September 2007 Archives

I would delete my Plaxo and Tumblr accounts if I could; but it appears that I can't. I can, however, delete all bookmarks thereto & do my best to forget they ever existed. And so I will.

Facebook accounts can't be deleted, either, but they can be deactivated. I'd deactivate mine - again; I deactivated it once before, then changed my mind after a few weeks - but there remains some miniscule chance that it might still prove useful.

I'm going to keep my Twitter account. I like posting blather to Twitter from my phone. (The oft-mentioned Scoble has a Twitter account; I added him today to my followed-people list, and within hours he had reciprocated. Don't follow me, sir, I'm not very interesting.)

The later you stay up reading (say, until midnight), the earlier your two-year-old will wake up the following morning (say, 6:37am).

Jacob used to wake up very early (5:30am), but these days he usually wakes up at a more reasonable hour.

Tried to take the kids to some kind of art-for-kids thing at the Krannert Art Museum; alas, there was nowhere to park, so Jennifer took the kids to the art thing. I drove to work (and still had a hard time finding a place to park) and goofed off until they were finished.

Pictures were taken. They're still in the camera, but might escape once Sam wakes up from his nap.

Lunch was at Fiesta Cafe: steak fajitas, very tasty. And I didn't dribble very much fajita juice down the front of my shirt this time. (Always a plus to finish lunch with minimal wardrobe damage....)

I'm told the average first frost in Champaign County is on October 14. The temperature just now (according to NOAA) is 82°, so I think the first frost might be a little late this year.

The lawn still needs to be mowed, and the backyard hornet nest still needs to be sprayed with Death-to-Bugs^tm; maybe later. Or tomorrow.

CNN - acting through one or another of its nine-and-ninety avatars / subsidiaries / whatever - says:

...the bust of content-oriented resellers simply reinforces the notion that there isn't a huge demand for exclusive content on wireless devices - something all the mainstream carriers offer. Instead, consumers increasingly seem interested in getting all the content that's out on the 'Net on their mobile devices.

No. Really?

Cell-phone companies have this weird notion that they're half television station - from the bad old days when there were only three networks, and nobody had a vcr: you watched what they felt like broadcasting, when they felt like broadcasting it; and you couldn't skip the commercials - and half online service - from the bad old days when everything was dialup (1200baud!), and if you had a CompuServe account you could only send mail to other CompuServe users.

Perhaps someday that will change.

(At the moment, there are four separate national data networks: land-line telephones, cell phones, the internet, and cable television. [Well, yes, there's quite a bit of overlap between them. Work with me on this.] Like the cheesy 1980s movie Highlander - which spawned a number of cheesy sequels and a cheesy television series - there can be only one. Which one? If I knew, I wouldn't be blathering here. I'd be buying stock.)

On game days, every parking space within two miles of Memorial Stadium will be:

1. Occupied;
2. Blocked off;
3. Permit only; or
4. Obscenely overpriced (i.e., $20).

CNN says:

WASHINGTON (AP) - Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said Friday that every child born in the United States should get a $5,000 "baby bond" from the government to help pay for future costs of college or buying a home.

Let's see now...

We already have a huge problem with illegal aliens, who can't resist coming here to take crummy jobs at low pay (since even that is apparently better than they can get at home). Now we're going to pay them $5,000 for every child they have once they get here?

The national debt already works out to something like $20,000 each for all 300,000,000 Americans; the budget deficit adds another $1,000 or so every year. The government needs to spend less, not more.

I thought she was smarter than that.

(Then again, it's the nature of politics to promise the world during the campaign, but deliver nothing after the election is won. Perhaps that's what Hillary has in mind.)

It's taken three gates, a set of doorknob covers, and a can of Mazola, but now we can be reasonably sure of keeping Sam out of the places he shouldn't get into.

(Sam's an inquisitive fellow. He likes to get into the laundry room and turn off the water heater; he's done it twice now, which makes the morning showers rather bracing. He also likes to fetch his favorite foods from the pantry and carry them around the house. One time he got into the refrigerator, grabbed a dozen eggs and dumped them on the kitchen floor.)

P.S. Wondering about the Mazola? Doorknob covers are no impediment at all to the dangerously clever Mr. Sam unless they have been well-lubricated - in which case they keep out not only Sam, but also Mama & Papa. At least we know how to take the covers off; if Sam ever figures out how to do that, we're doomed.

Disturbing micro-organism of the week: naeglaria, also known as the brain-eating amoeba. The CDC says:

Infection with Naegleria causes the disease primary amebic meningoencephalitis (PAM), a brain inflammation, which leads to the destruction of brain tissue.

Initial signs and symptoms of PAM start 1 to 14 days after infection. These symptoms include headache, fever, nausea, vomiting, and stiff neck. As the amebae cause more extensive destruction of brain tissue this leads to confusion, lack of attention to people and surroundings, loss of balance, seizures, and hallucinations. After the onset of symptoms, the disease progresses rapidly and usually results in death within 3 to 7 days.

I'm sure there's a made-for-TV movie already in production.

The video billboard - aka 'the eyesore' - recently installed in the IGA parking lot near State & Kirby has a long metal pole sticking out the front of it; at the end of the pole is a video camera - the same kind as are being installed at all the intersections in town - pointed at the billboard itself.

Apparently the billboard operators are themselves a little nervous about someone replacing the advertisements with something naughty.

Had my four-week followup this morning with doctor #4, who seemed quite pleased with my progress; she predicted that my scar will be 'barely visible' once it's finished healing.

I don't know about that. It seems pretty visible to me.

She also suggested that I buy a grip strengthener - she called it a 'gripper' - and work my hand with it in idle moments through the day. (No, she didn't phrase it that way herself. All awkward phrasing and grandiose speechifying here are my own doing.)

Doctor #4 also ordered another four weeks of physical therapy (two visits per week), and a second followup in November.

No talk yet of when/whether we'll start work on the left hand, which is also in need of a bit of surgical repair. Perhaps we'll discuss it at the November followup.

Today is Jack LaLanne's 93rd birthday. Happy birthday, sir.

Me: sitting at the table, finishing breakfast.

Sam: runs past.

Jennifer, to me: "I smell poop. Or is that your coffee?"

I've always wondered -
When famous mimes die, do they
Have any last words?

No, I don't want one.

It has built-in WiFi, which at first sounds like a great idea - you can get your pictures off your camera without the need for cables, memory-card readers, etc. You can mail them to your Flickr account from anywhere you can get a signal.

Alas, (so far as I can tell from the documentation) you can only connect to T-Mobile hot spots, which aren't free; or, if you can connect to other wireless networks, you have to route your pictures through some lame photo-sharing site that Nikon has set up for S51c users.

So that's a big Never Mind on the S51c, Nikon. Better luck next time.

There's nothing worth reading on http://patrick-rice.net/ any more - it's been years since I added anything - so I added

Redirect 301 /index.html http://pzr.typepad.com/

to my .htaccess file: now anybody who tries to visit the old site will get bounced here instead.

Today - only two days before the autumnal equinox (which is at 4:51am CDT Sunday morning) - NOAA recorded a high temperature of 91°.

Now, that's just wrong.

Most of the dead skin & other debris is gone now; it came off over the last few days. (Yes, I helped it a little.) The incision is now just a long, narrow oval of pinkish skin with a dark line down the middle.

My hand feels mostly normal most of the time. I even carried the laptop bag with it for a while this morning. (But not too long. That silly laptop weighs a ton.)

I still wear the brace at night. There's probably no physiological reason to keep doing that, but I sleep better when my hand is all trussed up & safe in its security blanket.

I noticed just now that fifteen of the last twenty pictures I've uploaded to Flickr were taken with my phone, even though its pictures aren't nearly as good as those from the digital camera (a Nikon Coolpix 3700).

That's because the phone is in my pocket all day long, and I've configured everything so that it's just about zero effort to post pictures by email to Flickr, and have it forward them to TypePad. (I even signed up for one of Virgin Mobile's message plans - the cheapest one - so I can send a bunch of picture messages without bankrupting myself.)

I'm having a grand time taking the bus everywhere, and snapping silly pictures as I go. It's my new hobby.

Careful examination of the opening titles for Bear in the Big Blue House reveals that Bear's house does have a bathroom (top floor, left side) but the bathroom doesn't always have a toilet.

Perhaps the toilet was added for that very special episode from season three: Treelo Eats Too Many Prunes.

(Other very special episodes: Ojo Learns to Hibernate; Pip and Pop Make a Fur Coat; and - my personal favorite - Tutter and the Gluetrap.)

Clockwise around the kitchen table:

• Jacob: a bowl of sugar-frosted chocolate bombs...er, Cookie Crisp cereal.
• Jennifer: no breakfast yet. (Poor Jennifer.)
• Sam: waffles (with butter) and strawberries.
• Me: oatmeal, with raisins. (An hour ago.)

Sam likes to pick up his plate, hand it to Mama or Papa (whoever's available) and say, "All done!" This does not mean he's finished; half the time, he'll take back the plate and continue eating. Other times, he'll take back the plate and dump his food on the floor.

The News-Gazette says:

CHAMPAIGN - Nextumi, the 3-year-old company that aims to help Web users find the information most relevant to them, is California-bound.

It turns out that Nextumi only has eleven employees: six in Ohio, two in California, and three here in Champaign (There are more three-person high-tech companies in Champaign-Urbana than there are fire hydrants.)

Nextumi used to have a web site, http://www.nextumi.com/, but it's been taken over by domain squatters. That's a bad sign.

Good luck in San Francisco, Nextumi. (What's the nickname for Nextumi employees: nexties? tummies?) I hope the VCs give you lots of money.

A few items:

• The hand is doing better. There are floppy bits of dead skin on either side of the incision, but apparently that's normal. I bought some vitamin A&D lotion at the grocery store the other day - they keep it in the baby section, not in the medicine section; go figure - and every once in a while smear some into the incision. (It stings. Is that normal?)
• Jake's on vacation. For the next few weeks, our mornings will be a bit more leisurely than they are when school's in session. (Alas, I still have put in my 40 hours per week at dear old WRI.)
• An observation: the percentage of smokers is much higher among bus riders than in the general population. The bus platform at the train station downtown is always cloudy & stinky.
• I have a headache tonight. Pity me, pity me.

MSNBC says:

NASHVILLE, Tenn. - A federal judge today ruled that Tennessee's new lethal injection procedures are unconstitutional and stopped an execution scheduled for next week.

U.S. District Judge Aleta Trauger said the protocol "presents a substantial risk of unnecessary pain." She said it violates death row inmate Edward Jerome Harbison's Eighth Amendment protections against cruel and unusual punishment.

At first, death-row inmates tried to argue that the death penalty is unconstitutional, but that didn't work: the Fifth Amendment explicitly says, No person shall ... be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law....

In response, the inmates - or, more accurately, their lawyers - argued that specific execution methods were cruel and unusual, hence unconstitutional; and so the gallows, the gas chamber and - in most states - the electric chair were replaced by lethal injection.

Now the lawyers are chipping away at lethal injection. Perhaps the plan is to raise the bar so high that no method of putting an inmate to death will ever qualify as sufficiently humane & painless.

I suppose persuading a judge to strike down a law is easier than amending the Constitution, but it's rather annoying that people are manipulating the system this way.

Mr. Physical Therapist's capacious bag-o-gear includes a tub of transclucent yellow ointment which he's been rubbing into the FrankenScar at the beginning of each session, before the workout begins. Supposedly it keeps the scar tissue flexible, or something.

When he brought the stuff out this morning, I said, "Ah, Turtle Wax," which made him laugh.

He also tested me with a grip-strength meter: left hand, 120lbs; right hand, 80lbs. The latter is weaker than it should be, but stronger than he expected. (Perhaps that means I'm making progress?)

I have only four sessions left, plus one follow-up with doctor #4, and then I'm finished.

State & Kirby, Champaign.

The other side is an enormous video screen, that cycles through the same set of advertisements as movie theaters inflict on their patrons before the show starts.

I'm waiting for the day when somebody hacks into the video screen control system and puts up the goatse.cx picture....

It's been an interesting morning:

• Jennifer dropped me off at the clinic, for another round of physical therapy; I got out of the car, collected my gear (sure is a lot of it, these days), waved goodbye, and turned to go - just as a fella on a bicycle tried to zip around behind me. Poor Mr. Bicyclist managed to avoid me, but his wheels left the sidewalk & got bogged down in the landscaping. Down he went.
• My cell phone rang, just as I was leaving the check-in desk: some fella in area code 715 (which is northern Wisconsin), looking for 'Steven'. So sorry, no Steven here. Better luck next time.
• Mr. Physical Therapist says my hand is fine, but suggested a bit of hand lotion - the kind with vitamin E, he said - might be helpful. He also said there's quite a bit of callus there, and over the next few weeks and/or months it's going to come off. The FrankenScar is going to look worse before it looks better, which I suppose will be good for frightening small children.
• The bus I take home from work crosses a bridge that was inspected recently & determined to be quite incapable of supporting so large a vehicle. So now there's a weight restriction (four tons) on the bridge, and a redirect on the bus route. (The bridge in question is about ten feet long. It crosses the Boneyard Gorge, which at this point is about 1,250 millimeters deep. So I don't think we bus riders were in any particular danger crossing it.)

(And I have no idea why I formatted this post as a bullet list. I'm very sorry.)

I'm trying to decide whether the incision on my right palm is still as good as doctor #5 said it was when he examined it last Thursday, or if I've damaged my hand somehow by using it too much.

I suppose Mr. Physical Therapist - with whom I have an appointment, bright & early tomorrow morning - will tell me if something's wrong.

Maybe I just need to put a little skin lotion on it.

There are so many Linux distributions that an entire web site is required to keep track of them all: http://distrowatch.com/.

Don't tell me, let me guess: each & every distro is still a bit rough around the edges, and there's some documentation still to write; but it's shaping up nicely, building momentum, and nearly ready to take over the desktop and push Microsoft off the face of the earth.

(Just now DistroWatch is down. DDOS attack, or something.)

Dear mass media:

I don't care about O.J. Simpson.

Please adjust your coverage accordingly.

Thank you.

For the rest of the day, I will not be subjected to any episodes of Bear in the Big Blue House.

Milan William Scoble, born September 14, 2:24am. 9 pounds, 21 inches.

(Usually, whenever Scoble talks about something new he's acquired - e.g., an account on Twitter, Facebook, Plaxo, Tumblr, etc. - I rush out and get one for myself. Not this time.)

Jake: Sprained his ankle jumping in the Curtis Orchard hayloft on Thursday. Currently wearing one of those brown elastic wraps. Still limps a bit, if somebody's watching.

Jennifer: Has a cold.

Me: The same cold as Jennifer, I think.

Sam: A bit rowdier than usual (not to mention louder), but otherwise fine.

NOAA reports 37° at 7:00am.

(I hope it warms up before Jake's soccer game. Assuming we're all healthy enough to go, that is.)

Wednesday night, some fool left vaguely-worded threats of violence on the office answering machines of various local schools, so on Thursday all the schools in town had 'heightened security' (including Jake's school, which had a lockdown) while the police tried to figure out who (if anyone) was plotting what kind of mayhem (if any).

Today's newspaper reports that police have interviewed all residents of the house from which the threatening calls were made, but are still trying to figure out who made the calls and whether the threat was real or bogus.

My theory: one of the less-bright students over at Urbana High School (one of the threatened schools) didn't finish his homework in time, and decided this would be an easy way to get an extension. (The other schools were threatened merely as a smokescreen.) When I was in high school - thirty years ago (egad!) - certain students were in the habit of pulling the fire alarm to get time for one more cigarette in the smoking lounge behind the school. In these twitchier & less innocent times, imaginary gun plots are the preferred way to yank the principal's chain.

Saw doctor #5 - actually a Physician Assistant, which is pretty much the same as a doctor except one rung lower on the hospital status ladder - yesterday afternoon, to have my stitches removed.

He looked at my hand, said the incision looked good, then sent in a nurse to do the work. A few minutes of snipping & tugging, and I was de-sutured.

This means: I can drive again (for which Jennifer is grateful, I'm sure); I can pick up Sam again (ditto); and I don't have to wear the brace any more (except at night).

I still have a half-dozen physical therapy sessions scheduled. (I was hoping that I wouldn't need all of them, but - alas - I do.) In two weeks I see doctor #4 for one last followup, and then the big hand surgery adventure of 2007 will be over.

(Well, yes, there's still the other hand to think about. Maybe next year.)

Finally got a reply from Tumblr tech support, with a link to reset my password. I did, it works now, yay.

Meanwhile, over on Flickr: somebody has marked this picture - of the Woodford County sign just outside Carlock, Illinois - as a Favorite.

I'm baffled.

Once upon a time, there was FrontPage.

I used it from version 1.1 through FrontPage 2000; it was nasty. It generated ugly HTML, it had annoying bugs (one that bit me a number of times: spontaneous disappearance of page footers). By 2002 I'd had enough, and switched to CityDesk (which turned out to have its own problems).

Last year, Microsoft announced a new web site editor, Expression Web. The ad copy left me with the impression that the 'softies had finally realized just how vile FrontPage is, thrown it out, and started over from scratch.

Alas, no. The other day I installed a trial version of Expression Web at work, and it looks to be a slightly spiffed-up version of FrontPage with the serial numbers filed off.  It does generate decent XHTML, though; the 'softies got that much right.

Just retrieved my phone from the kitchen floor, where Sam dropped it (since he needed both hands to open & slam the cupboard doors: another of his hobbies).

Poor phone, it was covered with sticky, gooey little-boy fingerprints.

Fortunately, we have a packet of wipes especially made for cleaning electronics. A minute or two of scrubbing, and all was well.

We're in the awkward time of year when the temperature at 7:00am might be 60° - close to jacket weather, at least for Jake - while the temperature at noon might be twenty degrees higher.

The forecast for later this week calls for overnight lows in the forties. Jake will definitely need a jacket then. (I probably won't. 45° just isn't that cold for me any more.)

Sent mail to the Davidville tech-support address, on the theory that maybe it's only the Tumblr tech-support address that's being ignored.

If I don't hear from them soon, that will be the end of my involvement with Tumblr.

Grandparents coming to visit this afternoon. (Jennifer spent all day cleaning. Poor Jennifer....)

Jake & I got to play with an iPhone today, at the AT&T store in Savoy while Sam was next door getting a haircut. (That's why I arranged for Jake's haircut to come first. I'm very sneaky sometimes.)

iPhones are pretty cool. Small, but not flimsy. The display is excellent. The touchscreen is easy to use.

Two problems: even after last week's $200 price cut, they cost too much. And the iPhone isn't nearly cool enough that I'll put up with AT&T's customer-hostile wireless plans just to get one.

The Windows Installer team says:

Our friend and blogger Aaron Stebner asked on behalf of his readers whether the Windows Installer had recommendations for "good, comprehensive training covering" the Windows Installer. This question comes up regularly and I've built up the following stock answer.

Windows Installer depends on our tools vendors to provide a considerable portion of our end to end story. There is an opportunity for the Tools Vendors to differentiate themselves in the market with the degree to which they onboard their users quickly and given them all the information they need to be successful.

In other words: No, we're not going to document the [censored] thing. You suckers trying to use it are on your own.

(The only thing worse than straight-up Windows Installer is Windows Installer wrapped in some kind of simplification tool such as InstallShield. The vendors don't understand Windows Installer either, so their simplifications are sort of like choosing - completely at random - half the switches & gauges in the cockpit of a 747, covering them with black tape, and expecting pilots to fly the resulting simplified airplane. If the 'softies are expecting vendors to make their unusable product usable, they must be using some slightly-illegal alternative smoking mixtures.)

The iMac has an Apple trackball mouse. It looks pretty, but there are problems:

• The simulated right mouse button doesn't work very well. I work the right mouse button pretty hard - a habit picked up over on Windows - so it's extra annoying when I try to right-click on something and left-click on it instead.
• The trackball gums up quite easily - some people might do a doctor-style pre-surgery handscrub before using a computer; I'm not one of them - and there's no easy way to clean it. I've used Microsoft wheel mice for years, with no problems.

I've heard good things about Kensington trackballs. (A trackball might be easier on my wrists than a mouse, too.) Too bad there's no bluetooth version.... (Also too bad that I don't have $100 lying around to spend on Yet Another Computer Gizmo. Pity me, pity me.)

Jeff Duntemann posted a link today to http://naebllc.com/, Not Another E-Book LLC. They're making an e-book reader that - unlike all the others - will be format-agnostic and not crippled by DRM.

Sounds interesting...but the site hasn't been updated since last March.

(Apparently they're using the Bookeen Cybook reader, which looks pretty cool - but isn't available yet. Real Soon Now, quoth the Bookeen people. Very frustrating.)

P.S. Engadget says the Cybook will be available "later this summer" - which deadline has already passed - and will cost "about $350". Alas, that's about $300 beyond my price range.

Still no response from Tumblr tech support.

Curiously, I am still logged in to Tumblr on nessus, so I can verify there that I did give Tumblr the correct email address. (Why, no, I won't post it here. I get quite enough spam as it is, thankyouverymuch.)

In other Tumblr news:

The official Tumblr blog hasn't been updated in five months. Users are starting to ask questions like Davidville, where'd you go? One of the developers - a fellow named Marco - is still active, but won't say anything about Tumblr other than "We're still here."

Where have I heard that before? Hm...that's what Joel Spolsky said about CityDesk, long after he had decided to abandon CityDesk and the customers who had purchased it.

So maybe Tumblr 3.0 will be released soon, and maybe it won't. Maybe the Tumblr tech support people will fix whatever's wrong with my account, and maybe they won't.

Maybe I'll care, and probably maybe I won't.

It's been two days since my first - disastrous - attempt to use Tumblr; I still can't log in, I still can't reset my password, and the Tumblr tech support people still haven't answered my plea for help.

I begin to suspect that they don't really want me to use their service.

Tumblr seems a little bit like an online version of OnFolio, http://www.onfolio.com/. OnFolio was a big deal three years ago; lots of column-inches, lots of chatter. Then - in March, 2006 - Microsoft bought OnFolio, and that was the end of it. No more chatter, no new releases.

OnFolio is still available for download from Windows Live Gallery, but hasn't been updated in a long time. A certain air of neglectedness clings to it. Did the 'softies lose interest?

Sam has a set of letter magnets: they stick to the refrigerator, or to a small noise-making gizmo that plays a little song about whatever letter it's given.

I know of four pangrams - sentences that use all twenty-six letters exactly once (each) - but can only remember two:

Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz.
Mr. Jock, TV quiz Ph.D., bags few lynx.

Today I wondered what was the longest single word that had no repeated letters. So I found a word list online (118,000 words, that should be enough) and wrote a little Python script to examine them.

The answer: a three-way tie between 'ambidextrously', 'stocking-frame' and 'vaulting-horse'. (Those last two, being hyphenated, should perhaps be disqualified.)

But - alas - the E is missing from Sam's collection. (It disappeared almost immediately after we put the letters on the fridge. It'll turn up, one of these years.) A minor change to the Python script, and the new answer: 'world-shaking'. Ignoring hyphenated words, it's a three-way tie between 'flowcharting' (does anybody still do that any more?), 'unforgivably' and 'unprofitably'.

At home today, officially resting & recuperating after this morning's cortisone injection (#2, performed by doctor #2) but in fact just loafing.

Blustery day today: overcast, very windy. No sign of rain yet, but the forecast calls for showers and thunderstorms.

A small but enthusiastic storm passed through town this afternoon, just as I was supposed to catch the bus for home.

There's no bus shelter at Fox and State, which was a bit of a problem since I'd left my umbrella at home.

But there is a bus shelter a little ways south on Fox; I decided to go there, walking a bit farther than usual so I could wait for the bus - which is always late, every single time - out of the rain.

It turns out that the bus shelter is farther than I thought, but I still got there ten minutes before the bus did.

(The rain had stopped by the time I got off the bus, so the second half of my walk home was considerably more pleasant.)

Scoble mentioned Tumblr, so I created an account for myself: http://pzr.tumblr.com/.

Alas, it is inaccessible: I seem to have misremembered the password, and Tumblr's reset-your-password system isn't working. It says:

We've sent you an email with instructions to reset your password.

If it doesn't show up, please make sure it didn't wind up in your Junk Mail.

If it's still not coming through, please contact support.

I've tried that about two dozen times. Tumblr's mail has yet to arrive. It's rather annoying.

(The FAQ mentions an 'Activation mail' that I was supposed to get when I signed up. No sign of that, either. Too bad the signup process doesn't mention the activation mail, or I might have twigged earlier that something was fubr at Tumblr.)

Tumblr seems a bit on the pointless side, anyway, to somebody who's already using TypePad and Twitter. And how do I get my 'tumblelog' entries out of Tumblr, should I decide to move them elsewhere (say, to the next site Scoble mentions)? Alas, I see no way to do that.

Never mind, Tumblr.

I want one of these:

All the music, video & WiFi goodness of the iPhone, without all that nasty AT&T [censored]-the-customers cell-phone unpleasantness.

Alas, they're $400.

Cow-orkers leave the strangest things in the breakrooms.

The official high today was 96°, but sputnik recorded 98° at 5:00pm.

That seems a bit excessive for September. (Won't we all feel silly when it's 85° outside, but the swimming pools & water parks are all closed because summer is over.)

The Lake County Assessor has property tax records online, so I looked up the houses I used to live in:

2951 Allen St., Lake Station (neé East Gary): assessed value $106,700 (a little over three times what it sold for in 1970, if memory serves); the current residents have lived there since 1978, just three years after we moved out.

537 Fillmore Ave., Dyer: assessed value $183,400; the current residents have been there only since 2005.

NOAA says the temperature - which was a pleasant 60° when Jacob & I were out waiting for the school bus this morning - has shot up to 91° as of 11:00am.

The humidity is so low I wouldn't be surprised if we hit 95° or higher this afternoon.

This just in from the Dept. of What-a-Surprise: Windows Installer 4.5 (coming soon from Microsoft) and the Windows Installer XML toolset (also from Microsoft) don't play nicely together.

The mistake Microsoft made with Windows Installer is the same mistake they made with the Windows registry, with Outlook, and with WinFS: using a database when it isn't appropriate.

My day job is - in part - writing installers for Windows applications. I gave up on Windows Installer and WiX some months ago, and haven't learned anything since then to change my mind. Quite the opposite: each new post from the Windows Installer team, or the WiX people, makes me think: I am so glad I don't have to deal with that [censored] any more.

Handy rule of thumb: 99.44% of people whinging in public discussion forums about being censored have no [obscene gerund omitted] clue what censorship actually is.

The Flickr discussion forum has an unusually high concentration of such people. Flickr staff mark their pictures 'Restricted', so they immediately scream in the forum about censorship.

They don't seem to realize that the rules still apply, even for people who've paid $25/year for a Pro account.

Drove over to Urbana this morning, to watch the Labor Day parade.

It seemed shorter than usual: fewer marching bands, fewer political candidates, fewer activist groups. The ironworkers' union was back with their I-beam; alas, they didn't stop & demonstrate their beam-climbing skills this year. (Liability problems, I'm sure.)

The real show was on the other side of Washington Street from us: a woman with two pet rats, which had a tendency to crawl down the front of her dress. She didn't seem to mind. (I think rats crawling around inside my clothing would be just a little disturbing.)

We came home with a big bag of candy, which nobody here is going to eat. (No more caramels for me, thank you: gluing crowns back on is expensive.) I imagine I'll take it to work tomorrow and leave it in the break room.

The doctors tell me I mustn't drive so long as I'm wearing the brace on my right hand.

(I note in passing that all the important controls in an Explorer are on the left side - except the gearshift, which is never used while the car is moving and can in a pinch be operated with the left hand. Jennifer suggests this restriction is more legal than medical, which seems plausible. Somewhere, a doctor got sued because one of his patients wrecked his car while wearing a wrist brace, so the rest of us have to suffer.)

I'd take the bus, but my bus pass expired on Friday.

I'd buy a new bus pass, but that can only be done at the Transportation Center, downtown.

I do have a single bus token, left over from last May; I could use it to ride downtown, buy a new bus pass and therewith restore my mobility. Perhaps that's what I'll do, come Tuesday. Jennifer's been driving me everywhere for the last five days, and I'm sure she's quite tired of it by now.

We went to a game night last night (never did play any games though; mostly we just chatted & watched the kids - eight of them, including two sets of twins).

Before we left, I had to promise Jake that I wouldn't take off my wrist brace during the party. The incision on my hand is "creepy", according to Mr. Jacob, and he didn't want me showing it to anyone.

Normally, being embarrassed by one's parents doesn't kick in until age fourteen or so. Jake's just a little ahead of the curve.

Apparently there's been a big net squabble going on recently, that I only today learned about. It involves http://www.scribd.com/:

Scribd's mission is to create the world's largest open library of documents. Explore the thousands of docs already uploaded or contribute your own!

Be sure not to upload any copyrighted material, though; that would be wrong. Alas, quite a few Scribd users seem unclear on U.S. copyright law, so quite a bit of copyrighted material is available - illegally - on Scribd.

The Science Fiction Writers of America found out about this, and sent a takedown letter to Scribd; Cory Doctorow got mad when one of his novels was (erroneously) taken down; Slashdot picked up the story; drama & disputation ensued.

I've seen Scribd described as Flickr for documents; but it seems more like Napster, with its wink-wink nudge-nudge don't do anything illegal, boys & girls approach to copyright infringement.

I predict Scribd will come to the same sticky end as Napster, once one of the big publishing houses gets wind of it.

P.S. It took me about ten seconds to find Robert A. Heinlein's By His Bootstraps available for download from Scribd. Last I checked, copyright on that story had not yet expired. But Scribd doesn't violate copyright, no not at all, wink-wink nudge-nudge.

MSNBC says:

BOISE, Idaho - Idaho Sen. Larry Craig resigned Saturday over a men's room sex sting, bowing to pressure from fellow Republicans worried about a scandal dimming their election prospects.

(CNN, on the other hand, buried the whole men's-room thing five paragraphs down.)

The interesting thing here - to me, anyway - is not what Larry Craig does with his [censored], nor what he - apparently - does in airport restrooms.

No, what's interesting is that Senator Craig was arrested two months ago, and it's only now become news. Why wasn't it on the front page last June? People have been clamoring all week for Craig to resign; why was there no clamor two months ago?

Whose interests are being served by making this an issue now, rather than when it happened? Is there a Democrat who's running for Craig's seat? He was up for re-election in 2008, so there must be someone, but I can't find anything at http://www.democrats.org/ about it.