February 2007 Archives

Online banking says our state income tax refund was deposited yesterday, less than a fortnight after we filed our returns. I think that's even faster than last year.

No sign of our federal refund, though.

The New Horizons spacecraft is just a few hours from its closest approach to Jupiter. Perhaps it will send back some interesting pictures.

After Jupiter, New Horizons has 3,058 days of nothing much to do until it reaches Pluto (on Bastille Day, 2015).

I can't imagine working on a project like New Horizons. I lack the patience.

Last night, the thermometer said 101.3°, and my right ear was a bit painful; so this morning I went to see the doctor.

My temperature was quite normal, but Mme. Doctor agreed that my ear needed a little help and prescribed a course of antibiotics. (Biaxin, the stuff that makes Jacob throw up.)

The pills are enormous, too.

A bit of construction here at Wolfram Research World HQ today: the concrete slab that used to be an ugly little strip mall (until storms last April tore off some of the roof) is going to become a new parking lot.

The constant hammering is just a little distracting - where little is defined as I'm about to start throwing office furniture out the window at that [censored] jackhammer.

The Carmi Times says:

Carl H. "Bud" Maurer, 91, Carmi, died Saturday evening Feb. 24, 2007 at Wabash Christian Retirement Center in Carmi.

Mr. Maurer was the son of Jacob Maurer, Jr., the brother of my great-grandfather Harry Maurer; so he was my first cousin twice removed.

Finished (yesterday evening) reading Burning Tower, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle. It was a disappointment: characters I didn't care about doing things that weren't very interesting, and most of them reached the end of the book not much different than they were at the beginning.

Pournelle says there's going to be a third book, Burning Mountain. I might read it, if/when it's published. Or I might not.

Currently reading Wolves of the Calla, by Stephen King. Some years back I read the first four books in the Dark Tower series, then I got distracted. Time to finish up.

We've a bit of an ice storm going on outside: all afternoon it's been raining, with the temperature hovering right at 32°. The trees are pretty iced up just now, and the power's been flickering a bit.

(No problems with the DSL, obviously.)

And why hasn't he reworked Candle in the Wind for Anna Nicole Smith?

Our camcorder has a snapshot function: hit the button, it records a five-second video clip (which is really just a single frame overlaid with a cheesy shutter animation). We used it quite a bit, way back in 2000, so there were quite a few of these in the MiniDV Tape #1 iMovie project.

That's rather silly. As video clips, they occupy about 17MB each; as single-frame JPEGs, they're about 100KB. So this evening I used the iMovie save-frame function to export JPEGs of all our camcorder snapshots, then imported them into iPhoto. I don't know what I'll do with them there, but I saved about 500MB by moving them.

(Remember when 500MB was a lot of disk space?)

I really need to get going on the iMovie project. Grandparents are coming down from Arlington Heights in a few weeks, and it would be nice to have a DVD to give them.

Sam's been in his crib since 9:00pm, but it sounds like he hasn't gone to sleep yet: I hear chattering & singing on the monitor, plus the occasional thump on the wall. (Perhaps he's trying to push the crib across the room, to get at my desk. I wouldn't put it past him - he's quite the furniture mover.)

A year ago, staying up late for Sam meant 2:00am, or later. So I'm not too concerned that he's still awake at 9:30pm or 10:00pm.

The other day, I was catching up with my RSS feeds in Google Reader. Wil Wheaton had a post, life sure does come at you fast, which had a link to Jessica Hagy's site, Indexed. I followed the link, read a few posts, then decided to subscribe.

I clicked the add-to-Google button, and now I have a mostly invisible, completely inaccessible subscription: it's not in the subscription list, but the All Items page shows 14 new items. Whenever new posts go up on Indexed, the number increases.

I've tried everything I can think of: deleting all my subscriptions & restoring them from backup; logging out of Google Reader; clicking the various Refresh / Show All Items / etc., etc. links. Nothing seems to work.

There might be something wrong with the RSS feed for Indexed. Perhaps if I unsubscribe for a while, Google Reader will get itself sorted out. Too bad, it's an interesting site.

Update: I switched to Expanded View, scrolled all the way to the end of the list, clicked Mark All as Read, and the All Items thingy fixed itself. How nice. (Does this mean it's safe to resubscribe to Indexed?)

Jennifer reports that Sam has figured out how to climb out of the Pack & Play, which leaves his crib as the only container he is unable to escape.

The word 'shampoo', when viewed upside-down, looks a bit like 'oodways'.

What's an oodway? Is it some species of small, furry animal - "This is my pet oodway, Reggie. Isn't he cute?" - or is it just pig latin for 'wood'?

Apparently tonight is the last night some yutz in a goofy costume is going to leap about the University of Illinois basketball court at halftime: and there will be much weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth amongst the fans.

I try not to gnash my teeth. (I'm afraid of knocking loose the crown on #30.)

Some people think the Chief is a noble symbol, an honored tradition, etc., etc. I'm not one of them. Other people think the Chief is an evil, racist caricature. I'm not one of them, either.

I just think that the Chief is cheesy & lame, not to mention a little embarrassing. I can't say that I'll miss him. (I wouldn't miss the basketball team, either, if it went away. Ditto the football team.)

Lately, I've been calling him Chef Illiniwek, followed by my best Isaac Hayes impersonation: Hello, children!

(As long as we're getting rid of embarrassing holdovers from the 1920s, what about the Miss America pageant? That one has lingered way past its time.)

Random items on a Tuesday evening:

• Sam had his eighteen-month checkup today. He's 26 pounds and 33 inches tall; both approximate, as the notion of standing still while measurements are taken hasn't occured to Mr. Sam just yet. Three vaccinations this time: two in one arm, one in the other. He howled, poor little guy.
• We have finished shoveling the driveway. (The recent warm temperatures have been a huge help.) We even managed to excavate the mailbox, so we should get mail tomorrow, for the first time in a week. Mr. Newspaper Guy will no doubt be happy to resume use of the orange newspaper box. Tossing the paper up onto the driveway has been so difficult this last week that half the time he just couldn't manage it: yesterday's paper, for example, was left floating in the gutter.
• I saw a headline on Fox News: Anna Nicole Smith's Body Is Deteriorating. Well, she is dead, people. (I never watch Fox News, except by accident. I don't trust them.)
• The disposal began making an astonishing racket this evening, during the after-dinner cleanup. Usually this means something has fallen into it, but we couldn't see anything. After rooting around inside the thing, and trying to point a flashlight into it - This must be what it's like to be a dentist, I thought - I gave up and unbolted the disposal from the sink. (They're much easier to work with that way.) There was a small piece of white plastic wedged against the side of the chamber, battered into unrecognizability by the disposal. What was it? Where did it come from? Did I reassemble the disposal correctly, or will it fall off the next time somebody throws the switch? You make the call!
• Jennifer & I looked over our tax returns this evening. Everything looks good. Another big refund, woowoo. (Though I think I will adjust my withholding so as to trade next year's refund for a boost in take-home pay.)
• I bought a coffee maker yesterday: a four-cup Mr. Coffee, with timer, so I can have twenty ounces of caffeinated goodness waiting for me when I get up in the morning. I also bought a travel mug, so I can enjoy my drug of choice while waiting with Jake for the school bus.
• In change at the grocery store yesterday: a 2007D penny. I'll have to add that to my collection. I'm not a very serious coin collector, but I do try to collect one of each denomination and mint mark every year. (February seems a bit early for pennies, I must say.)

And that's the news of the day. I'm very tired. Time to read a bit - I'm about halfway through Burning Tower - and then to bed.

New from Lego, the Millennium Falcon:

This monster has over five thousand pieces, measures 33 × 22 × 8 inches, and costs $500. (Limit 5 per customer, Lego somewhat optimistically cautions.)

I think our net worth would have to be a few digits longer before I'd consider buying one of these. But it's certainly impressive.

The recent chatter here about income tax refunds, Lotto winnings (or the lack thereof) and money in general has made me wonder: just how much money would it take to significantly (and permanently) change our lives?

I'm talking about actual cash in hand. Lottery prizes are a bit deceptive: the lump-sum payment is considerably less than the official prize value - and taxes whittle it down even further. So your $10,000,000 jackpot might turn out to be $3,000,000. (Still nothing to sneeze at, I suppose.)

• 1¢ - Pennies are pretty much useless these days. When I see one lying on the ground, I don't even bother to pick it up (unless I'm the one who dropped it). I don't carry around change; I keep it in a plastic bag on my dresser. When the bag fills up, I take it to the bank & cash it in.
• 10¢ - Almost as useless as pennies. A dime won't even buy a telephone call any more. (Not that there are any pay phones left: they were too useful for drug dealers, hence were removed. The drug dealers have switched to cell phones, but the pay phones haven't returned.)
• $1 - I found a dollar once, in one of the breakrooms at WRI. I sent mail to one of the internal mailing lists: "If this is your dollar, come get it; otherwise, I'll buy a can of Mt. Dew with it and drink a toast to my anonymous benefactor." Nobody claimed it. (One person even expressed surprise that I had tried to find out whose dollar it was.)
• $10 - A non-trivial sum, but still not terribly significant. I'd probably put it in my wallet, carry it around for a while, then spend it on M&Ms, or lunch at McDonald's, or something equally irresponsible.
• $100 - I imagine Jennifer & I would split this down the middle, and I'd spend my half on books, or CDs. It's enough to have some fun, but not enough to do anything practical with.
• $1,000 - Furniture, small kitchen machineries (e.g., a new dishwasher), that sort of thing: items we could pretty easily afford anyway.
• $10,000 - This is enough to undertake one or two major household projects (remodel the kitchen, buy a bedroom set, etc.), but afterward life would go on much as it had before.
• $100,000 - Now we're getting into some real money: enough to pay off the mortgage, with the remainder going into savings as a very nice emergency fund. With the mortgage payment gone, we could easily afford a new car (something large enough to carry two grownups, two kids, and all the kids' gear). But when the dust settled, life still wouldn't be that much different: we'd be living in the same house as before, the kids would be going to the same school as before, I'd still have to go to work. But we'd certainly be more comfortable, and more financially secure.
• $1,000,000 - A million dollars isn't what it used to be. It's not enough to retire on, for one thing. But it's enough to buy a chunk of land out in the country and build a spiffy house on it, which is what we'd probably do. (I don't want a McMansion, of which there are hundreds going up in Champaign, packed cheek-by-jowl into subdivisions with cheesy faux-French names: Pointe du Chien Mort, that sort of thing.) The remainder would make a good-sized college fund for Jake & Sam.
• $10,000,000 - Hm. New house. College fund. Retirement. Or - stand by for insane middle-aged pipe dream - start some kind of computer-related business. Software consulting, maybe, just to keep busy. (I suppose managing this much wealth would be a job in itself.)
• $100,000,000 - At this point, imagination fails me. After buying everything I can think of, funding a comfortable retirement for Jennifer & myself, and sending the kids to whatever college(s) they might want to attend, there'd still be eighty or ninety million dollars left over. Trust funds for the children, and for the grandchildren? Some kind of charitable foundation?

Alas, yesterday's Lotto prize went to somebody in Lindenhurst, so it's all moot.

I believe I have solved the mystery of the unusually large income tax refunds: the medical insurance premiums that we pay - that represent an alarmingly high percentage of our income - are paid with pre-tax dollars. (How nice.) The taxable income reported on my W-2 is therefore considerably less than the gross pay reported on my paychecks. If the withholding is calculated against the latter figure, it's no surprise that too much was withheld.

I have a bit more confidence now in the numbers from TaxCut.

The final TaxCut update came through on Thursday, so one final sanity check on our returns and then it's time to e-file. I imagine the refunds will be deposited by the end of the month. (Isn't technology wonderful?)

Once again, we have been spared the terrible burden of wealth.

(A story I read once, long ago: Reporter asks wealthy man, "How much money is enough?" Wealthy man replies, "A little bit more." I thought the wealthy man was one of the Vanderbilts - Cornelius, perhaps - but the first page of Google results all say it was one of the Rockefellers. Go figure.)

Another three inches of snow fell last night, because there just wasn't enough of it on the ground already. We needed more.

The huge drift at the end of our driveway is still there. We've had no mail delivery in almost a week, because the carriers can't reach the mailbox. (God forbid they should get out of the car and walk up to the house, or anything like that.)

The street hasn't been plowed, either. It's rather annoying.

Jacob got to play in the snow for an hour this morning, while Jennifer shoveled the driveway. (I was inside, communing with the heating pad and writing Python code while Sam watched Toy Story 2 for the 29,000th time.)

Tomorrow we'll chip away a bit more from the drift, and maybe start on the sidewalk. Next week is supposed to be quite a bit warmer (mid-thirties, even low forties - be still, my pounding heart!), which should melt a bit of our incipient glacier.

Only thirty days until spring....

CNN says:

NEW YORK (Reuters) -- Police called to a Long Island man's house discovered the mummified remains of the resident, dead for more than a year, sitting in front of a blaring television set.

I suppose that's one of the hazards of automatic banking: the Social Security gets deposited automatically, the bills get paid automatically - and nobody bothers to check whether the person is still alive. Perhaps it's better to write a few checks every month?

As Lord High Treasurer of the Champaign County Genealogical Society, I see quite a few checks. The other day I saw one - annual dues, from one of the society members - with a check number somewhere above 29000. They sure do write a lot of checks, thought I. Then I saw the date next to the name & address: it turns out they've had this checking account for over forty-three years.

It is to boggle.

(On the other hand, dividing 29,000 checks by 516 months works out to over fifty checks per month for forty-three straight years. I'm still impressed that they've kept the same checking account for nearly half a century, but I begin to doubt that they really did write 29,000 checks.)

Last weekend we bought a new microwave oven (from Sears); it arrived today.

It's a microhood, a combination stove hood / microwave oven, very much like the old one - except that it's shiny clean, and it works. The controls are simpler, which is nice. There's even a cook-one-minute button, which is very handy. (Push it again, it's cook-two-minutes. And so on, up to 99 minutes 59 seconds - at which point the microwave oven will collapse into a miniature black hole, fall through the kitchen floor to the center of the Earth and begin to consume the planet.)

The delivery / installation charge was almost as much as the oven itself: $140. All week, I had the nagging suspicion that maybe I could have saved all that money by installing the thing myself. You just slide the old one out, slide the new one in, tighten a few screws and - presto! - you're done, right?

It turns out to be a bit more complicated than that. Mr. Installer - who seemed friendly enough, even though he never spoke more than two sentences in a row before falling silent once more - had to drill holes in the wall, mount a bracket, mess around with drill templates, etc., etc. It looked like the sort of project I'd spend all afternoon on, after which the oven would look nice for about ten minutes before crashing onto the stovetop.

So I'm glad we paid to have it installed.

I let the sales clerk talk me into signing up for a Sears credit card: she said if I did, I could get a $50 rebate on the delivery charge. It turns out she was wrong about that. Our microwave oven didn't cost enough to be eligible for the delivery rebate. Now I'm stuck with a credit card I don't really want. Thanks bunches, Sears.

I had a Sears card, long ago; apparently I didn't use it enough, so the Sears people cancelled it on me. Did they tell me my card had been cancelled? No, I didn't find out until I tried to buy something with it. I've held a bit of a grudge against Sears ever since. I've annoyed countless cashiers with the Tale of the Cancelled Credit Card, and probably embarrassed Jennifer a few times as well.

I imagine Sears will end up cancelling this one, too, since I don't expect to use it for anything. (If they ever send me a card, I most likely won't even carry it in my wallet. Too much junk in there already.)

But it's a nice microwave oven. (It has a popcorn setting. Every microwave oven manufactured in the last twenty years has had a popcorn setting, and every box of microwave popcorn sold in that time has included a warning not to use the oven's popcorn setting. Left hand, meet right hand.)

Too much snow-shoveling yesterday, I fear. Fortunately, I have powerful medications left over from my last back sprain and expect to be much improved in a day or two.

(More snow last night: two or three inches, by the look of it. Jennifer & Jacob are out shoveling the driveway. Jake's been having a grand time in the snow. If you say, "Let's go outside," he's bundled up & ready to go in about two minutes.)

NOAA says the temperature was -9° while Jake & I were out waiting for the bus this morning. Jake didn't seem to notice, and played in the snow until the bus came.

My feet got a little cold, though. Pity me, pity me.

Downloaded the last TaxCut update this evening. Our returns have been finished for a few weeks now, but I wanted to wait for this update before filing.

The software says we'll get another sizable refund this year, which just seems wrong.

I printed copies of both returns (federal and state), and will look them over. Perhaps I've made a data-entry error somewhere.

Currently reading Burning Tower, by Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle, and probably not having quite the reading experience Mssrs. N & P had intended.

Whenever a new character shows up with a goofy name - Regapisk, or Maydreo, or Egmatel - I find myself thinking: That's an anagram, isn't it? Then I stop reading. Skip rage? Rag spike? Paris keg? After a while I give up and go back to reading, but I've lost the momentum.

Or a character shows up with a name like Clever Squirrel, and I think: Who was top bidder at a sf convention charity auction, and picked that name? Ever since Orson Scott Card raffled off a slot in one of his books, I've been a little suspicious of where characters' names come from.

When I'm not doing anagrams, I find myself thinking, You're going somewhere with this, aren't you? I have doubts.

And I still haven't figured out the whole Lords vs. Lordkin vs. kinless thing. Somebody draw me a diagram, please.

One more number, then I'm done:

• 3 hours: How long it takes for novocaine to wear off.

Now I can eat lunch. Yay.

Two numbers:

• 13½ inches: How much snow the blizzard dumped on Champaign.
• $85: How much it costs to have a crown re-attached.

Now seems like a good time to give up caramels....

Jennifer & I gave each other heart-shaped boxes of candy this morning, which was nice.

Alas, mine included a caramel that was sticky enough to pull off one of my crowns (the one on #30, for those keeping track of my dental work). Usually I'm pretty careful about caramels. I don't know what happened this time.

Mr. Dentist's office was closed yesterday and today, because of the blizzard, so he's already got a huge backlog of cancelled appointments to reschedule. He won't be very happy about having a surprise crown repair dropped on him as well.

It took several hours of effort - spread out over most of the day, with frequent rest breaks, so as not to end up in the emergency room - but we've cleared enough of our driveway that both cars can get out. Jennifer will have to do some fancy driving to make her escape: her half of the driveway is still pretty well buried.

Before the plows gave up yesterday, one of them left a huge pile of snow on the street right in front of our driveway. It's not the usual wall of snow thrown out by a passing plow: it's a pile of snow, pushed there by Mr. Plow Operator.

Thanks bunches, sir.

I suppose I could spend tomorrow digging through it, but I'm hoping that the plows will come back and clean up their mess before then.

The drift that runs across the driveway & front yard (and on into the neighbors' yard) was high enough that Jake could ride down it on his sled. He had a grand time playing in the snow.

The snow & wind have stopped; it's a bright, sunny day. It's also a bit cold: 8° as of 9:00am.

Rumor has it that the snowplows were running all night, so the roads are in pretty good shape this morning. I haven't been out of the house since Monday evening, so I wouldn't know.

Our project for the morning is to clear the driveway. It'll probably take all morning, too.

Snow still falling, wind still blowing. We have huge drifts in the back yard, and also across the front of the house (thereby blocking the garage door and the front door).

Everything is shutting down: stores, movie theaters, libraries, the bus system. Schools won't be open tomorrow, either: Jake gets a five-day weekend.

There's a rumor that Jimmy John's is still open and still delivering sandwiches. That seems just a little crazy: I'd need a lot of persuading (that is to say, a lot of money) before I'd risk my life to deliver a $5 bag of chow.

Before the big TypePad/Flickr migration project began, there were three kinds of images in the daybook:

1. Pictures I had taken and/or scanned;
2. Pictures from the (old, nasty) 3com webcam;
3. Random screen shots & images lifted from other web sites.

Everything from #1 has moved to Flickr, and - as of about ten minutes ago - all the daybook entries that include them now point to Flickr instead.

I'm not sure what to do with #2. I've imported them into iPhoto, where they have their own folder (unimaginatively named 'webcam'); it wouldn't be too much work to upload them to Flickr, then fix up the links as I did with #1. But would it be worth the trouble? These pictures are only 160×120 pixels, and not much good for anything.

I'm pretty sure that #3 will have to stay on Pair: the Flickr TOS forbids uploading other people's images.

I really want to remove the Daybook directory from the Pair server. I imagine I'll move the remaining images to some other directory, fix up the (relatively few) links, and then the Daybook directory can go away.

Snow began to fall around 10:00pm last night, and it's still coming down. The latest forecast calls for 10 to 15 inches before the storm is over. The wind is pretty fierce, too, so there are huge drifts everywhere.

Most everything is closed today. Jake's home from school, I'm home from work (and, judging by the very light email traffic, so is everybody else).

We haven't had a blizzard like this since the big New Year's Eve storm of 1998.

The forecast now calls for eight to twelve inches of snow: half tonight, half tomorrow. The local schools have already announced that they'll be closed tomorrow.

So far, exactly zero snow has fallen.

I might just stay home tomorrow, if the roads are bad enough. I can work from home. (I can work from just about anywhere, which is a good thing, sometimes.)

I am gradually fixing up the image links in the daybook: switching them from the old location on http://patrick-rice.net/ to the new location at http://www.flickr.com/photos/pzr. This is a rather laborious process, and impossible to automate.

It bothers me a little that Flickr renames my files when I upload them. If Flickr disappears - or if I ever decide to drop my Flickr account - the daybook will be full of unfixable broken links. (Perhaps this migration project isn't such a good idea after all.)

I'm also thinking about what to do with the dusty old CityDesk site. I don't use it for anything any more, and I doubt that I'll ever update it. (CityDesk is dead & gone forever, even if Fog Creek refuses to admit it.) I'm toying with the idea of using iWeb (on mork) to create a spiffy title page with links to TypePad and Flickr, and a discreet little link to the CityDesk site (in case there's anybody out in the world who still cares about it).

NOAA says we have some interesting weather coming:

IT APPEARS AREAS ALONG AND NORTH OF A SPRINGFIELD TO CHAMPAIGN LINE WILL SEE THE HEAVY SNOW...WHERE 6 TO 8 INCHES MAY OCCUR BY LATE TUESDAY...WITH LOCALLY HIGHER AMOUNTS POSSIBLE IN THIS BAND.

Jake might get a four-day weekend out of this: Presidents Day on Monday, snow day on Tuesday.

Trinity Oaks, 2003 California, merlot: I can't say yet what the stuff tastes like, but the cork split in half when I was opening it, which seemed sufficiently noteworthy to mention here. (No wonder most wineries are using plastic stoppers these days.)

I don't think any cork got into the wine. (Maybe it would have improved the flavor?)

Packed up everybody this afternoon and crossed the frozen tundra to Peoria: today is Grandmother-in-Law Grace's 95th birthday, and we were invited to the party.

It was held at the same church as the Christmas party two months ago, but this time the piano had been turned to face the wall to prevent any improvisation thereon by the kids. (A five-year-old with a piano is to music what Jackson Pollock was to painting.)

There was quite a crowd, mostly unfamiliar faces. (After almost fourteen years, I can recognize most of Jennifer's relatives. I'm still working on the names, though.)

No injuries, no property damage, and everybody had a great time.

The forecast for Monday calls for temperatures above freezing, for the first time in many days. (The sputnik data file is on the other computer, and I'm too lazy to go look at it. Otherwise I'd know exactly how long we've been in the icebox.)

It's pathetic how excited I am about this.

Just about thirty years ago - when I lived in Dyer, Indiana - the temperature stayed below freezing for over a month. It set some kind of record. When the big freeze finally broke, there was much rejoicing.

Some years ago - I'm too lazy to look up exactly when - my mother (hi, Mom!) gave me a collection of old family photos. I scanned them all, got halfway into creating a set of web pages to display the pictures, and then...um...I got distracted.

The files sat on nessus for a long time, then last year moved (with all my other files) over to mork. They sat for a long time there, too, but tonight I imported them all into iPhoto and started organizing them. The files have a very bad naming convention, and I didn't always record the names of all the people in the pictures, but I think I can get everything neat & tidy.

And then? I'll think of something, I'm sure. I could have another book printed, like the Jake & Sam book we gave Grandma for Christmas. That would be nice.

Sputnik is reporting some seriously bogus weather data: wind speeds of 227mph, 6.2 inches of rain, that sort of thing.

Interference? Weak signal? Perhaps the cold has sapped sputnik's battery. Or maybe there's ice on the solar cells.

I really should get out there and check on it one of these days.

When the genealogists ask me why I haven't registered for the genealogical society conference (June 9th), I will say, "The baby ate my registration form."

I suppose I should clarify: he didn't eat the whole thing, he just tore it up and - apparently - chewed on it a little.

Maybe I can pick up another form at next week's meeting.

Woodbridge, by Robert Mondavi; Cabernet Sauvignon, California, 2004: generally vile, with distinct notes of nasty & wretched, and a horrid finish.

I don't even use Outlook any more, and it still manages to annoy me:

1. The X30 pops up a calendar item (say, for next week's genealogy society meeting); I click Dismiss; it goes away.
2. Later, I dock the X30 with nessus, mainly to recharge the battery but also to synchronize (especially Personal Vehicle Manager, the only software on the X30 that I actually use any more); synchronization completes, nessus and the X30 are happy.
3. Outlook - on nessus - pops up the same calendar item as the X30 did; I click Dismiss again; it goes away.
4. But now ActiveSync reports one item in need of synchronization; I click Sync.
5. Outlook pops up a warning box: Warning! Danger! An application is attempting to access Outlook! Cancel or allow? I cuss a bit, and click Yes; synchronization completes, again, and everybody's happy, again.

Maybe I should just buy Missing Sync, and synchronize the X30 with the iMac....

Uninstalled a bunch of software from nessus this evening: EditPad Lite, Retrospect, Easy Thumbnails, TiVo Desktop and probably a few other things I've already forgotten.

I don't use nessus much any more, and Jennifer & Jacob don't need text editors and backup utilities.

But afterward, I let Windows Update install .NET 3.0, which will probably eat up all the disk space released by my tidying up: and thus is equilibrium maintained.

I meant to shovel the sidewalk this evening, I really did...but, alas, I didn't.

Instead, I bought The Hollies' Greatest Hits from iTunes. More songs I remember from way back:

Hey, Carrie Anne!
What's your game now,
can anybody play?

I still worry a little about buying music from iTunes. I have CDs that I bought twenty years ago; I can still play them. Will my iTunes purchases still work in twenty years? Given Apple's habit of breaking backwards compatibility every few years (Apple II » Mac; 68K » PowerPC » Intel; OS 9 » OS X; etc., etc.), I'm skeptical.

But Sam is having a fit in the other room, and I really should go see what I can do to help....

Jake & I shoveled the driveway yesterday. Jake had a great time, but I'm feeling a bit creaky today. For "light, fluffy snow" (which is how the NOAA described it), pushing it around sure was work.

On the other hand, things could be worse. CNN says:

Nearly 60 inches [of snow] had fallen in areas along eastern Lake Ontario by mid-Wednesday, and weather forecasters said some areas could receive more than 100 inches before the system breaks up.

I can't imagine digging out from under eight feet of snow. Snowblowers must be very popular.

NOAA says the temperature was -5° this morning, while Jacob & I were out waiting for the school bus. I don't think I believe it.

It's been cold enough that yesterday's snow is all still here: no melting just yet, alas.

Work stuff:

I need MySQLdb for some Python code I'm working on, but MySQLdb isn't installed. MacPorts has MySQLdb:

% port info py-mysql
py-mysql 1.2.1_p2, python/py-mysql (Variants: mysql3, mysql4)
http://sourceforge.net/projects/mysql-python/
A package containing a Python module that allows you to connect to MySQL databases
Library Dependencies: python24, mysql5

That's nice. But it seems MacPorts wants to install MySQL too, which is not so nice. First, I already have MySQL installed & configured. Second, the MySQL server my Python code will be chatting with isn't on this machine.

I imagine many (most?) people use MySQLdb to connect to remote databases, so why the dependency on MySQL?

Finished (at precisely 10:57pm last night) reading Sahara, by Michael Palin: the companion volume to the television series (which I don't have on DVD after all, despite prior claims to the contrary).

It was a little bit like Around the World in 80 Days in that the first third of the journey took up the first three-fourths of the book, leaving the remainder to be squeezed into the last few chapters.

I don't know what I'm going to read next. Something, I'm sure. Maybe I'll take a week to work through all the magazines that have piled up over the last few months.

It's been snowing all morning. It's hard to tell from a sixth-floor window, but I think there's about two inches on the ground so far.

The streets haven't been plowed, but traffic is moving pretty well. (It's dry snow, very crunchy & not as slippery.)

No word yet on school closings.

Today's snow came earlier than I expected, starting even before Jacob & I walked down to the bus stop.

"It's a snow army!" Jake said.

An hour later, it's really coming down, and starting to accumulate. The Trade Center parking lot is going to be very interesting, once everybody shows up. (Myself, I snagged a front-row parking space, so I don't care how crazy the rest of the lot might get.)

I'm quite content to sit in my cozy warm office, and drink caffeinated beverages while watching the storm grind along outside the window.

Update: Today's Zen calendar entry:

This snow,
that wafts softly down
I could eat it!

How did they know it would snow today?

Tomorrow's forecast calls for three to five inches of snow, starting sometime in the morning and ending about the time I'll be driving home from work.

NOAA says that due to the reduced moisture in the air, the snow will be "light and fluffy".

It'll be easier to shovel that way, I suppose.

NOAA says it was -8° this morning when Jake & I were waiting at the bus stop. At least there wasn't much wind.

It's not much warmer now: 3°. Egad.

Sputnik says the temperature was -2° at 5:00am; the current temperature is 3°.

Sputnik also recorded 210mph winds earlier this evening, but I don't think I believe that.

I managed to set off the smoke alarms this evening, while baking muffins.

Our smoke alarms are loud, and there's no way to turn them off. They're also wired so that if one goes of, they all go off. Admittedly, these are desirable attributes when there's a fire, but they're rather annoying when it's just a bit of smoke from inept use of non-stick spray.

Jennifer & Jacob were trying to watch the Super Bowl halftime show. (Do they still play football in the Super Bowl, or is it all commercials and halftime show?) They weren't too happy with the ear-splitting beep-beep-beep. I did my best to persuade the alarms that there was no fire, that everything was fine, but they wouldn't listen to me.

After a few minutes, when I was starting to think about fetching the Hammer of Persuasion from the garage, they shut off by themselves. (It's true, silence is golden.)

The muffins weren't all that good, either.

Just about sixteen years ago, when I was living in Prairie View, I set off the smoke alarm in my apartment. I couldn't figure out how to shut that one up, either, so - instead of letting the wretched thing squeal and panic the neighbors - I ripped it down from the ceiling (slicing one of my fingers in the process).

Then I put it in the freezer. (Why the freezer? I don't know. It seemed like a good idea at the time.)

Our microwave finally gave up the ghost this morning: my bowl of oatmeal proved too much for it, and it died. The lights went out, the buttons stopped working.

We were planning to buy a new one anyway.

(After a few minutes, the microwave beeped & woke up again, just like K-9 in all those Dr. Who episodes. But we didn't trust it any more, so we unplugged it.)

Was messing around with Flickr just now, and got this:

Parse error: syntax error,
unexpected T_CONSTANT_ENCAPSED_STRING,
expecting T_VARIABLE or '$'
in /var/www/html/www.flickr.com/include/init_config.gne on line 1206

Hm...I wonder what happened to the pictures I was uploading....

Update: Shortly after this happened, Flickr was down for several hours of 'maintenance'. Coincidence? You make the call!

The good news: I discovered this morning that the camera in my phone has an image-quality setting, and it's been set to Low since I bought the phone.

The bad news: even with the image-quality setting changed to High, the camera takes crummy pictures.

The new keyboard & mouse are working nicely. No problems with interference, dropped characters, anything like that. (The wireless keyboard on nessus is always dropping characters. It's really annoying.)

The mouse is a little heavier than the old one, but that turns out to be a good thing. The old mouse was so light, I had a tendency to oversteer it. The new mouse is easier to control.

Toys I've recently considered buying, and why I'm not going to buy them:

1. The Yamaha YPT-300 keyboard: nowhere to put it, no time to play it, not much chance of ever playing it well, the kids would destroy it.
2. The Motorola RAZR V3 from T-Mobile: too expensive, no coverage in Carmi, camera takes crummy pictures.
3. Age of Empires III for OS X: no time to play it; the computer would probably beat me, every time, even on the super-easy setting; Jennifer would make fun of me.

I suppose I could buy some books. Or not: we've nowhere to keep them (the shelves are full, and there are several boxes more in the front closet), and I don't read very quickly any more. Ten pages a day is about all I can manage. Fifteen, if the kids go to bed early.

Poor Sam, he was impressively grumpy this evening. He sure did scream a lot at Papa, that's for sure. He didn't each much of his dinner, either. (Milk was very popular, though. He drank quite a bit.)

Is it really just a few new teeth causing all this? Or is he sick? He doesn't have a fever, so he's probably not sick. Whatever it is, I hope it's over soon.

1. Yesterday during dinner, Sam was heard to say, "Mama." Jennifer was very excited.
2. I've no doubt that, sometime soon, Sam is going to grab the wireless mouse from my desk and run off with it. The only uncertainty is whether I'll be able to find it again when he does.