November 2006 Archives

I'm working backwards through the daybook, fixing broken links. I finished 2006 and 2005 this evening (it didn't take very long, there weren't very many). Still to go: 2004 through 1999.

I think the old Movable Type setup on the Pair servers is now redundant. I'll probably remove it one of these days.

Sam was only four months old last year, so I don't think he really noticed Christmas.

This year is different. Sam really likes the Christmas tree (even in its half-lit state): he points at it and says, "Ooh!"

9:00pm, and it hasn't started snowing yet. The updated forecast calls for a quarter-inch of ice, followed by two to three inches of snow: not quite the winter storm we were all expecting.

I was convinced we'd all be staying home tomorrow, but now I'm not so sure.

MSNBC says, regarding plans for the Mars Reconnaisance Orbiter:

Upcoming targets are "all the easy-to-find hardware on Mars," McEwen noted in a press statement. That includes the Spirit rover - Opportunity's sister ship investigating the Columbia Hills - as well as the Viking 1 and Viking 2 landers that touched down in 1976, and the Mars Pathfinder that landed in July 1997.

I was hoping they'd try for pictures of the Vikings.

The Viking landers touched down on Mars fifteen days before my thirteenth birthday. I remember being very interested & excited, and building my own Viking landers out of Legos.

(I wonder what happened to all those Lego kits I had. Gone to garage sale heaven, probably, sometime around 1977.)

38° and raining, and it's all downhill from here: freezing rain this afternoon, followed by almost a foot of snow.

Jake might get his first snow day tomorrow.

(There are WRIfolk who live an hour's drive away: Bloomington, Kankakee, etc. What do they do on days like this? Stay home?)

The NOAA forecast for Champaign includes this rather unwelcome news:

RAIN WILL CHANGE TO FREEZING RAIN ON THURSDAY AFTERNOON. ICE ACCUMULATIONS GREAT THAN ONE QUARTER INCH ARE POSSIBLE BY LATE AFTERNOON AND EVENING...ESPECIALLY ON ELEVATED SURFACES...AS ARCTIC AIR CONTINUES TO FILTER SOUTHEAST. THIS PRECIPITATION WILL MIX WITH SLEET AND SNOW IN THE EVENING...AND CHANGE OVER TO ALL SNOW OVERNIGHT. HEAVY SNOW IS POSSIBLE OVERNIGHT...INTO MIDDAY FRIDAY...WITH ACCUMULATIONS OF 6 TO 12 INCHES POSSIBLE.

Maybe we'll all just stay home on Friday.

Our fancy pre-lit Christmas tree - only two years old - is broken: there's a slice right through the middle where none of the lights will come on. This sounds suspiciously like what happened two years ago, when our shiny new tree didn't work:

We thought we had mis-wired it during assembly, leaving one strand without power, but it turns out half the lights on that strand are lit. A bulb taken from the dark half and plugged into the lit half will light up; going the other way, a previously-lit bulb will go dark.

We returned that one. Its replacement worked nicely in 2004 and 2005, but is now showing exactly the same symptoms.

Argh.

Maybe we should just buy a real tree every year & throw it away in January.

MSNBC says:

MAHOPAC, N.Y. - A man broke into a barn on Thanksgiving morning, spray-painted three pet goats and scattered pages of pornographic magazines on the floor, apparently to harass the property owner, police said Tuesday.

Apparently the goats ate the porn, and it made them sick. Poor goats.

Current temperatures, according to NOAA:

Billings, Montana: -2°
Pierre, South Dakota: 8°
Des Moines, Iowa: 28°
Moline, Illinois: 45°
Peoria, Illinois: 61°
Bloomington, Illinois: 61°
Champaign, Illinois: 62°

That's a pretty steep gradient. The forecast for Champaign calls for daily highs to drop about 20° per day for the rest of the week.

After laboriously uploading a bunch of images to my TypePad account, and even more laboriously fixing up the links thereto in a few dozen daybook entries, it - somewhat tardily - occurs to me that I could have left the images where they were. It's the web, just link to them.

Oops.

Think first, then type.

Sam, playing in Grandma & Grandpa's back yard, Normal.

Available from iTunes: I Am Santa Claus, by Bob Rivers. Includes the classic Walkin' Round in Women's Underwear.

I've already spent too much on music this month. Just say NO to novelty records and impulse purchases!

Another problem with the old posts recently imported from Movable Type: they contain approximately 260 links to pages within http://patrick-rice.net/Daybook/ - that is, cross-references from one post to another - and they're all broken. When I moved everything last year from CityDesk to Movable Type, the URLs changed.

There will be much hand-editing before this is sorted out, I'm sure. Gack.

Sam's new favorite food: bread and butter. He saw me eating a slice of buttered bread at dinner last night, and fussed & clamored until I gave him some. He ended up eating about two-thirds of the slice.

He's also quite fond of pancakes and french toast, but he's starting to lose interest in the toddler food - the stuff in the little tubs - we've been buying for him. I guess he wants to eat the same food as big brother.

Another city crew - three fellas, a truck, a (small) crane and a backhoe - is currently replacing the fire hydrant on the southeast corner of State & Kirby.

It's a rather more involved process than I thought it would be: the new hydrant has six feet or so of pipe attached to it, so they had to dig down at least that far to install the thing (being careful not to sever any random utility pipes & conduit that might be passing through).

No pictures, though: the camera is at home. (I have the camera in my phone, but it takes crummy pictures.)

I just had my annual meeting with the HR benefits person, to set up insurance & whatnot for 2007. (You can't just say, "Next year, same as this year." You have to fill out the forms, every year. This is a huge waste of people's time, but there's no getting around it.)

"We'd like to increase the life insurance coverage, if we can," I said. "The wife is planning on bumping me off next year."

As it turns out, we're already maxed out on life insurance. Perhaps this means I won't be bumped off next year - or maybe now there's no reason to wait.

Yesterday, I moved all 3100 posts and 133 comments from the old Movable Type site to the shiny new TypePad site. It went fairly well, except there's a bit of a snag with images.

The TypePad file manager is nice for simple operations (create one directory, upload one file), but isn't so good at uploading a hundred files spread across six directories (which is what I needed to do). And there's no way to upload a zip file. It took a while (half an hour? an hour?) to upload everything, but it's not something I'll be doing every day, so I didn't mind too much.

TypePad doesn't like file names that contain spaces, so I had to rename a bunch of the more recent files.

That left only the problem of fixing all of the links to the images. Unfortunately, each & every one of them is a hard-coded reference to http://patrick-rice.net/Daybook/Images. I had to hand-edit some of the links anyway, to remove the spaces, but that left fifty or sixty (who counts?) entries still in need of fixing. Ten seconds with search & replace, and I'm done, thought I.

TypePad Basic doesn't have global search & replace. (Search, yes; replace, no.) As Charlie Brown would say, AUGH.

I have a choice: hand-edit all those links, or upgrade to TypePad Pro just long enough to do the replace, then drop back to Basic. Is it worth $10 to save myself a few hours of editing? Does anybody even care whether image links work in old posts?

If I'd been thinking ahead, I could have edited the links in the MovableType export file before uploading it to TypePad. Alas, I wasn't thinking ahead. I suppose I could also export the entire site, edit the links, then delete everything & re-upload. That would be faster than hand-editing all those posts, and cheaper than the one-month Pro upgrade - but would also run the risk of completely scrozzling the entire daybook.

Hm...what to do, what to do....

Sam is very grumpy this morning, prone to throwing noisy tantrums in response to any - to every - disappointment.

The current theory is that he's just tired.

I really shouldn't be awake at 2:52am, but I am.

Too much caffeine, too late in the day, I suppose. When will I learn?

I was supposed to order Christmas presents today, but I didn't. Oops.

Tomorrow, definitely.

There are compaints from the loyal readership that the new daybook design isn't as readable as it might be. The default font does look a little spindly & faint on Windows. (It looks much nicer on the Mac.)

Um. Sorry about that. I'll see if I can tweak the design a bit.

There I was, pecking away at nessus, somewhat laboriously adding all my rss feeds (twenty-five, at last count) to Google Reader, so I don't have to bother any more with keeping three different rss readers on three different computers synchronized, when - surprise! - Windows locked up.

The mouse wouldn't move, the keyboard didn't work. The only thing that worked was the F Lock key, and all it did was blink the F Lock light on the keyboard / mouse dongle. (Microsoft advertises it as a 'wireless' keyboard / mouse combo, but they're lying.)

I found something pointy - a fork, from the slice of pie I was eating (pumpkin pie, the last bit of Thanksgiving food in the house) - and poked nessus' reset button. The BIOS trundled a bit, Windows trundled a bit, and now everything's fine.

Did Windows really lock up? Or was it just the ham radio operator down the street causing interference with the wireless desktop? Perhaps I should have hit the change-channel button on the dongle instead. (I'll try to remember that, if it happens again.)

Poor Sam, picked up an ear infection yesterday.

He's on antibiotics, plus a few things to keep the fever down. (Just like Jake, Sam will spike a really scary fever if it's not controlled.) He should be fine in a few days.

I resisted temptation for all of thirty seconds, then purchased The Best of the Cowsills from iTunes.

The Rain, the Park and Other Things is one of those songs that I remember from way back. It's nice to have it in my music collection, finally.

(The other day, I almost bought I Had Too Much to Dream by the Electric Prunes, but I managed to resist that temptation.)

Poor Sam, he's running a fever (101.5° this afternoon).

Jennifer took him to the doctor this afternoon, then spent two hours in the waiting room. (May I make a suggestion? When patients are waiting two hours to see a doctor, there aren't enough doctors working. Call in a few more. Thank you.)

He was a little droopy & cranky earlier today, but he's perked right up this evening. We're hoping he'll be back to normal in a few days.

(We also wonder whether this illness has anything to do with the vaccinations he got last week. Probably not.)

...as requested yesterday by Grandpa Norm. (At least, I think it was Grandpa Norm. My memory isn't what it used to be.)

Lots of chattter lately about Parallels Desktop, which according to their web site is:

...the first solution that gives Apple users the ability to run Windows alongside Mac OS X in a secure, isolated virtual machine. Parallels Desktop works with Intel-powered Apple, including iMac, Mac Mini, MacBook and MacBook Pro.

Only $80, too.

It looks interesting, but there are two problems: first, Windows isn't included, so you have to spend another $100 or so for that; second, I don't really need Windows on the iMac.

It'll run Linux, too, but I have even less need for Linux.

I've been using Personal Vehicle Manager (from Two Peaks Software, recently acquired by Iambic) for a few years now, to keep track of fuel and maintenance expenses for Mr. Explorer. It works great, and certainly beats scribbling in a ratty old spiral notebook.

This morning, though, PVM decided to eat its database. I was entering a gas purchase ($29.53, ouch) when I noticed that the Vendor dropdown was empty. That's odd, thought I. Then it wouldn't let me save the purchase. I closed PVM, rebooted the X30, and tried again.

Database? What database? said PVM. [censored], said I.

Fortunately, PVM synchronizes with a desktop version of itself, so I had a backup database on nessus. All is well, no data lost. (Except for the exact odometer reading for yesterday's fillup at the BP on US40 in Effingham. So I approximated. Rule 1: Always make backups!)

Spent the day in Normal, visiting the grandparents and eating tasty food.

(Midafternoon we sneaked out to see Happy Feet, to give Sam and/or the grandparents a chance to take a nap.)

Drove down to Carmi today, for an afternoon in the courthouse.

I had the notion to look at the will record books. (Wills are usually packed with genealogically interesting data.) There are ten books, unimaginatively named Will Record A through J; I looked through the index pages for all ten.

Alas, it seems my ancestors weren't in the habit of writing wills. The few who did seldom went further than I leave everything to my wife.

Instead of lugging the huge books over to the photocopier (and paying 50¢ per page), I used my camera to take pictures of the more interesting pages: it has a copy mode, which is a high-contrast monochrome mode supposedly perfect for copying documents. It was an experiment, and I was a little nervous about it, half-expecting to come home with a bunch of unreadably blurry pictures. But it worked very nicely.

I'll have to remember that on future research trips.

I finished the will record books around 1:30pm, then - because it was such a beautiful day - paid a visit to Kuykendall Cemetery (just north of Carmi) and wandered around outside for a while. Supposedly, Jasper Sturm (my great-great-grandfather) is buried there, but after two attempts I still can't find the grave.

Kuykendall Cemetery is still active - I saw quite a few recent graves - so there has to be somebody keeping records. Perhaps one of the local funeral homes would know.

Finished - last night - reading The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-third Annual Collection, edited by Gardner Dozois. For the first time in quite a few years, I'm caught up: the twenty-fourth annual collection won't be published until next June (more or less).

I set myself a reading quota for this book, ten pages per day, but I didn't really stick to it. Some days I read a little more, some days I didn't read anything at all. Even so, it took me sixty-five days to read all 650 pages.

Now I need to find another book to read. I suppose I could give Niven & Pournelle's Burning Tower a second try. The first time, I just got tired of reading the phrase bull pizzles, which appears way too often in the first chapter, and of trying to figure out anagrams for all the characters' names. Maybe it deserves a second chance.

Jennifer took this picture last week, but I didn't upload it from the camera until today. (What a slacker!)

Sam is in his crib, loudly protesting that he isn't sleepy, no not at all!

But if Mama or Papa picks him up, he goes right to sleep. Silly little boy.

I've set up a TypePad account: new blather will appear at http://pzr.typepad.com/daybook/.

I also have a shiny new Flickr account: new pictures will be posted to http://www.flickr.com/photos/pzr/.

When I get around to it, old daybook entries (all 3100 of them) and old pictures (all 357 of them) will be moving to the new locations.

(PZR was my user id when I worked at Washington National, way back in 1991. It amuses me greatly that I'm still using it, long after Washington National and its wretched, primitive TOPS system vanished from the earth.)

The Internet Explorer file dowload dialog offers three choices once the download is complete: open the file, open the folder containing the file, and just close the dialog.

Choosing option #2 in previous versions of IE triggered a rather annoying misfeature, if the folder in question was the desktop: even though the desktop really is just another folder on the disk, and even though Explorer has no trouble at all displaying it in a window, Internet Explorer used to pop up a rude little message box: It's on the desktop, you idiot.

No, it didn't really say that, not in so many words. But it certainly left that impression.

Internet Explorer 7 just pops up an Exporer window. No complaints, no insults. Well done, 'softies.

Sam is supposed to be taking his afternoon nap, but from the monitor I can hear chattering, singing & bouncing.

This happened yesterday, too. The culprit then turned out to be a stinky diaper: once changed, Sam fell right to sleep. Perhaps today's naptime rowdiness has a similar cause.

I'm on vacation this week: not going anywhere, just staying home to annoy Jennifer & the kids. But this week of idleness will be balanced by quite a bit of travel over the remainder of the year, I'm sure.

(Who had the bright idea of scheduling Thanksgiving and Christmas so close together? And in the winter?)

Supposedly, Flickr plays nicely with TypePad: I can upload pictures to Flickr, then blather about them on the daybook.

After a brief credit-card snafu - I mistyped the 'security code', tried again, triggered some kind of repeated-transaction security lockout and had to wait an hour for a third (successful) try - I now have a 30-day trial account on TypePad.

First impression: much snappier, more responsive than Movable Type running on Pair's servers. And the TypePad post editor works on Safari, which is a big win. (MT's post editor works, but only just. Half the edit controls are missing.)

It still worries me a bit, the idea of having all my blather locked up on TypePad's servers instead of someplace more accessible. And there's the risk of Six Apart pulling the plug on TypePad someday, and disappearing all my blather before I can retrieve it. (Rule One: Always make backups!) It's happened with other online services over the years (though I've never lost any data myself).

Sam started acting sleepy this morning, around 10:30, so Jennifer put him in the crib. He chattered & sang to himself for an hour until we went in to get him.

After lunch, Sam was acting sleepy again: yawning, rubbing his eyes, etc. So I put him in the crib. He chattered & sang to himself for an hour, until I went in to get him.

Maybe this means he'll go to sleep a little early tonight.

Snow showers this morning: big, fluffy snowflakes that melted as soon as they touched the ground. Still, it counts as the first snowfall of the season.

I couldn't resist checking today's football results: the local team lost again, this time to Northwestern, 27-16.

(I seem to recall that when I was in school, twenty-five years ago, Northwestern was in the middle of a record-setting, multi-season losing streak. People called them the mildcats. I gather they've improved since then.)

I have the same reaction to football as I do to auto racing: neither is terribly interesting, unless something disastrous happens. Without the occasional flaming cartwheel of death, auto racing is just a bunch of people driving in circles, really fast. Without a 1-6 record for the season, college football is just goatless buzkashi.

Grandparents came down from Arlington Heights today, to visit the grandchildren. I hope they didn't take any germs home with them.

I didn't take any pictures. I'm such a slacker.

Jacob & Sam have colds. It's hard to say who caught it first, but there's been a lot of nose-wiping here over the last few days.

Sam really likes grape-flavored Dimetapp.

Sam's finally asleep in his crib. (Jake's been asleep in his bed for some time now.) I thought he was ready at 9:00pm to go to sleep, but when I put him in the crib, he sat up and cried. Usually when he does this it's just a token protest: two minutes of WAHHHH then he's out like a light; alas, tonight he was serious. So I fished him out and sat down with him at the computer.

I made him listen to an entire Enya album (The Memory of Trees, for those playing along at home) while I read about Wordpress, Typepad and Blogger, various alternatives to Movable Type. It worked; he's sleeping now.

Today I created an account for myself on Flickr, and uploaded a picture (a rather arty shot of a ladybug on a stone wall).

Supposedly, Flickr can talk to Movable Type, so I can - in theory - upload pictures to Flickr, then create new posts here that link back to them. In practice, it doesn't work very well: Flickr generates nasty HTML, and ended up creating a duplicate post.

I think I'm going to seriously look at alternatives to the current absurd mash-up of software behind the curtain here at http://patrick-rice.net/. The older pages are managed from CityDesk, the daybook is Movable Type, the picture pages are Gallery 1.5 - and I can't stand any of them.

There's something Wil Wheaton said a while back that sticks in my mind. He tried to upgrade his Movable Type setup, scrozzled his database, and had to set up a TypePad account just to keep some kind of online presence while sorting out the mess; but when - after Herculean labors - Movable Type's head was once again screwed on pointing forwards, he discovered:

I really like how easy TypePad has made everything for me; it's allowed me to put my energy into creating content that hopefully doesn't suck, rather than mashing away at annoying code that never seems to validate, anyway.

That's what I want: easy. I don't want to fight with software, I don't want to maintain databases. I just want to write. (Not that I consider myself a good writer. I'm not. But I'll never get any better wasting my time patching Movable Type.)

Across the nation, gamers are lining up to buy the PlayStation 3. I'm not one of them.

I didn't buy an XBox 360, either.

If I had infinite leisure time (and infinite disposable income), I might be more interested in such things.

Ever since I abandoned CityDesk, I've been using Gallery to manage the (hundreds of) pictures on the web site.

I don't like Gallery. It's clunky, it's ugly and it's slow. I've been wondering whether I should use Flickr instead.

Flickr just seems spiffier than Gallery. It's certainly more convenient: there's an iPhoto plug-in, FlickrExport, that would let me upload my pictures directly from iPhoto. Currently, I have to export the pictures from iPhoto, launch the web browser, fool around with Gallery's upload widget (written - horrors! - in Java), and then manually fix the file timestamps after the upload completes. Very tedious.

A paid Flickr account - the only kind worth having - is only $24/year. Hm....

A city crew - two fellas and a truck - visited State & Kirby this morning, to repair the damage from yesterday's truck vs. pole incident.

The signals are once again aimed properly, but the pedestrian signals are still missing their shades. The fire hydrant remains on its side, like a downed tree. (Perhaps a different crew is required to fix that: union rules, etc.)

In today's mail: a check from Mr. Dentist, for $50.

Not a bill, a check. Apparently our insurance - affectionately known as the Nothing-Is-Covered Plan - paid more than Mr. Dentist expected for last month's dental adventures (checkup for me, a full set of x-rays, and a filling in #15).

I'm sure it's a mistake, and the insurance company will be asking for their money back any day now. (This is the company that, were Mr. Dentist to charge $1 for a checkup, would reject 20¢ of it with their standard exceeds usual & customary ploy.) In the meantime, I suppose I'll put it in the bank and pick up a little interest.

This is the first time in my (almost) six years as his patient that I've seen Mr. Dentist's handwriting: it's small, and a bit scribbly. Much neater than mine, though.

The southeast corner of the intersection of State & Kirby - that is, just up the road from Wolfram Research World HQ - looks a little different than it used to.

The traffic signal is still attached to its pole, but now faces northeast, toward the new hotel (which is nearly finished), instead of north, toward traffic on State Street. The pedestrian signals likewise are facing in a most unhelpful direction for anyone attempting to cross Kirby Avenue. The shades from the pedestrian signals were last seen blowing across the empty parking lot of the (recently demolished) strip mall. The fire hydrant on the corner no longer stands upright, but leans toward the mangled traffic signal.

And there's a fresh set of double tire tracks through the grass, back of the sidewalk: looks like a semi cut the corner a little too closely.

(Too bad the camera was at home, or I'd have taken a few pictures.)

Ugly weather today: cold (41°) and drizzly, with a wicked north wind.

Very tired this morning: didn't sleep so well last night, for some reason.

In yesterday's mail: a letter from Verizon Wireless. They miss me, and want me - or, more accurately, my money - to come back.

Your current contract is about to expire, the letter began, which made me laugh. We don't have a contract, two-year or otherwise.

After throwing away the letter, I had the notion to see just how much we've spent on our Virgin Mobile phones over the last two years. Approximately $380, as it turns out - of which approximately $210 went to buy the phones (three, including the camera phone).

So, $380 spread over two years = $16 per month, more or less, or $8 per phone per month. When Verizon Wireless can match that, I'll consider switching.

Tonight was the genealogy society's monthly meeting; I invited Jake to come with me, just so he could see were Papa goes on the second Tuesday of the month.

I didn't tell him, but the scheduled speaker was a fella from the Urbana Fire & Rescue Department. The society web page didn't say what Mr. Firefighter would be talking about, but I thought Jake might enjoy it regardless.

Alas, the firefighters were called away to Springfield (some kind of Homeland Security business). The backup topic was Everybody's Favorite Genealogy Web Sites, aka Stuff a Five-Year-Old Would Find Really Boring. Jake and I sat at the back for half an hour or so, whispering to each other, then bugged out for the children's department (conveniently located just down the hall).

Poor Jake, didn't get his firefighters. But I think he got a kick out of doing grownup stuff with Papa.

Dear Cow-orkers:

Please read all of your new email before responding to any of it.

Otherwise, you'll look like a dork when you ask a question whose answer has been sitting in your inbox for the last twelve hours.

Thank you.

Twenty years ago, Roger Waters produced a movie, When the Wind Blows, and wrote half an album's worth of music for it. The CD was released only in France, and promptly went out of print. For twenty years, I despaired of ever finding a copy.

It's available from Amazon.com:

I put it on my wish list. Christmas is coming....

Jennifer & I had a date this afternoon: we left Jake & Sam at home (with a babysitter - thanks for asking!) and went to see A Good Year at the Savoy 16.

It's a nice little movie, with lots of beautiful French scenery. (And more than a few lingering close-ups of female anatomy in various states of undress, which seemed a little out of place in a chick flick light romantic comedy.)

I spent much of the movie trying to identify the actor who played Uncle Henry. Turns out it was Albert Finney, familiar from other movies I've seen: Big Fish, Erin Brockovich and Breakast of Champions.

The plot got a little tricky to follow toward the end. I had the feeling that half an hour or so of story was cut at the last minute.

Rather warm today for mid-November: NOAA says 66° at noon. Lots of sunshine, too, which is nice.

Alas, there's a cold front coming: Saturday's forecast calls for highs only in the 40s.

They're going to have to replace all those county signs that say Kendall County, Home of Congressman J. Dennis Hastert, Speaker of the House because, come January, he won't be Speaker any more.

Final results aren't in yet from Montana and Virginia, but it's starting to look like voters have given the House and Senate to the Democrats, along with a majority of state governorships.

I'm not surprised. More and more people are questioning the war in Iraq: Did we have good reasons for invading Iraq? Now that we're in Iraq, are we accomplishing anything? The official Bush & Cheney response to anyone asking these questions has always been, "You must be an idiot. Or a traitor. Or both." I found their attitude rather offensive; apparently, so did quite a few other people around the nation.

It will be interesting to see how the remainder of the Bush administration plays out.

The Carmi Times reports that another Carmi restaurant has gone up in flames:

Lins China Buffet at 1706 W. Main St., Carmi, was totally destroyed by fire late Monday night. Carmi Fire Chief Ray Yates said his department received the call between 10:30 and 11 p.m. Monday.

Last year - or was it 2004? - the Two Tonys smorgasbord burned to the ground. Soon the only fine dining available to the good people of Carmi will be the salad bar at Wal-Mart.

Incredibly foggy this morning, visibility under a hundred yards in some places.

It's burning off as the sun gets higher in the sky. I imagine it will be gone by lunchtime.

Dear Mr. President:

S P A N K

Sincerely,
The Voters

Surprisingly warm today - 51° just now - but also rather damp & foggy.

A recurring topic of conversation between Jacob & Papa is the mysterious creature known as the six-legged cabbage monster. For months, I've tried to persuade Jake that there really is such a thing, but so far he isn't buying it.

"Why do you believe in things that aren't real?" he says.

People do that all the time, Jake. All the time.

This morning I asked him, "What is the mortal enemy of the six-legged cabbage monster?"

He thought for a moment, then said, "The six-legged hot dog monster!"

Now, that's a movie I'd pay to see: The Six-Legged Cabbage Monster Meets the Six-Legged Hot Dog Monster, with stop-motion animation effects by Ray Harryhausen.

This evening, Jake drew some pictures for us: the six-legged cabbage monster, the six-legged hot dog monster and the six-legged sun monster. (I guess all monsters have six legs.) They're hanging on the pantry door in the kitchen.

Amazon.com has the Linksys WPS54GU2 Wireless-G Print Server in stock: two refurbished units, only $150 (each).

Last month, they were selling new ones for $90 each.

Jennifer has returned from her weekend quilter retreat (at a posh bed & breakfast somewhere near Paris - the one in Illinois, sheesh).

She has a cold, too. Poor Jennifer.

She says it's my turn, now: I should plan a weekend retreat of my own.

It would be nice to spend a day or two at the courthouse down in Carmi, or maybe work on finishing up the Illinois Counties project. (Only twenty counties to go, but they're all on the far side of the Illinois River - a bit of a drive from Champaign.) And I do have quite a pile of vacation time to use by year's end.

I'll have to give the matter some thought.

Remember, kids: Guy Fawkes Day is just fireworks. Actually attempting to blow up a national legislative body is beyond the scope of the holiday. (It's probably illegal, too.)

In Iraq, Saddam Hussein has been convicted of crimes against humanity and sentenced to death. Newsdroids are all a-twitter.

In the U.S., we're two days away from midterm elections in which the Republicans just might lose control of Congress, because the voters think the U.S. is losing the war in Iraq.

Took a vacation day today, to stay home with der kinder while Jennifer has a quilter thing.

Sam's just a little thrown by my unexpected presence. Poor little guy.

He's starting to talk, too: he can say hi and bye.

Bought a USB 2.0 hub (a cute little plastic thingy from Belkin) the other day, and installed it on the iMac this evening. It has a port on the top, which is very convenient for plugging in the flash drive, and is fast enough that uploading pictures from the digital camera is once again a pleasant experience. (The nasty old USB 1.1 hub I borrowed from nessus wasn't very happy transferring multi-megabyte video files: lots of timeouts and/or mysterious errors.)

Now I just need to plug in the scanner & printer, and get them online again. (And then I'll be out of USB ports. Maybe I should have bought a seven-port hub. Oops.)

The electronic filing system on the U.S. District Court web site tells me that I have downloaded 119 pages of information about [censored], the defendant in the trial for which I was almost a juror.

That's $9.52 in pretend money - but if I download six more pages, my balance will hit $10: at which point they'll actually charge me.

I think my account resets to $0 at the end of the year. Mr. [censored]'s sentencing hearing isn't until January, so maybe I should just get my nose out of his business for a while.

Mr. [censored] has already filed a Motion for Retrial, and his lawyers have filed a Motion to Continue (they want to postpone the sentencing hearing). The verdict was reached two weeks ago, but the case - like that annoying pink rabbit that used to be all over the television - just keeps going.

I wonder if Mr. [censored] will stay behind bars while the wheels of justice grind slowly on.

Mail from H&R Block today, begging me to order TaxCut 2006 now, instead of waiting until January - i.e., until the forms I need to prepare our returns actually arrive.

Silly H&R Block. They have a conflict of interest here: they make their real money from their consulting business. If their software is too good, nobody will want to pay the big bucks to talk to a human being.

(But if their software isn't good enough, people will just switch to TurboTax. So their business model is in trouble either way.)

Somewhere, Roger Waters feels a sharp pain:

Not since the Austin Lounge Lizards did a bluegrass cover of Brain Damage have I heard a Pink Floyd song so...mutated....

The Trade Center building - home of Wolfram Research World HQ - is looking a little different these days.

The west entrance has metal benches, some landscaping and a few ashtrays (too bad everybody smokes in the stairwells). The lobby has new furniture (cheap, ugly), new tile (less slippery than before) and a new paint job (aka [censored] brown). The first-floor building directory, previously a sheet of black paper behind a clear plastic cover (held to the wall with screws at the corners), is now much fancier: it's an actual three-dimensional metal box, with replaceable metal strips inside for the tenants. So when a tenant moves in (which is rare) or out (which is rather more common), only their particular strip need be replaced.

The realtor on the first floor needs a new strip, since the current one says "Purdential".

(The rumor is that all this renovation & remodeling was done to entice Wolfram Research to renew their lease. I have no idea whether that's true, but it's an interesting rumor.)