December 2006 Archives

Jake is much better today: no fever, much perkier than he's been, almost back to normal.

I'm not blowing my nose quite so mich any more. Instead, I'm coughing, nasty dry hacking coughs that are making my throat very unhappy. Pity me, pity me.

We went to the 12:20 showing of Charlotte's Web this afternoon, at the Savoy 16.

Sam got a little squirmy & bored halfway through, so he and I went out into the lobby until the movie was over. I guess we'll have to rent the DVD when it's released.

(I checked my watch: the 12:20 show actually started at 12:38. Yes, they ran eighteen minutes of commercials and previews before getting around to the movie.)

H&R Block says:

The order number ... that was attempted is incomplete and does not have any items to cancel. Your credit card will not be charged for this attempted order and no items will be delivered.

H&R Block values you as a TaxCut customer and we apologize for any inconvenience you may have experienced using our H&R Block TaxCut products or services. We look forward to working with you in the future. If you have further questions or concerns, please reply to this e-mail.

My concern is that the only alternative to TaxCut is TurboTax, which is from Intuit. The Mac team at Intuit is a bunch of chimps, so maybe I'll go back to Best Buy when it's less crowded & buy the Windows version of TaxCut. That one works pretty well.

Jake & I tried to buy TaxCut 2007 at Best Buy yesterday; but there was a huge line (and only three cashiers), so we abandoned that notion. (Memo to merchants: if there's a line, open more registers. Thank you.)

Never mind, thought I. I'll buy it from the web site.

So I went to the TaxCut web site just now, and tried to buy the download version of TaxCut 2007. The Free! Free! Free! Deduction Pro was automatically added to the invoice, and could not be removed.

They can force me to download their shovelware, I grumbled, but they can't make me install the stupid thing.

So: click-click-click, enter name, address, credit-card number, etc., etc., blah blah blah, clear the Yes! Send me spam! check box, click Submit Order, and...nothing. I got a page with a header, a footer and a gaping void in between. No confirmation email, no download. Nothing.

Memo to H&R Block: if your web store sells Mac software, chances are people will be buying it from a Macintosh. You might want to make sure your web store app actually works on the Mac's web browser. Thank you.

Norm, Barb, Amy, Scott, Natalie & Ryan all came over from Normal for one more round of Christmas.

Presents were unwrapped, there was chaos. The cheese dip (one cup each of Velveeta, sour cream and salsa, dump in crock pot, heat) was a big hit.

Poor Sam wore himself out, and had to take a nap halfway through the festivities.

And now Christmas is over, except for de-lighting the tree and packing everything up for next year.

The Iraqis have executed Saddam Hussein.

I'm thinking of Nicolae Ceauşescu:

On Christmas Day, [Nicolae and Elena Ceauşescu] were condemned to death by a military kangaroo court on charges ranging from illegal gathering of wealth to genocide, and were executed in Târgovişte. Before they were shot dead, Ceauşescu sang part of the "Internationale" and proclaimed that history would judge him well. His wife was screaming at everyone to go to hell.

The Ceauşescus were executed by an officer named Ionel Boeru who shot them with his sub-machine-gun. [Wikipedia]

(I suppose some people might be thinking of Mussolini, but that was before my time. And considerably nastier than what happened to either Hussein or Ceauşescu.)

I have to wonder: What do the Iraqis think they've accomplished? Has justice been served? Will this end the civil war? Will it help the U.S. forces? Or will it just make things worse?

I'm sure I don't know. But I do wonder.

Sitting at the kitchen table, pecking away on the laptop, which is running on battery power. Everybody else is still sleeping. Then, four things happen simultaneously:

1. I hit the Save button on my daybook post (the previous one, 'Unhanged');
2. Jake walks out from his bedroom and says, "Good morning, Papa."
3. I hear Sam on the baby monitor, waking up.
4. The laptop beeps & goes into hibernation, even though the battery meter says 30%.

I guess the battery meter got confused.

The Iraqi government - to the extent that Iraq has a government, given that most of the country is apparently busy trying to kill each other and/or any Americans they can find - has demanded that the U.S. hand over Saddam Hussein, so they can hang him.

Saddam is said to be happy at the thought of being killed by his enemies: instead of spending a few decades behind bars, irrelevant and forgotten, he'll be a martyr.

Foolish man. He won't be a martyr, he'll just be irrelevant, forgotten and dead.

Sometimes the blather here reads like a third-grade book report:

We went to Pizza Hut. We ate pizza. The waitress was grumpy. We didn't leave a tip.

I'll have to work on that....

It was Jake's turn to decide where to go for lunch, and he picked Pizza Hut (mainly because he had a coupon for a free pizza). We went to the one on Mattis (the new one, built after its predecessor burned to the ground). It was...interesting.

The parking lot was nearly full, the restaurant was rather crowded, and the staff seemed either overwhelmed or just indifferent. Our waitress in particular seemed rather grumpy. She never did bring silverware or napkins; a woman from the next table, who knew where they were kept, brought us some. (Thanks.)

Mysteriously, the waitress left us two checks. We only paid one, and declined to leave a tip. Somehow I don't think we'll be going there again any time soon.

Another quiet day at home, as we all try to get out from under our various illnesses. Sam is pretty much back to normal; Jake still has a bit of a fever now & then; I have a bit of a sore throat, and probably a bit of a temperature too (though I'm too lazy to actually check).

Jennifer remains uninfected. Lucky Jennifer.

("On vacation" means that I only spend an hour or two per day working. You might think this would get me some points with the cow-orkers; you'd be wrong.)

Tried to cook a roast for dinner, but - alas - there were problems.

It seems that a 2.72-pound roast cooked at 350° for 40 minutes/pound (that is, 1 hour 48 minutes) comes out rather overdone (internal temperature 194° vs. 170° for well-done).

After one bite, Jake said it was too tough and refused to eat any more of it. Jennifer ate some, then said that she just doesn't like big chunks of meat. Sam liked the potatoes & carrots, though.

I remember trying the same recipe, long ago (1988?), and getting the same results. I guess I'll try again in 2014 or so.

Everyone says Ruby on Rails is the best way to write database-backed web applications, so I thought I'd check it out.

The Apple developer site has a nice article, Using Ruby on Rails for Web Development on Mac OS X, which looks very helpful.

Apple says I should install Locomotive, which is supposedly a self-contained Ruby + Rails + this-that-and-the-other package: everything you need, except for MySQL (which I've already got).

Perhaps I will install it on mork, one of these days.

Finished reading Dancing Barefoot, by Wil Wheaton. It's a small book - only 115 pages, including the colophon, and set in fairly large type - so it's a fast read. I read it in an afternoon (with numerous interruptions for more important things).

I'm a bit puzzled by the Author's Note that says the stores in Dancing Barefoot were intended for Just a Geek, but didn't fit. Wasn't Dancing Barefoot published first?

(I'm not a geek. I'm too antisocial.)

One of my new year's resolutions is to finish the Illinois Counties project, which has been stalled at 82 (out of 102) since last May.

Toward that end, I have mapped out a day trip to the western part of the state: McDonough, Hancock, Warren, Henderson, Mercer, Knox, Henry, Bureau and Stark counties. If Streets & Trips 2005 is to be trusted, I can finish the loop in ten hours.

Nine counties in ten hours. Egad.

Exactly when the stars might align to permit this journey cannot be predicted, but I hope to manage it soon. All I need is good weather, good health (Jake's, Sam's, Jennifer's and my own), a day off from work, and no other obligations.

Santa did visit our house, and he left some pretty spiffy toys for Jake (a sleeping bag, a remote-control T. Rex, some Legos) and Sam (a turtle doll, some blocks, probably a few other things I've forgotten).

Jennifer got an iPod Shuffle, so she's been feeding CDs into nessus ever since, bulking up her music library. (I don't think she's bought any Mungo Jerry or Flaming Groovies songs yet.)

And me? I continue to be embarrassed by the sheer quantity of presents I have received this year. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

We were supposed to go to Normal yesterday, for part three of Christmas 2006, but - alas - Jake was sick: nasty cough, fever, etc., etc. We stayed home, so as not to infect the relatives, but I'm told that some of them got sick anyway.

Germs will out, I suppose.

Continuing my random walk through the Contemporaries & Influencers links in the iTunes music store, I landed this morning on The Flaming Groovies:

One of America's greatest, most influential, and legendary cult bands, the Flamin' Groovies came out of the San Francisco area in 1965 playing greasy, bluesy, rock & roll dashed with a liberal sprinkling of British Invasion panache....

iTunes has one greatest-hits collection available, containing 16 songs I've never heard of. I'm a big fan of impulse purchases, but I think I'll skip this one.

iTunes tells me that Mungo Jerry is still touring, thirty-six years after their big hit In the Summertime.

They have a web site, too: http://www.mungojerry.com/.

Thought I'd work a bit on the long-dormant Money 2005 + Quicken 2006 (Windows) + Quicken 2007 (Mac) data merge project; ran into an annoying problem: Quicken 2007 believes that a 401(k) account that Jennifer closed four years ago still has -49.8953 shares in it.

Curiously, this only appears in the Portfolio view. The register shows a balance of $0 and a market value of $0. If I add 49.8953 shares to the account, the Portfolio is correct, but the register is wrong.

Paraphrasing Geddy Lee, "[censored]. Stupid Quicken."

(Geddy Lee used to have a web site, but now I can't find it. geddylee.com is a domain squatter; geddylee.org is a fan; geddylee.net doesn't exist. Maybe now that Rush is - more or less - a going concern again, he dropped the solo site?)

Among my many Christmas presents this year - I think I won the prize for most presents - was a Linksys Wireless PrintServer, obtained by the indefatigable Grandpa Bob after all my efforts had ended in failure. (I guess I don't check the right web sites, or something.)

I plugged in the various wires & cables, installed the software on nessus and - presto! - we have both printers online again, for the first time in nearly a year. How nice.

At least, they're both online as far as nessus is concerned. I still need to teach the iMac about the new print server. (The received net wisdom is that this will be difficult. But the net's been wrong before.)

One quibble: I know how to change the name of the print server, but the printers themselves seem stuck with the unhelpful names P1 and P2. I'd rather call them inkjet and laserjet, or something like that. Alas, if the printer-renaming option exists I have yet to find it.

Happened to be reading flow|state this evening - for a site devoted to UI design, it sure is hard to read: tiny white text on a black background, feh - and encountered this observation:

Recent experience has convinced me that installing fonts on Windows is a fragile and buggy proposition. Even with the substantial assistance of a widely-used setup framework, it's absurdly difficult to ensure that the fonts you want get registered in such a way that they can be used immediately (without requiring a reboot) under all conditions.

Just so. Installing fonts on Windows is hard, and has been for at least ten years (which is how long I've been dealing with font installation at dear old WRI).

Try convincing the cow-orkers of that, though....

Grandparents came down from Arlington Heights yesterday, to visit the grandchildren (and, I suppose, the grandchildren's parents). They spent the night in a hotel, then came back today for more visiting.

They brought presents, too. I'm surprised they didn't have to rent a trailer, they brought so many presents. (Some were even for me. Thank you, thank you, thank you.)

We opened some presents today. There will be more tomorrow morning, from Santa. And still more tomorrow afternoon, at the other grandparents' house in Normal.

Funny how Christmas has gotten so big that it takes several days to contain it. It wasn't like that when I was a kid. (Now that I think of it, I don't remember ever seeing a Christmas tree at my grandmother's trailer. I guess she didn't do trees.)

Last summer, with gas prices over $3/gallon, the garbage collection people said, "Fuel for our trucks has become so expensive that we must add a Fuel Recovery Fee to your bill or we'll go bankrupt."

Now, with gas prices hovering around $2.20/gallon, the Fuel Recovery Fee has mutated into a Fuel/Environmental Recovery Fee and is three times larger than it was six months ago.

I'm cynical enough to see this as just another ploy to raise their rates without having to admit to raising their rates - but they also raised their base rate by 20%.

I surely do wish I could go to the boss and say, "Expenses are up this year, so I'm going to raise my salary 20%." Alas, I don't think that would have the desired effect.

Jake's in a snit because we won't let him open any of his Christmas presents yet.

"It's not Christmas yet," we tell him.

On the other hand, I think we'll be opening some presents on Sunday, when the grandparents are here. I suppose Jake will find that out soon enough, so there's no need to tell him now.

Here's how to play sock rodeo:

1. Put a pair of socks on Sam's feet.
2. If you can keep them there for eight seconds, you win!

Partial credit if you keep one sock on for eight seconds....

Jake and Sam, dinnertime: the 400th picture uploaded to Flickr.

Flickr tells me that the Jacob photo set contains 207 pictures, while the Samuel photo set contains a mere 34.

Jake is four times as old as Sam (2,089 days vs. 491), but even in terms of days between pictures Jake comes out ahead: Jake averages a new picture every ten days, while Sam has to wait fourteen.

Poor little guy.

I really like iPhoto, especially now that I've figured out how useful folders and albums are. However:

• I wish there were a way to search for images by their dimensions, e.g., return all 96x128 images. I have lots of thumbnails in my photo library; I don't need them any more, and would very much like to delete them. But I'm too lazy to hunt them down myself.
• There doesn't seem to be a way to have Automator check whether iPhoto is running. I want to write an automatic backup script that copies the entire iPhoto library to the external disk, but backing up the iPhoto library while iPhoto is running sounds like the express route to data corruption and unhappiness.

Maybe I just need to read the manual a bit more.

Taken last September, during a Jake and Papa photography adventure to Cardinal Road, north of town.

It occurs to me that since I got back from the doctor on Monday, I haven't been farther from the house than Jake's bus stop, down at the end of the block.

I haven't even gone outside, except to walk Jake to the bus and to bring in the mail and/or newspaper.

I've been poking around in the iPhoto library, looking for pictures I want to upload to Flickr.

I like Flickr. It's infinitely more convenient than coding up my own photo album pages with CityDesk, and much faster & spiffier than using Gallery.

One downside: the TypePad sidebar thingy shows the three most recently uploaded pictures, which means if I upload a bunch of cemetery pictures to the Genealogy photo set, then that's what shows up in the sidebar: probably not what the grandmas want to see.

Sorry, grandmas.

The fierce and potent medications prescribed by Mr. Doctor yesterday are working nicely. I can stand up & walk around without cussing (which is a good thing when there are kids in the house).

I have a thirty-day supply of pills, which seems excessive. A two-week supply would have been generous, and I imagine I won't actually use more than a week's worth.

I've moved my blather from Movable Type to TypePad, and moved my pictures from Gallery to Flickr, but there's still work to be done: there are pictures lurking in the old daybook directory that really belong in Flickr.

I've been getting them organized in iPhoto, and will upload them to Flickr one of these days. Then I can fix the links thereto in the daybook, and remove the old files.

The Pair online account-management thingy tells me that I've lopped 71MB off my web site in the last few weeks. It's down to 41MB now, not counting TypePad or Flickr.

I've been feeling a bit creaky these last few days, so this morning I trundled off to see the doctor.

The last time I did this - just about two years ago, I believe - Mr. Doctor said, "You strained your back. Two Aleve, three times a day. Now get out of here and stop wasting my time."

Well, no, he didn't actually say that last sentence. But his tone & demeanor definitely gave that impression. He's no longer with the clinic, and I rather doubt that he's missed. He was quite a sourpuss.

(A bit of Googling turned up a press release mentioning Dr. Sourpuss: he has a new job that, so far as I can tell, doesn't involve any contact with patients. That's good news for the patients.)

Today's doctor wasn't my usual, but it was a fella I've seen several times before (most notably during the pneumonia incident of 2003). After a brief exam & chat, he prescribed the usual happy pills (non-steroidal anti-inflammatories and some kind of muscle relaxant) and sent me down for some x-rays. (He did that with the pneumonia, too. I think he just likes to have me irradiated on a regular basis.)

The clinic was amazingly crowded, so I was there nearly three hours. And through it all, I was thinking, This is so unnecessary. My back feels much better already. But I suppose I'll take my medicine, until I feel 100% again (or as close to 100% as I ever get).

Did I mention that I think I'm catching a cold? Just in time for Christmas, yay.

It's the annual year-end vacation, to use up vacation time that can't be carried into the new year. (Which is a silly policy, since it means that everybody's gone in December and productivity plummets. Somehow, this always comes as a surprise to management....)

Plans? None. But if the good weather holds, and there's nothing else going on, it might be fun to nip over to Rockville for a little genealogical research. It would be nice to confirm that the Orval Akers buried in Dailey Chapel Cemetery really is my grandfather.

Or maybe I'll just stay home for three weeks and annoy Jennifer.

Gallery 1.5 is large, slow and generates ugly web pages. Now that I have moved all my pictures to Flickr, I don't need Gallery any more.

So all 41MB of it (most of which was pictures) along with a 65-byte database (that apparently wasn't needed after all; maybe I misread the documentation) have been removed.

That was the last database left on my Pair account, which means I don't need an Advanced account any more. I can drop back to Basic ($9.95/month), or even FTP ($5.95/month), and save a little money.

I just balanced our checkbook, in the process finding & correcting a 20¢ error, while holding a wriggling, screaming toddler (who did not want to sit at the computer any more).

Just back from the Miller Christmas party, held at a tiny Lutheran church in Peoria.

The kids had fun, running around the room. The grownups chased after the children and tried to prevent serious injuries and/or property damage.

Sam & I explored the church a little, on the theory that if I got him away from the craziness he'd take a nap, and it was fascinating. (It was not, however, sleep-inducing.) It struck me as considerably warmer and more welcoming than the big-box megachurches that are popping up all over (almost as rapidly as Wal-Marts, to which they bear more than a passing resemblance).

We ended up having dinner in Peoria, at Avanti's. (It would have been Culver's, but I missed the shopping-center entrance and it seemed too much work to turn around. Jake was very disappointed, but only briefly.)

All 349 pictures have been uploaded to Flickr, collected into various sets, and tagged. Now I can get rid of Gallery, and probably the picture pages from the dusty old CityDesk portion of the web site.

I think of Flickr and TypePad as part of my web site, even though technically they aren't. Once upon a time, my web presence was a small set of text files maintained with notepad & uploaded via ftp to a single web server. Now, I am rather more dispersed, but it's all still me.

One thing I hadn't considered about Flickr: it's much more public than the old Gallery pages. Pictures I upload will be seen by random strangers, unless I set permissions to prevent it. Random strangers can even comment on my pictures, and one already has.

Am I disturbed by this? Maybe, a little. I might take the Jacob & Samuel photo sets private, in which case the grandparents would have to get Flickr accounts to see them. Fortunately, Flickr accounts are free.

The Big Upload has begun: so far, I've uploaded the Gardening (10 pictures) and Illinois Counties (82 pictures) sections of the old photo pages to Flickr. Next will be the Road Trips and Sam sections (33 and 31, respectively). Last will be the Jacob section, since it has nearly two hundred pictures in it.

FlickrExport is remarkably easy to use. It threw 92 pictures at Flickr, and Flickr caught them, with almost no problems. (There was a network glitch uploading the Kane County picture, but it worked fine on the second try.)

Maybe this means I'll upload more pictures. I've been quite negligent these last few months.

This morning, online banking showed a sizable deposit in addition to the usual paycheck.

Hm, bonus, thought I. How nice.

Not wanting to spoil Stephen's surprise, I decided not to say anything about the bonus until this evening. But today is payday, and there's an entry on the stub showing the exact (pre-tax) amount of this year's bonus.

So I figure Stephen's surprise is already spoiled, and the embargo on this story is lifted.

I'm pretty much finished creating iPhoto folders corresponding to the various Gallery photo albums. I even copied over the captions.

It comes to about four hundred pictures, which will be rather a pain to upload. I should probably just bite the bullet on FlickrExport, and buy a license. It's only $22.47 (aka 12 euros).

Jake lost another tooth this evening, during dinner.

We were going to put it in an envelope for the tooth fairy, but it mysteriously disappeared during the post-dinner tidying-up.

I think the tooth fairy is going to come tonight anyway.

MSNBC says:

Johnson County, Indiana - Salvation Army Bell Ringers are a staple of the holiday season, volunteering their time to help others. But this year, some of the bell ringers would otherwise be in jail. Parolees are doing their community service in the spirit of the season.

I've seen some scary-looking bell-ringers over the years....

Yesterday, I said:

The Ford dealer just called: Mr. Explorer's done with his oil change, and - mirabile dictu! - no painfully expensive additional repairs were required.

Alas, my joy was premature: today, the turn signals stopped working.

The Ford dealer tells me that Mr. Explorer's multifunction switch has failed, and must be replaced. Total cost, parts and labor, $225.

From a recent page of the Know-It-All Calendar:

The light from heaven shone on him indeed, but not in a direct line, or with its own pure splendour. The rays had to struggle through a disturbing medium; they reached him refracted, dulled and discoloured by the thick gloom which had settled on his soul, and, though they might be sufficiently clear to guide him, were too dim to cheer him.
- Lord Macaulay on Samuel Johnson,
from the eleventh edition of the Britannica, 1911

The Ford dealer just called: Mr. Explorer's done with his oil change, and - mirabile dictu! - no painfully expensive additional repairs were required.

I've been rummaging around in the electronic shoebox - that is, my iPhoto library - for the high-resoluton originals of all the pictures on the various picture pages of the web site. This is harder than it sounds.

First, there are over 10,000 images in the library, going back nearly seven years. iPhoto tries to organize them by date, but the earlier images don't have EXIF data. Since the file timestamps have nothing to do with when the picture was taken - apparently they were all reset when I copied the pictures to the iMac, last March - things get misfiled.

And some of the earliest pictures were just gone: apparently, way back when, I just pasted interesting pictures into CityDesk without keeping a separate copy. I had to import a few pictures from the web site into iPhoto, so that I can re-export them to Flickr. This just seems wrong.

But I think I have everything neatly organized in iPhoto folders now. Next is fixing up the titles & comments, then figuring out a cheap and easy way to upload the lot to Flickr. Then Gallery can go away forever, and no one will miss it.

Fog this morning, fairly thick an hour ago (7:00am) but burning off rapidly now (8:00am).

Mr. Explorer is at the Ford dealer, getting an oil change. Usually oil changes end up costing me $300, when the mechanic finds something that needs fixing. One hopes that will not happen this time.

Today is Update Tuesday, Microsoft's monthly admission that Windows XP still needs work - more than five years after its release.

This month's package is approximately ten updates, plus or minus a few depending on the precise version of Windows you're updating.

Multiply that by the twelve Windows machines to which I am nursemaid here at Wolfram Research World HQ, and the result is rather tedious. There's an option to download & install updates automatically, but that always seems to happen in the middle of something important. So every month I waste half an hour going click-click-click with the mouse.

Thanks bunches, 'softies.

MSNBC says the Vatican has been digging in St. Paul's Outside the Walls Basilica (which is a goofy name for a church). I was amused by this quote:

"These excavations give us the full certainty and knowledge that the sarcophagus is St. Paul's tomb, whether it contains his remains or not," said Cardinal Andrea Cordero Lanza di Montezemolo, head of the basilica.

Um...okay, then. I guess the box of Kleenex on my desk is also the tomb of St. Paul. I have full certainty and knowledge that this is so, whether it contains his remains or not.

Another gloomy, foggy, drizzly day. But at least it's warm: 48° as of 8:00am.

Our DVD player has an annoying tendency to crash: suddenly, the remote stops working, the buttons on the player stop working, and we have to power-cycle the thing to wake it up again.

Maybe I'm just a hopeless dreamer, but I think that DVD players ought to be able to play DVDs without getting completely bunged up.

I also think that our next DVD player will not be from RCA.

(The RCA web site has an animated dog on it. Sam really liked watching it while I was looking up initialization codes for the remote.)

Mr. Sam gave up the baby bottles on Sunday: for a while now, he's been using cups at mealtimes but still having a bottle (8oz, whole milk) at bedtime; but as of Sunday his bedtime milk comes in a cup.

Most of the bottles have been packed up (I believe one was kept, just in case) and will be given away.

No more bottles. It makes me a little bit sad to think that my days of giving bottles to babies are over forever. (Soon enough, I'll be giving car keys to teenagers. Gack.)

I installed FlickrExport on mork the other day, with the idea of using it to upload pictures directly from iPhoto to Flickr.

It works, but there are problems. Specifically, the uploaded pictures don't appear in the Flickr sidebar thingy on TypePad, nor does the automatic post to TypePad happen.

Is it because I'm using an unregistered version of FlickrExport? Is it because I've misconfigured Flickr somehow?

Investigation continues.

Warmer than last week - 42° at 2:00pm, according to NOAA - but raining. The cloud cover is thick & heavy, and almost low enough to qualify as fog.

All in all, not a good day to be outside.

There's a Mac version of Age of Empires III.

I had fun with the first Age of Empires - maybe a little too much fun - but not so much with Age of Empires II. Apparently the game designers beefed up the AI until it was smarter than me: I lost, badly, every time.

Unless Age of Empires III has a setting that means Let me win, I just want to waste an hour destroying tiny simulated buildings & killing tiny simulated people I don't suppose I'd have any fun with it.

Something to contemplate on a Sunday afternoon:

If a tree falls in the forest, and nobody sends email about it, did it really fall?

(Yes, this post was inspired by certain email-obsessed cow-orkers, for whom nothing is truly real until it appears in their inbox. Thanks for asking!)

The furniture arrangement in the tv room (which doubles as Sam's playroom) wasn't working very well: Sam was destroying the DVD player (he was particularly fond of pulling it down from the shelf and standing on it) and constantly trying to garrote himself with the tv cable. So yesterday afternoon we moved everything around.

The television is back in the corner where it started, when we first moved in (almost seven years ago). All wires & cables are behind the television. The DVD player is on a high shelf next to the television. It's about as toddler-proof as we can make it.

All we need to do now is get the DVD player remote working, and we'll be able to watch DVDs again. The original remote was eaten by its batteries, and the replacement I picked up at Best Buy some months ago has already forgotten how to talk to the player. (I have to wonder why these things aren't standardized. Surely there is a better way for people to exercise their creativity than by coming up with yet another infrared signal that means "play the movie".)

Spent the morning at the Savoy Recreation Center, having breakfast with Santa.

Santa arrived on a fire engine, with lights & siren going; and - according to witnesses - tripped getting down from the thing and crashed to the ground. Poor Santa.

There were some activities for the children, but mostly they just ran around. Sam had a good time exploring the building (and trying to open and/or close every single door he saw). In the weight room, I managed a few one-armed curls with a 27.5-pound hand weight - one-armed because I was holding Sam in the other - but was too chicken to try anything bigger.

Pictures were taken.

I fixed the Gallery breakage that happened during the Removable Type deletion. Pictures are back.

Soon they will be moving to Flickr, though.

A Flickr pro account costs $25/year, the FlickrExport plug-in for iPhoto costs $22. TypePad costs $50/year. That seems like a lot of money, just to keep blather & photos online.

But switching to TypePad+Flickr means I can downgrade my Pair account from Advanced to Basic, trimming $8/month off the Pair bill. So it will all balance out. Unless Flickr and/or TypePad start raising their prices.

Rummaged around in the iPhoto library this evening, and gathered all eighty-two pictures from the Illinois Counties project into their own album. (Handy things, albums. I should use more of them.)

I had the notion to start uploading them to Flickr, but - alas - free accounts like mine are limited to three photo sets. I already have three, so it's decision time: pay the $25 for a one-year pro membership, or not?

I do like Flickr. It's certainly worth $25. Hm....

Jeff Duntemann's online diary page, http://www.duntemann.com/Diary.htm, has a row of Google ads in the sidebar. The current set:

• Mormon Ringtone
• Sex Offender Registry
• Instant Criminal Records
• Registered Sex Offenders

Is Google trying to tell me something about Mormons?

While snooping around Amazon.com the other day - no, I haven't peeked at my wishlist to see what's been purchased - I noticed that color LaserJet printers cost around $300 these days.

Perhaps instead of trying to get my antediluvian LaserJet IIIp back online, I should just buy a new printer, a nice USB color laser printer. It would be much easier to set up a wireless print server with a printer that isn't fourteen years old.

On the other hand, toner cartridges for HP color laser printers cost around $120 each - and the printer needs four of them. One batch of cartridges would cost $200 more than the printer.

Um...never mind....

Here's hoping Mr. Jacob remembers to bring home all of the hats & gloves he's worn to school this week.

He keeps forgetting them, and stockpiles of spare hats and gloves are dwindling.

Only 5° when Jacob & I were out waiting for the bus this morning. Not much wind, though, so it wasn't as unpleasant as it could have been.

I finally broke down and wore long pants today.

There are people in Decatur who have been without electricity since last Friday's ice storm / blizzard. They're not too happy. AmerenIP, the power company, says they're working as hard as they can, but nobody believes them. Legislators down in Springfield are beginning to mutter about hearings & investigations.

I read in the newspaper recently that AmerenIP doesn't actually generate electricity. They have no power plants of their own, they just buy electricity from other companies and pass it along. Isn't that what Enron did?

Attempts to access the old photo gallery are now failing with the blunt & unhelpful message:

Error: Your Userfile is not writeable

I suspect that when I deleted Movable Type (or is that Removable Type?) the other day, I deleted a few of Gallery's files.

Oops.

CNN says:

NASA Associate Administrator Scott Horowitz...estimated that perhaps by 2024 there might be a continual presence on the [lunar] surface, with crews rotating in and out, as is done with the international space station.

It's nice that NASA is going back to the moon. But it's disappointing that they'll take almost twenty years to do it.

I keep thinking that this is what NASA should have been doing thirty years ago, instead of messing around with the shuttle (an example of second-system effect if ever I saw one).

As Lazarus Long and/or Robert A. Heinlein once said:

Never try to teach a pig to sing. It wastes your time, and annoys the pig.

(Why, yes, this entry was inspired by a recent email exchange with a cow-orker. Thanks for asking!)

A house down the street from ours has had a For Sale By Owner sign out front for the last few weeks. Just recently it was replaced by a realtor sign.

Quite a few people in our subdivision have thought that they could sell their houses without a realtor. So far as I know, none has ever managed it. Always in the end they go with a realtor, and the house usually sells within a week or two.

Tonight I believe I will start reading The Mind's I, by Douglas R. Hofstadter and Daniel C. Dennett.

My library database doesn't have a purchase date for this book, which means I must have bought it sometime prior to mid-1984. It certainly looks twenty-two years old: dry, yellowed, a bit musty.

This will be my first time reading it, too.

Sputnik reports 32° as of 9:00pm: the first time since 7:00am on the 1st that the temperature has been so high.

Weatherdroids say the warming trend will be short-lived, and by Thursday we'll be back in the deep-freeze.

I just deleted from my Pair account:

• The Movable Type database;
• The Movable Type code;
• The old daybook files.

...thereby freeing up about 50MB of disk space.

http://patrick-rice.net/Daybook/ is now a redirect to the TypePad site (i.e., to here). The loyal readership are encouraged to update their bookmarks.

This morning I grew weary of hand-editing each of the scores of broken links scattered across dozens of pages in the daybook, and decided to take drastic measures: I exported the entire site to a text file (MT import format, or some such), edited all the links in one go, then deleted the daybook, re-created it and re-imported all the data.

This took rather longer than I expected, but it was still faster than hand-editing. I feel quite the chump for not doing it sooner.

So: the links are all fixed, and the old daybooks (both of them!) can now go away. I imagine I'll just replace them with redirects to the new site.

My next project is to move all my pictures to Flickr, and get rid of Gallery. That shouldn't take nearly as long as moving the daybook.

Last year's flu shot seemed to work pretty well - at least, I don't recall getting terribly sick last winter - so I sneaked over to Mr. Doctor's office today for this year's model.

It was quick & painless: station #1, give name & birthdate, get mysterious piece of paper; station #2, give paper to person; station #3, sit down, get injected - "Left arm, or right?" - and you're done.

Elsewhere in the room, people were setting up tables (including one with brownies, cookies and other snacks) for a 12:00 noon training session. I thought about grabbing a brownie on the way out, but decided against it.

Mail just now, from the head of HR:

Smoking is not allowed in the Trade Center building or other WRI facilities at any time, including in restrooms, in stairwells, or on the rooftop.

Who's been smoking on the roof?

A bus turned the corner at the end of the block and headed toward Jacob & Papa.

"Is that Jake's bus, or the fake-out bus?" I said.

The bus came closer: wrong number, wrong driver - and, like yesterday, it didn't stop.

"I guess it was the fake-out bus," I said.

"Curse you, fake-out bus!" said Jake.

MSNBC says, regarding the imminent launch of space shuttle Discovery:

If the launch doesn't get off Dec. 7, NASA can keep trying through Dec. 17. After that, the agency will likely call it quits until January. NASA wants Discovery back from its 12-day mission by New Year's Eve because shuttle computers aren't designed to make the change from the 365th day of the old year to the first day of the new year while in flight.

I was going to say that the nitwit who wrote this software should be ashamed of himself for making such a bonehead design choice, but it occurs to me that the software probably was designed thirty years ago, and the nitwit has long since retired.

The registration on Mr. Explorer expired three days ago. I have the new sticker, but I haven't stuck it on the license plate yet.

I've been a fugitive from justice these last few days. Oops....

Uploaded today's Christmas tree pictues to the iMac; very disappointing. With only two or three exceptions, they're all blurry. Is the autofocus broken? Or was it confused by all those tiny lights?

I suppose we'll have to try again tomorrow.

At long last, the Christmas tree is up, lit and decorated.

We added a string of lights (which are labeled "temporary use only, 90 days maximum" - I guess on day 91 your house burns down) to replace the broken string we ripped out yesterday (our hands are healing nicely, thanks for asking), then hung all the ornaments. The tree looks very nice, despite being only 2/3 pre-lit.

Jake helped, while Sam played in the Pack & Play. (No, not "played". More like "protested his captivity".) Pictures were taken afterward; perhaps some of them will appear over on the Flickr page, one of these days.

Flickr has competition, Zooomr:

With Zooomr, photos are no longer just photos - they are emotions, ideas, and stories meant to be shared and explored. Zooomr helps you share them with the world.

Er...my pictures are just pictures.

After a week-long struggle, Jennifer & I have decided that the lights on our pre-lit Christmas tree are beyond repair. We're going to buy a few strings of lights and put those on the tree instead: then, in January, get out the wire cutters and do a complete light-ectomy on the tree before packing it up for the year.

If there's anybody out in the world who bought a pre-lit tree because we did, we're very sorry....

Fiesta Cafe.

Links to posts from 2004 and 2003 have been fixed (i.e., they point to the TypePad site now, instead of to the old site). Still to go: 1999 through 2002.

This might take a while.

The Spy Kids 2 DVD - which Jennifer brought home from the library the other day, and which Jake has been watching every spare minute since - has some sort of custom player application that it wants to install.

Unlike U3, this thing - whatever it's called - will uninstall itself when asked, so it isn't evil useless crapware. But it's still useless crapware.

I tried to tell Windows to play DVDs in the regular DVD player application, but the stupid crapware installer kept popping up no matter what. In the end, I had to fire up the Group Policy Editor and disable AutoPlay on all drives.

Have you ever noticed how many exciting new features of Microsoft's operating systems and applications involve automatic, invisible execution of third-party code on your computer? One imagines the design meetings at Microsoft:

Let's have Outlook automatically execute Javascript in all incoming email!
Great idea!
Let's have Windows automatically run whatever programs are on CDs & DVDs that people put in the drives!
Great idea!
Let's have Internet Explorer hand over complete control of the computer to any web page in the world that asks for it!
Great idea!

...etc., etc., etc.