July 2006 Archives

A little bit more foolery with Liquid Ledger this evening; there were problems:

• Its transaction scheduler is quite limited. It offers exactly nine hard-coded scheduling options (weekly, bi-weekly, twice monthly, monthly, every four weeks, bi-monthly, quarterly, semi-annually and annually) and there's no way to specify a transaction that never ends.
• Apparently there's no support for mortgages and mortgage payments. (Well, yes, I could figure out the amortization schedule myself, and do all the necessary data entry manually. But life is too short for such tedium.)
• There are no forecasting tools. The whole point of personal finance software is to answer the question Do I have enough money? How much can I spend on toys, and still have enough left in the checking account for groceries & the mortgage payment? Liquid Ledger can't tell me.

Fortunately for me, uninstalling software on OS X is considerably easier than on Windows: drag the application to the trash, and you're done.

In today's mail: a $20 check from SanDisk, the rebate for the 1GB Cruzer I bought last month.

This time around, I used the online rebate submission thingy, instead of snail mail; I submitted my rebate request on July 21st, and ten days later had the check in my hand.

I've never received a rebate that quickly before. Thank you very much, Staples & SanDisk.

Poking around Microsoft's Mactopia site, I found:

In June 2003, the Microsoft Macintosh Business Unit announced that Internet Explorer for Mac would undergo no further development, and support would cease in 2005.

...and...

Microsoft will continue to offer Windows Media Player 9 as a free download for Macintosh users, but has no plans to provide future updates or product support for Windows Media Player for Mac.

...and...

Virtual PC for Mac Version 7 is still the best emulation solution for users who have PowerPC-based Macs, but it does not run on Intel-based Macs. We are working with Apple to determine the feasibility of developing Virtual PC for Mac for Intel-based Macs.

...which together leave me with the impression that Microsoft never was very serious about supporting the Mac.

It looks like Flip4Mac has finally released Universal binaries of their Windows Media plug-in for QuickTime.

I'll have to download that one. People are always sending me links to .wmv files, even though stock QuickTime can't play them.

Sam's new hobby: yelling. He's particularly fond of doing it in restaurants.

We call it "baby opera". It doesn't upset us nearly as much as when Jacob used to do it.

I had Liquid Ledger and Quicken open at the same time. I opened the Quicken help window, typed "equity account" in the search window, and pressed Enter.

I got three hits - in the Liquid Ledger help.

Er...is it supposed to do that...?

Using my kids-in-bed grownup time this evening to mess about with Liquid Ledger, trying to set up our various accounts & balances; this evening's lesson: equity accounts.

It looks like I can use equity accounts to separate our finances into, say, the Operating Fund, the Jacob College Fund, the Samuel College Fund, etc., etc. Then we're no longer constrained to keep the money in distinct bank accounts, which would certainly simplify things.

At least, that's the impression I get from the Liquid Ledger help. Must investigate further....

Update: Apparently equity accounts don't work the way I thought they did. I'm rather disappointed.

iTunes told me this morning that Blue Man Group has a new video podcast (three episodes so far), so I subscribed.

Alas, the blue meanies' technical prowess does not extend to web servers: after half an hour, only a tiny fraction of a single episode has been downloaded.

Uh...never mind, fellas.

MSNBC tells me that "sizable reserves" of oil have been discovered off the coast of Cuba, which may at last put an end to the U.S. trade embargo (that's been in place since 1961 and has accomplished exactly nothing).

We - that is, the U.S. - already buy oil from dozens of nations whose leaders & citizenry despise us. What's one more?

(I suppose it will annoy the aging counter-revolutionaries in Miami. But that crowd would be annoyed by anything short of an Iraq-style U.S. invasion, so who cares what they think?)

On Thursday I noticed a somewhat-red tomato on the plant in barrel #1; yesterday, I picked it.

It's not quite ripe, and it's a bit misshapen (the cages were a mistake, I think - they have made me the comprachico of tomatoes), but it's the first tomato of the year.

Jennifer was unimpressed.

In other garden news:

• The basil is huge & bushy, with (usually) dead Japanese beetles all over it.
• The hot pepper plant grew a little too tall and spindly for its own good. The recent thunderstorms have knocked it over onto the basil. It has twenty or so peppers, of varying sizes; alas, none shows any signs of ripening.

Pictures coming soon.

A cow-orker said, "Hey, your code sure is slow."

The code in question has to parse a big & ugly xml file, so I wasn't really surprised. But I fired up the Python profiler (I didn't know Python had a profiler until today...), which said:

4251998/3392 ... copy.py:156(deepcopy)

Total execution time, 337 seconds. Um...four and a quarter million calls to deepcopy? That seems a bit excessive....

So I wrote a very small node-cloning function and used that instead of deepcopy. The profiler said:

5137/3993 0.457 copy.py:156(deepcopy)

Total execution time: 3 seconds.

In today's mail: a Summons for Jury Service from the U.S. District Court.

But I am not actually summoned for jury duty just yet - I will merely be on call for two months, from September 5 through October 27. The paperwork says:

Although you are on call, you will only be required to report for jury selection a few times during your term of service.

I guess this means I shouldn't make any plans to leave town during September & October....

Getting rather dark outside; much thunder, rumbling nearby; occasional lightning. Radar shows a thin line of storms coming in from the west.

My umbrella is out in the car. Perhaps I should retrieve it before the deluge begins....

Ceej said:

It's hard to teach evolution to the uneducated because they don't get what random means.

...which led to a discussion of the iPod song shuffler: is it really random?

The word from Apple is that, yes, the song shuffler really is random: only the finest algorithms were used in its creation. And yet - if I put my iPod on shuffle and listen to music for a while, I'll hear two (or more) songs from the same album. That doesn't seem very random to me.

Stated mathematically: given n songs grouped into k albums, what is the probability that selecting p songs (at random, without replacement) will return two or more songs from the same album?

It's been twenty-five years (more or less) since I was in a statistics class, so I have no idea how to set up a problem like this. I had hoped that MathWorld might offer some clues, but - alas - it does not.

This looks interesting: Liquid Ledger:

Liquid Ledger is the personal accounting solution you need to help you trim monthly expenditures and put more cash in your pocket. With over a dozen time-saving features such as Transaction AutoComplete and the ability to import account activity downloaded from financial institutions, just a few minutes each week is all you need to start feeling more confident about how you manage your money.

A real OS X personal-finance application: just the thing I need. There's a trial version, too. I might have to download it tonight.

(On the other hand, it costs $75, which is rather more than I feel like spending.)

Took Jake to school this morning, for his first day of kindergarten.

It was a bit chaotic. The kids were excited about going to school (except for one who cried & clung to Mama), while the parents tried to get all the kids' gear (backpacks, lunches) and classroom supplies (hand sanitizer, markers, etc., etc. - the list was quite long) put away. The teacher tried to keep everything as orderly as possible.

A few parents brought cameras. (I did.) I have a nice picture of Jake sitting at one of the tables, ready to get started.

Thus begins Jake's education: an adventure that won't finish until 2023, more or less.

(Last night, Jake asked, "Is kindergarten a garden of kinders?" Indeed it is, Jake.)

Uploaded a half-dozen pictures to various photo albums.

Grandmas, click here for Jacob, and click here for Sam.

Anyone interested, click here for the garden project, aka Japanese Beetlemania. (The garden pictures are two weeks old. The tomatoes & peppers are bigger now, and there are more of them. But nothing shows any signs of ripening. It's rather frustrating.)

CNN has an opinion piece by Alexandra Paul, who says:

I drive an electric car. Not a hybrid - a gasoline-powered car that gets some help from an electric motor - but a full electric vehicle. I plug it in at night and can drive 100 miles the next day and go faster than 80 mph on the highway.

Meanwhile, CNN says:

As the death toll from a scorching heat wave rose and record demand tested California's power supply, energy managers feared they may have to trigger rolling blackouts.

Suppose pixies sneaked into every garage in California tonight, and replaced all those horrible gas-guzzlers with environmentally pure electric vehicles. Would California have the spare generating capacity to charge them?

Some outfit calling itself the Space Frontier Foundation has published a whitepaper titled Unaffordable and Unsustainable: NASA's Failing Earth-to-orbit Transportation Strategy:

Over the past 30 months, NASA has made fundamental errors in its implementation of the Vision for Space Exploration (VSE), errors which can be fixed today but will be fatal if left uncorrected. In particular, NASA has laid out a strategy for Earth-to-orbit transportation that is already showing signs of failure to meet its own stated goals: closing the gap in U.S. human spaceflight, supporting full utilization of the ISS, and enabling affordable and sustainable exploration beyond Earth orbit.

(Their web site is entirely too busy, in a screaming garish vintage-1996 sort of way. A redesign would be most welcome.)

The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter web site hasn't been updated in two months.

The New Horizons mission to Pluto still has nine years to go before reaching its destination. Updates there have been nearly as sparse.

I still visit each web site, several times a week, looking for news. I feel quite a chump for doing so.

Last night, while staying up late with Sam, I finished reading Duh! The Stupid History Of The Human Race, by Bob Fenster.

It was a birthday present (somewhat early) from Mom & Bob. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

The first half of the book was a collection of news items demonstrating stupidity by various people. These were insufficiently vetted prior to publication; more than a few urban legends & errors crept in. (No director of the US Patent Office ever said, "Everything that can be invented has been invented.")

The second half of the book was devoted to two questions: Who is stupid? and How can I destupify myself?. The answers: Everybody is stupid. and You can't. This was apparently intended to be tongue-in-cheek, but it seemed more cynical to me.

Maybe I was just grumpy last night. Sam was very sleepy, and had no trouble falling asleep; he just didn't want to sleep in the crib. Silly boy.

It's been years since I looked at census records on microfilm: everything's been scanned & indexed by Ancestry.com, and is available online. It's not free, but the Urbana Free Library has a membership. (So it's free to me, I suppose.)

Even better, the Ancestry.com web site allows census images to be saved to the local disk, including to USB thumb drives (such as my relatively new 1GB drive from SanDisk). No more 15¢/page printing fees, no more schlepping around big piles of printouts, and no more squinting to read 2600x2000 images squeezed to fit an 8½×11 sheet of paper.

Isn't technology wonderful?

Art Mart has raised their prices on tea: a 100g tin of Twinings Orange Pekoe that used to cost $5.12 now sells for $6.19, which works out to 6.2¢/gram.

But I can order a 500g tin of English Breakfast Tea direct from Twinings for $16, which is 3.2¢/gram.

I suppose shipping costs would reduce the difference a bit, and I don't drink enough tea these days to really justify buying half a kilogram of the stuff. But it's interesting to compare prices.

CNN says:

Nevada and South Carolina will likely join Iowa and New Hampshire as kickoff states for the Democratic presidential nominating process in 2008 after a panel voted to recommend the measure to the party's national committee Saturday.

I don't like the presidential primaries. They seem designed to exclude most states from the candidate selection process. If memory serves, I've voted in three presidential primaries (1996, 2000 & 2004); each time, my vote was completely irrelevant, because one or another candidate had already locked up the nomination long before the Illinois primary was held.

I particularly dislike New Hampshire's role in the primaries. There's this air of We get to go first because we're more important than the rest of you as the Dixville Notch spuds cast their ballots at midnight on primary day. So it's good to see New Hampshire getting a little reality check.

They're not going quietly, though: apparently state law requires the New Hampshire primary to precede all others by at least a week. The state Attorney General is grumbling about suing the Democratic Party, the DNC Chairman is grumbling about not seating New Hampshire's delegates at the convention.

Who knew politics could be so...entertaining?

More struggles last night, with Quicken and my 401(k). I fixed a few data-entry errors, re-checked all the numbers - and the account still didn't balance.

So I decided that my 401(k) statement is useless, Quicken's 401(k) support is broken, and I'm not going to waste any more time trying to make sense of either. I deleted (from Quicken!) the 401(k) account, and replaced it with a generic asset account. Every quarter, I'll update the total, and that will be that.

Tracking how many shares I own, tracking share prices - you know, all the personal financial information that a personal financial management application is supposed to track - is, alas, no longer possible.

It might be time to reconsider MoneyDance....

The Champaign County Fair starts tonight, and runs through the 29th, which made me wonder whether there was still a Cook County Fair. This seemed unlikely, given that pretty much the entire county has been paved over.

The County Fairs page on the Encyclopedia of Chicago web site reports that there hasn't been an annual Cook County Fair in eighty years, more or less:

Urbanization and financial difficulties ended the Cook County Fair. Although the 1924 fair set attendance records by blending urban and rural interest, the costs of permanent grounds and world-class entertainment were debilitating. Numerous attempts to reinstate the Cook County Fair failed, including an 11-day event in 1948 at Soldier Field.

(I suppose it's unfair to say that the entire county has been paved over. There is the occasional forest preserve, to break the monotony & keep developers out of the Des Plaines River floodplain.)

The newly-reconstituted Ma Bell (aka AT&T, which recently acquired SBC, which itself had recently acquired Ameritech) sent me a flyer this week: upgrade to DSL Pro, only $18/month. As our current service, DSL Not-So-Pro, costs $54/month, this offer was intriguing.

A skeptical study of the fine print turned up no particularly nasty catches (there's a $90 early termination fee), so I submitted an order. I had expected to upgrade the DSL modem, but apparently that's not necessary.

So our internet connection speed will go up a bit (not that I really care about that; DSL Not-So-Pro is plenty fast), our telephone bill will go down $35 or so, and I don't even have to swap out modems. How nice.

My 401(k) statements got a makeover last quarter: now they're very pretty, with color charts & graphs and my current balance in big bold numbers.

What used to be there, and what's missing now, is a statement of my current holdings: how many shares of each fund. Apparently they thought that would just confuse me.

So I went to the web site, and managed to coax therefrom a list of all transactions for the last quarter. (This is harder than it ought to be. But the web site is very pretty.) Then I somewhat laboriously entered all these transactions into Quicken, occasionally playing whack-a-mole with Quicken when its arithmetic didn't agree with the numbers from the web site. (No, I didn't pay a commission, you stupid piece of [censored] program. Stop auto-entering bogus numbers in the [censored] form!)

Having done all that, nothing balances. Quicken's share totals don't match the web site, the prices are wrong, and the account balance is completely off. I'll have to try again tomorrow to clean up the mess.

Thank you so much for improving my 401(k) statement, you morons.

Work stuff:

Hm...ParseTarget doesn't handle projects properly. Maybe I should fix it?

But ParseTarget is only called from GetFilter, which is only called from build_match, which is only called from ComponentBuild, which is obsolete (having been superseded by launchBuild some months ago).

So maybe I needn't bother fixing ParseTarget's project handling after all.

Jerry Pournelle says:

Niven is on his way over, and we're out of dog food. I have to go get some before Niven gets here.

A few paragraphs later, he says:

Lunch with Niven.

Does this mean Mssrs. Niven & Pournelle had dog food for lunch...?

NOAA reports: temperature 89°, dewpoint 75°.

Storm clouds are looming, but there's nothing on the radar. Very strange.

(I forgot to water the tomato plants yesterday. I hope they're still alive....)

Was reminded today of LibraryThing:

LibraryThing helps you to create a library-quality catalog of your books. You can do all of them or just what you're reading now.

And because everyone catalogs online, they also catalog together. LibraryThing connects people based on the books they share.

I created an account for myself last September (my catalog is here); it sat idle until today, when I added a few books. Perhaps someday I will add more. A lifetime membership is only $25....

The latest thing from Microsoft: the Windows Media Photo image format:

Windows Media Photo is a new file format for continuous-tone still images that surpasses the limitations of existing image formats.

Just what the weary world needs: another incompatible-with-everything image format. And it's owned by Microsoft, too, which pretty much guarantees minimal support for the non-Windows world.

Remember the FrontPage Server Extensions? They were cross-platform, for a while. Now they're Windows only. You can be sure that somewhere down the line, the Windows Media Photo format will become - for the soundest of technical reasons - supported only on Windows.

No thanks, 'softies.

Supposedly, Jamie Zawinski once said:

Some people, when confronted with a problem, think, "I know, I'll use regular expressions." Now they have two problems.

(I can find quotes without number of this statement, but the original post, supposedly in comp.lang.emacs, remains elusive. The search continues.)

But it occurred to me that Microsoft has their own variation: when confronted with a problem, the 'softies think, "I know, let's use a database." Now they have two problems. How else to explain:

• The registry. "Let's re-implement .ini files with...a database!"
• The Windows Installer service. "Let's re-implement application installers as...databases!"
• WinFS. "Let's re-implement the entire filesystem as...a database!"

Oh, wait, the 'softies pulled the plug on WinFS last month, so maybe I shouldn't hold that one against them....

Update: Ask Google the right question, you get a useful answer: the "two problems" statement can be found here.

Had the notion that, as long as I'm getting rid of some books, I might try to make a little money: so I collected from the back porch to-be-discarded pile a bagful of mostly hardcover, mostly science-fiction and trundled off to the used-book store. (Priceless Books in Urbana, for those playing the at-home version of our game.)

Hardcover science fiction has been very popular at every used-book store I've ever been in, so I was expecting to leave with an empty bag and $20 or $30 in my wallet.

Alas, no. Priceless Books doesn't do hardcover science fiction. "Try Jane Addams, over in Champaign," quoth the proprietor.

I might do that. Or I might drop them off at the library. Or I might just throw the [censored] things in the nearest dumpster, and get on with my life. I'm still thinking about it.

Update: According to the Jane Addams Book Shop web site:

We buy from the public by appointment.

Well, don't let me inconvenience you or anything.

Jake & I found the Champaign Public Library considerably more welcoming when we stopped there this evening. They were quite pleased to take my books, and even sent a fella out with a cart to help bring them in. Somehow I can't imagine the Jane Addams spuds being so helpful.

Trying to find a good performance of The Liberty Bell March (by John Philip Sousa), so I can annoy Jennifer with it (since it's the theme music for Monty Python's Flying Circus, which Jennifer can't stand).

iTunes has four, but I'm not sure I like any of them. The search continues.

Thunderstorms passing through just now: the sky is a murky dark greenish-gray, sheets of rain are pounding the windows, and lightning is frequent & close by, with long, rumbly thunder following.

For once, I have my umbrella. Hah.

My toys & I have something in common today: a certain lack of energy:

• iPod - No battery power remaining. Won't turn on.
• Axim X30 - Battery at 55%.
• Phone - Only two bars (out of four) on the battery meter.
• Me - Six hours of sleep last night. Six hours the night before.

Pity me, pity me.

As of today, it's been 17,126 days since Hawaii became the 50th state, breaking the previous record of 17,125 days between #47 (Arizona, February 14, 1912) and #48 (Alaska, January 3, 1959).

The BBC says:

Syd Barrett, one of the original members of legendary rock group Pink Floyd, has died at the age of 60 from complications arising from diabetes.

Alas, poor Syd.

CNN says:

ELLISON BAY, Wisconsin (AP) -- At least one explosion damaged three buildings in this resort community early Monday, killing two people and sending seven others to hospitals, authorities said.

Meanwhile, MSNBC says:

NEW YORK - A four-story building housing doctors' offices collapsed and burned in an apparent gas explosion Monday after what witnesses described as a thunderous blast that rocked an upscale neighborhood just off Madison Avenue.

Curious, that so many buildings are blowing up today....

(Ellison Bay is just down the peninsula from Gills Rock, where Jennifer & I went on a Sunset Concert Cruise two years ago.)

Did another purge of the bookshelves yesterday afternoon, removing the ones that seemed interesting once but which I'll never get around to reading (e.g., the six-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson I bought from the Book of the Month Club nineteen years ago), the ones that I tried to read but didn't like (e.g., the second Well of Souls trilogy from Jack Chalker), and the ones that never were particularly interesting but somehow survived previous purges (e.g., The Gutenberg Galaxy by Marshall McLuhan).

I really should dust the bookshelves. (I was going to add "...more often", but that would imply that I do dust them from time to time. I don't.) The books were covered with dust and crud, and carting the culls out to the screen room (where they await final disposal) left me likewise begrimed.

ThinkSecret says Quicken 2007 is coming. However:

Quicken 2007 will remain a PowerPC-only application, although it will run on Intel-based systems under Rosetta.

Maybe next year Intuit will ship an Intel version, says ThinkSecret. Intuit, as usual, says nothing, which makes me think of that old Lily Tomlin phone-company joke: We don't care. We don't have to.

The ongoing quest for a decent personal-finance application has turned up iBank, from IGG Software. Looks pretty, only costs $40. I might have to download the trial version & see how it compares to Quicken.

Usually, Gardner Dozois' annual anthology, The Year's Best Science Fiction, is released in time for Father's Day. It's a nice present: 600+ pages of good fiction keeps me happy & busy for a long time.

Alas, this year there was no Twenty-Third Annual Collection in the bookstores when Jennifer, Jacob and Samuel were looking for Father's Day presents.

Two years ago he resigned his (long-held) job as editor of Isaac Asimov's SF Magazine, so I worried that maybe he'd given up on the anthologies as well. Apparently not: Amazon.com says #23 will be released on July 11.

(The Wikipedia entry for Gardner Dozois doesn't answer the question that's bothered me for the last ten years or so: how to pronounce "Dozois". Duh-zoise? Doe-zwa? Inquiring minds want to know!)

One difference between Windows and OS X is the latter's preference for keyboard shortcuts. I suppose Windows has just as many as OS X, but I never bothered to learn them: I just right-clicked on everything and used the context menu. OS X has context menus, but they're not as complete, nor as ubiquitous, as Windows.

So I'm slowly learning the OS X way of doing things. This is complicated by the wide selection of modifier keys on the Mac keyboard: is the function I'm trying to find invoked via shift-click, control-click, option-click, apple-click, or some combination thereof?

It's giving me flashbacks to the old PLATO system. The PLATO keyboard had about a dozen Enter keys on the right side of the keyboard, with random silly names. (Though I had less trouble then, keeping track of all those keys. I must be getting old.)

Update: It occurs to me that the iMac's keyboard has the same number of modifier keys as on the Windows machine. They even have the same names, except for the Apple / Windows key. So I can't really complain about that. On the other hand, simple text-editing operations are pointlessly, annoyingly different between the two machines. The arrow keys (unmodified by Control, Shift or Alt) are about the only thing that works the same on both, so I find myself using them exclusively.

When I checked on the basil tonight, it was covered with Japanese beetles. A few were nibbling on the hot peppers, too.

I dosed everything with sevin, so maybe the beetles will leave my plants alone for a while.

The tiny green nubbins on the pepper plant are a little bigger today than they were yesterday, which is encouraging. The tomatoes are also getting bigger, but they show no signs of turning red.

How my garden does grow:

• Basil - Big & bushy, but leaning a bit. Lots of flowers and seeds. Occasionally nibbled by Japanese beetles.
• Hot peppers - Very tall and spindly, with numerous tiny green nubbins that are probably peppers-to-be. Several dead leaves; too much Sevin, perhaps.
• Tomatoes - Barrel #2 has caught up with barrel #1, but it's starting to look a bit thin. This happened last year, too: no-see-ums were eating the leaves. Another application of Sevin seems in order. Both plants have quite a few large (but still quite green) tomatoes.

With all the beetle carnage, we're running low on Sevin. Perhaps this weekend we'll buy some more.

I'm wondering now whether the tomato cages were a good idea. This year's plants were specially bred for growing in containers, so they're shorter than usual and the branches are considerably thicker. They look strong enough to stand up on their own, and also look a bit squeezed inside their cages.

Alas, it's probably too late to remove the cages.

Sometime between 29 and 40 seconds past 12:28pm on July 1st, 2006, while Jennifer & I were taking pictures of Sam's first haircut, Sam lunged toward the camera - he doesn't just reach or lean toward things that interest him, he lunges - and managed to plant one drool- and/or snot-covered fingertip on the camera lens.

I know this so precisely because of the timestamps helpfully encoded by the camera into each image, and the large blurry smear present in every picture taken after the finger incident.

So this evening I fished some lens paper out my old camera bag and cleaned the baby goo off the lens. My pictures will no longer have the Guccione Effect on one side.

Thirty years ago - more or less - I used to stay up late to watch reruns of Night Gallery. I'd turn off all the lights and get up close to the television; I still remember how spooked I was by the theme music. (Never enough to turn off the television & go to bed, though.)

My two favorite episodes: There Aren't Any More MacBanes, starring Joel Grey and John Vernon; and The Sins of the Fathers, starring Richard Thomas. (The latter introduced me to the curious profession of sin-eater; I think I'll stick with software.)

As it turns out, there's a Night Gallery web site, http://www.nightgallery.net/, and the entire series - all three seasons - is available on DVD.

(Everything's available on DVD these days. I'm sure the six minutes of dead air broadcast by CBS when Dan Rather stormed off the Evening News set back in 1987 can be purchased on DVD, somewhere.)

Colonial Williamsburg has podcasts:

Colonial Williamsburg Web users now have Podcasts, delivered as RSS feeds. The popular, downloadable audio files are here featuring special interviews and presentations available only to our Web users. Listen to programs on your computer, or download and listen later on your MP3 player. Lloyd Dobyns is your host as you go "behind the scenes" to meet interpreters, chefs, tradesmen, musicians, historians, curators, and more. Check back often. New Podcasts are added weekly.

Long ago, I watched Weekend and NBC News Overnight, both of which were hosted (co-hosted? co-anchored?) by Lloyd Dobyns. He's a good writer & interviewer, so this latest project sounds very interesting.

Perhaps I can have iTunes subscribe. Hm...must investigate....

Update: Indeed, the Colonial Williamsburg podcasts are available though iTunes. Subscribed.

Sam woke up around 3:00am.

He's sleeping now - but not in the crib. If I put him in the crib, he wakes up & cries.

Wednesday's going to be a long day. Pity me, pity me.

Took der kinder to the Independence Day parade, over in Urbana, this afternoon. (The last few blocks of the parade route are in Champaign, so technically it's a joint project.) The temperature was much lower than previous years, which was nice. There was a little rain; just sprinkles, really, not enough to cause problems.

Sam seemed to have a good time, especially when he discovered that his tippy cup was full of water & he could dump it all over himself.

Jake seemed a little put out that the marchers weren't handing out candy. Maybe on Labor Day, we told him.

I took the camera, but didn't take any pictures of the parade: just pictures of Jake and Sam. Oops.

Lots of political-action groups in this year's parade: smokers' rights, gun-owners' rights, gay marriage, anti-abortion, anti-war, etc., etc.

I've had a sore throat and cough for the last few days, so this evening I went to the spiffy new evenings & weekends clinic to see whether it was anything serious. My conversation with the doctor was rather amusing:

[Doctor sticks otoscope in my left ear, looks around.]
Has this ear been bothering you lately?
No.
Well, it's infected.

Mr. Doctor seemed a bit disturbed that I could have an ear infection and not notice. I guess they're supposed to hurt, or something.

He prescribed a bottle of enormous chalky white pills, that are supposed to clear up the ear infection and - as a bonus - also take care of the respiratory infection that's behind the sore throat and cough.

Sam had his first haircut today. He seemed to enjoy himself. Jennifer held him, Jake kept him amused, I took pictures.

By a curious coincidence, Sam was wearing the same shirt that Jacob wore for his first haircut (June 8, 2002, that was).

In the Junk folder, an urgent message from the "Amazon Security Department":

You have received this email because we have strong reason to believe that your Amazon account had been recently compromised. In order to prevent any fraudulent activity from occurring we are required to open an investigation into this matter. To speed up this process, you are required to verify your Amazon account by following the link below.

I have two problems with this:

1. The real Amazon.com doesn't send messages like this.
2. The address this was sent to isn't the address on my Amazon.com account.

Nice try, morons.

The Wendy's on south Neil St. closed last week. Exactly why is a bit of a mystery; nobody involved is talking.

Long ago, I used to walk down from WRI to Wendy's, for some late-night dinner. And before that, I used to walk over from CTC for an afternoon frosty. These days, I just go to McDonald's, or hit the salad bar over at the IGA.

(There's a Hooters just down the street from WRI. It's been there seven years. I have yet to set foot inside it.)

In today's paper: the Bennigan's on Town Center Blvd. (just off North Prospect) has also closed. Management says they weren't getting enough customers. I can believe that - we usually go to the O'Charley's next door, since they give out balloons. Jake loves balloons.