May 2007 Archives

As Alfred Austin once wrote, many years ago (1871, to be precise): He is no better; he is much the same.

Young Mr. Sam continues to spike moderately high fevers (102° or so) whenever the Motrin wears off, but he also continues to be completely oblivious to his illness. He eats, he plays, he pulls down Ayn Rand books from the shelves & tries to read them, just as if his temperature were normal.

(Jennifer did call the doctor this morning. Quoth the doctor: It's probably a virus. Give him Motrin.)

In other news, I am feeling a bit sniffly & feverish myself. Perhaps I have caught strep throat (from the Bloomington relatives), the mystery virus (from Sam) or a cold (from my office mate at WRI). I am surrounded by illness.

I pay so little attention to the Entertainment sections of CNN.com & MSNBC.com that it took two weeks (and an email from Jennifer) for me to find out that Jericho - one of the two network shows Jennifer & I watched this year, the other being 24 - has been cancelled due to poor ratings.

There's an online save-Jericho petition, but CBS has spoken: the axe has fallen, Jericho is dead & gone.

Now we'll never find out whether Snape...er, Hawkins is good or evil.

NASA has some pretty spiffy interactive maps showing all total, annular & hybrid solar eclipses for the next hundred years or so.

On August 21, 2017 there's going to be a total eclipse whose path arcs across the United States, from Oregon to South Carolina, including Illinois: the centerline passes just south of Carbondale, a little bit north of Paducah.

I still remember the annular eclipse of May 10, 1994: the centerline passed through Mahomet and Rantoul, just west & north of Champaign. I made myself a box camera and drove out to the farms west of town to watch the show.

Perhaps in 2017 we'll have to take a trip to Paducah: Jennifer can look at quilts while Jake, Sam & I watch the eclipse. (On the other hand, Jake will be sixteen in 2017. I imagine that hanging out with his painfully uncool father won't be very high on his list of fun things to do.)

Jennifer & Sam drove me this morning to the Illinois Terminal building (which used to be called the Intermodal Transportation Building; perhaps that was uncomfortably highfalutin for Midwestern sensibilities, prompting the switch to a more modest name), so I could pick up a summer bus pass.

A summer pass costs a mere $30, and buys me unlimited rides from June through August. That's cheaper than tokens (72¢/ride), and a huge bargain compared to paying full fare ($1/ride); and taking the bus to work means fewer trips to the gas station ($55/tank).

The Illinois Terminal ground floor is the bus station (replacing the mangy old Greyhound station that sat like a toad at the corner of Logan & Walnut); it was surprisingly clean for a bus station, and even smelled pretty good. The train station is upstairs, but we didn't go there. (I haven't ridden on Amtrak since 1984.) The third & fourth floors are all office space.

The old train station, just across University Avenue, is still standing. I'm not sure what it's used for these days. Mostly vacant, perhaps.

I'm not sure yet what I'll do when my pass expires at the end of August. An autumn pass costs $100, which is a bit much. (And the autumn pass overlaps a month with the summer pass, so I'd be paying twice for August.) An annual pass costs $200, which at first glance seems outrageous; but that works out to $16.67/month: one-third the cost of a tank of gas for Mr. Explorer.

Squeezing $200 out of the budget won't be easy. But I suppose I have three months to experience life as a bus rider before I have to make any decisions, so there's no point in worrying about it just now.

Poor Sam, he's picked up some germs from somewhere: this morning, he had a temperature of 102° (which I imagine has already been knocked down by a bit of Motrin).

Jennifer reports that he's a bit sleepy, bit not otherwise acting sick.

I suppose if we took Sam to the doctor, the doctor would say: There's a virus going around. Give him Motrin.

(I also suppose that I'm next. Any illness that Jake or Sam catches is swiftly transmitted to me.)

It's been a pleasant four-day weekend, but - alas! - it's over. Tomorrow Jake goes back to school, and I go back to work.

Met some friends at the Savoy 16 this morning, for the 11:25am showing of Shrek the Third.

Unlike previous attempts (e.g., Barnyard and Charlotte's Web), Sam actually watched some of the movie this time. Not all of it; I spent the last third trying to keep him entertained and/or distracted. But at least he was willing to stay in the theater.

Interesting movie. Better than Shrek 2, but that's not saying much.

Shrek has settled in for a long & lucrative franchise, which means that plot and character development aren't very important any more: instead, we get ninety minutes of familiar characters working through familiar gags, with a new episode cranked out every three years in time for the summer movie season.

There will surely be a Shrek 4. Look for it in May, 2010.

Working on my chart-of-gas-prices project (nearly finished), I ran into an annoying difference between the Windows and Mac versions of Excel: the date systems.

On Windows, day 1 is January 1, 1900; on the Mac, day 1 is January 2, 1904. So when I finished entering the Mustang's fuel history on Windows, then tried to paste the data into the chart workbook (which was created on the Mac), the pasted data was about four years off. (More precisely, 1,462 days off, that being Excel's - incorrect - calculation of the number of days between January 1, 1900 and January 2, 1904.)

Much foolery with the TEXT() and DATEVALUE() functions was required to fix this. (Though it occurs to me now that I could have just subtracted 1,462 from the Windows dates before pasting them into the Mac spreadsheet.)

Foolishly, Excel thinks 1900 was a leap year. Microsoft blames Lotus 1-2-3 for this. (IBM is still selling Lotus 1-2-3; it's up to version 9.8, only $289. But who still uses Lotus 1-2-3?)

Out-of-context quote of the day:

My organ is an obsolete instrument.
--Ray Manzarek

I can be so juvenile sometimes....

A bit of data-mining on a Friday evening:

Every gas purchase I've made since I bought my first car (twenty-three years ago!) has been recorded: the earliest entries were written in small spiral note-pads, but later ones were computerized (courtesy of Personal Vehicle Manager from Two Peaks Software; the company is gone, but their product remains quite useful).

It was pretty easy to feed all those numbers to Excel and make a chart of them. (The hard part was fudging the scale on the x-axis so that the year numbers came out right: range 32874.25 to 39448.75, major unit 365.25, minor unit 91.3125. Sure would be nice if Excel handled time graphs more sensibly.)

I still have the notebook in which I recorded gas purchases from 1984 to 1990. One of these days I'll have to get that data online, and update my graph. (Some other night, perhaps.)

Update, 5/28: Data from the Mustang era (1984 - 1990) has been added, and the chart updated.

The streets & sidewalks were a bit damp when Jake and I walked out to the bus stop this morning; NOAA says there was thunder at 4:00am last night, and heavy rain at 6:00am.

Much cooler today than yesterday: 71° vs. 90°.

I had briefly entertained the notion of spending today working on the county sign project (which has been stalled at 92 since January), but discarded the idea: too many things here needed doing.

So far today, I have replaced three burned-out light bulbs: two in the bedroom, one in the tv room. That leaves three to go: one in the kitchen (halogen, tiny, expensive), one above the washing machine (hard to reach) and one out on the porch (can't find the right kind of bulb).

The light bulb sockets in this house aren't very good. The bulbs are always sticking, so that it's nearly impossible to remove a dead one or install a new one.

Perhaps we should buy some Bulb EZ....

Currently slogging my way through The Collected Stores of Robert Silverberg, Volume 1: Secret Sharers. Mostly I read it on the bus, going to & from work; there's not much else to do on a bus, except stare out the windows (and that gets old very quickly).

There's one quirk of Silverberg's writing style that's starting to annoy me: he's fond of lists. He can't just say It was a dark and stormy night; he has to say It was dark, like a cave, like unconsciousness, like intergalactic space, like a llama on quaaludes.

Perhaps it's because he was cranking out fiction as rapidly as he could, for a market that paid by the word.

(I'm a little worried for Mr. Silverberg's health & safety now. I grumbled here about Jack Chalker and Gordon R. Dickson, and they both died shortly therafter. A bad review from me is lethal.)

Lately, Sam has decided that he likes to read books. He can't actually read yet (his vocabulary stands somewhat shy of a dozen words), but that doesn't deter him. He'll pull a book down from the shelf, carry it to the couch, and settle in with the book in his lap; then he'll stare at it, turning pages until he's reached the end.

Then he'll throw it on the floor and go looking for another one.

He has an inexplicable fascination for the works of Ayn Rand, but this evening switched to Robert Graves.

Once upon a time, Eric S. Raymond wrote books, essays & software; he worked the lecture circuit; he served on the boards of various corporations.

Now he only makes the news when he throws a tantrum. How the mighty are fallen, etc.

(Yes, he posted "Goodbye, Fedora" three months ago. I don't keep up with Linux news as diligently as I used to.)

My office here at Wolfram Research World HQ has a lock on the door, a legacy from the time (long ago) when someone more important than me occupied it. As I have nothing on my desk valuable enough to warrant locking up when I'm gone, I was not issued a key when I moved in. So it was rather awkward this morning when I arrived to find my office door locked, and no one inside to unlock it.

Egad, thought I. Am I unemployed?

The receptionist informed me that my paranoia was misplaced: it was just an overzealous cleaning lady. She even lent me her master key, so I could use my office instead of setting up shop in one of the conference rooms, or the library. (I suppose the library might be a passable work area: plenty of reading material for slow days, vending machines conveniently nearby, comfortable chairs. I might have to try it sometime.)

The clever ducks that run the local bus system have come up with a useful bit of geekery: STOPwatch.WIDGET, which is a nifty little program that sits on the desktop and tells you which buses are coming to your favorite streetcorner (and when they're due to arrive).

It tells me that the 9A Brown will pass State Street & Fox Drive in 28 minutes - i.e., it's running ten minutes behind schedule.

STOPwatch.WIDGET uses the Yahoo Widget Engine, which is rather annoying. When I installed it - that is, the Yahoo Widget Engine - it tried to take over my web browser's home page (about:blank, and I like it that way) and default search engine (Google), then it spewed a dozen useless widgets all over my desktop. I don't need a stock ticker on my desktop, thanks. Or another clock.

Fortunately, widgets can be deleted.

The temperature was a quite pleasant 63° when Jake & I were out waiting for the school bus this morning; now it's 84°, and expected to creep up a bit higher this afternoon.

Perhaps summer isn't really the best time to be taking the bus to work.

I knew that Wolfram Research World HQ will be closed next Monday, for Memorial Day; but I didn't know until just now that it will also be closed this coming Friday.

A four-day weekend, how nice.

But what to do with this sudden windfall of free time? I'll have to think about that.

The good news: somebody commented on one of my photos, over on Flickr. (Specifically, the Oldman River photo I uploaded this morning.) The bad news: the comment is - apparently - in Spanish:

Las vallas estas suelen afear las foto. Igualmente aceptable y bonita.

Babelfish offers this somewhat fractured translation:

The fences these usually disfigure the photo. Equally acceptable and pretty.

I don't know if he's complaining about he guardrail, or saying he doesn't mind the guardrail. Maybe somebody who knows Spanish can help me out here....

Streets & Trips 2005 (which I haven't upgraded because I'm cheap, lazy and also somewhat dubious that the latest version would actually work on creaky old nessus) tells me that the driving distance from Champaign to Seattle is approximately 2,150 miles.

In the other direction, the drive to St. John's, Newfoundland is approximately 2,400 miles.

It always boggles me a bit to think that the eastern edge of North America is so far away.

Ferry service to Newfoundland and Labrador is provided by Marine Atlantic, which has a rather nice web site. The trip from North Sydney to Port aux Basques takes about five and a half hours. (From North Sydney to Argentia is fourteen hours. I've never spent fourteen hours on a boat in my life.)

The good people of St. John's have set up a few webcams around town. Alas, just now all they can tell me is that it's nighttime in Newfoundland. I must remember to check again tomorrow, during the daytime.

I can't help it: whenever I hear the name Mathematica Player, I think of Telly Savalas and the Player's Club card he used to shill for back in the 1980s:

(Why does Telly Savalas have a web site? He died in 1994....)

P.S. If you go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J94-_w9ARX0 you will regret it. Trust me on this, and just stay away.

Poor Jake, he's had a sore throat (plus occasional fever) for the last few days; this morning, we took him to the doctor.

The five-minute strep test came back positive, so Jake is back on the amoxicillin. (Jake's only six, but I'm sure he's already consumed a gallon of amoxicillin. Poor little guy.) The current batch smells like oranges; Jake reports that it tastes like oranges, too.

Jake's was invited to a birthday party today, but - alas - he's still contagious. The only thing worse than one kid with strep throat is a dozen kids with strep throat; I don't think the other parents would be too happy with us for infecting their children. So Jake stayed home. (And there was much whining & complaining....)

And the grandparents were supposed to come down from Arlington Heights tomorrow, but it turns out they don't want strep throat, either. So they're staying home. (Sorry, grandparents.)

We had a garage sale this morning. (More accurately, Jennifer had a garage sale this morning; she did all the setup work, and 99% of the waiting for / on customers.) Alas, nobody came. Total sales: $11.50.

The big question now: what are we going to do with all the stuff that didn't sell? If we wanted to keep it, it wouldn't have been in the garage sale. I suppose there are numerous local charities willing to accept garage-sale leftovers.

Maybe we'll take next year off, and think about garage sales again sometime in 2009.

The US Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit , where Mr. C______'s appeal is being heard, uses the PACER online case filing system, but in a disappointingly incomplete way: only the docket sheet is available. The actual court papers - the endlessly fascinating motions, responses, letters, orders, opinions, etc., etc. - are nowhere to be found.

It appears that Mr. C______'s attorneys have filed a motion to withdraw from the case, and Mr. C______ has filed a response to his attorneys' motion. But I can't read either of them. It's very frustrating.

I suppose if I drove to the courthouse, up in Chicago, they might let me take a look at the case file. (Probably not.) But while I'm willing to spend 8¢/page for PACER downloads, I'm not willing to spend $60 on a tank of gas or waste a vacation day driving to Chicago & back, just to spy on some poor yutz who's trying to avoid a lengthy stay in the federal rest home.

I suppose the docket sheet will have to suffice, until the Court of Appeals gets themselves properly computerized.

Interesting: http://www.vinelink.com/ is an aggregator of all the various state & local inmate locator databases.

It tells me that Mr. C______ is still cooling his heels in the Ford County Jail, up in Paxton; but I'm not sure I believe that. Surely he's either on his way to a facility closer to Chicago for his appeal, or to a federal prison to begin serving his sentence.

It seems unlikely that they'd leave him in Paxton.

Finished (yesterday morning, on the bus to work) reading With Custer on the Little Bighorn by William O. Taylor.

A fascinating account, from a soldier who was there.

I've been to the Little Bighorn Battlefield three times: 1990 (by myself), 1992 (with Leland, on the way to Yellowknife) and 1996 (with Jennifer, on the way to Seattle). Alas, this was before the age of digital cameras; all my pictures are stuck in a photo album in the closet, otherwise I'd post them on Flickr.

Perhaps I will devote a portion of my copious free time to scanning a few.

Over at MSNBC, Jonathan Alter says of the newly-deceased Jerry Falwell:

The truth about the Rev. Jerry Falwell is that he was a character assassin and hype artist who left little positive impact on the United States - and little negative impact either, for that matter.

Don't mince words, sir, tell us what you really think.

CNN tells me that Jerry Falwell has died.

He was one of the crowd of t.v. preachers, back in the 1980s. He wasn't slimy & dishonest like so many of the others (I imagine he never hired a prostitute, or raped one of his secretaries) but he always struck me as a bit frightening.

He always had a whiff of Nehemiah Scudder about him - or, for those who never read Robert A. Heinlein's If This Goes On--, a whiff of the Taliban.

Goodbye, Mr. Falwell. I hope the God you met in the afterlife was the one you expected. (Bad news for the rest of us if it was, I suppose.)

Loren Heiny quotes a Bill Gates factoid regarding Windows Vista's first 100 days on the market:

Nearly 40 million copies sold so far. Twice as fast as the adoption rate of XP.

Hm. Adoption implies choice. How many of those 40 million had no choice? How many bought a new computer and got Vista because the manufacturer doesn't offer Windows XP any more? (How many bought a new machine and immediately wiped Vista & installed XP? [Or Linux?])

The 'softies love to broadcast the statistics that make them look good, but they never get around to answering the questions that I want answered.

One of those silly brain-teasers that are very popular in software-industry job interviews:

Given an opaque box with three light bulbs inside and three switches outside, how would you determine which switch corresponded to which bulb if the box could be opened only once and only after all the switches were permanently set?

The solution:

1. Turn on switch one;
2. Turn off switch two;
3. Turn on switch three, leave it on for a few minutes, then turn it off.

The light for switch one will be on. The light for switch two will be off and cold. The light for switch three will be off and warm.

Silly brain-teasers. If you already know the answer, but the interviewer doesn't know that you know, a little play-acting ("Hm...let me think about this for a minute...") will make you look very clever.

(No, I haven't had any job interviews lately, and don't expect to have any in the foreseeable future. Thanks for asking!)

Recently deposited in my mailbox here at Wolfram Research World HQ: a card, with hand-written message from Stephen:

Thanks for being part of reinventing Mathematica!
May 1, 2007
Stephen Wolfram

That was nice of him.

(The loyal readership have all ordered their copies of Mathematica 6, yes?)

The sun was out this morning, while Jake & I were waiting for the bus; since then it's clouded up, and radar shows a line of storms racing northeast across the state.

Just now, they've reached the Illinois River. Springfield is under a severe thunderstorm warning.

There's a tiny little blob of a storm currently soaking Tolono, but as yet nothing here.

Will the rain wait until I get home? Since I left my umbrella at home this morning, I am not hopeful.

At my last checkup, Mr. Dentist showed me a photo he'd just taken of tooth #31, and said, "See those lines? Those are cracks. Any day now, this tooth is going to shatter like a dropped light bulb. You need a crown."

As Charlie Brown would say, AUGH.

So this morning I went back for a rather unpleasant hour of drilling & scraping, followed by the installation of a temporary crown. It's a cute little aluminum nubbin, hiding at the back of my mouth.

The permanent one - which won't be installed until next month - will be gold. How posh.

The temperature at 7:00am was a mere 60°; six hours later it's climbed to 86°. (The humidity is rather low today, so the air heats up faster.)

I most assuredly will not be attempting any two-mile hikes this afternoon. If I miss the bus, I'll wait for the next one.

A recent conversation with Mr. Sam, who didn't want to be in the stroller any more:

Babble-babble-babble down?
Sorry, Sam, no down.
Oh no!

Sam's having waffles for breakfast. He likes them whole, so he can pick them up & gnaw on them.

Continuing my current obsession with all things Custer: I suddenly remembered this evening that there once was a novelty song:

Please, Mr. Custer
I don't wanna go

...sung in a plaintive, almost whiny voice. But what was the title? And who sang it? (And when was it released?)

Jennifer suggested Google, but I decided to try iTunes first. A search for 'Custer' returns quite a few hits: Beth Custer, Kurt Custer, various songs about Custer, etc., etc.

And Larry Verne's 1960 hit, titled Mr. Custer. The iTunes preview was instantly recognizable.

I may have to buy it, just to annoy Jennifer.

Had the notion to re-enable the X30's wireless networking, and set up network synchronization with nessus. If I did that, I wouldn't need the dock any more; and that would mean one less thing for Sam to get into trouble with.

(He's discovered the speaker wires under the desk. I think it's time to buy a cheap pair of stereo speakers for nessus, and garage-sale the fancy 4.1 surround-sound system I bought way back in January, 2001.)

Setting up a wireless network connection is always harder than it needs to be. Microsoft included a wireless-network configuration tool in Windows CE, but it isn't very good. Dell included one of their own, but it's worse.

I wrestled with it for a while, but finally got it working. This means I can't upgrade ActiveSync, since the latest version doesn't support wireless synchronization.

(I hadn't planned on upgrading. There's just no point in it. ActiveSync is dead, dead, dead; I'm sure there are more 'softies working on MS-DOS - which was discontinued sometime around Windows 95, twelve years ago  - than on ActiveSync. That's Microsoft - always throwing ideas & products onto the market, but just as often losing interest in them.)

Lunch today was at Mcalister's Deli, a new place in the twilight zone between North Prospect and Marketplace Mall.

Tasty food, but very crowded. (Lots of dressed-up people, too. Post-church? Mother's Day lunch?)

Yesterday:

• Went to Jake's soccer class, over in Dodds Park. (I neglected to use sunblock, and am now sporting an impressive sunburn.)
• Went (straight from soccer class) to Cousin Ryan's birthday party, in Normal.

Today:

• Put fertilizer on the lawn (which isn't as green as it ought to be).
• Take Jennifer out to lunch.
• Call the grandmas.
• Other Mother's Day festivities, as time & energy allow.

The camera has about 60 pictures on it, most of them taken yesterday. Perhaps a few will appear on Flickr presently.

Join the crowd: go to http://icanhascheezburger.com/ and be amused.

My favorite: halp! i not cheezburger!.

The U.S. Bureau of Prisons inmate locator still lists the unfortunate Mr. C______ as "in transit", but has added a projected release date: 2014.

That's about a year shorter than his original ten-year sentence.

(The Bureau of Prisons has a Sentence Computation Manual that is absolutely imcomprehensible. It's a wonder that they can figure out when - or whether - to release anybody.)

Rush will begin the Snakes & Arrows tour in June; they'll be in Indianapolis on August 26th, and in Chicago on September 8th.

I wonder if I could make it to either of those shows. Probably not; I'm too cheap to pay for tickets, and too lazy to drive that far.

Apparently filing an appeal of his recent conviction isn't enough to keep Mr. C______ in the Ford County lockup, where he's been for the last year and a half; he is now listed in the U.S. Bureau of Prisons inmate locator system as "in transit".

I wonder where they're taking him....

Orson Scott Card posted a few paragraphs recently about Israel "Iz" Kamakawiwo'ole, a Hawaiian musician and singer. Uncle Orson says Iz is pretty cool, so I thought I'd check him out. A bit of poking around turned up two facts:

1. Iz's albums are on iTunes, and - yes - they're pretty cool.
2. Iz died ten years ago.

I wonder if Uncle Orson knows that....

Someday I will learn that if I miss the bus it's always better to wait for the next one than to walk the rest of the way home. Today, alas, was not that day.

I worked the MTD this afternoon: the 10E from WRI to Lincoln Square; then the 5W from Lincoln Square to Country Fair; then the 9A from Country Fair (almost) all the way home.

Except I sorta kinda missed that last connection. (I did arrive in time to watch the 9A pull away.) Oops. The fancy computerized bus-tracking sign said the next bus wasn't due for 35 minutes. Forget that, said I. I'm in  a hurry. I'll just walk.

It's about two miles from the Country Fair bus stop to the front door of Stately Rice Manor. The temperature was 87°; there were no clouds, and not much of a breeze. By the time I got home, I was feeling a bit scorched.

I feel better now. A few hours of air-conditioned comfort, and lots of water, have put me right.

(The 9A that I was too impatient to wait for passed me while I was resting in a convenient bit of roadside shade, about two-thirds of the way home. If I'd waited for it, I would have gotten home quite a bit sooner - minus the sunburn, dehydration, exhaustion, etc., etc. I'm an idiot.)

Today's pedometer total: somewhere above 9,200 steps. Some troubledome once said that everybody should aim for 10,000 steps every day, to be healthy. If I tried that, I'd be in the emergency room sometime around day 3.

I had the notion to calibrate my pedometer (which I've had for nearly two years, and am just now starting to use), so I counted out ten panels on the front sidewalk and paced carefully from one end (a few feet into the neighbor's yard) to the other (just inside our driveway).

Ten panels, twenty steps. I did several trials; twenty steps, every time.

From there, it's just a matter of arithmetic. Measure the length of one panel, multiply by ten, divide by twenty, and - presto! - the length of my stride would be revealed. (I suppose it would be a little faster to just divide by two.)

My ancient tape measure said panel #10 (i.e., at the driveway end) was 61 inches. Just for laughs, I measured panel #9, which turned out to be 58 inches. The other panels ranged from 56 inches up to 63. Apparently, whoever built the sidewalk left their tape measure at home that day, and just eyeballed it.

Slacker.

But the total length of all ten panels turned out to be 603 inches. Divide that by 20 steps, and my stride length is 30 inches.

(Today's pedometer total: 4,574 steps, or slightly over two miles.)

Cute survey thingy over at http://www.tk421.net/character/: Which fantasy/sf character are you?

I'm Commander Data:

A controlled personality with a vast range of skills and behavior, you are often intrigued by the people and places surrounding you.

Rush released a new album two weeks ago: Snakes & Arrows.

I had no idea they were back in the studio. (It's been so long since Vapor Trails - five years - that I was half-convinced that Rush had slipped quietly into retirement.) I guess I haven't been paying attention.

Finished (at 10:41pm last night) reading My Life on the Plains, by George Armstrong Custer.

Yes, that George Armstrong Custer. Civil War hero, 7th Cavalry, etc. And quite the 19th-century celebrity, too; Wikipedia says:

It is believed that Custer was photographed more than any other Civil War officer, and perhaps more than any other person in the 19th century with the exception of "Buffalo Bill" Cody.

A fascinating bit of history.

Last night I dreamed that terrorists exploded a hydrogen bomb in the town of Bethlehem, Virginia. The mushroom cloud bore a suspicious resemblance to a stellated icosahedron, official mascot of Wolfram Research; this should have told me it was just a dream, but in dreams the most outlandish things seem perfectly normal.

A curious fillip from my subconscious: Bruce Springsteen was performing in town when the bomb went off, and was vaporized. (Not just killed - vaporized. The dream was quite clear on this point.)

The dream was so vivid that when the alarm went off this morning I half-expected to hear the NPR people talking about fallout, body counts, etc. (And, I suppose, the unfortunate Mr. Springsteen.)

There's a Bethlehem, West Virginia (it's near Wheeling), but (so far as I can tell) no town named Bethlehem in Virginia.

MSNBC says:

In remarks just after his election, [French President-elect Nicolas] Sarkozy said: "France is back in Europe."

France is back? I hadn't known it was missing.

Poking around the web this morning - as opposed to doing something useful with my time - I came across a rumor that Yahoo is going to pull the plug on the Yahoo Photos service in order to focus (heh) on Flickr.

So I wandered over to the Yahoo Photos web site, looking for a press release or other official statement; instead, I seem to have accidentally created a Yahoo Photos account for myself.

Oops.

The good news is that I don't have to bother cancelling it. The rumors are true: sometime this fall, Yahoo Photos - and my inadvertent account there - will disappear. (I'm not sure it's possible to cancel a Yahoo account, anyway. Yahoo is the Hotel California: you can check out, but you can never leave.)

My current regimen of medication:

• 6:00am - Vitamin; medicine #1, #2, #3 & #4; ear drops
• Noon - Ear drops
• 2:00pm - Medicine #3
• 6:00pm - Medicine #2 & #4, ear drops
• 11:00pm - Medicine #3, ear drops

I believe I will skip #4 today. It's just some prescription-strength naproxen, and my ear doesn't hurt nearly as much as it did on Thursday.

Mail from AT&T this morning:

Additionally, within the next few weeks you will begin seeing graphical advertisements in your AT&T Yahoo! Mail service. These advertisements will be integrated into the AT&T Yahoo! Mail experience, and we hope you will find the advertisements useful.

I would not describe tacking advertisements on the end of every message I send as 'useful'. No, the word I'm thinking of is...hm...how about 'annoying'?

If I used my AT&T mailbox for anything, I'd probably be upset. As it stands, I just don't care: so long as AT&T doesn't block access to the Pair POP server, it doesn't matter to me how AT&T tries to [censored] their customers.

This is pretty cool: the US Court of Appeals (7th Judicial Circuit) has a podcast of oral arguments. Listen to lawyers & judges arguing cases.

I might have to subscribe to that one. (Or not. Hours of impenetrable legalisms, every day? The poor iPod would melt.)

Mr. C______'s appeal has shown up in the docket, but there isn't much information there yet.

I have redirected just about all picture links from the old people pages (Jacob, Sam, etc.) to the corresponding Flickr photo sets.

I suppose this means I can delete the old pages now, and free up some space on the Pair servers.

Sometime in the last 24 hours or so, the pilot light went out in the water heater.

It doesn't take long for all warmth to leach away from the (apparently) under-insulated tank, either. My morning shower was quite bracing.

Re-lighting the pilot light was the work of a moment, and now we have hot water again. How nice. (I just hope the silly thing stays lit. Now is not a good time for another expensive major-appliance repair job.)

This morning, out at the bus stop, Jake & I saw three geese perched - one each - on the rooftops of nearby houses.

They honked at each other a bit, then #1 flew over to #2's house; then both of them flew over to #3's house.

There was more honking, then they all flew away.

Stopped off at the doctor's office this afternoon, to have my ear looked at.

"Swimmer's ear," quoth the doctor. "Here are some pills & some drops."

Swimmer's ear? I haven't been near a swimming pool since the water park trip last April. (Which somehow never got a mention in the daybook, so don't bother searching the archives for it.)

I hope the medicine starts working soon. My ear hurts. Pity me, pity me.

Mr. C______'s journey through the American legal system isn't finished: he has filed an appeal. On what grounds, I have no idea. The US District Court case file doesn't say, and the Court of Appeals online case filing system has no cases filed under the name 'C______'.

The Bureau of Prisons inmate locator still has no record of him, either. Not even 'in transit'. The sentencing form said he was to be remanded to the custody of the US Marshals, so he should be there.

(Poor Mr. C______. Not only is he looking at 10 years behind bars - probably at the federal penitentiary in Pekin; it's closest - but there's some goon from Champaign obsessively tracking his every misfortune and blathering about it on a web site.)

Sam took a late nap today (and woke up really grumpy), so we were worried that he'd want to stay up late.

But at the usual time (9:00pm) I put him in the crib, and he didn't mind. He didn't mind, but neither did he go to sleep. For the last hour, he's been chattering, singing and kicking.

Just now (10:00pm) he seems - finally! - to be settling down.

(Things could be worse. When Sam was very small, he'd sometimes have an attack of the midnight rowdies, and be wide awake until 2:00am or later. Going to work the day after a night like that was rather difficult.)

Yesterday, Mr. C______ - the defendant in the case for which I was almost a juror, last October - went before Judge McCuskey for sentencing.

The sentence: ten years, plus three years of supervised release. Ouch.

I was hoping the court's electronic case filing system would have some kind of judge's statement, explaining the sentence, but - alas - none was available. (In addition to the rather dry Judgement in a Criminal Case form, there were three very interestingly-titled documents posted yesterday, but I'm not allowed to download them. Very frustrating.)

I suppose I can stop stalking Mr. C______ now.

A tiny little thunderstorm is currently centered over Champaign. If the radar is to be trusted, five miles in any direction is blue sky.

Perhaps it is a message from the gods:

Dear Wolfram Research:
Your software is not pleasing to me.
(s) Zeus

Mathematica 6 is now available.

Buy it today, only $2,495.

NOAA reports that yesterday's high was 90°: first of the year. In April?

Today's forecast calls for highs in the upper eighties, which seems unseasonable even for May.

I suppose global warming will get more airtime & column-inches now.