MSNBC says:
Rep. Mark Foley, R-Fla., resigned from Congress on Friday, effective immediately, in the wake of questions about e-mails he wrote a former male page.
Hm...is a "former male page" a fella who used to be a page, or a page who used to be a fella? Alas, MSNBC does not say.
East-west streets in Champaign, and why they're a pain to drive on:
I could have worse problems, I suppose, than a morning commute that takes five minutes longer than it used to.
The latest me-too effort from Microsoft: http://www.wallop.com/:
Wallop is the exclusive social experience where it's easy to 'be you' and connect with the friends you choose.
Wallop redefines the social networking experience and unlocks the potential of self-expression online.
Wallop is invitation-only, just like Orkut was (and perhaps still is; but who uses Orkut any more?).
Maybe I'm too old & unhip for social-networking software, but I don't see the point in something like Wallop. There are so many ways already to 'be myself' and 'connect with friends' online, why should I buy into one that's a closed system, completely owned by a single company?
(The Wallop Corp. web site is ominously silent on how they propose to make money from Wallop. "No advertising," they say. So what's the business model? Subscription fees? Sale of users' personal information to the highest bidder?)
iMovie can capture time-lapse video from the iMac's built-in camera, so I left it running overnight on the iMac at work to see if anything interesting happens in my office when I'm not here.
Not really. The cleaning lady shows up in two frames. Sometime later the office light came on for a while, but nobody shows up in the video. Sunset and sunrise looked interesting, but most of the time the sky was either completely dark, or washed out.
Now I have 112MB of video that's sort of interesting, but mostly useless. I should probably delete it.
(My time-lapse calculations were faulty: I was expecting sixteen hours of capture to produce a five-minute video, but ended up with just under three minutes instead.)
Still trying to migrate all our financial data from its various hiding places (Money 2005 & Quicken 2006 on nessus, Quicken 2007 on mork) into a single Quicken 2007 data file on mork; still having problems.
I've standardized the account names across all three data files, to minimize post-import category fixups, but for some reason the Quicken 2007 importer ignores most of the paychecks in the QIF files generated by Money 2005. (If you remove six years of paychecks from our checking account, really interesting things happen to the balance.)
I suspect Quicken doesn't like Money's categories. (You might think that the accounting profession would have standard category names, and that Microsoft & Intuit would use them in their respective applications; you'd be wrong.) Next project: switch the Money file to use Quicken's categories.
Maybe that will help.
Over at everything2.com, there's an article about de Bruijn sequences and the keyless-entry keypads on cars:
Right now, I am going to give you a sequence of minimal length that, when you enter it into a car's numeric keypad, is guaranteed to unlock the doors of said car. It is exactly 3129 keypresses long, which should take you around 20 minutes to go through.
I don't actually know the magic code to unlock Mr. Explorer. It wasn't included in any of the paperwork I got when I bought the car, and for the last eight years I've been too lazy to RTFM to find out how to reprogram it.
I'm also too lazy to memorize a 3,129-digit de Bruijn sequence, so I don't suppose I'll ever be able to use the keypad. Oh well.
Today's entry: the Town Crier.
The Town Crier's credo is: I see everything that goes on around here, and I'm going to send everyone email about it.
Once upon a time, mork & nessus were happy network neighbors: each could see shared directories on the other, I could copy files back and forth without trouble.
Alas, I seem to have broken things somehow. I can see mork from nessus, but not the other way around. So far as mork is concerned, it's alone on the network.
Argh.
Update: The culprit appears to be Windows Live OneCare, which I installed on nessus a while ago. Its firewall was configured to allow file sharing only on the local subnet, but this doesn't work. You have to select 'Accept connections from anywhere' for file sharing to work properly. Silly 'softies, fix your code.
(The PC Magazine review says this was a known bug in the OneCare beta, but claims that it's been fixed in the final release. Silly writers, don't just copy & paste from the release notes, test software before reviewing it.)
Jennifer had a quilter thing this afternoon, so Jake, Sam & I went up to the Octave Chanute Aerospace Museum in Rantoul.
They're having real problems with the roof: it seemed like every room had huge water stains in the carpeting. It's a great museum, but maybe it's just not pulling in the revenue to finance repairs.
The outdoor planes are kept locked these days (due to vandalism & theft [Of parts, not of entire aircraft. Thanks for asking!]), so we didn't get to go inside the C-130.
Chanute AFB closed in September, 1993: just three months after Jennifer & I met. Coincidence?
Grandparents came down from Arlington Heights yesterday, for a visit with the grandchildren.
There was birthday cake (yesterday being close enough to Grandpa Bob's birthday for celebrating), and presents. Jake & Grandpa Bob played Battleship; I don't think Grandpa was quite familiar with Jake's rules for Battleship: it doesn't matter, really, where anybody shoots. After a while, everybody's ships will be sunk, regardless.
(Poor grandparents, had to drive through some bad weather coming and going. Here in Champaign we had clouds all day but no rain.)
I seem to have told iTunes to download album artwork for all of the albums in my music library (722, according to iTunes, though I wouldn't have guessed so many myself).
Oops.
The head of System Administration at Wolfram Research bears an uncanny resemblance to the fella in the Apple commercials who says, "Hi, I'm a PC."
On the other hand, many of the System Adminstration staff bear a certain resemblance to the other guy....
Took a vacation day today, mostly to help clean the house in preparation for tomorrow's visit by the grandparents, but also to attend our first parent-teacher conference with Jake's teacher.
Jake's doing pretty well in school, though he does have a little trouble paying attention. He's easily distracted, and a roomful of five-year-olds offers many distractions.
Still, he's been in school only two months. He'll figure out what's expected of him.
The Virgin Mobile account management web site tells me that in the last sixty days I've sent/received thirty-two text messages and made voice calls totaling twenty-nine minutes.
I added $20 to my account two months ago, and still have $14 left.
So when I see other carriers advertising their low! low! low! $40/month plans, I wonder just how stupid they think I am.
48° at 8:00am.
When Jake & I were waiting outside school for the bell to ring, a very unhappy-looking girl walked up. She was wearing jeans and a t-shirt, and was all huddled into herself. She looked like she'd been crying.
"Are you cold?" I asked.
"Mommy wouldn't let me wear my coat," she said.
I told her to go stand by the door, figuring it might be warmer there. Poor kid.
NOAA says the overnight low was 37°, and it wasn't much warmer when Jake & I waited outside Jake's school for the morning bell.
(Why, no, I wasn't wearing a coat. I might have to buy one before autumn progresses much further.)
I've noticed that morning drop-off traffic is thinning out a bit. More kids are taking the bus, I suppose.
It's National Talk Like a Pirate Day!
Avast there, ye scurvy dogs!
Jake is sleeping. Sam is in the tv room with Jennifer, having his pre-bedtime bottle of milk. (It's the only bottle of the day: for meals & snacks, Mr. Sam uses sippy cups. He's growing up.)
I did a little Quicken data entry, wrote a few checks - the water bill and the cable bill are the only ones left that have to be paid with pieces of paper sent through the mail; how twentieth-century of them - then read a few web pages. (Today's lotto numbers were very disappointing.)
I really should do something productive with my time: work on the Quicken conversion project, write some code, that sort of thing. But it's almost bedtime, and morning comes very early these days. (We're into the gloomy time of year when the alarm goes off before sunrise. I hate getting up when it's still dark outside.) A little reading is about all I have energy for.
I started The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-third Annual Collection (Gardner Dozois, ed.) yesterday, so there's hope I'll have it finished by the time the twenty-fourth annual collection is published (sometime next summer).
Sam's new nickname, bestowed upon him by Grandpa Norm.
I imagine Grandpa Norm meant for it to be spelled 'samurai'...sorry....
(Long ago, there was a store in Champaign called Caravans Awry, which joke I didn't get until some decades later when I first encountered the word caravanserai. Or maybe the store really was called Caravanserai, and I mis-heard their radio commercials. Alas, Google offers no clues either way.)
Joshua Allen said today:
I think it was Meister Eckert who once said "Only the hand that erases can write the true thing".
...which is the quote on today's page of the Little Zen Calendar here on my desk.
MSNBC says:
The pontiff said on Sunday he was "deeply sorry" Muslims had been offended by his use of a medieval quotation on Islam and holy war. But he stopped short of retracting a speech seen as portraying Islam as a religion tainted by violence.
...then goes on to list the churches that have been destroyed & the people who have been killed by the We are not violent fanatics, and we'll kill anyone who says we are! lunatic fringe of Islam.
The date & time display on my phone here at Wolfram Research World HQ says 3:10am, Sunday, February 6.
Apparently the morning's excitement - server-room power outages, etc. - isn't entirely over yet.
Overheard this morning:
Jake: You know that crocodile guy? He died.
Jake's friend: Yeah.
Jake: You know what killed him?
Jake's friend: What?
Jake: Poisonous fish!
This morning we rented a power rake from Home Depot (four hours, $40) and pushed it around the yard a bit.
The idea was to remove all the dead grass, so we can put down some seed & fertilizer and begin the rehabilitation of our grub-destroyed lawn. We had thought that the yard was recovering pretty well on its own, but apparently it wasn't: the power rake left behind huge patches of bare dirt. (Maybe I had the height setting wrong?)
The power rake was incredibly loud, but almost as easy to push as the self-propelled lawn mower: whenever I held down the "operator presence bar" - I suppose calling it a dead-man switch isn't politically correct any more - and spun up the whirling blades of death, it just about pulled itself along. All I really had to do was steer.
We raked up four yard-waste bags of dead grass, plus a few grubs. They're in the garage now, waiting for the free pickup next month.
(A cloudburst opened up less than ten minutes after we finished up & went inside. It lasted just long enough to wash off the sidewalks and dampen the soil. How convenient.)
This might be useful:
...the Wireless-G PrintServer for USB 2.0, from LinkSys. It has a USB port and a parallel port, so - in theory - could accommodate both of our printers.
The received net.wisdom is that LinkSys products work nicely with Windows, but Mac support is a bit spotty (i.e., nobody at LinkSys knows or cares much about making their products work with Macs).
On the other hand, it costs $90 (more or less), which is rather more than I can afford just now; and it's unclear whether ancient printers (e.g., our six-year-old Epson Stylus Photo 785EPX, or our fourteen-year-old LaserJet IIIp) can be made to work with it.
So maybe I shouldn't rush out and buy one. (Not that I could: nobody in town sells them. I'd have to order from CDW or Amazon.)
Update: There are too many negative reviews of this thing floating around the internet. I don't think I want one after all.
MSNBC says:
[Pope Benedict XVI] quoted from a book recounting a conversation between 14th-century Byzantine Christian Emperor Manuel Paleologos II and a Persian scholar on the truths of Christianity and Islam.
...and protests erupt across the Islamic world. So far, nobody's died in the riots, but it's only a matter of time.
This is cool:
If, for instance, I'm standing at the corner of State & Kirby, waiting for a bus, I can use my cell phone to send the code MTD3263 to 35890 and get back a text message listing all the buses that are coming and when they're expected to arrive.
I wish I'd known about this last Friday, when I stood on the corner like a goon for nearly half an hour because the 10E was running seriously behind schedule.
Too much Coke yesterday afternoon, too little sleep last night, too much sleepiness this morning.
Jake gets rest time in kindergarten (though I suspect it's as much for the teacher's benefit as the students'); alas, afternoon naps are not included in the Wolfram Research employee benefits package.
In today's mail: the $50 rebate for the copy of Office 2004 I bought last month. Which means I get to buy myself another birthday present. How nice.
(First SanDisk, now Microsoft. Rebate checks aren't taking nearly as long to arrive as they used to. Perhaps this means they're no longer a bait & switch scam, a way of advertising discounts without having to deliver them?)
Lately, the music library in my subconscious popped up In the Year 2525, by Zager & Evans (their one & only hit, way back in 1969).
As it turns out, it's available from iTunes, on the compilation Radio Hits of the 60s, only 99¢. So I bought it.
(I skipped the other twelve tracks. Some other time, perhaps.)
Update: These days, Mr. Zager makes guitars: http://www.zagerguitar.com/.
Thunderstorms rolling in from the northwest. Radar says the leading edge is just outside of town, but the view from my office window suggests otherwise.
My umbrella is, of course, safe & dry out in the car.
A fire engine, lights & siren going, just pulled into the IGA parking lot across the street.
And now an ambulance has arrived.
Nothing too serious, I hope....
Somebody's car - not mine! - has a serious problem with its fuel system: from the former Bagleman's at least as far as State Street, the right-hand lane of eastbound Kirby Avenue has been spritzed with gasoline, with large puddles every so often (whenever the stop & go traffic stopped going).
So Kirby Avenue is a big NO SMOKING zone until that's cleaned up.
There was a fire engine parked outside Wolfram Research World HQ when I arrived; apparently, somebody tripped a fire alarm. No sign of an actual fire, though, so we didn't have to stand around in the lobby for very long.
The competely withered & dead tomato plants somehow managed to produce two more mostly-ripe tomatoes yesterday, bringing the year's total up to one hundred thirty-two.
We're making a big batch of pasta sauce out of them.
I don't know if I want to grow tomatoes next year. Maybe something we can harvest & eat with a minimum of preparation, something that won't pile up in the kitchen while we figure out what to do with it all.
The cable people showed up just after 8:00am this morning to bury the cable that they installed last February. (In fact, they ripped out that cable, installed a new one, and buried that instead.)
The cable-burier is small, but loud. I imagine the neighbors weren't very happy with us. But at least the cable is out of sight, for the first time in seven months.
(A rather substantial tree root was severed during this project, and is now sticking straight up out of the ground near the back fence. I hope it didn't hurt the tree very much.)
Sam's been cruising along the furniture for a while now, but in the last few days he's been striking out across the room: he can take two, sometimes three unsupported steps to get from coffee table to sofa.
Soon he will realize that he doesn't need to lean on anything, and then we'll be chasing him around the house. Sam has even less regard for his own safety than Jacob had at twelve months, and is always finding new ways to risk his life.
Silly little guy.
Twelve more tomatoes this evening. The plants are almost completely dead: dry, brittle & brown. There are still a few tomatoes left, but the critters have been eating them.
Jake & I also picked twelve hot peppers, 8½ of which were red.
It's been a good year for gardening, but I think the growing season is just about over. Probably this weekend there will be a new yard-waste bag waiting for the free pickup (in October, I think).
Jacob lost his first tooth today, during dinner. It's already in an envelope under his pillow, waiting for the tooth fairy.
Its replacement is already visible; for the last few days, Jake's had two teeth growing in that position. Just like a shark.
Finished reading Building Harlequin's Moon, by Larry Niven (who, inexplicably, has no web site) and Brenda Cooper. A synopsis:
Interstellar colony ship John Glenn, fleeing an Earth & solar system overrun by rogue AIs and uncontrolled nanotechnology, suffers a catastophic ramscoop failure and has to make an emergency stop at Gliese 876. To resume their journey, they need 1200 tons of antimatter. To produce the antimatter, they need a planet-sized collider. So they spend 60,000 years terraforming a moon, then install a colony of slaves on it to build the collider for them. But the slaves don't like being slaves. Drama ensues.
I don't think Larry Niven wrote much of this book. Very little of it seems written in his style. My suspension of disbelief failed pretty early in the book. A shipful of clever people, armed with technology that gives them immortality and godlike powers, can't just build the [censored] collider themselves? They need a colony of undereducated, technology-deprived slaves to build it for them?
Vast quantities of Laffy Taffy were distributed to the crowds at yesterday's Labor Day parade; today, dentists across the county are receiving calls from patients who - to their dismay - have discovered that Laffy Taffy is stronger than the dental adhesives used to attach crowns.
This morning, one of the toilets - we have two, aren't you impressed? - began spraying water out from under the tank lid with every flush; for years we've been talking about replacing the innards of both toilets, and this was the final straw.
Jake & I went to Home Depot this afternoon, for a little toilet-hardware shopping. We bought the full kit from FluidMaster, a bargain at $20.
Removing the old hardware was difficult (not to mention messy), but installing the new hardware was pretty easy. It took me two hours, but I was being methodical. (Fear of shattered ceramics has that effect on me.) I don't suppose it will take nearly so long the second time.
No leaks yet.
(Yes, I took pictures. No, I'm not going to post any of them. This isn't ToiletCam.)
Alas for Steve Irwin, done in by a stingray while snorkeling near Cairns, Australia.
MSNBC says he was born February 22, 1962, so he was only eighteen months older than me. Sigh.
We got ourselves out of the house early this morning, to see the Labor Day parade over in Urbana. (Strange that there isn't one in Champaign....)
It started late, and there seemed to be more people marching in the parade than sitting at curbside watching it; but a pleasant time was had by all. Jake brought home a bucketful of candy.
I indulged in a bit of camera geekness during the parade: I pointed the camera up Washington Street and set it to take a picture every thirty seconds. Now I have one hundred and thirty-seven parade pictures.
Perhaps a few of them will be good ones.
Jake picked seventeen tomatoes yesterday morning, and I picked five more today: the year's total is now one hundred eighteen. This year's garden no longer qualifies as a failure.
We're going to make a big batch of pasta sauce & freeze it for use this winter.
(Something's been eating the tomatoes. I found three or four half-chewed ones in barrel #1 this morning. The leading suspect: squirrels.)
