destroy them.

So we passed on the electric models and bought a nice, medium-priced gas stove from Sears. They delivered it yesterday; it looks nice, it works great, and it doesn't go beep-beep-chirpity-beep at 3:00am.

(The microwave above the stove now looks quite shabby in comparison. I imagine we'll be replacing it one of these days.)

A bit of rain this morning. Thunder & lightning, too, though nothing as intense as last Sunday's storm.

I remembered to bring my umbrella, too.

Weatherdroids are saying the skies will clear for a while this afternoon, then a second line of storms will ruin everybody's evening.

Began dismantling the rat's nest under my desk this evening, as part of the overall computer reorganization project. Some parts will go in the closet, to await final disposition (i.e., garage sale): network cables, a USB hub, and two of nessus' four speakers. Other parts went out to the living room, and were plugged into nessus: the other two speakers and subwoofer, the weather station console, and the microphone (which doesn't work). Most of the rest will probably get plugged into the iMac, someday, somehow. I'm still thinking about that.

Next, I need to clean the dust bunnies off the desk, and move the iMac onto it. Then Jake can have his table back, and I can type without hunching over.

(What will I do, when all this is finished? Find a new project: sort my library by number of pages - shortest first, or longest first? - or something equally eccentric, I'm sure.)

Today is the first time I've been to work since Sunday's storms, so it's my first chance to see what damage they wrought:

• Much of the tarpaper & plywood sheeting has been stripped from the roof of the building just north of WRI World HQ; the underlying metal is intact. The few gutters on it that survived the last big storm (September 19, 2005, that was) are now a twisted wreck packed into the northeast corner of the roof.
• The new hotel going up on the old Chancellor site suffered some damage: one of the elevator shafts - five stories tall, cinder block - was blown down.
• Strips of shredded paper have collected like snowdrifts in sheltered corners of the big Trade Center parking lot.

No obvious damage to the Trade Center building itself. (Lucky us.)

Today, Apple announced Boot Camp:

More and more people are buying and loving Macs. To make this choice simply irresistible, Apple will include technology in the next major release of Mac OS X, Leopard, that lets you install and run the Windows XP operating system on your Mac. Called Boot Camp (for now), you can download a public beta today.

I confess that I'm intrigued at the possibility of running Windows XP on mork (the recently-renamed iMac), but I don't think I'll bother with it. I like OS X, and creating an OS X / XP dual-boot system sounds like a painful process (not to mention fraught with peril).

(Interesting side note: the PC industry is increasingly annoyed with the twenty-five year old cruft in the PC design: the BIOS, floppy drives, etc., etc. The big PC manufacturers keep talking about "legacy-free" PCs, but never quite get around to building any. But that's exactly what Apple did with the Intel-based Macs.)

I happened to be awake at 1:00am (Sam took a while to fall asleep), so I thought: This is my chance to see actual human beings on the DNA Lounge webcam.

Nope, the place is deserted.

I'm starting to think it's never actually open.

Nessus has moved out into the living room, on a nice wood desk we bought on Friday, to make room on my desk for the iMac (which has been on a kid-sized table I borrowed from Jacob). Now Jacob and Jennifer can use the computer whenever they want.

I also swapped the Microsoft MN-130 network card in nessus for an 802.11g card from Linksys. There was some concern whether it would work in nessus (the old PCI 2.1 vs. PCI 2.2 bugbear, back again); but there were no problems.

Still to be done:

• Move the speakers, so Jake can hear his games.
• Move the Axim X30 dock, and get synchronization working again. (Plugging the dock into a different USB port causes Windows and/or ActiveSync to think it's an entirely new, never-before-seen device, which is just plain stupid.)
• Clean my desk (which is covered with dust & crud), move the iMac to it, give Jake's table back to him.
• Get the inkjet printer connected to the iMac, and visible over the network. (I fear this is the end for the workhorse LaserJet IIIp, which I've had for nearly fourteen years: the iMac has no parallel ports.)

There's probably more, but that'll keep me busy for a while.

Update: Well, color me surprised: I plugged the X30 dock directly into one of nessus' two USB ports, docked the X30, and synchronization went off without a hitch. Sometime when I wasn't paying attention, the 'softies must have fixed this particular ActiveSync wart. How nice.

Around 7:00pm last night, Jake & I had just put on our shoes for a trip to the grocery store, when - to our surprise - it started raining.

Then there was hail.

Then the tornado sirens went off.

So we turned on the television, and watched nervous weatherdroids tracking various tornadoes through the county: one down by Sadorus, and possibly a second one north of Mahomet. Newsdroids breathlessly described local storm damage: car wash destroyed, power lines down, etc., etc.

By 8:30pm or so, it was all over.

No damage here. We were hoping our fence would be blown down, so we could ask the insurance company to buy us a new one; despite its decrepitude, the wretched thing stayed up.