January 2007 Archives

My new toys arrived today: a wireless keyboard & mouse for the iMac.

Setup was incredibly easy:

1. Install the mouse software. (This required a restart. Apparently there was a firmware update involved.)
2. Pair mouse with iMac. (This took two tries. Scandal! Outrage!)
3. Skip installing the keyboard software, because (according to the instructions) it's really the same as the mouse software.
4. Pair keyboard with iMac. (Got it on the first try, too.)

The directions didn't say anything about when to unplug the old mouse & keyboard, and I was a little worried that there'd be weird hardware conflicts. No, the iMac happily used both mice and both keyboards.

But having all that hardware on the desk made things a little crowded, so the old mouse and keyboard are in the closet now. I'm not sure what to do with them. They're not old, or broken, or unpleasant to use. I don't need them, but I'd hate to throw them away.

What to do, what to do....

Microsoft's latest me-too is called XBAP:

XBAP (XAML Browser Application) is a new Windows technology used for creating Rich Internet Applications.

While windows applications are normally compiled to an .exe file, browser applications are compiled to an extension .xbap and can be run inside Internet Explorer.

Xbap applications are run within a security sandbox to prevent untrusted applications from controlling local system resources.

This is a bad idea, because:

1. Unlike Java (which, I note in passing, is nasty), it runs only on Windows.
2. If Microsoft says it's secure, you can be sure it isn't. There will be XBAP viruses, trojans, etc., and existing antivirus software won't be able to stop them.
3. According to the xbap.org FAQ, to use XBAP you have to disable Internet Explorer's pop-up blocker.

There's also WPF/E (Windows Presentation Foundation/Everywhere), which is a reduced-functionality subset of XBAP that isn't restricted to Windows. There's even an OS X version (still in beta).

Too bad no one will ever use it. The 'softies won't cannibalize XBAP by making WPF/E too useful, so developers will ignore WPF/E, so there won't be any good WPF/E applications, so OS X users won't even bother installing it, so (after waiting a discreet period) Microsoft will quietly pull the plug on non-Windows versions of WPF/E (or perhaps on WPF/E in general).

CNN says:

MIAMI, Florida (AP) -- The city of Miami is planning an official celebration at the Orange Bowl whenever Cuban president Fidel Castro dies.

That's just...hm...now what's the word I'm looking for...ah, I know: contemptible.

The permanent floating counter-revolutionary riot club in Miami have been an annoying & tedious bunch for years. (Remember Elian Gonzalez?) I don't want to see them on television, dancing in the streets of Miami and singing ding-dong the dictator's dead like demented munchkins.

But if I do, I suppose my reaction will be: Castro's dead? Good, now you can go home. Don't let the door hit you in the [censored] on your way out of the country.

Was rummaging around in the phone this morning and found this picture from last August.

Sometimes - usually by accident - the phone takes a good picture.

The X30 is getting old - I bought it in August of 2004, so in dog years it's quite ancient - and its battery is failing: it just won't hold a charge for very long any more.

This means its days are numbered, since I don't think I'd be able to reinitialize it if the battery ever drained completely. I still have all the software, and all the registration keys, but installing everything would be too much work to bother with. Most likely, I'd procrastinate for a few days, then for a few weeks, then put the X30 in the closet so I wouldn't have to look at it any more, then fish it out again a year or two later and throw it away.

Jennifer - if she hasn't skipped this entry - is probably thinking now that I am harboring secret dreams of buying a replacement for the X30. I'm not. Windows CE - or whatever Microsoft is calling it this week - is a dead end. Microsoft's replacement for the Pocket PC, the Ultra-Mobile PC, is likewise a dead end. The other replacement for the Pocket PC, the Tablet PC, is almost interesting. But Tablet PCs are expensive.

Short of winning the Lotto - which we didn't, last night, to my great disappointment - we're unlikely any time soon to have enough spare change in the piggy bank for a Tablet PC. So I will keep the X30 alive as long as I can, then give it a decent burial when it goes: and that will conclude my ten-year flirtation with handheld computing devices.

(Perhaps in the brief but glorious period between the last mortgage payment and the first tuition payment there will be room in the budget for some fancy but unnecessary computer toys. But before then? I'm not holding my breath.)

Sam's been sneezing all day, and the baby goo has returned. (Sam does not like having his nose wiped. Poor little guy.) He's also been a bit sleepy & clingy. It's possible that all this is due to the new teeth (he's getting at least two), or it could be allergies, or it could be some new germs.

It's been several weeks since anybody was sick; we're overdue.

We dosed Sam with...er...something purple (Jennifer knows what it was; perhaps I should have been paying closer attention), and put him to bed a little early. Maybe he'll feel better in the morning.

(Whenever one of the kids is sick, I usually catch whatever it is he's got: one of the many burdens of parenthood. All day, I've been trying to decide whether I'm sneezing any more frequently than usual. And is that a sore throat getting started, or am I just thirsty? I never used to worry about my health, but Jake & Sam - not to mention my advancing age - have made me a hypochondriac.)

The old daybook - the one that's part of the CityDesk site - has quite a few images in it. When I transferred everything to Movable Type (two years ago), I left the images where they were.

But now the pictures are on Flickr, and the links need to be updated. This is a rather tedious process: find the links, find the corresponding images on Flickr, change the links, save, go on to the next. Whenever I'm in the mood, I do a few more. There's no hurry: the old images are still there, so the pages that use them aren't broken.

Today I cleaned up all the images links in daybook entries from 2001. At this rate, I'll finish sometime in the next decade or two.

(A side project: collect all the pictures I took with the old 3M webcam, import them into iPhoto on the iMac, then upload them to Flickr.)

Yesterday I paid a visit to Circuit City (an annoying store, devoted mainly to selling huge, expensive televisions to people who can't afford them) and picked up the TiVo-branded wireless network adapter. The idea was to upgrade the TiVo from 802.11b (which is slow) to 802.11g (which is faster), so that the entire house network would be 802.11g - hm, it occurs to me that the print server is 802.11b, oops - and to give TiVo Desktop another try.

TiVo Desktop will transfer programs from the TiVo to nessus, where they can be played with Windows Media Player. This could be useful for Jake - copy all the cartoons & kidstuff to nessus, so he can watch it there while Mama watches her shows on the television - but apparently 802.11g is still pretty slow at transferring 800MB video files.

There's an OS X version of TiVo Desktop, which is nice; but there's nothing on the iMac that can play back the TiVo video format. They expect me to pay $70 for yet another video playback application. No, thanks.

In the long run, TiVo is doomed. Cable is going digital, and the cable companies are selling - renting, I suppose - their own DVRs. Who'll need TiVo then?

Even in the short term, TiVo is in trouble. Their business model discourages upgrades: subscriptions are by TiVo, not by household. If you buy a second box, you pay twice as much. Lifetime subscriptions - before those were discontinued - aren't transferable. So the best thing for customers to do is buy one TiVo, then hang onto it until it dies.

Bad news for TiVo, I suppose.

The vacuum cleaner hasn't been working very well lately, so this morning I dismantled it to see what was wrong.

Turns out it was quite thoroughly clogged. I removed what seemed like several cubic yards of disgusting crud, packed all around the brush & into the ductwork - then reamed out the hose with a broom handle when it clogged up - and now the vacuum cleaner is back to normal.

I think maybe we should have used the shop-vac from the garage after last month's tree-dismantling session. Oops.

Woke up around 6:00am and couldn't get back to sleep, so I set up the laptop on the kitchen table and did a little work.

I don't suppose it gets me any points for dedication when I do work at 6:30am on a Saturday morning. But it should.

Indulged myself yesterday, and bought The Best of the Lemon Pipers from iTunes, thereby adding to my collection of one hit wonders from the 1960s.

Green Tambourine is one of those songs I remember from way back; the other twelve tracks on the album are...interesting. I don't know that I actually like them yet. Perhaps a few more listens will clarify my opinion.

This morning, while waiting with Jake for the school bus to arrive, I counted nine contrails; this evening, while stopped at a light on the way home from work, I counted eleven contrails - and I could only see one quadrant of the sky (the southwest).

The air over Champaign is quite crowded with people on their way to somewhere else.

Rumor has it that the tax year 2006 W-2 forms are in the building, somewhere.

I'm pretty sure that's the last piece of paper we need to prepare our return (everything else having arrived in yesterday's mail).

Will we get a refund this year? I surely do hope so, though I doubt it will be quite so large as last year's.

Various items:

• Sam is much better now. The prodigious flow of baby goo has stopped, his appetite is back, and his mood is much improved. He was tired this evening - when I put him in the crib just now, he went right to sleep. Usually he howls a bit first.
• Depositing a traveller's check...er, cheque...at the bank is a rather involved process: sign here, sign there, show some ID, wait while the teller calls the American Express home office to confirm that the checks...er, cheques...aren't stolen, blah blah blah. (It probably didn't help that I neglected to sign them before showing up at the bank.)
• I stopped at Best Buy on the way home from work, to see if there were any toys I wanted to buy for myself. Strangely, there were none. Except maybe the Yamaha YPT-300AD keyboard. Lately I've had the inexplicable compulsion to buy a keyboard & learn to play, even though I have no musical skill whatsoever.
• Supposedly, there's an easter egg in the TiVo: something about typing in the word SHAGWELL in just the right place, then pressing the thumbs-up button on the remote. Alas, neither Jennifer nor I can get it to work with out TiVo. Maybe it's only in older boxes?

And so to bed, as Samuel Pepys used to say.

Sam's been whiny & miserable all day, poor little guy. He's been generating prodigious quantities of baby goo from his mouth & nose, so we think he's getting a few more teeth.

I put him to bed around 9:00pm, and he went right to sleep; alas, he woke up again an hour later with a renewed attack of miserableness. He cried and squirmed, no matter what I did. (He did enjoy a visit with Mama in the big bed, though, perhaps because it allowed him to smear baby goo all over Papa's pillow. Thanks bunches, little man.) He didn't want to sit at the computer, he didn't want to rock in the rocking chair, he didn't even want me to walk him around the room.

I even dosed him with a little Orajel, but I don't think it helped. Finally, in desperation, I put him back in the crib. He cried for a minute or two, then fell asleep. (Maybe I should have tried that first.)

It would be nice if he slept until morning, but I don't really expect that he will.

I thought about what I wanted to do with the money I was given at yesterday's company meeting - does it qualify as income? do I have to declare it on my tax return? - and decided that all I really wanted to do was buy some toys for the kids. So I stopped at the local Toys-R-Us on the way home from work and picked up a set of blocks for Sam, and a Lego helicopter set for Jake.

Sam was unimpressed with the blocks, but Jake was thrilled with his helicopter. (So thrilled, in fact, that he flew it around the house, shedding pieces everywhere he went. I suspect that not all of them made it into the Lego bag at the end of the evening. Oops.)

But that was only a small percentage (6%, to be precise) of my windfall. Jennifer & I are still thinking of what to do with the rest of it: possibly a bread machine.

Briefly entertained the notion of buying a Motorola RAZR V3 from T-Mobile, but in the end decided not to.

Reasons to buy a RAZR:

1. It's pretty cool.
2. It can sync (via Bluetooth) with the iMac.
3. It can take pictures, and record video.

Reasons not to buy a RAZR:

1. It costs $200 (or $170 from Amazon).
2. T-Mobile's prepaid plan, while pretty good, is a bit more expensive than Virgin Mobile's.
3. T-Mobile's coverage isn't any better than Virgin Mobile's: I still wouldn't be able to use my phone in Carmi.
4. So far as I can tell, the RAZR's camera is about as good as the one I've got now, i.e., not very good at all.

So: no RAZR for me.

A bit of snow fell overnight: less than an inch, but enough that I'll be shoveling the driveway again this evening. (Maybe Jake will want to help.)

The WRI parking lot hasn't been cleared. The yellow lines aren't always visible, which means people are parking wherever the spirit moves them. This is going to be a big problem in another hour or so, when the parking lot fills up.

I left my coffee cup at home, too. Pity me, pity me.

There was a company meeting today at Wolfram Research World HQ (or, more accurately, at the hotel next door); today's topic was the [censored] Project, about which I suppose I'm not allowed to actually say anything - at least not until the rest of the world already knows about it. Then I'll be free to say, "I wasn't involved. No, not even a little bit."

It's traditional at the January company meeting to recognize employees who have reached various milestones: five years, ten years, fifteen years. (There are no twenty-year employees yet; the company isn't that old.)

I hit fifteen years last June, so I got to walk up to the front of the room and receive a gift bag & card. I didn't open it right away, figuring it would be a little tacky to rummage around in a bagful of tissue paper while the speaker was talking about the [censored] Project. (Oops, almost let it slip just then. Memo to self: be more careful!)

Jake & I opened it when I got home. For fifteen years of service, I received:

1. The traditional lucite thingy. (Or maybe it's crystal. I never was very good at identifying bivalves.)
2. A card.
3. Several rather impressively-denominated American Express traveller's checks. Excuse me, I meant cheques.

Jennifer says I should buy myself something, but I can't think of anything.

I was working through chapter six of Agile Web Development With Rails, typing in all the code & running all the commands, when I hit a little problem:

You have a nil object when you didn't expect it!
You might have expected an instance of Array.
The error occured while evaluating nil.[]

Um. True, I wasn't expecting a nil object. I wasn't expecting Rails to fall over, either.

A quick visit to the book's errata page revealed the cause of the error: it seems I'm running Rails 1.1.6, and the sample code in the book only works with Rails 1.2.0.

I suppose I'll have to upgrade, once Rails 1.2.0 is actually released. (Or has that already happened?)

The WRI parking lot was clear this morning, but treacherously icy: yesterday's meltwater, refrozen overnight into miniature skating rinks, scattered invisibly across the pavement.

My usual parking space turned out to be in the middle of one of these nasty little surprises, but I managed to stay on my feet.

I'm very paranoid about ice these days, for fear of re-injuring my (already somewhat dodgy) spine. When there's ice about, I walk like an old man, eyes firmly fixed on the ground ahead of me. Mountain climbers have their crampons; perhaps there's something similar for those of us who stay on level ground.

Must investigate....

Update: Such things do exist. They're called Yaktrax (http://yaktrax.com/).

Woke up this morning to two or three inches of wet, heavy snow. Very pretty.

After lunch, we bundled up Jake & Sam and went outside for a while. I shoveled snow while Jennifer pulled Sam around in the sled and Jake bounced back and forth between us: shovel a bit, ride in the sled for a bit, lather, rinse, repeat.

Pictures were taken. Perhaps a few will go up on Flickr, once Sam wakes up from his nap.

My genealogy files - which, I must confess, are no more than a stack of papers in the closet - include quite a few property records: Joel Bramlet bought this parcel of land, Michael Felty bought that one, etc.

It would be very nice to have a big map of White County, with all these purchases marked on it. Even better would be some kind of online system, where I could bring up an annotated map for any given year, or landowner, or any other query I can think of.

(One project that's been burbling in the back of my mind for a few years now: cross-reference the deaths and injuries recorded in newspaper accounts of the Tri-State Tornado [March 18, 1925] with property records, to reconstruct the tornado's path through White County. That would be cool.)

Alas, the genealogy software houses don't seem too interested in that sort of thing. I've looked, but can't find anything.

Maybe the US Geological Survey has something....

Update: one last go-round with Google before bedtime turned up http://nationalatlas.gov/, which looks very interesting.

Weatherdroids have been predicting snow for tonight & tomorrow morning, but the numbers are all over: one inch, two inches, six inches, and - most recently - three to five inches.

Everybody was out & about today, finishing up their errands before the snow. Traffic was pretty bad, restaurants and grocery stores were crowded, etc., etc.

The MSNBC Photoblog had this to say when I tried to bring it up on the iMac:

Hello, Safari user! Unfortunately, the photoblog is having a hard time with Safari right now, but we're working on it as fast as we possibly can. Until we can get a fix in place, would you mind giving Firefox a shot?

Is there a bug in Safari? Is the MSNBC web group unable to write portable code? Perhaps it's both? In the meantime, no photoblog for me.

Is there any meaningful difference between the following:

© 1999-2007 LlamaVision, Inc.
© LlamaVision, Inc.

Here at Wolfram Research World HQ, considerable time is spent every January tracking down these little nuggets and incrementing the year. It seems so unnecessary.

Update: The U.S. Copyright Office has published Circular 3: Copyright Notice, which has the scoop on copyright notices. It says the copyright notice should include the year. But does that mean it must include the year?

Stayed up much too late, but finished reading The Draco Tavern, by Larry Niven.

The Draco Tavern stories aren't really stories, they're just snippets of fiction wrapped around a punchline. Reading a bookful of them in one go isn't as much fun as finding a new one every few months in one or another science-fiction magazine. (Not that I read any science-fiction magazines any more....)

Currently reading Sahara, by Michael Palin: the companion volume to the television series (which I also have). Maybe when I've finished the book, I'll watch the DVDs.

(Why, yes, I did write this on Saturday afternoon, then back-dated it to Thursday night. Thanks for asking!)

In no particular order:

• Guinness. I want to like Guinness, I really do. But it makes me gag, it's so bitter.
• Wine. The doctor said, "Drink a glass of red wine every evening, it'll raise your good cholesterol." So every night for the last two and a half months, I've done exactly that: 8oz of red wine, just before bedtime. That works out to about twenty bottles (or $150, take your pick), and I still can't stand the stuff. I drink it, but I do not enjoy it.
• World of Warcraft. I like the idea of running a character through some kind of online adventure, but not if other people are involved. Signing myself up for a massively-multiplayer online role-playing game would thus be a very bad idea.
• Windows Vista. Another version of Windows, yawn. Very pretty, but it won't run on seven-year-old nessus, and every new version of Windows has been an exercise in annoyance, figuring out where the 'softies have put everything this time.

I'm sure I could come up with more, if I tried.

Google Reader tells me that I average 2.3 posts per day. (The ubiquitous & indefatigable Robert Scoble averages 4.7 posts per day. I'm not worthy, I'm not worthy.)

Consider this your three-tenths of a post for today....

Downloaded XML Notepad 2007 from the Microsoft web site today, and installed it.

It's a nice editor, I suppose, but it has one fatal flaw: it does not preserve the formatting of the files it edits. If you open/edit/save a file, the new version will have all blank lines removed, all indentation stripped out and replaced with a new indentation scheme (two spaces per level, I think).

This makes it difficult to share XML files with people who aren't using XML Notepad.

(Incidentally, CityDesk ran into the same problem: just switching from HTML view to Normal view while editing a page was enough to strip out - permanently - all the semantically null but esthetically pleasing indentation & formatting that people had added to their HTML. In response to customer complaints, Fog Creek prodigiously hacked on their code so that round-tripping through Normal view didn't scrozzle the HTML. Alas, the 'softies didn't feel like doing that.)

This morning around 11:00am, the lights went out at WRI - and, apparently, across a good chunk of Champaign & Savoy as well.

Climbing six flights of stairs in the dark while carrying a computer bag isn't very much fun.

Fortunately, the power came back after a while. And, courtesy of the enormous generator that was installed last year, none of the build machines even noticed there was a power failure. How nice.

There's a rumor going around that Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, used to work at WRI.

Every winter, the sump pump hose freezes up, and one of two things happens:

1. The pump throws off the outflow pipe, and I have to go down into the crawlspace to reattach it.
2. We turn off the sump pump, and the crawlspace slowly fills with water.

It occurred to me this evening that we've had a lot of rain over the last few days (from the icestorm that wasn't), and the temperature is now solidly below freezing. Rather than choose between #1 and #2, I decided to remove the hose. That side of the house will get rather swampy, but the pump won't freeze up. (I hope.)

Maybe I should dump a bag or two of gravel under the pipe, so the erosion isn't quite so bad.

While rummaging around in the closet to extricate the Lego Mindstorm box I promised Jake he could play with, I found a stack of old Newton manuals & pamphlets:

• What's new in Newton Software
• Notion: the Newton List Manager
• Newton Fax Modem Handbook
• MessagePad Handbook

...etc., etc. I even have the registration card, which I suppose I should have sent in when I first got the Newton, eleven years ago. (It was a Christmas present.)

And the modem, which I never used.

I don't have the Newton any more - it died a few years ago, so I threw it away - so I probably shouldn't keep the paperwork. But I have an inexplicable compulsion to keep old computer toys.

The Newton was replaced in 1998 by the Philips Nino, which was replaced in 2000 by the Compaq iPaq, which was replaced in 2004 by the Dell Axim X30 - which I'm not using nearly as much as I used to, since it won't play nicely with the iMac.

I think the X30 will end up being the last handheld computer that I ever buy. There's no future in tiny computers that run an almost-but-not-quite clone of Windows. These days it's all cell phones, and most of those don't run any kind of Windows.

This evening I imported tape #5, which covers 2005 & 2006.

I haven't bothered to add up the disk space this project has consumed, but I think it's fifty or sixty gigabytes. The disk - which also holds downloaded software and a backup of my iPhoto library - isn't even half full yet.

Ah, technology. The iMac has 25,000 times the disk space as the Compaq Deskpro that I bought in 1985 - and I didn't even buy the biggest disks that were available last year. And this year is supposed to bring 1TB disks. It's hard to imagine ever filling up one of those - but I felt the same way about the 20MB disk in the Deskpro.

One of these days I need to start editing all this footage. Real soon now!

CNN says:

Iraq hanged two of Saddam Hussein's aides early Monday, and one of the condemned was accidentally decapitated.

The official video of the hangings shows Hussein's half-brother lying headless below the gallows, his severed head several yards away, The Associated Press reported.

"Accidentally"?

Am I the only one who has a hard time believing that?

The calendar tells me that not only is today Martin Luther King Day, it's also his actual birthday.

They say that even a stopped clock is right twice a day; even always-on-Monday federal holidays fall on the right day, once in a while.

The much-forecast (and much-feared) ice storm that was supposed to glaze over Champaign this weekend has - so far - not materialized. The temperature has stayed just far enough above freezing that all we've had is rain.

Elsewhere - e.g., most of Okalahoma, parts of Missouri - conditions are not so pleasant.

CNN says:

SACRAMENTO, California (AP) -- A woman who competed in a radio station's contest to see how much water she could drink without going to the bathroom died of water intoxication, the coroner's office said Saturday.

And she didn't even win the contest....

Finished (last night) reading The Road to Science Fiction #5: The British Way, edited by James Gunn. It waited on the shelf for nine years until its turn came.

It's a good book, too. I feel rather the chump for taking so long to get around to it.

Currently reading The Draco Tavern, by Larry Niven. It's a bunch of Draco Tavern stories, going back a long way. (Maybe it's all of them?) Most I've already read, but there have been a few surprises.

(The reading list - which I've been maintaining for nearly twenty-three years - tells me that in 2006 I read only eight books. During my last two years of high school, I averaged just over 100 pages per day of purely recreational reading. I didn't get out much then. Come to think of it, I still don't....)

Poking around the CNN web site, I found an article by David Kirkpatrick, who says:

We're entering an era of ubiquitous wireless broadband, where data will be available to us wherever we go. In that kind of world, we will not need iTunes. I doubt most people will want to buy or "own" music at all. It will be far more useful to pick from a giant online library and listen to whatever we want wherever we are.

Well, now. With iTunes, I pay 99¢, and I get a song. I can keep the song as long as I want it, and I can listen to it as many times as I want. I can download it to my iPod, and listen to it there as many times as I want. I don't have to pay Apple anything unless I actually buy something.

Will the same be true on music subscription services? I think not. Instead, I predict that the Music Services of the Future will work like this: Pay a flat fee every month, whether you use the service or not. (No, not a flat fee. It will go up every year, just like the cable bill.) Choose from whatever songs the service feels like providing this month; if they've dropped your favorite song, too bad.

Happily, there is an alternative: we are indeed entering the era of ubiquitous wireless broadband, but we are also entering the era of nearly infinite, cheaper-than-water disk space. So instead of some pay-per-listen scheme, it's better to buy songs outright and store them on disks that are physically tiny but can hold 10,000 songs.

(Better for me, I suppose. Not so good for companies pushing the music subscription service idea.)

I just queued up a credit-card payment to cover last month's Christmas shopping (plus car repairs, etc., etc.; it was an expensive month), so now Christmas really, truly is over.

The day so far has been overcast & drizzly; the temperature got as high as 51° (in January?) but in the last hour or so began to fall.

Tonight's forecast: rain, freezing rain, chance of snow. Not much change through the weekend, either.

Somehow I don't think we'll be going anywhere until Monday morning.

For some reason, we've been watching old movies lately.

A week or two ago, we watched Raiders of the Lost Ark (since Santa brought Jennifer a nice boxed set of all three). I've seen this movie uncounted times in the last twenty-six years, but there are two things I learned about it this time:

• Alfred Molina has a bit part ('Satipo'). I knew him from more recent movies (The Da Vinci Code, Spider-Man 2 and Chocolat, to name a few), but never recognized him in Raiders of the Lost Ark until Jennifer pointed him out.
• In the big scene at the end, the fella in the robes & hat who presides over the ark-opening ceremony (and comes to a bad end - a messy bad end), that was Belloq. I'd been wondering for a long time why the Nazis just happened to have a priest in their secret submarine pen on a tiny Greek island; it makes a bit more sense now.

And tonight we finished watching E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (I suppose Spielberg wanted to use the short title, but figured nobody would know what the movie was about). The observant Jennifer again pointed out something I had failed to notice on my own: one of Elliott's friends was played by a very young C. Thomas Howell (who later starred in The Hitcher and Soul Man, two movies I saw way back in the eighties).

Ah, nostalgia.

(Also appearing in E.T.: a thirteen-year-old Erika Eleniak, later known as Playmate of the Month, June 1989. Or so the IMDB web site says; I don't recall seeing her in the movie, nor her name in the credits.)

I can't believe I just used the word slumbrous in conversation.

Mail just now, from Iambic:

Thank you for contacting iambic and I apologize for the confusion. As a previous customer of Two Peaks Software, this is a free upgrade from your previous purchase made through Two Peaks Software. With the acquisition of Two Peaks Software, we have updated the software and you may activate your product. If you have any questions, please feel free to contact us further. Thank you.

It's nice that they've updated Vehicle Manager, and very generous of them not to charge for it, but I think I'll stick with what I've got.

(I just checked the system requirements for the new Vehicle Manager: it requires Windows Mobile 5 or later. The X30 is running Windows Mobile 2003 Second Edition, and Dell has refused to offer OS upgrades for the X30. So even if I wanted to run the new Vehicle Manager, I couldn't.)

In the inbox this morning:

Thank you for ordering Vehicle Manager for Windows from iambic. This email is a proof of purchase for your order number [censored]. Please save or print a copy of this email for your records.

There were two of these messages. Same order number, same download & activation instructions, etc.

The only problem: I haven't bought anything from these people. I did buy a copy of Personal Vehicle Manager, from Two Peaks Software; but that was years ago.

Two Peaks was bought last year by Iambic, which has been pestering me ever since to buy more software. I've ignored them, because I don't need anything they're selling. I guess they've decided to take matters into their own hands.

If anything from Iambic shows up on my credit card statement, I'll be very unhappy.

I didn't watch the President's speech tonight, but I did read the transcript on the White House web site. (Handy things, web sites.) Mr. Bush started by saying:

Tonight in Iraq, the Armed Forces of the United States are engaged in a struggle that will determine the direction of the global war on terror - and our safety here at home. The new strategy I outline tonight will change America's course in Iraq, and help us succeed in the fight against terror.

Well, it might work...otherwise, we'll have to wait until Inauguration Day 2009 for a solution to the Iraq Disaster. (Thank God for the 22nd Amendment....)

Created a second iMovie project this evening, then imported the contents of camcorder tape #2 into it: another 11GB of disk space. There's still 200GB left on that disk, so I think I'll have more than enough space to import all six tapes.

I did manage to crash iMovie once while setting up the second project. Oops.

Years ago, I had a video-editing package (StudioDV version one-point-something) installed on nessus. Back then, nessus had only 20GB of disk space, so there wasn't room to import big chunks of video. My video productions were thus limited to just a few minutes. But the iMac has almost half a terabyte of disk space, so I can import everything.

It's fascinating to watch the old Jake videos, from when he was a baby. He was so tiny! (Now he's a big fella, who says things like, "I did not plan to watch E.T. tonight.") His hairless phase seems to have lasted much longer than Sam's did.

One of these days I'll be finished importing & editing, and will have nice DVDs for the grandmas. No, really!

Price: $600; availability: not until June.

And suddenly, nobody cares any more about the LinkSys iPhone, announced last month. OK, nobody cared last month, either, except to snort a bit at so blatant a ripoff of Apple's iBrand.

LinkSys' lawyers will file a trademark-infringement suit, I'm sure. Not so much because they expect to win; they're just trying to get a cash settlement from Apple before handing over the trademark.

It reminds me of the spud who, some years back, registered panavision.com, put up a cheesy little web page about Pana, Illinois, then tried to sell the domain to the Panavision people. The judge sided with Panavision on that one, and Mr. Spud went home with empty pockets.

Yes, I want an iPhone.

No, I don't really expect I'll be able to afford one any time soon. Nor do I expect Cingular to abandon its [censored]-the-customers business model.

Too bad. The iPhone is amazingly cool.

I felt very clever with my geomag set until I found textodigital.com:

This giant icosahedron is made with five reinforced rhombicosidodecahedra (those on the yellow columns), and seven normal rhombicosidodecahedra.

It takes 1595 balls, 4485 rods, 239 pentagons and 515 squares to build this monster. I shudder to think how many sets that is, and how much they'd cost.

Now the stellated icosahedron I built yesterday doesn't seem nearly as impressive.

The Carmi Times says:

Lyndell M. Doty, 82, Bone Gap, formerly of Grayville, died at 8:53 p.m. Friday, Jan. 5, 2007 at Fairfield Memorial Hospital.

Mrs. Doty was the daughter of Elsie Mae Pollard and Ferdinand Felty, which means she's related to me somehow through my great-grandmother Barbara Ellen Felty. I just don't know how.

David Rath's web site - now, alas, defunct - said that Ferdinand Felty's ancestors are Edgar Charles Felty (who is really Charles Edgar Felty), Sylvester M. Felty, Albert S. Felty and William Michael Felty (really two brothers, William and Michael Felty); Barbara Ellen Felty's ancestors are Sylvanus C. Felty and Isaac N. Felty.

Albert S. Felty and Isaac N. Felty were either brothers or cousins, which means Mrs. Doty and I are either 4th or 5th cousins, once removed.

Mail from HR: "Fill out this form."

Uh...all right, if you insist.

One of the questions:

What potentially relevant areas do you spend time pursuing or reading about? (e.g. blogging, chess, gardening, Japanese history, parasailing, stamp collecting)

Exactly how parasailing might be relevant to my job is - alas - left unexplained.

We took down the Christmas tree today, so Christmas is now completely over.

We packed up all the decorations last week, so I imagine visitors to the house must have been a bit puzzled by a bare, unlit tree standing in the living room.

We put off boxing it up because we wanted to remove all the lights first, and that was too big a job to attempt during the week. In the end, it took three hours, two people and one band-aid, and made a huge mess on the living room floor, but we were successful: our tree is pre-lit no longer. (I guess it's post-lit now.)

Christmas is over. But there's only six weeks to Valentine's Day! The grocery stores are already selling Valentine's Day candy, too.

I've been on vacation for the last three weeks. Even though I've spent a goodly chunk of time every day keeping up with mail, keeping the build machines running, and generally dealing with all the boring old infrastructure of my job, it's been very restful.

Alas, I must return to work tomorrow.

Imported an entire MiniDV tape into iMovie yesterday, ending up with fifty-three clips (most of which were single-frame snapshots) and 12GB of raw footage. Next: divide the raw footage into separate iMovie projects, edit together a set of movies, pass them along to iDVD and burn a few DVDs for the grandmas.

(The promise of easily doing this sort of video foolery was one of the things that persuaded Jennifer to get an iMac. She's been waiting patiently for almost a year for me to figure out how to actually do it. Real Soon Now, honest!)

The other day I first heard about CentOS:

CentOS is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendors redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible. (CentOS mainly changes packages to remove upstream vendor branding and artwork.) CentOS is free.

My first thought was that CentOS is just Red Hat Enterprise Linux with the serial numbers filed off. (I was right, too.)

I don't use Linux - I don't even like it very much - but this smells more than a little like software piracy. Yes, the GPL says that Red Hat must release the source for RHEL, and that CentOS is allowed to do a global s/Red Hat/CentOS/ and ship the results as its own product, but that doesn't make it right.

Meanwhile, down in Florida:

Neighbors near Daryl Brown's Arlington home said a tree in his yard bears the image of Jesus. The likeness has created a buzz in the neighborhood and has many residents at a loss for words.

I would have expected a divine being to manifest himself in a more dignified manner than as a misshapen sort-of face assembled from tree galls in some yutz's back yard.

Yesterday, I spent the day driving around western Illinois, searching for highway signs marking county boundaries.

I found & photographed signs for McDonough, Hancock, Warren, Henderson, Mercer, Rock Island, Knox, Henry, Bureau & Stark counties: ten counties in ten hours, one better than I had expected. Still to go: Jo Daviess, Stephenson, Winnebago, Boone, Carroll, Ogle, Whiteside, Lee, De Kalb & Morgan.

After nearly three years of intermittent effort, the Illinois Counties project is nearing completion. What will I do for fun when it's finished? (Jennifer says she's afraid to find out.)

CNN tells me that over in Saudia Arabia the hajj is done: the hajjis - all 2.5 million of them - are going home. Surprisingly, there were no stampedes this year. Most years, or so it seems, a few hundred hajjis get trampled or crushed on their way to one or another of the rituals.

The hajj seems so impractical these days, there being so many Muslims, and travel being so easy. I can't imagine feeling particularly spiritual in the middle of two and a half million people, going through a set of rituals so thoroughly choreographed & controlled.

Maybe it's different for the people actually doing it.

Meanwhile, over at http://www.caldwellcartoons.com/:

The cartoons on this page were done back in the seventies and most appeared originally in the pages of the National Lampoon. As a result of some recent interest in the old stuff, John has decided to offer signed and dated inkjet prints of these cartoons on Strathmore drawing paper, for a negligible price of only $50, plus $5 shipping.

I particularly like number seven, though not enough to spend $55 for a signed, dated, etc., etc.

It's probably a bit crude to have hanging on the wall, anyway. But it makes me laugh.

This morning, Jennifer said to me, "You have bronchitis. Go to the doctor."

So after lunch I tootled over to Convenient Care (open on holidays, albeit with reduced staff). Two and a half hours later, I had a diagnosis (bronchitis) and two medications (an antibiotic, and some codeine-enhanced cough medicine).

I grow weary of popping pills every day. Please, can I be twenty again?

Fired up the VPN a few times today, to check work mail and keep an eye on the build machines - the build never stops, not even on holidays - and discovered that everybody else is taking the day off: no mail, from anyone, all day. Even the people who can't wipe their noses without announcing it across six mailing lists have fallen silent.

I'd say the mail servers are down, but the mail I sent did get through.

Jennifer & I watched a bit of New Year's Eve television last night, after the kids went to bed.

Hearing Dick Clark struggle to speak made me a little sad. (Almost as sad as seeing fifty-nine-year-old Meat Loaf camping it up on Paradise by the Dashboard Light with a woman somewhere between one-half and one-third his age.)

The musical entertainment was mostly rap; after listening to a half-dozen 'songs', I came to the conclusion that really there are only two rap songs. One is sung by men:

Look at me!
I'm a famous rap star!
I have lots of money!
I can have sex with any woman I want,
Because I'm a famous rap star!

The other is sung by women:

Look at me!
I'm a famous rap star!
All you men in the audience,
you want to have sex with me!
But you can't,
Because I'm a famous rap star!

(Closed-captioning is really quite helpful in deciphering rap lyrics.)