August 2006 Archives

In the mail: a letter from Arlington Heights:

Saw this in the Wall Street Journal. Thought you might be interested.

I looked at the accompanying newspaper clipping. Two graphs: Treasury Yield Curve, and Libor/Swap Curve. A table of Major Bond Indexes. (I'm old enough to remember when the plural of index was indices. Times change, language evolves.)

Well, yes, I do have an unhealthy fascination with charts & graphs, and maps, and aerial photographs. But Libor/Swap Curves don't do anything for me.

Finally, it occured to me that maybe I should turn the clipping over. Ah, an article: Allowances: Not Child's Play. That makes more sense.

(Jake doesn't get an allowance. Even so, he generally has more cash on hand than I do.)

Quite a few Intuit products have their own weblogs:

• http://quickbase.typepad.com/
• QuickBooks
• QuickBooks Online Edition
• Quicken Rental Property Manager
• Zipingo

And finally, there's one from Christine Rimer, whose mission (apparently) is to get all the other weblogs up & running. I think I would call her efforts only partly successful:

• QuickBase: first post May 3, 2005; most recent, August 29, 2006.
• QuickBooks: first post, September 20, 2005; most recent, August 27, 2006.
• QuickBooks Online Edition: first post, July 13, 2004; most recent, May 9, 2006.
• Quicken: first post, June 9, 2005; most recent, October 13, 2005.
• Quicken Rental Property Manager: first post, May 13, 2005; most recent, January 18, 2006.
• Zipingo: first post, July 21, 2005; most recent, August 17, 2006.

It's interesting that the Quicken team - constantly berated in the Quicken discussion forums for shipping wretched software - has the least interest in maintaining their weblog, while the QuickBooks team - praised by Apple for updating QuickBooks to really take advantage of OS X - is the most active.

I wish I could sneak into Intuit World HQ and spy on the Quicken team as they work. They can't really be the troop of not-so-bright slackers that the discussion forums make them out to be...can they?

It's at http://quicken.typepad.com/. The first post was in June of last year; over the next four months, the QuickenSpuds managed nine more posts, then fell silent.

I guess they just lost interest. (Rather like they've lost interest in the Mac version of Quicken.)

On the other hand, the QuickBooks Team Blog at http://www.quickbooks.blogs.com/ is pretty active.

Thick overcast today, but as yet no rain. Radar shows a vague blue smear northwest of Bloomington, which is probably the sort of fake rain that never reaches the ground.

Rather chilly, too: only 66° as of noon.

Jacob is very excited: he's got a loose tooth. Goodbye, baby teeth.

What's the tooth fairy pay for a tooth these days? I think I got a dime, or a quarter, or something like that; but that was during the Johnson administration.

(That's Lyndon Johnson, not Andrew Johnson. Thanks for asking!)

Just when I think the tomato plants have gone to their reward, another crop of vaguely straw-colored, almost ripe tomatoes appears.

This evening, Jake & I harvested twenty-five more. The year's total: ninety-six.

I was going to pull up the plants this evening, but I think I'll let them go a while longer. Maybe they'll break a hundred.

I managed to get .htaccess files working on mork this evening. The big problem: there's a previously-unsuspected (by me, anyway) user-specific Apache configuration file at /etc/httpd/users/user.conf, which is coded thusly:

<Directory "/Users/user/Sites/">
Options Indexes MultiViews
AllowOverride None
Order allow,deny
Allow from all
</Directory>

I changed the Options and AllowOverrides lines to match the main httpd.conf:

AllowOverride FileInfo AuthConfig Limit
Options MultiViews Indexes SymLinksIfOwnerMatch IncludesNoExec

And now .htaccess works nicely. mod_rewrite, too, after I added RewriteBase.

Picked every ripe, almost-ripe, and might-someday-ripen tomato from both plants: sixteen, in all.

The year's total: 71, which seems pretty good after all.

(I don't think there will be any more tomatoes. As soon as I work up the necessary energy, I'm going to pull up both plants & stuff them into a yard-waste bag.)

I gave up on Apache 2.2.3, and uninstalled it. I figure I'll stick with Apache 1.3.3 until I have a real reason to deal with what promises to be a quite painful upgrade. (Unless Apple ships an OS X update that includes Apache 2.2.2.)

Enabling CGI turned out to be easy: edit /etc/httpd.httpd.conf, find the line

#AddHandler cgi-script .cgi

AddHandler cgi-script .cgi .py

Then, find the

<Directory /Users/*/Sites>
...
</Directory>

section, which is commented out, and un-comment it. Below it, add a new section:

<Directory /Users/*/Sites/cgi-bin>
Options +ExecCGI
</Directory>

...and Apache will run Python scripts in the ~/Site/cgi-bin directory. That was easy.

(Easier than upgrading Apache, I must say.)

Jennifer & Jacob were supposed to go to Bloomington this morning, for Day of the Dozer; alas, the weather did not cooperate, and Day of the Dozer was rained out.

Instead, we had lunch at Steak & Shake, then went up to Rantoul for a visit to the Octave Chanute Aerospace Museum. The museum people have been quite busy since our last visit: we saw quite a few new exhibits, and the whole place has been generally spiffed-up.

Too bad the museum is housed in an old and not so well-maintained building. The roof leaks, badly. The exhibits haven't been damaged, but the carpet looks pretty bad.

Tried to install mod_python on mork just now; there were problems.

First, darwinports installed pcre 6.6_0, whatever that is. I didn't know mod_python had any prerequisites, but maybe it does.

Then it tried to upgrade Apache from 1.3.3 to 2.2.0, and fell over when it couldn't find a download mirror that would talk to it.

Apparently this is because the mirrors only have Apache 2.2.2 and 2.2.3. So why is darwinports looking for an old version?

Update: Ah. A little RTFM over at darwinports.opendarwin.org turned up the answer:

sudo port selfupdate
sudo port sync

The first command updates darwinports itself; the second updates its port list. Apache 2.2.2 is downloading now....

Update 2: Now I seem to have two copies of Apache installed: 1.3.3, which is running, and 2.2.2, which is not. Um. I'd mess around with this some more, but Jake needs a bath. Maybe later. Or tomorrow.

Yesterday's newspaper had an article about the Purple People Bridge Climb:

The Purple People Bridge Climb is a unique bridge climbing experience on the pedestrian bridge known as the "Purple People Bridge". This exciting experience will allow participants to climb "over the top" of the Purple People Bridge. Throughout the experience, participants will be able to view beautiful vistas of the riverfront and the Greater Cincinnati / Northern Kentucky areas.

Only $40. Too bad they don't allow cameras on the bridge:

For everyone's safety, especially those down below, we do not permit climbers to take their own cameras on the bridge climb. We do take great photos for you though and each person gets a complimentary group photo. We are happy to take additional photos for you, just ask your guide.

I don't suppose they have one of those cheesy purple & yellow jumpsuits in my size.

I just checked my pto accrual status: 26.4 days available now, with 8.1 additional days coming by year's end. To avoid making any sacrifices to the PTO eater, I must use 14.5 vacation days sometime in the next four months.

There's only 18 weeks left in the year: I could take every Monday off until January, if I wanted to.

(Too bad I can't just cash 'em in. Three weeks' pay would buy lots of toys...er...important, practical things for the house...that's what I meant....)

Turns out mod_python is included in DarwinPorts: installation instructions are at http://mod_python.darwinports.com/.

Perhaps tonight I'll have a go at it.

Apache and PHP are pre-installed in OS X 10.4; enabling them is pretty easy:

Apache: go to System Preferences » Sharing » Services, click the Personal Web Sharing check box. (Yup, that's all it takes. When I think of all the [censored] I had to put up with, the one time I tried to get IIS running on Windows....)

PHP: edit /private/etc/httpd/httpd.conf (use sudo), find these lines:

#LoadModule php4_module libexec/httpd/libphp4.so
#AddModule mod_php4.c

(They won't be together: the first is around line 240, the second is around line 284.) Remove the #. Restart Apache.

Presto, you have a web server with PHP enabled. Next: mod_python.

The other day, I installed the MySQL Migration Toolkit on nessus. It works very nicely (once the not-so-bright Windows Firewall is told to let it use the network).

It converts databases one at a time: there's no batch-convert option. But I only had eight databases, so that wasn't a big problem.

Everything converted, no errors or warnings. (Though beware: the MySQL database name, normally the same as the .mbd file name, gets truncated if the latter has a space in it.)

All my data, online again. How nice.

Next is to clean up the database designs (the schemata, to use the proper geek term), since when most of these were created - years ago - I didn't really know what I was doing; then get Apache running on mork, along with PHP and mod-python; then write a fancy web front end to it all.

That sounds like fun.

The Nikon can do time-lapse photography: take a picture every minute, stitch them together into a QuickTime movie. I had the notion to point it out my office window and record a day's worth of parking-lot activity.

It worked fairly well. Cars appear & disappear; pedestrians flicker across the pavement; light pole shadows sweep like the hands of a clock.

But I need to work on glare shielding. I taped a black plastic garbage bag over the camera, figuring that would prevent reflections from inside the room; I was right, but forgot about reflections of the camera & tripod. These are, alas, quite visible, especially toward the end. Perhaps a piece of black construction paper, taped to the glass, with a small hole for the camera to peep out.

I let the camera run for almost exactly eight hours, which produced a mere fifteen seconds of video. I think next time I'll use the fastest setting: one frame every thirty seconds.

Six more tomatoes this evening, smaller than before (golf ball sized vs tennis ball sized) and a bit cat-faced.

That's fifty-five for the year, or 98¢ each.

I neglected to check the basil & hot peppers, so no update on them. Maybe tomorrow.

Five tomatoes yesterday, plus two ripe hot peppers. (The peppers were an impressively vivid shade of red.)

Those, plus four on Sunday, bring the total to 48. I don't think there will be very many more: both plants are just about completely dead.

The basil is huge. Looking at it now, you'd never know that Japanese beetles had eaten most of it last month. I suppose we'll have to harvest some before it goes all woody or something.

The pepper plant is covered with peppers, of varying sizes. Only the two ripe ones, so far. (They really stand out against all the green.)

Finished reading Manhunt: The 12-Day Chase for Lincoln's Killer by James L. Swanson.

I learned a few things about the assassination of Abraham Lincoln (and about Dr. Samuel Mudd, who apparently wasn't nearly so innocent as I had thought).

Reading history always leaves me thinking of might-have-beens: how decisions that are so trivial one is barely aware of making them can be so terrible in their consequences. If not for a little bad luck, and some inexplicable errors in judgment, Booth might have made good his escape.

Today was the first day of class for most schools in Champaign. (Even the University started today, if memory serves.) Traffic was very bad, huge lines of minivans outside every school, huge backups at every stop sign.

I must find a different route to get from Jacob's school to Wolfram Research World HQ, one that doesn't pass too near to any schools.

It just occurred to me that I've stopped getting spam on my home email accounts. For a while, I was getting two or three every day; then, suddenly, nothing.

Perhaps the helpful folks at Pair have found & blocked the source?

(I've had an account with Pair for...um...several years now, but I've yet to actually speak with anyone who works there.)

iTunes has not one but two performances of Dueling Tubas available; I bought the one by Martin Mull.

My collection of novelty songs has really grown since I got iTunes....

Two months ago, I exported all my Access databases (eight of them) to a collection of .csv files. These turned out to be quite useless, since Access doesn't bother to escape any commas or quotation marks in the data. (Thank you so much, 'softies.)

I poked around a bit over the weekend, looking for the Access equivalent of mysqldump: something that would examine a .mdb file and spit out the appropriate SQL statements to recreate the database (or at least the database tables) on the MySQL server.

I tried msacc2mysql, but it wasn't very happy with the Access 2000 object model and kept throwing no-such-member exceptions. I thought about trying adoexport, but was a little suspicious that after five years of development (or, more probably, of neglect) it was still at version 0.1.

I should have checked the MySQL web site first: they have the MySQL Migration Toolkit. It appears to do exactly what I want: examine an Access database, then recreate it on a MySQL server. I installed it on nessus last night; perhaps I'll give it a try sometime this week.

It would be nice to have my databases available again....

75°, sunny, low humidity.

It's nice that summer has mellowed a little. 95° is just too darn hot.

The memory card in the X30 holds quite a bit of genealogical information, gleaned from various books over at the library; I had the notion of copying all of it to the iMac, so I could read it on a bigger screen. Alas, there were problems.

The iMac couldn't read the memory card: I plugged it in, and nothing happened. I didn't even get an error message.

Plan B: set up a Bluetooth connection between the X30 & the iMac, and use that to transfer the files over. After a bit of frobbing, I managed to get the X30 paired with the iMac. (Hint: don't try to initiate the connection from the X30. It won't work.)

By default, the X30 shares the My Documents folder, but I managed to change that so the entire device, including the storage card, was visible on the iMac. I picked a likely document, dragged it to the iMac's desktop, and opened it in Word.

Word 2004 can't read Pocket Word files. Apparently, I need to buy some kind of converter and/or synchronization software to munge my Pocket Word files into something not-pocket Word knows how to read.

I'm rather annoyed with Microsoft just now. Gratuitous document-format incompatibility is the sort of dumb stunt a second-tier software house might pull. (E.g., Intuit: the Mac & Windows versions of Quicken can't read each other's file formats.) The 'softies are supposed to be smarter than that.

Update: Plan C: dock the X30 on nessus, use ActiveSync to upload the memory card files (which will also convert them to regular Word files), then copy them to mork.

Which will happen first:

1. The New Horizons spacecraft reaches Pluto.
2. Jennifer & I pay off the mortgage on our house.

Here's a hint: both will occur in 2015.

Four more tomatoes last night: a little bigger, not so ugly, but the end is definitely near for both plants.

Total expenditures: $54.04
Tomatoes harvested: 39

That's $1.39 per tomato. I suspect it would have been cheaper just to buy them at the grocery store.

Left my desk for a few minutes just now; when I returned, the voicemail light was blinking. I picked up the phone, punched a few buttons, and heard Jake's voice: Where is he? Where is he?

Sorry I missed you....

Just got a wrong number on the cell phone, from 660-646-xxxx; a bit of googling on area code 660 & exchange 646 suggests the call came from Chillicothe, Missouri (population 8,968). Here's something I found on the city web site:

Too bad the caller hung up without saying anything. We could have had a nice chat about sliced bread.

MSNBC says:

Workers at [Martucci] Angiano's gourmet chocolate company, Bodega Chocolates, discovered under a vat a 2-inch-tall column of chocolate drippings that they believe bears a striking resemblance to the Virgin Mary.

The thought of a kitchenful of confectioners worshiping a two-inch-high lump of chocolate is rather amusing, I must say.

Seven more tomatoes yesterday: small, lumpy & unevenly colored. (They still tasted good.)

Quite a few green tomatoes are still out there, in both barrels, but the plants are dying so quickly that I doubt they'll ever ripen.

I've been lax about keeping count of the year's tomato harvest, but I'm sure it's below twenty-five.

Large machineries of destruction are tearing down the tiny strip mall just north of Wolfram Research World HQ.

No pictures, alas: the camera is at home.

Last year's music project was to listen to all 7,000+ songs in my iTunes music library; it took quite a while, but I managed it.

Alas, the play counts were reset to zero when I moved everything to the iMac last March.

So I've re-created the Never Played playlist, and will be working through it as time permits. As of now, there are 6,517 songs in Never Played, so I won't finish until sometime next year.

Today is Sam's first birthday. Happy birthday, little guy.

For yesterday's dinner I dumped half a jar of carrots on Sam's high-chair tray and let him fend for himself. (He also had eight ounces of milk, and about ¾ of a tub of spaghetti & meatballs.)

Sam ate all the carrots he wanted, then very carefully picked up the rest and put them in the cup holder.

The newspaper microfilms I requested - how many weeks ago was that? - have finally arrived: the Gary Post-Tribune, January through April, 1943.

This gives me a one-in-three chance of finding something about Orval Akers, who apparently died in Gary in 1943. (Industrial accident, I've been told.)

I feel a sudden...cough...illness...cough cough coming on...I may have to stay home from work tomorrow....

Urgent mail just now from the WRI Windows sysadmin: go to Microsoft Update & install patch blah-blah-blah right away.

Er...I installed that patch last Wednesday....

Update: I didn't find this site on my own. I didn't even find some other site that links to it. No, I was told about it, by former cow-orker Vicki.

Spent the day at State Farm Park, over in Bloomington, having a joint birthday party for the August crowd (that is, me [4th], Norm [14th], Natalie & Sam [16th] and Amy [20th]).

It was fun. Rather exhausting, but fun.

A few weeks ago, the 'softies released Money 2007. I don't care. There's no Mac version (never was, never will be), and the Windows version is unlikely to run on nessus.

But what really caught my eye: Microsoft is pulling the plug on Money for Pocket PCs. The Money for Handheld Devices page says:

• Money for the Pocket PC will work on versions prior to Win Mobile 5.0 (2005). It does NOT work on Win Mobile 5.0.
• Money 2007 will not synchronize with any Pocket PC version.

I suppose the 'softies want everything to be online (available for a low monthly fee). If I can get to my personal financial information from any web browser in the world, why would I need a Pocket PC?

Maybe because I don't want my personal financial information accessible from any web browser in the world?

Or because my Pocket PC works even in places where there aren't any web browsers?

I don't think Microsoft quite understands their customers any more. Silly 'softies....

Finished (last night, just before bedtime) The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Second Annual Collection, edited by the unpronounceable Gardner Dozois.

Only 652 pages, but it took me four months to finish it. I'm slowing down in my old age.

Last year sometime, I bought the 10th anniversary DVD edition of Myst, which included Myst, Myst II: Riven and Myst III: Exile.

There was no hope of running Myst II or III on six-year-old nessus, so I didn't even install them. But I did have fun messing around with Myst. (No, I didn't finish it. I'm lazy.)

It occurred to me this evening that there are Mac editions on the DVD, so I thought I might install them on the iMac. Alas, Myst and Myst II don't run on OS X. Myst III does run on OS X, so that's the one I installed.

If that's the right word - there's no actual installer for Myst III. The readme file (which, I note in passing, was very badly formatted) suggested manually creating directories on the iMac & manually copying files into it from the DVD. There were even instructions for a complete install, so the game would run without the DVD.

It didn't work: when I started the game, it immediately demanded the DVD, from which it tried to play some video. That didn't work very well, either. So I did a force-quit on Myst III, ejected the DVD, and dragged the Myst III directory to the trash.

Myst IV and Myst V have been released, but I don't think I'll bother with either of them.

Two more tomatoes last night.

Unlike the 2004 tomato plants, which produced edible tomatoes into October and survived several hard frosts before going to the great yard-waste bag in the sky, this year's plants are already dying: whole branches are shriveled & yellow.

I suppose this year's garden hasn't been as dismal a failure as last year's, but I wouldn't consider it a shining success, either.

Wait 'til next year!

(I used to say that about baseball. Now I say it about tomatoes.)

Another ten tomatoes yesterday, mostly from barrel #2, plus one that was too deeply split to use, and a green one that I accidentally dislodged when going after the ripe ones.

I threw it at a rabbit.

We're going to attempt some kind of stuffed-tomato recipe this evening.

The previously-mentioned Blue Man Group video podcasts are now downloading - slowly, but surely.

This is better than last week, when the servers were apparently down or overloaded, and all download attempts ended in dismal failure.

(Why, no, I haven't watched any of them yet. Maybe later tonight.)

The Celts by Enya was another album that didn't import so well into iTunes on nessus: three or four songs were chopped off after just a few seconds.

So I tried re-importing it on the iMac this evening; no problems, no more truncated songs. (And the iMac imports CDs much faster than nessus ever did.)

Sometime when I wasn't paying attention, Microsoft released a new version of MS Reader, their e-book application. Apparently 2.4.1 isn't so different from 2.3 (the version preinstalled on the X30). Microsoft says:

This version includes updates for known performance issues, and adds exciting new features:

• Pan and zoom capabilities for embedded graphics
• Screen rotation capability between portrait and landscape modes for more natural, comfortable reading (Windows Mobile 2003, Second Edition devices only)

Microsoft has tens of billions of dollars in cash and tens of thousands of employees, but can't seem to find anyone to do any serious development on their Windows CE...er, Windows Mobile...whatever they're calling it this week...applications: MS Reader, ActiveSync, MS Money for Pocket PC, etc., etc., which are all quite feeble.

Rather dark outside just now. Radar shows a small line of storms coming in from the west.

But it's not actually raining, and the darkest clouds are nearly past. We may not get any rain after all.

(This would be good for me: my umbrella is out in the car.)

Update: Five minutes later, the rain started. Curiously, the sky is much lighter now.

BP has put up a new web site, http://usresponse.bp.com/:

This website was established to provide information about BP's corrosion response activities for the Prudhoe Bay field on the North Slope of Alaska.

Meanwhile, various company mouthpieces have been insisting that BP spends lots of money on pipeline maintenance, the pipelines are in great shape, and BP has no idea how this corrosion might have occurred.

I believe that.

The Wendy's on south Neil Street, next to the Jiffy Lube, abruptly closed in June. (There was much discussion of this on various WRI mailing lists.)

The building has since been demolished and carted away. I imagine some new eatery will go up in its place.

Two more birthday presents, ordered and/or acquired today:

• Microsoft Office Student and Teacher Edition 2004, for the iMac. I like to call this the Wink Wink Nudge Nudge edition of Office: only Qualified Educational Users (or parents thereof) are allowed to buy it, or so Microsoft says; but nobody's enforcing this. (Why, yes, I do qualify, now that Jacob is in school. Thanks for asking!)
• On an Island by David Gilmour, his first solo album in twenty-two years. I haven't listened to it yet. Maybe tomorrow. (I bought it from iTunes; it includes a nice e-book with lyrics & artwork.)

Picked five more tomatoes yesterday evening.

There was a sixth ripe one, but it was rather cat-faced: so I tossed it in the general direction of the compost heap. (And missed, by about five yards.)

That makes fourteen, and we're already running out of ideas for what to do with them all.

MSNBC says:

Oil company BP scrambled Monday to assess suspected pipeline corrosion that will shut shipments from the nation's biggest oilfield, removing about 8 percent of daily U.S. crude production and driving oil prices sharply higher.

Way to go, BP. Billions in profits, but - apparently - no money for pipeline maintenance.

On the other hand, MSNBC also says:

Victor Shum, an energy analyst with Purvin & Gertz in Singapore, noted U.S. crude inventories are at a five-year high.

"But the market is in very high anxiety, so a real disruption affects the prices, even if there is no threat of a supply shortage," Shum said.

Perhaps I misunderstand, but it appears that supply & demand don't influence oil prices nearly as much as the anxiety of the market. Consider switching to decaf, fellas.

Today's tomato harvest: seven, for a total of nine so far this year.

Jamie Zawinski says:

I think you will enjoy these Victorian Obituaries.

Apparently he found somebody's genealogy page, with a bunch of newspaper extracts.

Nineteenth-century newspapers weren't at all shy about printing the most gruesome details of death, violence & mayhem:

Thursday, May 12, 1887
A terrible accident occurred in the rolling mill of the Hubbard Iron company, at Hubbard,, Ohio, shortly after 2 o'clock on the morning of the 6th. Engineer Griffith Phillipps, aged 29 years in passing around the ore crusher oiling the bearings, was caught in the wheels and dragged into the crusher. He was mangled out of all semblance of humanity, the flesh adhering to the clogs. He leaves a wife and 3 children.

Genealogy is fun, but does have its euww moments....

Had the notion that the digital camera would be great for copying courthouse documents: no more shoveling quarters into photocopiers, no more struggling to keep reams of semi-legible papers organized.

All digital, all the time: that's my motto. Neat & tidy, and less of a fire hazard. (Just be sure to make frequent backups....)

But I'd need a copy stand. (Photographing documents with a hand-held camera only works in spy movies. In the real world, the results are seldom readable.) A reasonable-looking 12×9 copy stand costs $33, which isn't too expensive....

Of the 7,000 or so songs I imported into iTunes (from entirely legal sources, thank you very much), a few - ten or twenty - were mysteriously truncated: no import or playback errors from iTunes, but the song just chops off in mid-warble.

Sundown by Gordon Lightfoot had two truncated songs, The Watchman's Gone and Carefree Highway, which was a bit irksome. I like those songs.

It occurred to me this morning that the iMac might be better than nessus at reading dodgy fifteen-year-old CDs, so I fed it Sundown. No errors - and no more truncated songs.

How nice.

Jennifer & Jacob baked a cake for me:

It was very tasty, especially the M&Ms on top....

Found another mostly-red tomato, this time in barrel #2, so I picked it this evening. (It will finish ripening on the kitchen counter, away from bugs & nasty weather.)

The first one was very tasty; perhaps this one will be the same. No pictures yet, sorry.

This year's gardening mistakes:

• Inadequate soil preparation. The dirt in both barrels is rock hard, so water tends to run down the sides and out the bottom. I suspect the plants aren't getting enough water.
• The cages. Tall, spindly tomato plants need cages to keep them from falling over, but short stubby bred-for-containers tomato plants do not.
• The basil: it's so huge and bushy that it's overwhelming the hot pepper plant. And Japanese beetles are all over it.

Next year I'll do things a little differently.

Sam's first birthday is coming up, which means - among other things - he'll switch from formula to whole milk. To ease him into it (i.e., to sneak it past him), for the last few days we've been diluting the formula with milk: Tuesday, 6oz formula & 2oz milk; Wednesday, 4oz each; today, 2oz formula & 6oz milk.

Tomorrow's bottles will contain no formula at all.

(We still have half a can of the stuff. Maybe it's good on ice cream.)

Fished a message from Intuit out of the Junk Mail folder this evening: Please pay $60 for Quicken 2007. We need the money.

As seems obligatory with personal-finance applications, the differences are minimal between this year's model and last year's. A few things look different, a few more banks added to the online services. But the deal-breaker, at least for me: Quicken 2007 is still a PowerPC binary. No universal binary support this year; maybe next year.

Faced with indifference and/or hostility from their customers, Intuit is reduced to offering enticements: a $10 rebate, and some free encyclopedia software.

No, thanks. I want a universal binary, with all the features that the Windows version had. Maybe next year....

Wikipedia says:

At one point, it was rumored that [Leon Redbone] was Frank Zappa in disguise, but since the latter's death due to cancer, these rumors have subsided.

Or maybe Leon/Frank wearied of living a double life, and killed off one of his/their identities.

A clever fellow named Matthew Brown is getting lots of media attention these days for having written AutoStitch, a smarter-than-the-average-bear panorama stitcher: take a bunch of pictures, and AutoStitch will automatically glue them together into one large image, smoothing out exposure & color differenes, etc., etc. Very cool.

Microsoft Digital Image Library has something like that, but - alas - iPhoto does not. So I have more than a few broken-up panoramas in my image library, and no way to assemble them.

A little research turned out a few OS X panorama stitchers, one of which (Calico, from Kekus Digital) even uses Mr. Brown's AutoStitch. Next time I have $40 and nothing else to spend it on -

<shrek>
Like that's ever gonna happen!
</shrek>

- perhaps I will snag myself a copy of Calico.

MSNBC says:

Three years after now-embattled Rep. Bob Ney, along with Rep. Walter Jones, led the effort to rename french fries "Freedom Fries" in an attempt to strike back at France for not contributing to the Iraq war effort, the basement cafeteria of the House of Representatives has quietly reverted to using the original name, the Washington Times reported in Wednesday editions.

Hey, we sure showed those French people, didn't we? They'll think twice before disagreeing with us again!

Sometimes Congress just seems like an inadequately-supervised daycare. There aren't enough grown-ups.

NOAA says: as of 11:00am, temperature 86°, dewpoint 73.9°.

Being outside for any length of time is just...painful.

CNN is running an article about Fidel Castro's health problems that reads more like the first draft of an obituary. Talking heads & politicians are already speculating on what will happen when Castro dies.

What will the U.S. do, without the Communist Bogeyman lurking ninety miles south of the Florida Keys?

We live in interesting times....