June 2007 Archives

Jacob's in Arlington Heights this weekend, for a visit with the grandparents.

The house is strangely quiet without him.

Poor Mr. Sam, he spent most of Friday evening throwing up.

It started just before dinnertime. Sam & I were sitting at my desk, checking mail, when Sam leaned over and...blearggh, down the front of my shirt. He was his usual perky self afterward - I suppose little boys who aren't quite two years old yet are still a little unclear on the difference between normal and abnormal bodily functions: they're all equally surprising when they happen.

Fifteen or twenty minutes later, he did it again, this time in his pack & play. (Which is, now that I think about it, on loan from the grandparents. Sorry, grandparents.) We cleaned up Sam, cleaned up the pack & play, and got out some towels and washcloths.

Another twenty minutes, and...blearggh. Poor little man.

Jake went to bed at the usual time, but Jennifer & I stayed up with Sam. He was very sleepy, but the every-fifteen-minutes blearggh-ing kept him awake. We watched lots of trashy television (the Discovery Channel: Bering Sea crab fishermen (a very...um...crabby bunch); how to survive calamities & disasters; that sort of thing. Sam horked his way through most of the linen closet, and all of the washcloths, before finally falling asleep sometime after 11:30pm or so.

We didn't put him in the crib until 1:00am, to be sure he really was out for the night and wasn't going to spew any more. (Cribs are hard to clean. All those slats....)

This morning, Sam woke up at the usual time (7:15am). He's been his usual rowdy self all day, and very hungry. He's had pedialyte, applesauce, bananas and crackers, and - so far - kept it all down. Just now, he's taking a big nap. Whatever it was he had, he seems to be over it today.

But what was it? Germs? Something he ate?

I have no idea.

Dropped Mr. Explorer off at the Ford dealer - home of the first-class experience, and the occasional annoyingly persistent used-car salesman - for an oil change.

"Looks like you're due for the 120,000 mile maintenance," said the fella behind the counter. He then rattled off a lengthy list of tasks and announced the price: $340.

Just once, I'd like to take my car in for an oil change and not end up with $300 of additional repairs.

Update: Mr. Ford Dealer called to say, "Great news! Your Explorer needs another $200 of repairs!"

Since these are the people who (last time) charged me $160 to say, "Gee, I didn't hear anything," I am now quite suspicious. Fortunately, Ford has their maintenance schedules online, so I printed off a table of what Mr. Explorer should need at 120,000 miles. Mr. Service Tech and I are going to go over it line-by-line to see whether they're just padding the bill again.

Update #2: I chickened out, and didn't argue the bill with anybody. (I'm pathetically non-confrontational sometimes.) But my previous comment about annoying salesmen was right on the mark: while I was trying to load up the car (bag of work stuff, wallet, hat, etc.), some nitwit walked right up to me and went into his spiel.

"I don't have any money to pay for a new car," I interrupted.

"No money down! Blah blah blah..."

"I don't have any money for car payments, either." You people are already into my wallet for $550 today, I don't trust your service department any more, and I'm in a really bad mood. Now get out of my face unless you want tire tracks across that hideous used-car salesman suit you're wearing.

"Er...um...g'bye...."

I don't know yet what car might come after Mr. Explorer (or when), but I'm fairly certain it won't be coming from Ford of Champaign.

Is it just coincidence that today -

• Mr. Doctor told me that I've got mild-to-moderate carpal tunnel syndrome, and I really should have surgery - on both wrists - sometime soon, because it's only going to get worse if I procrastinate;
• One of the cow-orkers said, I'll be back in a few hours, I have to go to a funeral; and
• Robert Scoble linked to Derek Miller, who's dealing with stage 4 metastatic colorectal cancer and has - at best - a 30% chance of being alive five years from now.

I was feeling a bit sorry for myself on the bus ride from Mr. Doctor's office to work, but not any more.

Sputnik recorded over two inches of rain during yesterday's lunchtime storms. (Actually, it recorded over twenty-one inches, but the rain gauge is mis-calibrated and generally records ten times the actual rainfall.)

Woke up this morning with the sort of headache that usually results from a wild bacchanal the night before; but there was none. Instead, Sam & I went on some errands:

• To Sears, to pick up a few more tubes of caulk for the air-conditioner project (47 cents each, on clearance) and ask about replacement knobs for our stove (no, they don't carry parts).
• To the drugstore, to pick up a few prescriptions. (I'm amassing quite a collection of medicine bottles, I am.)
• To the grocery store, to pick up some milk & other miscellaneous items (including a few cookies from the bakery dept., very tasty - and they seem to have solved their quality-control problems: no more stale cookies, yay).

Yesterday was a busy day. I'm hoping today is a bit more relaxed.

Apple issued a press release today, titled AT&T and Apple Announce Simple, Affordable Service Plans for iPhone:

iPhone will be available in a 4GB model for $499 (US) and an 8GB model for $599 (US), and will work with either a PC or Mac. All iPhone monthly service plans are available for individuals and families and are based on a new two-year service agreement with AT&T. Individual plans are priced at $59.99 for 450 minutes, $79.99 for 900 minutes and $99.99 for 1,350 minutes. All plans include unlimited data (email and web), Visual Voicemail, 200 SMS text messages, roll over minutes and unlimited mobile-to-mobile and a one-time activation fee of $36.

I see a few problems:

• 8GB isn't nearly enough storage for a handheld video player.
• Two-year contracts are for suckers.
• $60/month hardly qualifies as 'affordable'.

Even so, people will be lining up on Friday to buy one. (Don't look for me in any of those lines. I'm not terribly happy with the phone I have, but of the many choices available to me - all of them bad, for one reason or another - it's the least bad.)

Thunderstorms passing through just now; radar suggests the rain will continue for a good long while.

I had planned to walk over to the IGA for lunch (salad bar, very tasty), but in this weather I'm reluctant to walk even as far as the McDonald's (greaseburger & fries, very tasty but spectacularly unhealthy).

There's always TGI Friday's, I suppose. I wouldn't even have to leave the building for that.

I should have brought lunch from home today. Duh.

I took Jake to his tae kwon do class this evening. Since the class is an hour long, and there's nothing much to do there unless you're out on the floor practicing kicks & punches, I brought my current reading project: Letters of Ayn Rand.

I felt strangely self-conscious about reading it in public, afraid that people would see it and think, Ayn Rand, eh? You're one of those people, aren't you? Not at all; I just read her novels, long ago, and thought it might be interesting to read her correspondence, possibly get a glimpse of her when she wasn't in character as the humorless, virulently intellectual Serious Novelist & Philosopher.

Alas, no. Her published letters have - so far; I'm scarcely one-fourth through the book - been more of the same. (Though I did cackle a bit when Frank Lloyd Wright told her that Howard Roark was a dumb name for an architect.)

Two months ago, I falsified my William Paterson University alumni contact information in an attempt to stifle the endless spam they were sending me; it worked, until today. (Not that my alumni contact information was particularly valid to begin with. I never went to WPU. I've never been to New Jersey. I've never even watched an episode of The Sopranos.)

I forwarded their latest message - a begging letter from the Alumni Fund - to Nancy Norville (any relation to Deborah?), Director of Annual Giving and Special Development Programs, pleading to be left alone.

It probably won't work.

Dear Cow-orkers:

If you send me mail that begins with

X wrote:
> Y wrote:
>> X wrote:
>>> Y wrote:
>>>> X wrote:
>>>>> Y wrote:
>>>>>> X wrote:
>>>>>>> Y wrote:
>>>>>>>> X wrote:
>>>>>>>>> Y wrote:
>>>>>>>>>> Z wrote:

I'm not going to read it.

If you want me to read your mail, send me something readable. Thank you.

Eight years ago today, Jennifer & I were married.

Happy anniversary, my love.

We were planning to go to the Taste of Champaign this afternoon, but - alas - it was cancelled due to rain.

We try to hit the Taste every year, to pick up some Curtis Orchard donuts a month before their official opening day. Jake likes the donuts, but lately he's more interested in the inflatable climb-on (and/or bounce-in) rides. (I thought these had some fancy name, but apparently they're just called 'inflatables'. Jake calls them 'bouncy houses'.)

We'll try again tomorrow, if the weather cooperates.

The Mecklenburg County Recorder of Deeds has a pretty spiffy web site, with lots of genealogically-interesting databases online. In particular, they have death records online & searchable, which is quite convenient (especially compared to, say, driving to North Carolina).

One of my genealogical projects (on hiatus for the last year or so) involves one Thomas Stirling, who died in Charlotte, North Carolina, in January 1969. My current hypothesis is that his wife, Rose, was the daughter of Anna Ziegler, who in turn was the sister of Jacob Maurer; but I'm having a hard time collecting sufficient information to prove or disprove it.

I need to get a death certificate for Mr. Stirling, and an obituary. In theory, the former can be obtained from VitalCheck, and the latter from the (presumably) friendly & helpful researchers at the Public Library of Charlotte & Mecklenburg County; but I'm too lazy to figure out how to send research requests to either of them.

NOAA radar shows a rather nasty-looking line of thunderstorms coming in from the northwest. The leading edge is just crossing I55 - it follows the highway almost exactly, all the way from Pontiac to Springfield - so it should arrive in Champaign shortly after midnight.

That's going to make it difficult to sleep tonight.

Update: NOAA also says:

A BAND OF STRONG TO SEVERE THUNDERSTORMS WILL RACE EAST OF THE ILLINOIS RIVER TOWARD A CLINTON TO DECATUR TO TAYLORVILLE LINE BETWEEN 1130 PM AND MIDNIGHT...AND NEAR I-57 BY 1230 PM. THESE STORMS COULD PRODUCE DAMAGING WINDS IN EXCESS OF 60 MPH...LARGE HAIL...VERY HEAVY RAINS OF 1 TO 2 INCHES AND FREQUENT LIGHTNING. THE STRONGEST STORMS THROUGH 1130 PM WILL BE ALONG AND WEST OF A CLINTON TO DECATUR TO TAYLORVILLE LINE.

Not much risk of tornadoes, though.

A more careful reading of the Apple TV documentation reveals that it has component video & analog audio connectors, which means it can be connected to our television. (Really it's Jennifer's television, but she lets me use it.)

The only troublesome point remaining is Apple's constant references to wide-screen televisions. I don't know if our television qualifies as wide-screen, and Apple seems reluctant to publish any sort of Known to work with Apple TV list. All they say is:

Enhanced-definition or high-definition widescreen TVs capable of 1080i 60/50Hz, 720p 60/50Hz, 576p 50Hz (PAL format), or 480p 60Hz

...which doesn't tell me anything.

I suppose it doesn't really matter. This month's budget is sadly lacking in funds for interesting (but expensive & unnecessary) gadgetry.

Finished reading - on the bus, stopped at Country Fair, wondering where the driver and gone and when/whether he might return - The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume 3: Second Variety.

Interesting stories. It seemed that most of them ran about fifteen pages; perhaps that was the standard length back in the 1950s for sale to science fiction magazines.

These stories were all written in the 1950s, and they're painfully dated. Especially the ones about mutants with psychic powers. Not regular people who happen to have psychic powers - it's inexplicably essential to the tale that they be mutants. Nobody writes stories like that any more (and that's a good thing).

There are two volumes left in the series, but I think I'll read something else instead. Letters of Ayn Rand - which has sat unread on the shelf since I bought it, twelve years ago - looks interesting, but I'm a little worried about the conversations it might get me into if I read it on the bus. Something less provocative, I suppose. (How about Journals of Ayn Rand? I've had that one for nine years....)

The Federal Bureau of Prisons Inmate Locator page reports that Mr. C______ has been moved to the Federal Correctional Institution in Manchester, Kentucky.

Manchester is about 400 miles from here, so Mr. C______'s friends & family are going to have a hard time getting there to visit him.

Remember the Personality Identification Playing Cards?

Four years ago, when the Iraq war was still about Saddam Hussein, the U.S. military released a deck of playing cards with the names and (when available) pictures of the fifty-five most wanted members of the Iraqi government.

The U.S. caught a few of them, killed a few more, then quietly dropped the whole thing. What happened? How many of the fugitives are still at large?

Tiny little thunderstorms are popping up all over Illinois today: quite intense, but only a few miles across.

One passed fairly close on the west side of town this morning; I watched it from my office window. Just now, there's another close enough to the east that I can hear thunder.

Alas, so far today no rain has fallen here. Our lawn is turning brown.

Wolfram Research started a 401(k) program shortly after I started working there, but in my laziness & procrastination I didn't sign up until some years later. But I did finally get the paperwork turned in before the deadline, sometime around 1994, and my 401(k) has been happily growing ever since. (It took a big hit when the tech bubble burst in 2000, and another in the months after 9/11, but generally speaking my balance goes up, up & away.)

My initial fund distribution was 40-40-20, but over the years it's drifted a bit; now it's 45-37-18. All the investment gurus say to rebalance your portfolio every year or so, but I never did. As long as the balance keeps going up, why mess with success?

One thing I've learned over the last few years is that the distance between 'not enough money' and 'enough money' is filled with a myriad tiny decisions, each of which by itself seems completely inconsequential & irrelevant.

A glass of wine at bedtime? That's $60/month: more than our cable bill. (That's why I gave it up, last month. That, and wine tastes vile.) Driving to work every day? That's $75 - $100/month, just for gas.

So this evening I decided to pay more attention to my 401(k). (Only 25 years until retirement. The clock is ticking....) I updated the account information in Quicken (sadly out of date), then used the online account management thingy to rebalance my account. Sometime in the next week or so, I'll be back at 40-40-20, and we'll see whether the gurus are right.

Jennifer & I had the notion to watch the first season of Heroes this summer, so we'd be ready when the second season starts (in October?). This turns out to be more difficult than it sounds:

• The Heroes season 1 DVDs won't be available until late August.
• The season 1 episodes are available from nbc.com, but only as streaming video. It can't be saved for later viewing. (And nessus' monitor is running pretty dark these days. Pictures & video are hard to see.)
• Season 1 can be purchased from iTunes (only $1.99 per episode, or $42.99 for the entire season), but videos purchased from iTunes can't be burned to DVD, or transferred to the TiVo.
• Video purchased from iTunes can be transferred to an Apple TV box, but - so far as I can tell from the rather spotty documentation - the Apple TV box can't be plugged into either of our televisions. (So even if we felt like dropping $300 on an Apple TV box, it wouldn't do any good.)

So all of our options for watching Heroes this summer are bad. Pity us, pity us.

Grandparents came to visit this weekend:

Yesterday, the Arlington Heights grandparents were here. Lunch was sandwiches from Potbelly, dessert was ice cream from Cold Stone Creamery. Very tasty. Jake & Sam played with Grandma & Grandpa, and we all stayed inside because the temperature outside was 95° (more or less).

This morning, the Normal grandparents were here, for brunch. (Funny word, 'brunch'. Sounds like a sports injury: "Yesterday I brunched my knee playing baseball.") Brunch was breakfast casserole (hash browns, eggs, cheese), fruit salad, donuts and orange juice. Jake & Sam played with Grandma & Grandpa, and we all stayed inside because the temperature outside was 91° (more or less).

Jennifer made fudge yesterday: two batches, one for Grandpa Norm and one for me. Very tasty.

Just now, Sam's taking a nap (charming the grandparents is hard work when you're almost two years old), Jennifer & Jacob are watching television, and I'm messing about on the computer.

I added a few more bookmarks to my del.icio.us page. I'm up to 331 now, which would seem like a lot if I didn't know about the people who have thousands of bookmarks on del.icio.us. (Sure would be nice if I could sort my bookmarks. Chronological order isn't very useful.)

Collecting links to state government web sites: twenty down, thirty to go.

The daybook has been rather boring of late: short, choppy & disorganized entries, nothing much worth reading.

I want to write longer, more detailed narratives, but I just don't have the time.

Pity me, pity me.

Had another round of physical therapy this morning: a bit of traction, to fix a bulging disc somewhere in my neck (C5-C6, I think; perhaps next time I should ask).

Last time, the therapist set the traction machine on 22 pounds of force; as that didn't seem to have much effect, today she upped it to 27 pounds. ("Don't worry," she said. "It takes 400 pounds to pull your head off." And how did you find that out, I wonder.)

I left the clinic about an eighth of an inch taller than when I went in, but I shrank back to my usual stature fairly quickly. (Or so I was told; I didn't feel any different, aside from a minor headache.)

Mr. Doctor says traction will work wonders on my spine. I hope so.

A sad day for children of the 1950s: Mr. Wizard has died. (I never watched his show, having been born ten or fifteen years too late for it.)

The June meeting of the Champaign County Genealogical Society was tonight; Jake and I attended. (So did about twenty other people.)

Mr. Jacob very carefully wrote his name on the sign-in sheet (I didn't know he could write that small), and sat quietly through the entire meeting. For the most part, we ignored the speaker (who was, if I may be parenthetically blunt, rather dull) and concentrated on scribbling notes to each other on the X30.

Jake also had fun with the solitaire game. (When did he learn to play solitaire?)

We got home a little after 8:30pm, so bedtime was delayed a bit (Sam, too). Good thing nobody has to get up early tomorrow.

The TypePad statistics page tells me that since Friday I've been averaging about twenty views per day, triple the normal amount.

I suppose the loyal readership have been looking for updates on my superannuated spine. It's much better now; sometimes I even walk almost normally.

I still have an ample supply of medications - a muscle relaxant and two different painkillers - so I'm ready for any relapses I may have.

Sixteen years ago today, I started working at Wolfram Research.

A quick check of the staff directory reveals that I am #15 on the seniority list. (I was sure I'd be in the top ten by now.)

Back still hurts today (though not as much as yesterday), so I decided to stay home & recuperate a little.

So of course today is the day that WRI's internet connection gets dodgy. The VPN won't stay up long enough for me to get anything done.

Can't sleep at night, because you're wondering which US Navy aircraft carriers have been converted into floating museums?

Wonder no more, the answer is over on my del.icio.us page, filed neatly under usa navy carriers.

Also available: usa navy battleships.

Sam's been in his crib for over an hour now; we thought he was sleeping, but from the baby monitor we just heard him...laughing?

What's so funny about being in a crib, in a dark room, in the middle of the night?

Over the last week or two I've added 247 bookmarks to my del.icio.us account. (I didn't think I had so many.)

Two things I like about del.icio.us:

1. It's not tied to one computer. I can maintain a single set of bookmarks, accessible from anywhere.
2. Tags are a huge improvement over the usual folder system. I can ask for a list of OS X applications, or a list of Indiana genealogy sites; that can't be done with folders.

Two things I don't like about del.icio.us:

1. Tags are always listed in chronological order. I want alphabetical order.
2. Coming up with a consistent & meaningful set of tags isn't easy, and changing tags once they've been created is quite difficult.

Still, I suppose I'll keep using del.icio.us, at least for a while.

Dr. Bill - or, more accurately, Nurse Practitioner Bill - poked at me a bit, then said I've strained my back. He prescribed a fresh supply of the same happy pills I received last December, with a bonus Darvocet prescription.

I imagine I'll be up & about fairly soon, but for now my life is little more than sloth with a heating pad.

1. I've strained my back again. Ouch.
2. The genealogy conference - scheduled for today - has apparently been cancelled, because yesterday's weather closed a bunch of airports on the east coast and the speaker was stuck in Washington.

Will there be more bad news? Stay tuned!

The TypePad statistics page tells me that over the last seven months the daybook has averaged 7.7 page views per day.

Wil Wheaton - who also uses TypePad - posted his statistics today: half a million visitors over the last month.

I'm suddenly keen to know who reads this (if anyone does, that is).

So: click here, scroll down to the bit that says Post a Comment, type something in the Name and Comments fields, then click the Post button. It's easy, it's painless, it's your chance to improve the signal/noise ratio of the daybook!

P.S. Anyone who sends me email saying, "I read the daybook" will be taunted mercilessly.

Posting all my bookmarks to del.icio.us (which project is nearly finished) means poking around in the murkier corners of my bookmark collection; in this case, http://www.the-nails.com/.

It turns out that the Nails' 1984 album Mood Swing is finally available on CD. Yay.

Carrie Newcomer has a new album, Regulars and Refugees - which was released almost two years ago.

I am so out of touch.

I have a set of bookmarks filed under 'Telephones': various landline & cellular companies that I've had some reason to check out, over the years. The current list: Cingular, Kyocera, Nextel, SBC, Sprint, T-Mobile, US Cellular, Verizon Wireless and Virgin Mobile.

Three of these companies don't exist any more: SBC bought Cingular and AT&T, then decided to rename itself AT&T ; Nextel was bought by Sprint.

I seem to recall that Verizon Wireless exists only because Ameritech was required by regulators to spin off its cellular service before merging with one of the other Baby Bells (BellSouth? Southwestern Bell?), sometime back in the 1990s.

It seems that AT&T is quietly, methodically reconstituting itself, like the T-1000 in Terminator 2.

I haven't played a vinyl record in over twenty years, yet I can still identify the precise location in Hopelessly Human by Kansas where my turntable always skipped; and the place near the end of L.A. Woman by the Doors where I leaned a little too close to the turntable, touched the edge of the record with the tip of my nose, and applied a most curious wah-wah effect to Jim Morrison's vocals.

Funny thing, memory.

An update on Mr. C______'s appeal:

The Court of Appeals has granted his attorney's motion to withdraw, and appointed a new attorney for him. The new one is based in St. Louis, which can't be very convenient to handle an appeal that's being heard in Chicago.

The remainder of the year will be devoted to briefs (documents, not underpants). According to the docket sheet: Appellant's brief due 8/8/07; Appellee's brief due 9/7/07; Appellant's reply brief, if any, is due 9/21/07.

I am not a lawyer, but I expect the end result of all this legal foolery will be: Appeal denied, go finish your sentence & stop pestering the Court.

(Were you thinking of that Ted Nugent song? You are now!)

Today was Jake's last day of school: no classes, just an hour-long all-school assembly. Various awards were handed out; Jake brought home one for perfect attendance. (Jake's a pretty healthy guy these days, a big improvement over the constant illnesses, doctor visits & courses of antibiotics we all suffered through when he was two.)

Now young Mr. Jacob is a man of leisure, until he starts first grade at the end of next month. (Summer vacation is a lot shorter now than it was when I was a kid.)

Last Friday was the 40th anniversary of the release of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band; and a PBS documentary I watched for a while this evening tells me that tomorrow is the 40th anniversary of the Six-Day War.

The latter reminded me of an old joke:

I'd give my left eye to look like Moshe Dayan.

(According to Wikipedia, June 1967 was a very busy time....)

It's raining. My umbrella is at home.

Radar says the storm will pass very soon. I think I'll just wait it out before leaving.

Went to bed late last night, got up early this morning, didn't sleep much in between; rather sleepy today as a result.

Not having a very productive day. Bleagh.

Finished (last night) reading The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 1: Secret Sharers: 546 pages of occasionally interesting fiction.

One of the stories, A Sleep and a Forgetting, was vaguely familiar. Apparently I read it when it was originally published (in Playboy, sometime in the late 1980s).

Now I have to find a new book to read. Something smaller (hence easier to carry on the bus), I think.

Mail the other day from Leister Productions: Reunion 9 is now available, only $59.95 for users of Reunion 8.

I seem to recall being promised, when I bought Reunion 8 last year, that the upgrade to Reunion 9 would be free; but there's no mention of that on the Reunion web site, and nobody's complaining in the Reunion Talk forums that they've been ripped off. Perhaps I am misremembering.

I suppose the next time I have $60 lying around, I'll upgrade.

(Not that I do much genealogy these days. No time for it, alas.)

No mail from del.icio.us tech support, but I can log in now. A big red banner across the top of the page says A verification email has been sent. It contains a link you must click in order to verify your email address. but so far nothing has appeared in the inbox.

Perhaps it's in the inbox on the Mac. I'll have to check, once Sam wakes up (which, judging from the sounds on the baby monitor, is going to happen any minute now).

As an experiment, I created an account for myself on http://del.icio.us/; alas, there were problems.

The final step of the registration process is a confirmation EMAIL: read the mail, click on the link, your account is up & running.

Alas, I skipped that step (I forgot - easy to do on nessus, where I can't read my mail), and tried to log on. Now my account is in some weird intermediate state: the confirmation link has expired, but I can't log in.

I sent a message to the tech support people, confessing my dumbness & pleading for rescue. There's no telling when I might get a reply; in the meantime, no del.icio.us for me.

This is frustrating:

I use four different computers: two at work, two at home. Each one has its own set of web browser bookmarks (except for poor nessus, which has no bookmarks any more), and they're all different.

I want a way to keep all four bookmark lists perfectly synchronized: add a bookmark at work, it automatically becomes available at home. Probably this means some sort of online thing (like Google Reader, which keeps all my RSS feeds online).

But some of my more important bookmarks are work-related, and I probably shouldn't be posting WRI-internal machine names & URLs for the whole internet to see.

(There's also the question of organizing my bookmarks. The simple tree structure provided by Safari and Internet Explorer isn't good enough. I want categories, tags, something like that.)

I suppose that's what http://del.icio.us/ is for. Maybe I should sign up. (But their URL is so annoying....)

Poor Sam, he is a bit worse today: he still has the fever, and now it appears that his throat is starting to bother him.

(I, on the other hand, do not have a fever, despite my worries yesterday that I did. Thanks for asking!)

The sun was out - and rather unpleasantly hot - while I was waiting for the bus this morning, but that didn't last long. When I stepped off the bus (at Fox & State), clouds had rolled in: low, misty clouds, the kind that leave distant buildings and trees visible but grayed out.

NOAA reports the current temperature is 69°, and the dewpoint is 66°. Usually that means big storms, later in the day. (I have my umbrella. Lucky me.)