March 2007 Archives

Entering more books into LibraryThing just now, I was surprised to discover that I'm the only LibraryThing member who has Jean Thompson's first three books (that's The Gasoline Wars, My Wisdom and The Woman Driver, for those playing the at-home version of our game).

I also have her next three books, Little Face, Who Do You Love and Wide Blue Yonder; they're shared with 2, 26 and 10 other LibraryThing members (respectively).

That will certainly help my obscurity score, which took a beating when I added The Lord of the Rings. Thousands of LibraryThing members have those books. Egad.

LibraryThing tells me I've entered 336 books so far.

(Jean Thompson has a web site: http://www.jeanthompsononline.com/. Nice, but rather sparse.)

A pre-breakfast conversation with Jacob:

I'm working on a new invention.
What is it?
Lowercase numbers!

Clever lad, is our Jacob.

And a big Happy Birthday to Jake & Sam's cousin Lily, who turns seven today. (Isn't that the age of reason, or something?)

Tomorrow is Jake's birthday: he'll be six.

The other day I was watching television. (I do that, sometimes.) During one of the commercials, the phrase Health & Fitness flashed on the screen, and I thought: there used to be a nudist magazine called Health & Fitness, published in the UK, mentioned in an episode of All Creatures Great and Small (Tristan sneaks an issue into the waiting room, hilarity ensues), and...it wasn't called Health & Fitness.

What was it called? Health & Something? Something & Fitness? I used to know this! My mind is going! AUGH!

I let my subconscious worry the question for a few days, then I gave up and asked google. The answer: Health & Efficiency. And it's still being published, too: http://www.healthandefficiency.co.uk/.

(Um. Don't click that link if seeing naked people disturbs you....)

MSNBC says:

NEW YORK - The Easter season unveiling of an anatomically correct chocolate sculpture of Jesus Christ, dubbed "My Sweet Lord" by its creator, has infuriated Catholics preparing to observe some of their holiest days of the year.

As with the caffeinated Moroni® crisis of last week, there have been no riots, no property damage, no deaths. Just angry letters & emails.

There's a new picture on Rosie O'Donnell's Flickr photostream today; the photo description had some interesting text in it:

This is an MMS message. Please go to http://mms.nextel.com/mms/anon/do/legacy/viewDirect
?sender=__________@messaging.nextel.com
&recipient=____________@photos.flickr.com
&password=______

Hm...is that Rosie's cell phone number? And is that the (supposed to be) secret email address & password for posting pictures to her phototream?

One wonders how many crank calls Rosie is going to get - and how many lewd and/or disgusting photos will be posted to her photostream - before she changes the locks.

Hm...forty-five minutes later (that is, fifteen minutes ago as this is written), Rosie posted another picture. Same phone number & account info, different password. Sorry, ma'am, still not fixed....

My $300 car repair turned into a $500 car repair, but at least now I can sit in my car and be - approximately - comfortable again.

No, not really comfortable. But I don't have to worry any more about falling into the back seat when I'm driving.

The mechanics gave me a mug full of candy, too. I don't know why.

The phone rang just now: the repair shop that's going to fix Mr. Explorer's latest problem, calling to complain that I'm late for my appointment.

I didn't know I had an appointment, you silly mechanics. I left three phone numbers with you people on Monday, and you didn't call any of them.

Perhaps their other customers are all mind-readers, so they assumed the same of me?

I finally found the pictures of Aldridge Cemetery that I took some years ago. (Alas, they're not very good pictures, so I probably won't bother scanning any of them.)

I also figured out when I took them: November 1, 2003.

I suppose this means I can obsess about something else now.

1. Fox News
2. Nancy Grace
3. Rush Limbaugh
4. Keith Olbermann
5. Any 'news' show that features people shouting at each other
6. Infomercials
7. Movies with the cussing bleeped out, bizarrely overdubbed ("You motherfather!"), or otherwise cleaned up to avoid offending anyone

That's all that come to mind just now. I'm sure there are more.

MSNBC says:

Autopsy Pending For Woman Found Dead Under Nude, Unconscious Man

One's mind is filled with questions. Alas, the article offers no answers.

A recent dinner conversation with Jacob:

Papa, how do you spell 'battleship'?
Well, let's break it up into smaller pieces. How do you spell 'ship'?
S...H...I...T!
Hm...I don't think that's quite right....

Sometime in the last ten years or so I drove down to Posey County, Indiana, and visited - among other sites - Alldridge Cemetery. Various ancestors & distant relations are buried there, so I took quite a few pictures.

I can't find them.

Even worse, I can't remember which camera I used: the old film camera, or the digital camera. I can't even remember what year I made the trip. I've looked for the pictures I took, both in iPhoto and in the dusty old box of prints, and couldn't find them.

The daybook tells me that I was in Posey County on April 20-21 of 2004; but was that the Alldridge Cemetery trip? I don't remember.

Update: the mystery road trip was definitely sometime after October 15, 2003, when I visited the UI Map and Geology Library in a futile attempt to locate some of the Posey County cemeteries I wanted to visit. Maybe April of 2004 is the right date after all. (So why can't I find the pictures? AUGH.)

Lately I've been mindful of a certain scrap of verse:

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

I don't suppose Yeats had software development in mind when he wrote that, but it fits.

NOAA says:

MOSTLY SUNNY. HIGHS AROUND 80. SOUTH WINDS 10 TO 15 MPH.

80° is unusual for March, but not unwelcome.

From the baby monitor: singing & chattering. Young Mr. Sam is awake.

He slept late this morning.

Finished reading Song of Susannah, book six of The Dark Tower by Stephen King.

Poor Susannah, she spent the entire book in labor.

I'd start book seven now, but for two things: first, I don't have it; second, I'm not so sure I should be spending money on books when there's a $300 car repair bill coming up this week.

I'm sure there's something unread yet readable already on the shelves.

CNN says that Just Add Coffee, a coffeeshop in Taylorsville, Utah, is selling t-shirts featuring the angel Moroni drinking coffee.

Mormons are taking offense at this, but in a rather mild way: they sent the Just Add Coffee proprietor a letter, informing him that the angel Moroni is a registered trademark of the church.

No riots, no property damage, no deaths. Just a letter. Adherents of a certain other religion - which shall remain nameless - might want to consider a similarly measured response the next time they see something in the newspaper that they don't like.

Grandparents came down from Arlington Heights today, to visit Jake & Sam. They brought birthday cake:

And presents, too. Lots of presents. (None for me, but my birthday isn't until August.)

This evening I bought a LibraryThing lifetime account. It was only $25, I couldn't resist.

This evening I entered a few more books (I'm over 200 now, hence the need to pay). I had high hopes when entering my eighty-year-old copy of The Druids by T. D. Kendrick (bought from a used-book store in Evanston, sometime in 1990 or 1991), thinking that surely I'd be the only person in all of LibraryThing with so rare & obscure a volume.

Alas, no: eleven other people own copies of this book.

(I almost signed up for a PayPal account, too, but Internet Explorer crashed before I could finish the signup form. Thanks bunches, 'softies.)

Thunder this evening, sounding like somebody in the next room knocking over furniture. (I'd accuse Sam, but he's asleep in his crib just now. Or quietly awake in his crib. With Sam it's hard to be sure.)

Lightning, too, flickering on the other side of the blinds (which have been on our things-to-replace list since the day we moved in, more or less).

Not much actual rain, though: sputnik has recorded about .15 inches since 8:00pm. (There was enough to give Jennifer a soaking on her way home from the grocery store. Poor Jennifer.)

The TiVo has started crashing: every few days, it will freeze up. Sometimes we have to power-cycle it to get it back; other times - e.g., this evening - it reboots itself.

TiVo has to last until November for us to break even on the lifetime account (for which we paid $300 back in 2005). If it doesn't, I'll feel quite the chump.

(If/when the TiVo dies, I doubt that we'll replace it. They don't do lifetime accounts any more, and $17/month is too expensive. We'd probably do better with a DVR from the cable company.)

Amazon.com & TiVo have a new cross-promotion: Amazon Unbox, which is a way of buying movies (etc.) from Amazon.com and having them automatically downloaded to your TiVo. It's a nice idea, but there are problems:

1. Downloading a two-hour movie takes a long time. No instant gratification here, sorry.
2. Only one Amazon.com account per TiVo. Jennifer signed up first, so I'm out in the cold.
3. The DRM is rather odious: rented movies, once started, must be finished within twenty-four hours, and expire after thirty days regardless. If your movie-watching time doesn't start until the kids are in bed, you have a problem.
4. The movie we downloaded - The Illusionist - had very poor sound, and no closed-captioning. Often enough we had to guess what the characters were saying to each other. I hope the rest of the Unbox catalog is more audible.

About The Illusionist - the audio track was wretched, but it was a very pretty film. Very artsy. A little too artsy, I think. Lots of art-film stock footage: a woman riding a white horse through a forest; a roomful of aristocratic types, in fancy Edwardian costumery, having a dinner party; etc., etc., blah blah blah.

I imagined little thought-balloons over the actors' heads: I'm in an art film! I am a serious actor!

We watched the middle hour on fast-forward, which improved the film considerably.

NOAA reports that the temperature at 1:00pm was 73°. My office window reports lots of sunshine, too.

This is a pleasant surprise, as I was expecting a cool, cloudy, drizzly day today.

Today's entry in the Little Zen Calendar:

No underrobes,
bare ass exposed--
gust of spring wind.

That's a bit racy to be displayed on my desk here at Wolfram Research World HQ.

Finished reading Wolves of the Calla, by Stephen King: a great big story (714 pages), and full of references to Stephen King books I haven't read. (Oops.) In particular, it might have been helpful to have read 'Salem's Lot.

I suppose next I'll read Song of Susannah, since I bought it last week.

(It turns out that nine years have passed since I read the first four books in the Dark Tower series: I started The Gunslinger on February 2, 1998; and finished Wizard and Glass on March 31, 1998. No wonder I didn't remember very much of them.)

My TypePad account has a bandwidth limit of 2GB per month.

My bandwidth usage so far this month: 0.00023286GB.

This just in: when Judge Michael P. McCuskey was an Illinois state trial judge, back in the 1990s, his nickname was Maximum Mike: apparently in recognition of the sentences he handed down.

I imagine using that nickname in court would be an effective way to get a contempt citation.

Judge McCuskey was nominated to the federal bench in 1998, and among his current caseload is the trial of E___ C______. (Yes, the trial for which I was almost a juror last October, and in which I have had a peculiar interest ever since.)

The particular crime of which Mr. C______ was found guilty carries a maximum penalty of ten years' imprisonment, so if I were him I'd be a little nervous just now.

Jennifer & I went to see Premonition yesterday.

It's a curious film: a woman (nicely played by Sandra Bullock) comes unstuck in time, and starts alternating between the days just before and just after her husband's (rather messy & violent) demise. Along the way, various icky things happen to various characters, various alarming secrets are revealed, and just about everybody finds some reason to be miserable.

There seems to be a fairly big hole in the plot, involving - of all things - stickers on a window. (Discussion of which is in the first comment, so as not to spoil the film for anyone who's planning to see it.)

I get the feeling that if we rented the DVD (when it's available) and watched Premonition more carefully - maybe taking notes - I'd understand the plot better. But I suspect I'd also find even more holes in it.

Perhaps one viewing is enough.

I've been adding books to my LibraryThing catalog (here): I'm up to 78.

Free accounts on LibraryThing are limited to 200 books, so if I want to enter my entire library I'll have to fork over $25. That's no so much.

Data entry is pretty simple in LibraryThing: type in the ISBN, press Enter. If LibraryThing finds a matching book - it can search Amazon.com, the Library of Congress, and scores of other libraries around the world - you click on it, and you're done.

Most of my books aren't particularly rare or obscure, so Amazon.com finds them just about every time. This is a little embarrassing. I want my library to be full of rare and obscure books, not the same mass-produced stuff that everybody else is reading.

If typing in ISBN numbers is too much work, LibraryThing sells CueCats. (Remember them?) Only $15, and they scan UPC codes very nicely.

I'll probably keep feeding data to LibraryThing, as time allows. (Which means I'll be finishing up sometime in 2023.)

Today is Jennifer's birthday. Happy birthday, my love.

Yesterday's high was 78°; NOAA says the current temperature is 73°.

Most of the snow has melted. Only the largest plow-piles are left, and they are small, filthy remnants of their former glory.

NOAA says it's going to rain tonight, and tomorrow's going to be much cooler. Still, we're getting into the time of year when it's warm more often than it isn't, which is nice.

Flipping channels just now, I landed on CSPAN2, where some fella in a uniform was talking about reorganizing the military.

The fella's name was displayed on the bottom of the screen. No, said I. That can't be his real name. It's got to be a typo!

But I was wrong: the Chief of the Defense - pardon me, Defence - Staff of the UK Armed Forces really is named Air Chief Marshal Sir Jock Stirrup (GCB AFC ADC DSc FRAeS FCMI RAF).

Excuse me while I go have a decidedly juvenile cackle at this august personage's expense....

Paid another visit to the electronic case filing system this evening, to check on Mr. E___ C______'s sentence. How many years did he get? When will he be eligible for parole?

It turns out that the purpose of yesterday's proceeding wasn't to hand down a sentence, it was just to talk about sentencing. Mr. C______'s next day in court is April 30th, but there's no telling whether he'll be sentenced then, either.

I'm a bit disturbed that this is taking so long: Justice delayed is justice denied, and all that. Does it mean that the sentence is going to be a long one - he could get up to ten years - so nobody's in any real hurry?

I keep forgetting that I have a LibraryThing account.

I created it about a year and a half ago; so far, I've only added thity-four books. Such a slacker I am!

MSNBC says:

The FBI improperly and, in some cases, illegally used the USA Patriot Act to secretly obtain personal information about people in the United States, a Justice Department audit concluded Friday.

The FBI promised that they'd only use the Patriot Act to catch terrorists, not to spy on Americans, and then - oops! - spied on Americans anyway.

The director of the FBI says that he is to be held accountable, but that doesn't mean he's going to be punished. No, he was using the bureaucratic definition of 'accountable', which means 'not accountable'.

Sunny & warm today: NOAA says 57° but I think their thermometer is in the middle of a snowbank. It's much warmer than that outside.

The snow is melting rapidly. The ground cover has all melted; but the huge piles stacked up by snowplows (and shovelers) are lingering a bit. Next week is supposed to be even warmer, so I think we'll be snow-free by next Friday.

And then we'll be in the blissful period that's too warm for snow, but too early for lawn-mowing. I'm looking forward to it.

The US Navy has a nice battleship list: all sixty-six of them, from Maine (commissioned 1895; decommissioned - explosively - in Havana Harbor, 1898) to Missouri (decommissioned 1992).

Most of them were sold for scrap. Some were used for target practice. Four - Arkansas, New York, Nevada and Pennsylvania - were anchored at Bikini Atoll to see what effect an atomic bomb would have on them. Two - Mississippi and Idaho - were transferred in 1924 to the Greek Navy, where they served - as Lemnos and Kilkis, respectively - until sunk in 1941 by Germany.

A few are currently serving as museums and memorials:

• Texas - Battleship Texas State Historic Site, LaPorte, Texas
• North Carolina - USS North Carolina Battleship Memorial, Wilmington, North Carolina
• Massachusetts - Battleship Cove, Quincy, Massachusetts
• Alabama - Battleship Park, Mobile, Alabama
• Iowa - Currently in storage at Suisun Bay, California, while people squabble over who gets to make a museum out of it
• New Jersey - Camden, New Jersey
• Missouri - Battleship Missouri Memorial, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii
• Wisconsin - Hampton Roads Naval Museum, Norfolk, Virginia

Of these, I've only been to one: Alabama, which I visited in 1993. Visiting all eight would be quite a project.

Over at the courthouse in Urbana, the sentencing hearing is about to begin for E___ C______ (whose name I have obscured so I don't get any nastygrams from his friends and/or relatives, as I did when I commented on S_______ H______'s brush with the law a few years ago).

Through the wonders of technology - specifically, the court's electronic case filing system - I've been following along with Mr. C______'s case ever since I was almost a juror at his trial last October. I thought briefly of showing up for the hearing - I have errands in Urbana this afternoon anyway - but decided against it.

I could just imagine the judge, peering down from the bench at me. What are you doing here? You weren't even a juror on this case! Bailiff, defenestrate him!

I didn't know this: there's a Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial in southern Indiana, run by the National Park Service:

Lincoln Boyhood National Memorial preserves the site of the farm where Abraham Lincoln spent 14 formative years of his life, from the ages of 7 to 21. He and his family moved to Indiana in 1816 and stayed until 1830 when they moved on to Illinois.

It might be fun to go there sometime.

There's also the Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Site, in Kentucky: also interesting, but a bit farther away.

Just up US 31W from Lincoln's birthplace is Fort Knox, site of the Patton Museum of Armor and Cavalry. I don't suppose Jennifer would be terribly interested in any of these places, but I think Jake would enoy looking at the tanks.

I'm amused that the Fort Knox web site discreetly neglects to mention that it is home to the US Bullion Depository, which currently holds 147.3 million (troy) ounces of gold. That's over five thousand tons of gold.

(The US Army garrison commander at Fort Knox is Colonel Mark Needham. When I was in elementary school - River Forest Elementary, Hobart, Indiana - one of my friends was a fella named Mark Needham. A mere coincidence of names? Or did my childhood friend go on to a career in the US Army?)

Today's link-chasing:

The people at http://broken-tv.blogspot.com/ made a poster:

(Yes, it has cusswords in it. The world is a naughty old place, sometimes.)

The people at http://www.wonderlandblog.com/ wrote about it.

The fella who runs http://www.boingboing.net/ linked to the wonderland article.

Wil Wheaton, in exile at http://wilwheaton.typepad.com/, linked to boingboing.

...and I'm linking to all of them. It's like a chain letter. Or a disease.

I can blather in the daybook while I'm sitting in a meeting at work.

Ain't technology wonderful?

Staples was selling 1GB memory cards for only $20, so Jake & I stopped there (on the way home from the Menards light-bulb expedition) to pick one up.

The Nikon E3700 can hold 999 pictures now, or just over fifteen minutes of video. (It can probably record several days of audio, but who bothers with that any more?)

I had the notion to move the old 512MB card to the X30. There was no good reason for doing this - the 256MB card has over 200MB free space on it - but it seemed like a fun project for a Sunday evening: copy files off the old card, copy them onto the new card. Alas, there were problems.

Problem #1: attempting to copy too many files in one go from the X30 to nessus will hang Explorer. Is it a bug in Explorer, ActiveSync, Windows CE, or just a problem with file transfers over USB 1.1? Whatever the cause, it's annoying.

Problem #2: I want Explorer to display files in alphabetical order, with subdirectories first. Always and forever, no exceptions. So I configure Explorer to arrange icons by name, and I turn on auto-arrange. It has no effect. New files go to the end of the list.

I did manage to get all the files off the storage card, by copying them in small batches, but the thought of fighting with Windows to copy them onto the new storage card just makes me tired.

Some other time, perhaps.

This morning I took pencil & clipboard in hand, and counted all the light bulbs in the house. The idea was to produce a list of which kinds of bulbs we use, and how many of each, then replenish our spares from the light-bulb section at Menards.

The results: distributed among the various rooms, hallways, closets, appliances and desk lamps here at Stately Rice Manor are no fewer than forty-four light bulbs. Most of them are 65W floods (twelve - the architect must have loved recessed lighting); also well-represented are 60W incandescents (nine). The 40W G9 halogens in the kitchen ceiling light are the most difficult to install, mostly because if you touch the bulb you'll ruin it.

A bagful of light bulbs costs about $40 at Menards. But at least now we'll be ready when the next bulb goes dark.

David Gerrold has a web site, http://gerrold.com/. (www.davidgerrold.com has been taken over by domain squatters. Don't go there.) It's rather annoying.

The blogs section lists no fewer than eight different blogs (ugh...hideous word, 'blog'), most of which haven't been updated since 2004. One of them was updated last June, and there's been nothing posted since then.

I suppose I shouldn't grumble too much about Mr. Gerrold's lack of dedication to his web site. I haven't updated http://patrick-rice.net/ in years, except to delete things. All the action these days is on TypePad and Flickr (http://www.flickr.com/photos/pzr).

I also sneaked over to http://www.rosie.com/ this morning. Alas, it's full of IM-speak (no capitalization, no punctuation, strange abbreviations) and very hard to read. I don't suppose I'll go back very often. Maybe I'm just old and unhip, but orthography is important to me.

Capital letters and punctuation are likewise scarce at http://www.moby.com/. The disease is spreading - soon I will be the only person left on the planet who uses the Shift key on his keyboard.

Sam, sharing Jake's vanilla shake. Jake didn't seem to mind too much.

Jake, showing off the milk moustache from his vanilla shake. (Too bad you can't actually see it in this picture.)

Online banking says that our federal income tax refund was deposited yesterday. How nice.

Cars I have owned:

1. 1982 Mustang: bought 1984, traded 1990, total milage approximately 111,000.
2. 1990 Blazer: bought 1990 (the only new car I've ever had), traded 1998, total milage approximately 126,000.
3. 1996 Explorer: bought 1998, current milage 120,000.

Which leads me to the gloomy suspicion that Mr. Explorer is likely to disintegrate by year's end. I really don't want to deal with car payments just now....

After a warm (51°) and rainy day yesterday, winter is back. It's 32° outside, which wouldn't be so bad except for the wind (28mph from the west).

Jake's school bus came a little earlier than usual, so we weren't standing out there very long. (Good news for me, as I left the long pants in the closet this morning.)

There's still quite a bit of snow on the ground from last month's blizzard.