This morning, the iPod's song shuffler is leaning toward the older songs in my library: so far, it's played the Guess Who, Iron Butterfly and Buffalo Springfield.
April 2007 Archives
A bit chilly this morning, not to mention windy and drizzly. (Nothing on the radar, though. Apparently drizzle doesn't register as actual rain.)
I've been taking the bus to work, mostly to save money (a tank of gas for Mr. Explorer costs about $50 these days) but also to get a little exercise.
The morning bus is full of college students heading to class, and people heading to work; it's a quiet ride. The afternoon bus is full of junior high and high school students, and is quite rowdy. Every day, the same kids get on the bus, and ignore the driver's stern warnings to stop cussing.
Perhaps one day the driver will follow through on his threat to put the kids off the bus, but it seems unlikely. (I'm sure the kids believe likewise, which is why they don't bother to curb their language.)
Rain is spattering against my office window here at Wolfram Research World HQ.
Radar shows a diffuse collection of small-but-intense storms across Illinois; just now a small one is over Champaign, but a bigger one is leaving Decatur, heading this way.
Perhaps taking the bus to work was a mistake. (At least I have my umbrella.)
A scene from the movie Ladyhawke:
Philippe is using Navarre's sword to chop firewood. It's not going well. Navarre takes the sword from him, and says: "This sword has been in my family for five generations. It has never known defeat. Until now."
When I think of the Bush administration's handling of the war in Iraq, that's the image that comes to mind: a magnificent weapon - i.e., the US Army - with a long and noble history, being egregiously misused by someone not really fit to wield it.
(Curious coincidence: while I was writing this, the iPod's song shuffle turned up a song from the Ladyhawke soundtrack.)
CNN regurgitates an AP article on digital music:
With their ability to store vast libraries of music in your pocket, sleek digital music players have replaced bulky home stereo systems as the music gear of choice. But the sound quality of digital audio files is noticeably inferior to that of compact discs and even vinyl.
The difference between vinyl, CDs and MP3s might be noticeable with a $5,000 stereo system, perfect listening conditions and perfect hearing - but I don't have any of those things.
So I don't really care that digital music is 'inferior'. It's good enough.
Yesterday, there was an intern in the cubicle across the hall.
Today, there isn't, and there's a fresh new nameplate - a blank one - on the wall.
Perhaps he's moved to a bigger cubicle?
Warming up quickly this morning: 72° as of 9:00am.
Very windy, too. Jennifer reports that she had to chase Sam's stroller across the library parking lot. (Sam wasn't in it at the time. Thanks for asking!)
The wind is kicking up quite a bit of dust from freshly-plowed farm fields, so the sky has a browning tinge to it. Today's forecast says there's a 20% chance of thunderstorms; if it rains, I think we'll get mud coming down instead of water.
Sam had his first bath in the tub this evening. It went fairly well.
Unlike Jake, who cried his first time in the tub, Sam really enjoyed himself. He ignored all the bath toys, and just splashed. Occasionally he took a break to play with the faucet and/or the drain lever, but generally he just splashed.
Other firsts for Sam this weekend: he figured out how to open doors, and - less than five minutes after seeing one for the first time - how to get through the doorknob covers that stymied Jake for years.
Clever lad, is our Sam. (Mama & Papa, on the other hand, are doomed.)
Bichon Frise Pulls Jeff Duntemann in a Little Red Wagon:
(Also noteworthy as the only known public recording of Carol Duntemann, Jeff's wife.)
Sam's first baths were on the kitchen table. Later, when he could sit up, we moved him to the sink: a convenient size, and - more importantly - a convenient height. (One of the many challenges of parenthood: all that bending & lifting is hard on the spine.)
Jake needed squirty bath toys in the sink with him, to keep him busy, but Sam doesn't. As soon as he's in the sink, he starts splashing, with both hands. (He looks a bit like one of those wind-up monkey toys that bang two cymbals together.) Jennifer & I usually end up soaked.
Alas, Sam has outgrown the sink (a month or two ago; we've been procrastinating), so tonight was his last sink bath. He splashed, he cackled, he had a great time. (Yes, we took pictures.) From now on, it's the tub for Mr. Sam.
There's talk of having Jake & Sam take their baths together. That might speed up the process a little, but having two squirmy crazy boys in such a confined space seems a little dangerous.
Pushed around the lawn mower a bit this evening: first time of the year.
The lawn was pretty shaggy (especially in the back yard), but the real reason for mowing was to empty the gas tank; and we were doing that in order to change the oil.
Some lawn mowers have a proper crankcase drain bolt somewhere on the bottom: put the mower up on blocks, remove the bolt, and the oil runs right out. (Be sure to catch it in something.) Alas, ours does not. We had to tip the mower over and pour out the old oil (nasty, dirty black gunk) through the dipstick tube. This turned out to be neither as difficult nor as messy as I had expected.
Tomorrow it's off to the gas station for a few gallons of unleaded, and we're good to go for another season of mowing. (How long before we can bribe Jake to do it for us?)
A close reading of the bus schedule revealed that a particular morning run of my usual bus route passes quite close to the house; so this morning I decided to give it a try.
Bad idea. This particular run is stuffed with side-trips and meanders: wander through this subdivsion, wander through the subdivision across the street, take a detour to drop off some junior-high students, etc., etc., blah blah blah. It took me over an hour to get to work. I could have stayed home an extra half-hour, taken my usual bus, and still arrived at work earlier than I did.
I don't think I'll be taking this bus again.
(Memo to self: don't drink a large cup of extra-strong coffee before starting an hour-long bus ride.)
Finished reading Homer's Daughter by Robert Graves. A curiously scant book, given its length (285 pages).
Prince Laodamas disappears one day; King What's-His-Name (father of Laodamas) goes looking for him; no fewer than one hundred and twelve suitors besiege the palace, hoping to marry Princess Nausicaa (who doesn't want to marry any of them) while secretly plotting regicide.
A few hundred pages of scheming, adventures, love & violence; then everything is wrapped up neatly in the last two chapters.
I found a review of Homer's Daughter that said it's one of Graves' "most daring fictional acts" because it says that the Odyssey was written by - horrors! - a woman. I suppose that might qualify as daring in the faculty lounge, but out in the real world?
Yesterday, I left my travel mug at work. No bus-stop coffee for me this morning, alas.
This morning, when I tried to fetch my coat from the car (where I usually keep it when I'm not actually wearing it), it wasn't there. Left it at work, I thought. Oops. The temperature this morning was only 42°, so I had a chilly time waiting with Jake for the school bus.
It turns out my coat was hanging on the coatrack. I walked right past it on my way out of the house.
Today would have been Alison's 45th birthday.
Dear Cow-orker:
If your web browser is broken, sysadmin can fix it for you.
If your web browser isn't broken, go read the [obscene gerund omitted] web page yourself. I'm not going to transcribe it for you.
Thank you.
For the last few months, I've been getting spam from William Paterson University (in stately Wayne, New Jersey). They seem to think that I'm an alumnus: class of '81.
Um, no. I've never even been to New Jersey.
I tried their unsubscribe link; it didn't work. I tried adding them to my spam filter; that didn't work, either.
Today, they sent me a Please update your information message, with a link to their alumni directory; so I told them my email address is linderj@wpunj.edu. That address really belongs to Judith Linder, Executive Director of Alumni Relations, William Paterson University.
I hope you enjoy the spam, ma'am.
This morning's drive to work took me past a fence on which the phrase JESUS ROCKS had been painted in big blue letters.
It reminded me of a bit of graffiti from the 1980s: some fool with too much leisure time (and a considerable stockpile of blue spray-paint) tagged just about every overpass along the entire length of I57 with the phrase TRUST JESUS. These little telegrams stayed up for years, until they finally disappeared sometime in the 1990s.
One of them was altered to read TRUST ELVIS, which always made me laugh when I saw it.
(Do you suppose Jesus really approves of vandalism done in His name?)
Just had an impromptu dance party with Jennifer, Jacob & Sam - to a thirty-second iTunes sample of Deathworship in Eurasia by Andi Sex Gang.
Somehow I don't think that's what the Gang had in mind when they recorded it....
Today's word in the Forgotten English calendar: Zarf, which is:
...a cup-shaped holder for a hot coffee-cup...usually of metal and of ornamental design.
The word 'zarf' appears in an episode of The Flintstones: Fred and Arnold the paperboy are playing Scrabble, and Fred plays 'zarf'. Arnold says it's not a word. They argue. Hilarity ensues.
Turns out Fred was right. Take that, you smart-aleck paperboy!
Long ago - Christmas, 2004 - I contemplated Deedmapper 3.0 for some genealogical mapping projects I had in mind (specifically, property ownership in White County, Illinois). I decided against it, on the grounds that it (apparently) didn't support aliquot land descriptions.
At the genealogy society meeting last week, I was chatting with one of the genealogists about the lack of good mapping software; she said, "Try Deedmapper." If it's recommended by genealogists, perhaps it's worth a second look.
Alas, no. The only change since 2004 is that the Direct Line Software site has moved to a new domain. I don't think the site's been updated, and I'm pretty sure the software hasn't, either. (It's been at version 3.0 for most of the last decade.) $100, for an application that isn't under active development? No, thanks.
I have - for now - finished entering my book collection (it is not so grand as to deserve the title 'library') into LibraryThing. The final tally: five hundred and seventy-five.
That's not really final. I've a few boxes of books in the front closet that haven't been entered yet, but I'm too lazy to dig them out. (Putting them back wouldn't be so easy, either.)
I don't know why I do all this rather pointless data entry. I don't suppose there's anybody out in the world who really cares which books are gathering dust on the shelves here. But - as with most of my hobbies - it's harmless, and keeps me busy.
First Kurt Vonnegut died, now Don Ho.
Alas, poor Don Ho
I guess his tiny bubbles
Have finally burst
(Or was it because of the Don Imus thing?)
Tried to visit http://www.dilbert.com/ just now, and got:
Forbidden
You don't have permission to access / on this server.
Hm...you might want to have the IT people look into that, Mr. Adams.
Apple says Leopard - that is, OS X 10.5 - won't ship until October, which means I have an extra few months to squeeze the price of an upgrade ($150, more or less) out of the household budget.
Not one but two visits from the tooth fairy this week: Jake lost one incisor on Tuesday at school, and the other one this morning at breakfast.
I have it on good authority that the tooth fairy has laid in a stockpile of shiny new dollar coins, another of which will surely be left under Jake's pillow tonight.
Jake also found this morning's frost quite interesting. Out at the bus stop he ran around, leaving long trails of footprints on the grass and drawing the occasional happy face. At one point, he drew a set of concentric circles:
Papa, I drew a target!
Maybe the Goose Air Force will come along and poop on it.
That's their only weapon.
And a fearsome weapon it is, too.
Years ago, I bought a copy of The Letters of Sidney Lanier, in a used-book store somewhere. (Evanston? Champaign?)
It's a small book, with a green cover and the same overall appearance as the 1942 editions (published on the centennial of Lanier's birth), so I assumed that's what I had.
I happened to look inside it the other day, while doing some LibraryThing data entry, and found a dedication:
Elizabeth Adelaide Macgurn
with love, from Olive
May the music found within put thee in remembrance of this season's delightful experiences and be a promise of many musical delights to come!
February 6, 1907
Er...1907? I guess it's a bit older than I thought.
I have the notion to hit the library sometime soon, and see what I can discover about Elizabeth Adelaide Macgurn, and her friend(?) Olive.
Reading web pages (as opposed to doing something useful with my time), I came across the following observation:
Captains go down with their ships. But so do barnacles.
Truer words were never spoken.
One of Sam's nicknames: Little Big Crazy, because his body is little but his craziness is big.
A bit of snow this morning. Just snow showers, blowing around; no accumulation. But still, rather distressing for mid-April.
I've noticed that nobody talks about global warming when it's cold outside.
Global warming is one of those questions where everybody has an agenda, and nobody seems very interested in the truth. These are the questions that need to be answered:
- What is the current state of the global climate?
- How has it changed over time?
- What influence does human activity have on global climate change?
It seems that most people pick two or three of their favorite data points, draw a line (or, more dramatically, an exponential curve) through them, and hold a press conference to announce their results (and ask for increased federal funding). That may make for good theater, or good politics; but it's not science.
Kurt Vonnegut has died.
Weather: Cold (41°), windy, drizzly.
Servers: Down.
Builds: Broken.
Trade Center water supply: Interrupted, air in the pipes, faucets & toilets going off like grenades when used.
...and how's your day going?
It's rather annoying to be awake so late at night, but - alas - I am. Too much chocolate too close to bedtime, I suppose.
Jennifer & I took Jake and Sam to the 11:00am showing of Barnyard at the Savoy 16.
Alas, Sam's attention span isn't quite as long as the average animated feature, so he and I spent the last hour out in the lobby. (Rather like Charlotte's Web on New Year's Eve.)
Mr. Sam is a creature of habit: he wants his lunch at noon, and doesn't much care where he is at the time. Fortunately, we always have a portable and long-shelf-life Sam meal in his backpack. (No milk, though. He didn't seem to mind.)
I lived in the dorms during all seven semesters of my time at the University of Illinois. (It seemed like a good idea at the time.)
My freshman year dorm room was 296 Forbes Hall; elsewhere on the floor was Derek Harper, up & coming basketball player.
After a lengthy NBA career, Mr. Harper is now a sports anchor for KTVT in Dallas. The station has a nice bio page, with photograph. I can't say that I recognize him, but it's been twenty-six years.
One of my roommates in good old 296 was named Darrick, which led to a certain amount of confusion on the floor. The losers next door (298?) - whose chief hobbies were drunkenness, vandalism and obscene restroom graffiti - couldn't keep straight who they were trying to offend.
The losers moved out of the dorm & into a fraternity, which shortly thereafter burned to the ground. The next day's paper had a front-page picture of one of the losers, standing on the sidewalk, all weepy at the loss of his stereo. (No more drunken Friday-night sing-alongs to the Blues Brothers' Rubber Biscuit for you, [censored]-for-brains!)
Easter egg hunts through the years:
- March 26, 2005: Hessel Park, Champaign. Cold (40° or so) & rainy. Jacob & I arrived five minutes late, which was late enough that Jake didn't get any eggs.
- April 15, 2006: Lake of the Woods Park, Mahomet. Hot (82°). Arrived early, hence had more time to flirt with sunstroke. Lots of eggs for Jake.
- April 7, 2007: West Side Park, Champaign. Cold (32°) & windy. Arrived barely in time. Lots of eggs for Jake, full of candy that I won't eat (for fear of pulling another crown) and enough thirty-day trial memberships in a local martial-arts club to keep Jake busy until high school.
Finished reading The Dark Tower by Stephen King: and so the seven-volume series is concluded.
In the last forty-five days, I've read Wolves of the Calla, Song of Susannah and The Dark Tower: 1,972 pages of fiction. And, having finally turned the last page, I find that I feel just a little bit...cheated.
You call that an ending?
(Further grumbling in the first comment.)
Fired up the WRI laptop & VPN this morning, so I could do a little work while having breakfast.
Breakfast ended, but somehow I never found the energy to actually get up and go to work. So I sat at the kitched table all day and did my work there.
Very peaceful it was, too. WRI's just a little crazy right now, due to [censored]. I can get more done at home.
NOAA offers this cheery news:
TEMPERATURES ARE EXPECTED TO DROP WELL BELOW FREEZING AGAIN TONIGHT...AS WELL AS EACH NIGHT THROUGH THE WEEKEND. SUBSEQUENT FREEZE WARNINGS WILL BE ISSUED EACH NIGHT THAT TEMPERATURES ARE FORECAST TO DROP BELOW 28 DEGREES.
A FREEZE WARNING MEANS SUB-FREEZING TEMPERATURES ARE IMMINENT OR HIGHLY LIKELY. THESE CONDITIONS WILL KILL CROPS AND OTHER SENSITIVE VEGETATION.
We've quite a few tulips already blooming, from the bulbs Jennifer planted last year. I suppose this means they're doomed. Poor tulips.
Sam managed to escape from the Pack & Play this morning. Unfortunately, he did so head-first.
T H U D
Poor little guy. He had quite a bit to say about this latest outrage against his person.
He's fine now, but has a most impressive bump on the back of his head. (Right about where Oswald's third shot hit JFK. Coincidence? I think not!) The first-aid books all say to put ice on it, but they have no advice on how to get a twenty-month-old to hold still long enough for Mama and/or Papa to ice his head.
Yesterday, the temperature was 66°; today, 28°.
Poor plants, they thought it was spring. It was, for a while, but now it's winter again.
Much chatter these days about using ethanol in cars instead of gasoline. It's rather annoying, because driving a little bit less, and improving fuel efficiency, would save more gasoline than if the entire U.S. corn crop were converted to ethanol.
So, a few slogans for the ethanol crowd:
- Ethanol: Made from corn,
because it's more important to drive than to eat - Ethanol: Draining aquifers,
so you can sit in traffic
Hm...any more?
Yesterday, while cleaning out the coffee machine in preparation for making a fresh pot of coffee, I discovered that one of the cow-orkers had used no fewer than three filters to make the previous pot.
I know it can be difficult to separate the filters, but you could at least make an effort. Sheesh.
A line of thunderstorms is bearing down on Champaign, coming from the northwest at 60mph or so. We're under a severe thunderstorm warning: high winds, damaging hail, etc., etc., blah blah blah.
I suppose I'll stay home until it's past. VPN is a wonderful thing.
Update: The storm was brief but intense. Lightning, thunder (close & loud), even a few minutes of fairly large hail. (Mr. Explorer is out in the driveway. Oops.)
Sam's having Cheerios for breakfast this morning. He's getting pretty good at using a spoon to shovel in the chow.
It makes him cackle.
- Bill O'Reilly
- Any show in which Gene Simmons gets a facelift and/or liposuction
There will be more, I'm sure.
Quite a few image links in old daybook entries haven't been updated to point to Flickr. I'm slowly fixing them, as time allows.
Today I decided to look at entries from 2002, and was surprised to discover two pictures there that never made it Flickr. I'm not sure how I missed them.
It was six years ago today - at the unfortunate hour of 3:45am - that Jacob was born.
