May 2006 Archives

Jake & I stopped at Prairie Gardens on the way home, to pick up some rocks & dirt: one bag of pond rocks, four bags of topsoil, one box of tomato plant food. (They had a spray for curing blossom-end rot, but I figured buying that could wait until we have some tomato plants to spray with it.)

It was raining, so we got a little bit soggy going to and from the car. The (surprisingly unsullen) youth who loaded up Mr. Explorer was completely soaked; apparently raincoats are not standard issue for the Prairie Gardens staff.

After dinner, Jake and I unloaded the car, and filled up the second barrel. Then we gave the new dirt a good soak with the hose.

Did I mention it was still raining? Jake & I were quite soaked by the time we were finished. (Jake was also quite muddy, from having fallen off his hippity-hop a few times. He went strait from the back yard into the bathtub, to avoid messing up the house too much.)

Today's expenditures: $12.59
Total so far: $20.95
Tomatoes harvested: 0

A thin line of thunderstorms has popped up just south of town; there's a tornado warning for the southern half of Champaign County, plus a slice of eastern Piatt County & northern Douglas County.

It seems to be heading more east than north, but the view south from Wolfram Research World HQ is rather scary-looking.

My umbrella is, of course, safe & dry at home.

CNN says that Charles Webb is going to write a sequel to (his 1963 novel) The Graduate, which is interesting, but what really caught my attention was this anecdote from Mr. Webb:

In 1988, Webb said he was nearly destitute, living out of a van in Williamstown, Massachusetts. He was given shelter by a woman in Connecticut who had read of his plight, but left soon after.

"It's not fair to say she threw us out," Webb said at the time. "There was just a difference of opinion on the nudism."

<seinfeld>
There's good naked, and there's bad naked.
</seinfeld>

Stopped at Prairie Gardens on the way home yesterday, to pick up the first batch of supplies for Garden 2006 (aka the bug buffet): one bag of pond rock (identical to river rock, but 30¢ cheaper) and four bags of topsoil, which turns out to be just enough to fill one barrel. Tonight I'll pick up more rocks & dirt, and fill the other barrel.

I'm hoping to avoid a repeat of last year's tomato disaster, in which we spent $200 and harvested exactly one tomato (that we didn't even eat). The plan is to put one plant in each barrel (instead of four), mix in some good fertilizer (including calcium, to avoid blossom-end rot) and use tomato cages (so the thunderstorms we're sure to get won't knock over the plants).

Maybe we'll get some veggies this year.

Today's expenditures: $8.36
Tomatoes harvested: 0

NOAA reports 90° as of noon.

Not much cloud cover here in Champaign, but it seems to thicken a bit going northwest. (Nothing on the radar, though.)

Went on a little road trip yesterday, visiting the western part of the state & taking pictures for the Illinois Counties project.

The day's haul was five counties: Adams, Brown, Calhoun, Green, Schuyler. I also tried for Morgan county, but was chumped again by road construction: US 67, where it crosses from Morgan county into Scott county, has just been rebuilt as a four-lane divided highway, and there was no county sign to be found.

I've been working on this project for two years, off and on. (Jennifer's been very understanding.) There are twenty counties left: Boone, Bureau, Carroll, De Kalb, Hancock, Henderson, Henry, Jo Daviess, Knox, Lee, McDonough, Mercer, Morgan, Ogle, Rock Island, Stark, Stephenson, Warren, Whiteside and Winnebago.

I imagine I'll finish, one of these days.

It's 91° outside, according to the Dashboard weather widget on the iMac.

It was cooler this morning, when I mowed the lawn. (Having a big burly gas-powered mower means I can finish the whole lawn in one go; having a self-propelled mower means it doesn't take nearly as long as it did with the wimpy old non-self-propelled electric mower.)

Apple released XCode 2.3 recently. I'm downloading all 915MB of it, even though I still haven't done anything with XCode 2.2. (I did launch it once; it was rather overwhelming, much like recent versions of Visual Studio on Windows.)

MSNBC reports that approximately 1350 people have stood on the summit of Mt. Everest, but until now no one had ever done so naked:

The Himalayan Times had reported on Friday that the Nepali climbing guide, whose name it gave as Lakpa Tharke, stood naked for three minutes in freezing conditions on the 8,850-meter (29,035-ft) summit of the world's highest peak.

Hope he didn't get frostbite....

I asked Google for a list of sites that link to (or otherwise mention) patrick-rice.net, and found two very strange hits:

First, some bunch of losers calling themselves Thunderstone's Web Site Catalog has filed my site under Health : Mental Health : Therapeutic Methods. Reading the daybook is an effective treatment for insomnia, but it surely will not improve anyone's mental health. (Quite the opposite, I fear.)

Second, Yahoo Travel has decided that my picture of the Grundy County sign on Hwy 47 in Dwight is really a picture of Jake's Restaurant, South Padre Island, Texas.

Google is in no danger from these clowns....

It's Towel Day today. If I'd known, I would have carried a towel.

Maybe next year.

...87° as of 4:00pm. The forecast thunderstorms have yet to arrive, but radar says they're coming: the storms' leading edge is just now crossing US51, headed east. I imagine the rain will arrive in an hour or two.

Here in Champaign, we still have sunshine, though the western sky does look a bit menacing.

Yesterday, it was vinegar. Today, Wolfram Research World HQ reeks of rubber cement.

Is it coming from somewhere inside the building? Or is it, like last month's nasty tar smell, coming from the new Walgreens across the street? Or is my brain just playing naughty tricks on me?

Questions, questions, questions....

I knew that Wolfram Research was closed on Monday, for Memorial Day; but until somebody mentioned it in the elevator this morning, I didn't know that it's also closed on Friday.

So the three-day weekend I was looking forward to is really a four-day weekend. How nice.

Here at Wolfram Research World HQ, the air is suddenly redolent of...vinegar. Perhaps there has been a salad explosion in the breakroom (which is just down the hall from my office).

Or perhaps I'm having an olfactory hallucination.

MSNBC says:

Andrew Martinez, 33, whose stripped-down strolls at the University of California, Berkeley, got him expelled and prompted the city to adopt a strict anti-nudity ordinance, was found unconscious Thursday in a Santa Clara County jail, said jail spokesman Mark Cursi.

I remember the news reports about Mr. Martinez, but for some reason I thought the Naked Guy of Berkeley did his thing in the early 1980s, not the early 1990s. I stand corrected.

Jennifer's been working very hard the last few weeks, preparing for annual garage sale; today was the big day.

The garage seems quite a bit emptier tonight than it was last night. Noteworthy sales: the old lawn mower, and my vacuum cleaner. The latter was a first-apartment-warming gift from Mom, way back in 1987; I felt a little bit sad to let it go, but it after nineteen years of service it was worn out. Selling it was a way to force ourselves to buy a new vacuum cleaner, something we've talked for years about doing.

Once again, we failed to sell the workbench (which the previous owners of our house left in the garage when they moved out, six years ago). It's ten feet long, built like a tank, and completely impossible to disassemble or transport without destroying. One of these days we'll find somebody who's willing and able to take it off our hands. Not today, alas.

Whatever didn't sell will be donated to one or another worthy local charity, and so the house will be (briefly) de-cluttered.

It seems that my personal email address has been compromised: three different spam pitches have appeared in my inbox today, with more sure to follow.

Fortunately, the OS X mail program is just a little smarter about spam than Outlook ever was, so I'm not too worried about falling victim to the usual spammer tricks (web bugs, code attachments, etc.). But I might have to crank up the spam filters a bit.

The back yard hasn't been mowed in two weeks. Jacob's toys are starting to disappear beneath the exploding verdure.

I really need to get out there this weekend.

Over at http://support.fogcreek.com/ there are discussion forums for Fog Creek's two products, FogBugz and CityDesk.

The index page for the FogBugz forum shows entries from the last 30 days. The page for CityDesk used to be the same, but traffic there is so light - CityDesk having been abandoned first by Fog Creek, then by most of its users - that seldom did it have more than three or four messages displayed.

Sometime when I wasn't paying attention, this changed: now the CityDesk page shows messages going back at least four months. The forum is no more active than it was, but it certainly looks more active.

Opus Dei says:

In The Da Vinci Code, Opus Dei members are falsely depicted murdering, lying, drugging people, and otherwise acting unethically, thinking that it is justified for the sake of God, the Church, or Opus Dei.

Opus Dei is a Catholic institution and adheres to Catholic doctrine, which clearly condemns immoral behavior, including murder, lying, stealing, and generally injuring people. The Catholic Church teaches that one should never do evil, even for a good purpose.

Well, of course they'd say that, wouldn't they?

Meanwhile, reviewers & audiences have not been kind to The Da Vinci Code. MSNBC says:

One especially melodramatic line uttered by Hanks drew prolonged laughter and some catcalls, and the audience continued to titter for much of the film's remainder.

I think Jennifer & I will be going to see it, regardless. She's read the book, but I haven't; it will be interesting to compare notes afterward.

As I was blathering away about the afternoon's lawn-mowing adventures, the iMac popped up a little window: There's about 200MB of updates available. Download 'em now, or later?

No time like the present, thought I.

Today was the first rainless day in nearly a week, so everybody was out mowing their lawns.

I figured I had half an hour available between work & dinner, so I fired up the spiffy new mower and went for a spin around the yard. The fella next door was doing exactly the same thing; it felt like we were racing.

He finished first, but then he did have a head start.

MSNBC says:

[A] British survey, released by a group of prominent Catholics, revealed that readers of [The Da Vinci Code] are twice as likely to believe Jesus Christ fathered children and four times as likely to think the conservative Catholic group Opus Dei is a murderous sect.

There are conspiracy theories about everything else, so it was only a matter of time before religion got dragged into the swamp.

Sam's getting pretty good at crawling. His technique isn't the usual hands & knees crawl, it's closer to an army-style crawl: he lifts himself up on his hands, then pushes with his feet. It looks a bit odd, but he can get where he wants to go.

Sometimes he gets on all fours, for a step or two, then he's back onto his belly.

He's also starting to pull himself up to a standing position, on furniture or whatever's handy. (Jennifer had to lower the mattress in the crib yesterday, to forestall any escape attempts.) Maybe he won't spend much time crawling, and will go straight to walking instead.

Just now, he's sleeping. This is rather awkward, as it's (past) time for his bottle....

MSNBC says:

Psychic Uri Geller and two partners have bought the Tennessee house Elvis Presley lived in before moving to Graceland, with a winning bid of $905,100 on eBay, he said Monday.

Perhaps on our way to visit Graceland - we'll go, someday - Jennifer & I should stop at 1034 Audubon Drive, Memphis, and bend a few spoons.

Two scams, actually, both perpetrated by the BP station at the Downs exit on I74:

• The lowest price - and the price posted on the sign out front - is for the mid-grade fuel. Regular is 10¢/gallon more. They must be counting on people automatically buying regular, thinking that it's the cheapest.
• The shut-off valve - i.e., the thing that turns off the pump when the tank fills up - doesn't work. So if you're at the other end of the car, checking the oil, you might dump $10 worth of gas on the ground before noticing. (That's what I did....)

I don't think I'll be stopping at that station any more.

Over at the University of Illinois News Bureau page, I see:

Between Sept. 1, 2003, and Aug. 31, 2004, 88 faculty members and academic professionals retired from the UI, according to the Office of Academic Human Resources.

Among them: Jean Thompson, retiring after 31 years of service. I took two Rhetoric classes with Professor Thompson, long ago (Rhetoric 144, fall 1981; Rhetoric 355, spring 1983); it makes me feel a bit old to think that she's retiring. (I still have the copy of My Wisdom she signed for me, twenty-five years ago.)

On the other hand, George Scouffas, from whom I took two other Rhetoric classes (Rhetoric 205, spring 1982; Rhetoric 305, fall 1982), died ten years ago, on March 1, 1996.

Got mail this evening:

Do any of you know who Suzanne Pflug is? I get lots of email from her. Many times people are CC'd on the email and I don't know any of them, either.

Hm...sources indicate there's a Suzanne Pflug living in Garland, Texas (apparently a suburb of Dallas), but I've no idea who she is or why she'd be sending mail to anybody I know.

Downloaded Python 2.4.3 from http://www.python.org/ this evening, and installed it on mork.

Python is nice, but IDLE (the Python development environment) is...less nice. It's a bit clunky, a bit mysterious & under-documented. What's the Console window for? I get error messages no matter what I type in it.

I just want something that will make it easier to edit the various modules of the wiki project, so I don't have to open a dozen vi sessions in a dozen terminal windows. Alas, I don't think IDLE qualifies. I wonder if Xcode will let me create a project that's just a bunch of Python modules....

I just deleted my LiveJournal account. I never used it for anything, and maybe there's some other Patrick Rice just pining away for a LiveJournal account with his name on it.

Thirty days from now, http://patrick-rice.livejournal.com/ will be up for grabs. Make a note of it, all you Patrick Rices out there.

Drove up to Chicago today, for a day with the grandparents at the Field Museum. We saw Sue the T. Rex:

(Shouldn't that be T. Regina?)

The drive from Champaign to the Field Museum is simple: I57 to I90/I94 to I55 to Lake Shore Drive, and the museum is at 1400 S. Lake Shore Drive. About two hours, according to Streets & Trips.

Alas, it didn't work out that way: there's construction on the Dan Ryan. We had the notion that it wouldn't be a problem, since rush hour would be over by the time we got there. We forgot: it's Chicago, it's always rush hour.

It took about three hours to get there, and about four to get home. (We stopped for dinner in Gilman, so it wasn't four hours of driving.) It was raining, too, with a ferocious west wind that made staying in one's lane rather difficult at times.

But we had a great time at the museum. Jake really likes dinosaurs. We also looked at an Egyptian exhibit (I liked the funeral boat); and the Evolving Planet exhibit was pretty cool.

We'll have to go back sometime.

Reunion 8 isn't the only Mac genealogy program: there's also MacFamilyTree, version 4.2.11 of which was released on Monday. I installed the demo version on mork last night, and messed with it a little. At first glance, it seems nice - and it's only $50, which is a bit less than Reunion ($90).

Poked around the T-Mobile web site recently. Their prepaid plan seems ok: prepaid funds expire, which is really annoying, but not as quickly as with, say, Cingular's plan. I'd probably use up my prepaid minutes before they could expire. It might even be cheaper than Virgin Mobile, depending on usage patterns.

T-Mobile also offers the Motorola RAZR phone, which is pretty spiffy. Supposedly, it can synchronize (via Bluetooth) with the address book and calendar on the imac, which would be very nice. (I don't have very many phone numbers programmed into my Virgin Mobile phone, because it's such a pain.)

Alas, a new RAZR costs $250, which is rather more than I feel like spending on a phone (especially considering that I spent - wasted, really - $100 on a phone just a few months ago). Though if we match enough numbers in tonight's Lotto drawing, I may reconsider.

A self-propelled jackhammer (i.e., one of those Bobcat tractors, with a jackhammer bolted onto the front of it) is tearing down the knee-high concrete wall in the Busey Travel parking lot on the other side of State street from Wolfram Research World HQ.

Long ago, when Busey Travel was Busey Bank (before they moved to the old Diana Foods building at Kirby & Prospect), that wall held up the far end of the drive-through awning. The awning was taken down a long time ago, but not the wall.

Did they finally get tired of looking at it? Are they planning to add more parking? Who knows? But with the hotel renovation (across the street), the new Walgreens (on the northwest corner of Kirby & Neil), the Lee's Oriental Foods expansion (next to the IGA on Kirby), the WRI generator platform (previously mentioned), and now the jackhammers at Busey, this part of town is just a hotbed of construction.

Sam went to see the doctor yesterday, just to be sure that the cold he's getting over - that we're all getting over, though some of us are further along than others - was just a cold, not bronchitis or an ear infection or something nasty like that.

Madame Doctor - not Sam's regular doctor - looked him over and said: ears are fine, lungs are fine, but he's got two more teeth coming in. Maybe that's why he's been so cranky lately.

We've stocked up on Infant Motrin, Orajel and various squishy liquid-filled things for teething babies to chew on. Sam was much less cranky today. (How nice.)

He's only three months from his first birthday: the point at which we say goodbye to bottles, formula and little glass jars of baby food. I'll miss them when they're gone.

At 2:00pm this afternoon, various Rices converged on the school where Jacob will start kindergarten later this year, to get him registered and to find out what we need to do before the big day.

There was a moderate crowd in the gym - these things are always in the gym - so Sam and I elected to wait out in the hallway. Jennifer and Jacob did all the registration & whatnot.

Sam and I walked up & down the hallway, looking at the students' artwork on the walls. Two amusing points:

• A collection of essays, "If I had three wishes, I'd wish for...". One clever duck said he'd wish for three more wishes. You'll go far, kid.
• A collection of drawings titled, "Art of Ecuador". I told Sam that Ecuadorians are nine feet tall, bright purple, and have six arms (which makes playing the piano much easier). I don't think he believed me.

Later, Jacob and Jennifer had a conversation about kindergarten:

Mama?
Yes?
Will the girls in kindergarten think I'm cute?
Do you want them to think you're cute?
That would be nice.

Where did that come from?

Now they're selling Lost in Space, $2 per episode. I may have to buy a few....

Very interesting: http://www.oilposter.org/. I don't know that I'd buy one, but I'd like to read it sometime.

Interesting web site: http://www.bts.gov/, the Bureau of Transporation Statistics. Of particular relevance: U.S. Motor Gasoline Production and Consumption, December 2002.

Apparently, three and a half years ago the U.S. burned between eight and nine million barrels of gasoline every day. That works out to about three billion barrels per year.

With that in mind, MSNBC says:

The U.S. produced almost 3.4 billion gallons of fuel ethanol in 2004.

http://www.onlineconversion.com/ tells me that one barrel = 42 gallons, which means that U.S. ethanol production would have to increase about 100-fold to completely replace gasoline. That's a lot of corn.

It's possible to submit a vacation request on Sunday morning, and have it approved by Sunday afternoon.

I'm trying to persuade CityDesk to use relative URLs in the XHTML it generates - i.e., leave off the http://patrick-rice.net/ part - so I can dump a copy of the site to the memory card in the X30 and read it there.

For some reason, it's just not working. I get absolute URLs, all the time. I know there's a way to do it: I have a copy of the site that I generated a few months ago, and it has relative URLs. The live site has relative URLs.

This is rather annoying.

Update: Mystery solved: it's a bug in CityDesk. The CityScript command withAbsoluteLinks is supposed to apply only to the article in which it appears, but apparently it's stickier than that: withAbsoluteLinks applies to every article parsed after the one in which it appears. The old CityDesk discussion forum has a post, withAbsoluteLinks seems to bleed, explaining this. And the article I created a few months ago to generate a Movable Type import file just happens to use withAbsoluteLinks. Remove that, and all is well.

(The forum post is almost three years old. Since then, there's been no admission from Fog Creek that the bug exists, let alone any attempt to fix it. But CityDesk isn't abandonware! Fog Creek says so, and they wouldn't lie about it, would they?)

Best Buy was selling 512MB SD memory cards for only $35, so I bought one for the digital camera. Now we can take 618 pictures - or record 454 seconds of video - before we run out of space.

How nice. And the old 256MB card will work nicely in the X30....

The latest techno-horror: in-game advertisements, which I suppose means that the monsters you're shooting with your BFG 9000 will now be wearing Coke t-shirts.

The "leader" in this questionable activity is Massive Inc; they were just bought by Microsoft. The latter's press release says:

Microsoft also has begun exploring how to apply Massive technology to incorporate dynamic advertising into other online environments, such as Windows Live and MSN, and to make it available on the adCenter advertising platform.

Why stop there? How about selling ad space in Microsoft's desktop applications? Each empty cell in your Excel spreadsheet could contain its own little animated billboard. Streets & Trips could give driving instructions that include stops at sponsors' restaurants. (Who cares if Joe's Diner is ten miles out of your way? They paid their money, so they will be on your route.) And Windows itself - let's have a screen saver that automatically kicks in after ten seconds of idle time (no, you can't change that) and starts scrolling advertisements across the entire screen (no, you can't have your desktop back until the commercial is over).

Today is No Pants Day.

Alas, my kilt is at the cleaners, so I'm wearing the usual shorts & t-shirt.

On the way to work this morning, I saw a woman doing a little yard work.

She had a shop vac, extension cord trailing off into the house, and was carefully vacuuming the sidewalk.

I suppose a broom just doesn't get things clean enough.

MSNBC says:

The Food and Drug Administration has determined that "keepsake" fetal videos and personal snapshots are an unapproved use of a medical device.

If getting a few souvenir snapshots is the only reason that the ultrasound is being done, I'd have to agree - especially if the person running the machine is a too rich & famous for his own good yutz like Tom Cruise (who apparently bought an ultrasound machine for home use).

But I'm rather fond of the ultrasound pictures of Jake & Sam that we got from the doctor. I don't think the FDA has any business approving or disapproving those.

MSNBC says:

"This piece you all see as [Abu Musab al-Zarqawi] walks away, he's wearing his black uniform and his New Balance tennis shoes as he moves to this white pickup. And, his close associates around him...do things like grab the hot barrel of the machine gun and burn themselves," the military spokesman added.

Well, now. Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, head of al-Qaida in Iraq, a regular twenty-first century Carlos the Jackal, wears the same brand of sneakers as I do. I'm not sure what to think about that.

Incidentally, New Balance is a U.S. company, founded in Boston almost a hundred years ago. Isn't it just a wee bit hypocritical for the head of al-Qaida in Iraq to be doing business with the Great Satan?

Poor Sam, he was not a happy guy yesterday. He cried, he wanted to be held (but the person holding him was not allowed to sit down). He was drooling quite a bit, which made Jennifer & I wonder whether he's getting another tooth. He's had two for a long time now; seems like he's overdue for a few more. Or maybe it was the germs that are currently burning through the household.

Rather late in the evening, it was discovered that running the fan at full blast would calm him down, so he & I did that while watching a little baseball (the Cubs vs. some team I'd never heard of; Cubs lost, 5 to 1). I put him on the floor, and he played a bit. Finally, around midnight, he fell asleep.

He only woke up once, too. Maybe all that crankiness wore him out.

In today's Carmi Times:

Lora May Mundy, 91, Evansville, Ind., formerly of Carmi, died at 12:25 a.m. Wednesday, May 2, 2006 at Newburgh Healthcare in Newburgh, Ind.

Ms. Mundy was the sister of Hazel Holsapple, who married...um...one of the Maurers. (All my genealogy data is in the other computer. Egad.)

Update: Hazel Holsapple married Homer Maurer, Sr., who was the brother of Herschel Maurer, Sr., my grandfather.

Had the notion that I might use Django, which is a spiffy-looking web framework written in Python, for one or another of the web projects I have kicking around in the back of my mind: either at work, or here. (I use CityDesk, Gallery and Movable Type, but I don't really like any of them very much.)

Alas, Django wants all sorts of things I can't give it. It wants to install itself into the Python site-packages directory. It wants to run under mod_python. It wants server configuration changes that can't be made in ~/public_html/.htaccess.

I need a framework that can run as a plain cgi script, and requires no server reconfiguration of any kind. Django, it seems, does not qualify.

(Well, yes, I probably could write my own. But I'm lazy.)

Yesterday was the first dry day since last week, so everybody was out mowing their lawns. I meant to, but got distracted by other things.

Plan B was to mow the lawn tonight, but radar shows a line of thunderstorms coming in from the west. Bloomington and Decatur are already getting wet; I imagine rain will be falling in Champaign in the next hour or two.

I suppose the lawn doesn't look too shaggy just yet. Waiting another day or two won't get us a nag letter from the homeowner's association.

Carl Sagan online: http://www.carlsagan.com/.

Apparently being dead is no impediment to having a web site. I don't know whether that's reassuring or not.

CNN says:

Organizers of the nationwide event, dubbed "A Day Without Immigrants," asked those opposing tighter restrictions on immigration - namely immigrants themselves - to flex their economic muscle by boycotting all aspects of commerce, including going to work and school.

That was yesterday. I didn't notice anything unusual happening in Champaign, but I wasn't really paying attention.

The protesters seem just a little confused. The proposed legislation that's got everyone so worked up isn't about immigrants. Immigrants are people who came here legally. Myself, I can understand the difference between an immigrant and an illegal alien, but that distinction is apparently too subtle for the sign-waving, slogan-chanting crowd.

(I meant to include a link to the House bill that, among other things, mandated construction of a fence along the entire southern border of the United States, but http://thomas.loc.gov/ isn't very helpful. The current Congress has introduced over five thousand bills, resolutions, proclamations, etc., etc., etc., since they were sworn in fifteen months ago, and there's no way to ask Thomas for immigration bills that passed the House in December of 2005.)

Update: It's H.R.4437, a.k.a. the Border Protection, Antiterrorism, and Illegal Immigration Control Act of 2005.

It's a new month, which means it's time to add some pictures to the Jacob and Samuel photo galleries.

I chased the kids around the living room for a while, and ended up with sixty pictures in the camera (the 256MB memory card can hold about 300 pictures, but 512MB cards are getting cheaper every day; I might have to pick one up sometime). The USB memory-card reader thingy slurped them all into iPhoto in considerably less than a minute.

I like iPhoto. It's zippy fast, and it keeps my pictures nicely organized. It even does clever behind-the-scenes things: it always keeps a hidden copy of the original, unmodified image, so an ill-advised crop or color adjustment can be backed out.

I'm still trying to figue out iMovie and iDVD. I have all those blanks, I really should try to put together something for the grandmas.

First, Jake had a cold.

Then Sam caught it from Jake.

Then Jennifer & I caught it from Sam and/or Jake.

Jake's getting better. Sam seems to be improving. So maybe Jennifer and I will be rid of our germs fairly soon as well. In the meantime, I'm sneezing a bit, blowing my nose rather more often than usual, coughing a bit, and nursing a bit of a sore throat. (Poor Jennifer is much the same.)

It's a good thing we had some Nyquil left after the last round of illnesses.

You're wasting your money with those slickly-produced television commercials.

First, I can't buy your products: they have to be prescribed by a doctor. You should direct your persuasions at doctors, not at patients. (Perhaps you already tried that, and it didn't work?)

Second, if you have to devote twenty seconds of each thirty-second spot to warnings of potentially lethal side-effects of your new wonder drug, maybe it's not so wondrous after all.

Jacob's had a cold for the last few days; he's been sniffling, coughing, etc. Poor little guy.

Yesterday, Sam started showing the same symptoms.

Sam doesn't like having a cold. Last night, he woke up five or six times, outraged: There's something coming out of my nose, and I don't like it! He likes it even less when somebody wipes his nose.

Still, it seems like a fairly mild cold. Everybody should be back to normal in a few days.

A message on my cell phone this morning directed me to http://www.vmclasssettlement.com/:

Welcome to the Nelson v. Virgin Mobile USA, LLC Class Action Settlement Website

The Court has preliminarily approved a settlement in the nationwide case of Scott Nelson v. Virgin Mobile USA, LLC, Case No. 05cv1594 AJB pending in the United States District Court For the Southern District of California.

You are a Class Member if you are a current or former customer of Virgin Mobile USA ("Virgin Mobile") who either:

(1) was charged for calls made to Virgin Mobile USA "At Your Service" by dialing *VM or *86 from your handset; or

(2) purchased one or more of the following handsets that advertised on its packaging that the purchaser would receive a $10.00 Starter Airtime Credit and did not receive $10.00 in free starter airtime: Kyocera Super Model, Kyocera Party Animal, Audiovox 8500, Kyocera K-7 Rave, Kyocera Slider V5, Kyocera K9, Audiovox Flasher V7 and Audiovox 8610, if the package for the handset you purchased advertised that the purchaser would receive a $10.00 Starter Airtime Credit.

I don't know if Jennifer & I qualify.

We did get our $10 airtime credit - but lost it: I used the automated procedure to activate our phones, in the belief that we could transfer our phone numbers (from the despisèd Verizon Wireless) afterward. Alas, it doesn't work that way. I ended up calling the Virgin Mobile support line, and the helpful fella there re-activated our phones with the right numbers. Our $10 credits didn't survive the reactivation process.

All of which means that we probably don't qualify for a share in the settlement.