October 2007 Archives

Lawyers:

Whereas, the Plan Sponsor desires to amend the aforesaid Plan Document as hereinafter stated; therefore, the Plan Document is amended as follows effective on and after the January 1, 2007.

Normal human beings:

We've changed the plan.

• Maybe the Haitian is responsible for Peter's amnesia.
• The Guatemalan Wonder Twins are getting really tiresome.
• If "everything Isaac painted came true," as numerous characters keep saying, why is Sylar still alive?
• Looks like Engineered virus wipes out humanity is this season's crisis.
• The writers are starting to re-use super-powers: two flying people, two regenerating people, etc. Running out of ideas? Limited effects budget?
• I'm sure 17th-century Japan is a fascinating place. But what's it got to do with the rest of the show?
• I detect a certain X-Files odor clinging to The Company and The Organization. The writers really don't know where they're going with either of them, do they?

I imagine I'll keep watching, just to see if the writers manage to escape the (rather deep) hole they've dug for themselves. But this season isn't nearly as engaging as last season.

I've been hearing much chatter lately about http://pownce.com/: it's sort of a spiffed-up version of Twitter (or a clone of Tumblr, I suppose).

Currently, accounts are by invitation only. I put in a request for one, but there's no telling if/when they'll let me in.

In between other things today, I read the (rather lengthy) Ars Technica review of OS X 10.5, aka 'Leopard', which just hit the stores last Friday.

I kept saying to myself, reading about this or that new feature, This is so cool.

Halfway through, it occurred to me that the various reviews I've read of Windows Vista left me with an entirely different set of reactions:

Feh.
That's going to be so annoying.
Yawn.

I've yet to hear about anything cool in Vista. I'll have to switch, one of these days (part of my day job is writing installers for Windows applications); but I don't want to.

I suppose this is when the 'softies find out how many people have been using Windows only because they had no viable alternatives.

Tonight was pumpkin-decorating night here at Stately Rice Manor:

Sam drew on his pumpkin with markers (though the ink didn't seem to be sticking, or even drying; I fear that Sam's art will not last until Halloween).

Jake supervised creation of a more traditional jack-o'-lantern: he drew the face, and helped scoop out the pumpkin guts., while Mama & Papa took care of all the slicing and carving.

When I was a kid, we lit our jack-o'-lanterns with candles, which didn't work so well. Either they blew out (the years when Halloween night was more blustery), or (the years when Halloween night was calmer) slowly cooked the lid until it fell in and extinguished the candle.

These days, we don't use anything so crude and primitive as an open flame for pumpkin illumination. In the high-tech 21st century we use a battery-powered LED tealight that rotates through several different colors: red, blue, green, etc. (Jake's pumpkin looks particularly spooky on the red cycle.)

Both pumpkins are standing watch out on the front porch.

I've been working at Wolfram Research for sixteen years now, which means that I'm just a few years away from having co-workers who weren't even born yet when I started here.

I feel old.

This afternoon I tried to update my Facebook account with my new email address, just in case I ever change my mind about Facebook; alas, there were problems. I couldn't log in, I couldn't reset my password, etc., etc.

In the end, I just created a new account for myself with the new email address.

(Something similar happened with LibraryThing. One day I typed in the wrong user ID, and accidentally created a second account for myself. Every now & then I make the same mistake, log in to the wrong account, and have a moment of panic when all my books are gone.)

I don't suppose I'll use Facebook very much, but it's still nice to have an account. It might prove useful, someday.

I used to have separate mailboxes for my Flickr and Twitter accounts, on the theory that once they were compromised by spammers I could just delete them and start over; but it seems that Flickr and Twitter do a better job than I do of securing personal information (e.g., email addresses).

So I have done away with the Flickr- and Twitter-specific mailboxes, and pointed both of them at my shiny new (and - as yet - unknown to spammers) mailbox.

Less clutter in my mail program, which is nice.

(Curious Mail.app feature of the day: one of its mailbox settings controls how long to leave messages on the server before deleting them. I didn't know that was there, and I wasted a long time trying to figure out why Pair's webmail interface showed ten messages in my inbox even though I had already downloaded them to the iMac.)

Tried to make some raisin bread this afternoon; there must have been something wrong with the yeast, since it didn't rise very much at all.

Instead of a light, fluffy loaf of bread, I got a small, dense, chewy lump of bread. At least it tastes good....

Spammers got hold of my email address a while back, and the volume of spam - mostly about fake Rolexes and/or anatomical enhancement medications - has been increasing steadily ever since.

To get out from under the flood, I have created a new email address, and am in the process of shifting all my various online accounts to it. (It turns out there weren't that many: only twenty or so.) Next up: sending the new address out to all the people who need it. (What's that? Of course you're on the list!)

The old address will continue to work, at least for a while. But its days are numbered.

Poked around a bit in http://www.myspace.com/ just now. It's nasty.

Half the users' pages have been so over-designed that they're impossible to read (especially on nessus' ancient and somewhat dodgy monitor). There are thousands of MySpace users in Champaign County, but - as near as I can tell - I know exactly one of them. MySpace is a vast, shrieking chaos of twentysomethings (if, indeed, any of them are even that old) - rather like Facebook, only more annoying. And there are advertisements everywhere.

I think MySpace will have to get along without me.

Spent a few hours in the Archives this afternoon - first time in a long time - poring over two of their recent acquisitions: Welman & Thiery's Encyclopedic Directory of Clay County, Indiana, published 1896; and The Backward Book: Extracts from White County, Illinois Newspapers, 1899-1905 and 1949-1955 by Barry C. Cleveland, published 2006.

The former mentions one L. E. Akers of Carbon; this is probably Luke Akers, who may or may not be my great-great-grandfather. (I've been trying to prove or disprove this hypothesis for a few years now, but haven't made much progress. I suspect a few research trips to the right places in Indiana would clear things up, but who has time?)

The latter is full of interesting factoids about close (and not-so-close) relatives of mine who lived in White County, e.g.,

Jasper Sturms of Old River lost a horse this week to buffalo gnats.
--May, 1904

(Jasper Sturm was my great-great grandfather.)

The only problem with The Backward Book is that there are no source citations. So there's no telling which newspaper carried any particular item (or what page it was on, etc.). Even so, it was a pleasant read.

We decided to avoid the Homecoming craziness by having lunch at the Villa Caffe in Mahomet.

Nice place, tasty food, etc.

It seemed a bit strange that the Saturday lunch rush should consist of nine people (counting us) occupying four tables. There were three computers in use (one at each of the other tables; had I brought the WRI laptop, we could have made it unanimous). Perhaps this means there's free WiFi available, which would be convenient if I spent more time in Mahomet.

The windows were big & bright, and the sun was shining; this made for a cheery atmosphere but interfered just a little with picture-taking. I did my best.

The definitive statement on the much-rumored, long-awaited Quicken Mac 2008 from Intuit:

Intuit is currently planning for 2008 Quicken offerings and is investigating the best possible ways to serve the entire Quicken community. With anticipation of the launch of the new Mac OS X (Leopard) and Intuit's ongoing focus on delivering customer driven innovation, more information around future Mac offerings will be shared at a later time.

They're hinting that Quicken Mac 2008 will be stuffed with Leopard-y goodness, which is a sure sign that it will not.

What a bunch of weasels.

The quest to synchronize a Sidekick LX (which I don't actually have yet) with an iMac (which I do) continues.

There's a Sync forum over at http://www.poweredbydanger.com/; somebody there suggested using Intellisync, which can be purchased from T-Mobile. It looks nice enough - but it runs only on Windows, and synchronizes only with Outlook.

That's not so useful for me, I'm afraid.

Apple support article 306833 says:

Time Machine in Mac OS X 10.5 Leopard can be used to back up to many kinds of Mac OS Extended-formatted drives, but it does not support AirPort Extreme's AirPort Disk feature.

The AirPort Disk feature is one of the main reasons I bought an AirPort Extreme - which cost nearly four times as much as the LinkSys router I had been using. And now one of the big features of OS X 10.5 doesn't support it.

One hopes Apple plans to fix this....

The clinic says, "Your appointment is at 10:45am. Please arrive ten minutes early."

If you want me to show up at 10:35am, why not schedule the appointment for 10:35am and be done with it?

Patient flow management isn't supposed to be the patient's responsibility, is it?

Today's mystery: who is Arnaud Robail, and why does he care what I post to Twitter? All his profile says is that he lives in Paris.

Just back from my biannual - or is it semiannual? - dental checkup; and the number of fillings, crowns, root canals and/or extractions that must be performed before my next checkup is...

...zero.

I guess all that brushing, flossing & fluoriding I've been doing since the last checkup has paid off.

Had the notion this evening: would it be possible to synchronize a SideKick LX with my Plaxo account?

I've been ignoring my Plaxo account for a few months now, but my interest in it might rekindle if I could use it to maintain a single address book / calendar / etc. across all the machines I use.

Alas, it seems that Plaxo doesn't synchronize with cell phones any more. It used to, but now they tell their customers to just use Mobile Plaxo. I don't want to go to all the trouble of launching a web browser every time I need to look up a phone number.

Time for my Plaxo account to go back into hibernation, I think.

Took the kids outside twice this evening, in a probably futile effort to see the space shuttle and/or space station, both of which were supposedly flying overhead this evening.

The first time - 5:50pm - it was still entirely too bright outside. We didn't see anything.

The second time - 6:45pm - was deep twilight: the perfect time for spotting orbiting spacecraft, as they're high enough to catch the sunlight even though down on the ground the sun has already set. We waited, shivering a bit in the chill (mid-forties, and very windy), and saw...a dot, moving south.

It might have been the shuttle, or the station, or - most likely - just an airplane.

I just checked the NASA spacecraft tracking page, which says that the maximum elevation for the space station during this evening's pass was a mere 34° above the horizon. Since the dot we saw was considerably higher than that, it must have been an airplane.

It also says that yesterday at 6:33pm the shuttle passed almost directly overhead (maximum elevation 84°), and would have been visible for approximately five minutes. We were outside for that one, too; alas, Champaign-Urbana was clouded over. (We could see the edge of the clouds, just a few miles west of us. Very frustrating.)

There are a few more opportunities to see the shuttle - but for the remainder of this mission they're all in the wee hours of the morning. I might be awake just then, but I surely will not be standing out in the driveway looking for spacecraft.

Wasting time at http://whois.pairnic.com/ this evening, I discovered that AllTheGoodNamesAreTaken.com is taken, by some kind of domain squatter organization.

PainfulRectalItch.com belongs to a physician in Indiana.

However, StephenWolframCountsOnHisFingers.com is available. I'd snap it up myself, but the joke's not worth $20/year.

The 2007 Punkin Chuckin Contest was held in Morton, Illinois this past weekend.

Too bad we were already busy with other things; spending the day watching a truckload of veggies get catapulted a thousand feet downrange at some junked cars has a certain appeal.

The 2007 World Championship Punkin Chunkin Contest - from which the Morton contest was ripped off adapted - starts just ten days from now, near Bridgeville, Delaware. I don't suppose we'll make it to that one, either.

I wasted a good long time this evening on http://freerice.com/, which is a vocabulary game wrapped in some kind of food-for-poor-people charity thing (that I didn't pay much attention to).

The poor people have another 1,400 or so grains of rice for their dinner because of me.

My score got as high as 48, but generally stayed in the 44 - 46 range. (I know of people who reached 50. I'm not worthy, I'm not worthy....)

The trick to a game like this is to parse the words: look for the Latin (or whatever) roots, figure out related words, decide which of the choices best matches the cloud of meaning. And sometimes it's a Zen thing. A word comes up that you've never seen before, and you just know it's a disease, or a part of the body, or whatever.

The loyal readership (both of you!) are hereby encouraged to waste as much of their own time as they can, and report their scores here.

Poking around this afternoon in Sam's closet - where I have some old junk taking up space, plus a few items of real (or merely sentimental) value - I found a book: Two Early Tudor Lives, edited by Richard S. Sylvester and Davis P. Harding.

The two lives (i.e., biographies) are The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey, by George Cavendish; and The Life of Sir Thomas More, by William Roper. Given that I'm already reading a book about the fourteenth century - that is, A Distant Mirror by Barbara W. Tuchman - a book about two sixteenth-century figures seems like it might be interesting.

(And I note in passing that a book, edited by two people, that contains two books, each written by a different person - neither of whom is an editor of the overall volume - presents a nasty puzzle to librarians & maintainers of book databases. What's the title of the book? Who should be listed as the author(s)? One can imagine fistfights breaking out at ALA conventions over this question....)

Finished reading Traveling Music: The Soundtrack to My Life and Times, by Neil Peart.

An interesting book, I suppose, but I had two problems reading it:

• Mr. Peart is way too fond of importing chunks of other people's writing into his own books. It's all above-board, properly attributed, not plagiarism or anything like that; but I read the book to find out what Neil Peart thinks about things, not what Ralph Ellison thought.
• He also likes to drop into the narrative entire letters he wrote - mostly to his friend Brutus, now a former dope dealer, instead of (as in Ghost Rider) an incarcerated one. This sort of thing just irritates me. Don't shovel in whatever text you have lying around, write some new stuff.
• And - worst of all - at the drop of a hat he'll veer off the main narrative into a ten- or fifteen-page digression, which is very confusing. ("You were driving a car in Arizona. Now you're on a bicycle in Africa? How did that happen?") And then he'll snap back to the main story with no attempt at a transition.

All right, that's three problems. Maybe I'm just cranky today.

nessus lost its internet connection this afternoon. Symptoms indicated a problem with the router, which was a bit awkward: the router is in Sam's room, and afternoons are naptime for young Mr. Sam.

After a while, it occurred to me to check whether the TiVo was having any connection problems; as it turned out, it wasn't.

A bit of jiggery-pokery with nessus, and all is once again well.

Item #1, a note:

On September 2, 1983, I reached stage 98 on Galaga, for a final score of 1,111,220: the only time I ever broke a million playing Galaga.

(It's too bad I didn't finish stage 98. Stage 99 was a free stage - the aliens didn't shoot back - and after that the game reset to stage 1, which was pretty easy. If I'd finished stage 98, I probably could have played for another ten or fifteen minutes.)

Item #2, also a note:

On December 19, 1983, I scored 206,725 on Centipede.

I really shouldn't have been in town on December 19th: I'd finished all my exams, and my time as a student at the University of Illinois was over. But I wasn't quite ready to let go of student life, so I lingered a bit. And played video games.

When I graduated from high school - Buffalo Grove High School, class of 1980 - I didn't feel any regret at leaving. Instead, I felt happy - glad to be finished with high school, excited to be starting college in the fall. But when I graduated from college, three and a half years later, I felt quite the opposite: that I was about to lose something I had only just come to appreciate & enjoy.

I moved back to Champaign in June of 1987, and fell in with a crowd of twentysomething post-student hangers-on: we spent most of our free time on campus, we lived like students, but we were not students. After a while, we all finished growing up & finally left school. (Even so, I didn't get very far - and you can be sure that if I had the time and means to replace my day job with a slate of University coursework, I would: even though the other students would laugh at the middle-aged fool in their midst.)

Item #3, a receipt:

On July 4th, 1986, I drove the Ohio Turnpike, passing the Westgate toll plaza at 2:03am and taking exit 8A - the I80/I90 interchange, just west of Cleveland - at 4:12am.

I was driving up to Niagara Falls, to meet up with Vince and his friend Kim: my first major solo road trip, since getting my driver's license eighteen months before. I wasn't very good yet at navigating, which is why I took the long way around Lake Erie instead of taking the direct route through southern Ontario. (Oops.)

Near one of the rest areas I was pulled over by an Ohio state trooper, who suggested that I obey the speed limit - 55mph - for the remainder of my time in Ohio; which I scrupulously did. Even so, I covered the one hundred and forty miles between Westgate and Exit 8A in just one hundred and twenty-nine minutes. You do the math.

Interesting bits of history. I think I'll keep them a while longer. (Perhaps I should get a scrapbook to keep them in.)

Every now & then, I visit eBay. It's never a pleasant experience.

Whatever I'm looking for, there are a hundred different people selling it - and ninety of them trigger all my ripoff alarms, with their shrieking sales pitches and suspiciously low prices. The other ten? They're hard to find amid all the hucksters, and - this is probably irrational of me, I admit - they're tainted by association, so I can't bring myself to buy from them, either.

I just have a hard time believing that anybody on eBay is honest.

Case in point: this evening, I was looking for a Sidekick 3, just to see whether any were available, and at what price. As usual, hundreds of people were trying to unload hacked Sidekicks, gray-market Sidekicks, used Sidekicks, etc., etc. One fella was asking $11.50 for his; it looks like it was run over by a truck, which might explain the low price. I saw another one offered for 99¢ - the fine print said it had no SIM card. A phone without a SIM card is just a paperweight, so what's the point?

Maybe I should just stay away from eBay.

It seems I was wrong about Sidekicks synchronizing via Bluetooth with iMacs: they don't. Never have, perhaps never will.

In 2005, Mark/Space announced - with great fanfare, and with much chatter from the tech web sites - an iSync plug-in for Sidekicks, but discontinued it a year later due to 'lack of interest'. (I'm interested, but nobody cares what I think.) At present, there is no way to synchronize a Sidekick with an iMac.

That's more than a little frustrating. The Sidekick has much coolness, but I surely do not want to maintain two address books, two calendars, etc., etc., etc.

Random things I've been looking at lately:

• Microsoft F# - A curious scripting language percolating away in the Microsoft Research labs. Sometimes I think I should learn a functional (as opposed to procedural) language, just to stretch my brain a little; but - alas - there just isn't enough time in the day for such things.
• SmugMug - A photo-sharing site, sort of like Flickr only more spiffed-up. But it was so much work getting all my pictures moved to Flickr, and fixing up all the links here, that it's going to take more than just spiffiness to persuade me to move again.
• Microsoft Math - The 'softies are getting into the math-education software market. WRI makes a lot of money in that market. (How much? What makes you think they'd tell a lowly cog like me?) Should I be worried? Perhaps instead I should hope that the 'softies make Stephen an offer he can't refuse, with generous severance packages for any WRIfolk unwilling to move to Seattle.

There's a free trial of Microsoft Math. Might as well download it & see whether it's any good.

Waiting at the bus stop this afternoon, I decided to take another picture of the Illini Plaza sign (Why? As George Mallory said, "Because it's there") - but this time, I wanted to be sure to get a picture with the temperature (81°) showing.

This is harder than it sounds, because the sign cycles quite rapidly between time & temperature, and there's a noticeable delay on my phone between pushing the button and taking the picture. So I took two pictures, just to be safe; and I sent them to my home email address, rather than straight to Flickr, just in case neither of them was any good.

Turns out if you have two messages in your inbox, and both of them have attachments, and the attachments have the same name, the OS X mail program (unimaginatively named Mail.app) can't tell them apart: look at message #1, see message #1's picture; look at message #2, see message #1's picture again.

If you try to save the files to the desktop, you get two copies of message #1's picture. (I suppose exiting Mail.app in between saves might work around this.) But the slideshow option - which is a bit silly when there's only one picture - isn't affected, so that's how I got both pictures saved.

I wonder if that's fixed in the ships-next-week OS X 10.5, aka 'Leopard'. (It doesn't matter. My checking account has $13 and change in it just now, and I don't think Steve Jobs would be willing to part with a copy of Leopard for such a paltry sum.)

Fished the X30's dock out of the closet this evening, and plugged it back into nessus for the X30's first synchronization since last August. (It went reasonably well.)

Then I:

• Made a full backup of the X30;
• Uploaded the X30's memory card (which has about 80MB of data on it) to nessus, in the process converting all the Pocket Word / Pocket Excel / etc. documents to something I can open with real Word / Excel / etc.;
• Exported the databases from FlexWallet (text and XML, very nice) and Personal Vehicle Manager (csv only);
• Mashed all this up into one big .zip file, then copied it to the iMac.

So if the X30's battery really does fail one of these days, I won't lose anything important.

The 'softies are all excited over the new version of Live Search Maps they released yesterday. Scoble says Microsoft's new maps are stunning, so I had to check it out.

It doesn't work on the iMac.

Instead of  the promised maps, I got a nearly-empty page with two edit fields - tersely labeled 'What' and 'Where' - and a button that's too small to read whatever text is supposed to be displayed on it. A bit of experimentation revealed that you have to type something in both fields, or nothing happens. With Google Maps you can enter a street address and get back a map of the neighborhood; not so with Live Maps.

I tried again on nessus, and the maps are a little better. Not earth-shakingly wonderful, not a huge improvement over Google Maps, just...ok. I don't think Google has much to fear from Live Search Maps just yet.

My efforts last night to get the X30's wireless networking operational left the battery rather low; and then something happened overnight - perhaps the midnight wakeup, done automatically by Windows CE so it can update its calendar - that drained whatever charge remained.

When the X30 woke up at 7:45am this morning to flash the day's reminders, it went into some kind of low-battery panic and wouldn't turn on. All my passwords are on there, thought I, and there's no backup. And the charger was at work. Oops.

On the theory that the X30's thirty-minute emergency backup battery was the only thing between me and the heartbreak of data loss - Rule 1: Always Make Backups! - I hurried to work (no bus today!) and plugged in the X30.

It's fine now. (Even so, I think tonight is X30 Backup Night.)

In other news, the gas tank is Mr. Explorer is nearly empty, and my phone is in desperate need of a battery recharge. Some evil alien force is draining the energy from every piece of machinery I own....

It's been a little over three years since I bought the Dell Axim X30 pocket PC (August 25, 2004, to be precise); alas, the end is near:

The battery won't hold a charge. I have to plug the thing in just about every day to keep it alive.

And I packed up the dock some months ago, thinking to synchronize with nessus via wireless networking. But the X30 and the AirPort don't play nicely together: the X30 can't keep a connection for more than a few seconds.

I still use the X30 to keep track of passwords (I sure do have a lot of 'em, too) and gas purchases for the Explorer. Beyond that, it's pretty useless.

Maybe I should just buy myself a $2 spiral-bound notebook at the office-supply store, copy all my passwords & whatnot into it, and give up on the X30.

(A few weeks ago, Jake asked for the X30: he likes to draw pictures in the note-taking application. Perhaps I'll give it to him.)

This is interesting:

The post-breakfast catch-up, and the afternoon bus ride home, are pretty obvious....

I'm looking for some large, flat plastic boxes, so I can pack up my CD collection - which, having been imported into iTunes, never gets played any more - and put it under the bed. It'll be out of the way down there, and the bedroom will look less cluttered.

A few years ago, Jennifer bought some fold-up boxes that would be perfect for the job - but the local stores don't carry them any more.

There's always the Container Store (http://www.containerstore.com/), but I'm reluctant to buy something without seeing it first. The closest bricks & mortar Container Store is in Schaumburg, which is rather far to drive just to spend ten or twenty dollars on some plastic boxes. (Though it's close to Arlington Heights, so perhaps the next visit to the grandparents could make a slight diversion. Possibly at Thanksgiving....)

Back in August, I was grumbling that the Virgin Mobile Cyclops phone could take 1280x1024 pictures, but couldn't mail them anywhere because they were too large.

Sometime in the last two months, that deficiency has been rectified: I just sent three 1280x1024 pictures to myself. (Three different ones, just in case I got lucky somehow with the first one.)

Now the traffic-sign pictures on Flickr will be even larger. The loyal readership will be so pleased.

My back hurt quite a bit when I got out of bed this morning; I took some medicine & loafed a bit; I feel much better now.

During the sad part of the movie Shrek, when all the characters are isolated & miserable, there's a background song playing:

They say there was a secret chord
That David played and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, do ya?

I was rather surprised when Neil Peart mentioned this song in his book. It's by Jeff Buckley, a gifted musician who - alas - died ten years ago. (The same year as Israel Kamakawiwo'ole. Coincidence? I think not!)

iTunes has Mr. Buckley's one & only album, Grace. Might be worth buying, one of these days.

(It's too bad iTunes doesn't have wishlists. Mine would be enormous.)

I've noticed an increase in phone spam lately - along with a number of news items pointing out that entries in the National Do-Not-Call Registry expire after five years.

Hm...has it really been that long since I registered our home phone number? Apparently so, since www.donotcall.gov reported that it was no longer registered.

I just re-registered our number, so we're more-or-less safe from phone spam until 2012. (Not all of it: the politicians of course excepted their own phone spam - those annoying prerecorded vote-for-me messages that interrupt dinner in the weeks prior to major elections.)

Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 Service Pack 1 takes a ridiculously long time to install.

Thanks bunches, 'softies.

NOAA says the temperature was 47° this morning while I was out waiting at the bus stop, but the sun was bright and warm.

I'm seeing lots of jackets on people, and even a few winter coats. The temperature drops to something a little more seasonal, and people panic. Sheesh.

Sam's getting very chatty. Phrases often heard from him include:

Yay! Good job!
Cookie? Please?
Three-four-five-six!

He's also fond of calling me Mama, despite all my efforts to persuade him otherwise. Silly boy.

I paid a visit to the 7th Circuit Court of Appeals web site just now, hoping to see what's going on with Mr. C______'s appeal. It turns out that a new brief was filed on September 14th; alas, the court won't let me see it:

In accordance with policy initiatives promulgated by the Judicial Conference of the United States, public access to view or download documents for this type of case will be unavailable on the Internet. Unless sealed by court order, documents will continue to be available for physical inspection in the office of the Clerk of the Court.

Well, that's a little frustrating. I'm not going to drive all the way up to Chicago just to read a few pages of legalese (and rather doubt the clerk of the court would let me read them if I did).

However: the docket sheet - which is still available online - describes the brief as a '15c Anders brief'. Hm, thought I. What's an Anders brief?

The name comes from an 1967 case, Anders v. California 386 U.S. 738 (available online at the amusingly-named www.fedworld.gov), in which the U.S. Supreme Court said:

If counsel conscientiously decides that the appeal is wholly frivolous he should so advise the court and request permission to withdraw, at the same time furnishing the court and the indigent with a brief of anything in the record arguably supporting the appeal.

I'd say that's a bad sign for Mr. C______'s appeal.

Later entries in the docket sheet suggest that Mr. C______ is now in the process of arguing that his appeal isn't frivolous, even though his own lawyer says it is. He has until mid-November to submit his response to the Anders brief; I must remember to check back next month and see how things turned out.

Deactivated my Facebook account (again). There didn't seem much point in keeping it: social networks are only useful when enough of the people you know are already on them, or can be persuaded to join.

Alas, for me neither was true.

Drinking decaffeinated espresso is like reading the Braille edition of Playboy magazine.

Turns out my next physical therapy appointment is tomorrow, not Friday; and it's at 9:00am.

Good thing I checked the calendar, or I might have missed it.

(The hand is doing quite well these days. The scar is barely noticeable.)

Scoble's been talking up Zude lately: it's cool, he says. Demo of the year, he says.

Well, all right, anything Scoble gets excited about is at least worth a look. The folks at www.zude.com have this to say for themselves:

Consolidate Your Web,
Share Photos & Experiences,
Create, and Communicate.

Why would I want to do that? The whole point of the internet is that it doesn't matter if I keep my blather on TypePad, my pictures on Flickr, and my extra bonus blather on Twitter. Through the magic of hyperlinks, it's all just as accessible as if it were locked up in a Zude 'experience'.

More accessible, perhaps, since Zude pages seem awfully busy & confusing.

Two things I really dislike about Zude:

Zude intercepts right-clicks, and puts up some lame copyright notice instead of the browser's context menu. I use that menu all the time, and get annoyed when some bunch of paranoids think I'm trying to rip them off.

Zude poisons the browser history stack: follow a link to somebody's Zude experience, and the back button stops working. The back button is another browser feature that I use all the time. Sites that interfere with it - either through some misguided attempt to make their pages stickier, or because their mad JavaScript skillz aren't quite good enough - end up on my don't bother going back list.

So goodbye, Zude. Don't let the VCs steal your company from you.

Today's high was a mere 55° - quite a comedown from the recent heatwave.

Perhaps I should look into buying a light jacket, for those early-morning waits at the bus stop....

When I log into Facebook, I really don't want to see ads like this...

...as I am most definitely not a callow twentysomething trying to trick women into sleeping with me.

Maybe it's time to pull the plug on my account, and leave Facebook to the children.

There's an article in Saturday's paper about a fella whose project is to ride his motorcycle (one of those big touring bikes) on every Interstate and U.S. highway in Illinois (except the ones in Chicago, on which pleasure driving is an impossibility). Along the way, he's collected pictures of all 102 county courthouses.

I don't think he's put them online anywhere, though.

Maybe when I finish the county sign project, I'll start over with county courthouses. That sounds like fun.

It was two years ago yesterday - October 7, 2005 - that I brought our TiVo home from Best Buy. It's performed splendidly (and hardly ever crashes).

(This milestone also means that we did the right thing by choosing the $300 lifetime subscription over the $13/month subscription: by now, the latter option would have cost us $338.)

I want a Sidekick LX, because:

• It can synchronize (via Bluetooth) with the iMac.
• It has a camera, which is a little better than the one in my current phone.
• It does email - specifically, it can connect to any POP3 server, so I could check my home email from anywhere I can get a signal.
• T-Mobile's Sidekick data plan offers unlimited internet, messaging, etc.

I do not want a Sidekick LX, because:

• It costs $400, which sum the household budget is unlikely to make available any time soon.
• The unlimited data plan is $30/month, which is rather more than I feel like paying.
• I've never actually seen one of these, or had a chance to use the (tiny) keyboard. Perhaps it's not as spiffy & useful in person as it seems on paper.
• The Sidekick LX isn't available yet. Real Soon Now, says T-Mobile.

I imagine I'll have my current phone for a good long while before replacing it, with a Sidekick or with something else. But in the meantime it's fun to dream.

Update: Sidekicks do not synchronize with iMacs, not via Bluetooth, nor by any other means.

Suppose that gas prices, pollution, etc., etc., finally became too much to bear, and everybody replaced their automobiles with bicycles. What would happen?

I can think of a few things:

• The bicyclists who look down on automobilists will have to find something else to feel superior about. Perhaps some of them will start bragging that their bicycles are more environmentally friendly than everyone else's.
• The bicyclists who ignore traffic laws - those are just for cars, y'know - will encounter more people like themselves. Mostly at intersections. Painfully.
• Pedestrians will enjoy a bit of schadenfreude, watching all the bicycle drama. Some of them will be run over by bicyclists riding on the sidewalk.

Anything else?

Finished - shortly after midnight last night - reading The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection, edited by the unpronounceable Gardner Dozois.

Lots of gloomy stories in this one. (Especially Nightingale, the closer. Euww.)

Also in progress:

• A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara W. Tuchman. I'm reading this one - a birthday gift from my sister (hi, Lisa!) - on the bus, going to & from work, which probably doesn't do much for my comprehension and/or retention, but it's an interesting read nonetheless.
• To Sail Beyond the Sunset by Robert A. Heinlein. This one I am reading in the living room, generally while minding the kids. (This is the fourth time I've read To Sail Beyond the Sunset since it was published; the others were 1987, 1991 and 2002.)

I don't know what I'll read next. Perhaps another of my birthday presents.

After Mr. Explorer's last oil change - which ended up costing $600, once the Ford dealer had padded the bill with a bunch of 'maintenance' that may or may not have been necessary - I swore that I was done pouring money into such a superannuated vehicle. Let it rot, thought I, and when it finally stops running I'll take the bus everywhere.

I'm starting to change my mind about that.

There's something wrong with the left front tire: it's making a nasty wup-wup-wup noise that gets louder as the car goes faster. Peak loudness is between 50 - 55 mph, at which point the car sounds rather like a freight train; beyond that, it starts to get quieter again. (Six months ago, when I asked the Ford dealer to investigate the disturbing sounds coming from the left front tire, they said, "We don't hear anything," and charged me $80. Morons.)

Perhaps this coming week I'll see if the nice people at Norris Tire can do anything about it. Probably not. There are two causes behind the wup-wup-wup noise that's driving me crazy: wheels that are out of alignment, and tires with uneven tread wear. Unfortunately for me, the former (which can be fixed) causes the latter (which can't). I could replace the tire, but there are plenty of more interesting things I could spend $100 on.

Tomorrow I'll be meeting Jake & the grandparents for lunch in Dwight; afterward, Jake will come home with me, and the grandparents will get some peace & quiet.

This evening I briefly entertained the notion that Jake & I, after saying goodbye to the grandparents, might head north out of  Dwight (instead of south, toward home) and add a few entries to the county signs project (which has been stalled since January). I even fired up Streets & Trips to set up an itinerary.

Alas, DeKalb county - the closest unvisited county - is farther away than I thought: an hour's drive, north on Hwy 47 then west on US 30 - entirely too far to drive, especially when Sam is sick.

Some other time, perhaps.

NOAA reports that today's high was 90°.

Two weeks into autumn, and we're still having August weather. It's insane.

Poor Sam, he's got the croup.

He seemed well enough yesterday; a bit sniffly, but we figured it was just a cold. (Most of us have been dealing with off-and-on cold symptoms for a while now. It's rather annoying.) Alas for Sam, he woke up at 11:00pm last night completely miserable, with a cough that sounded like a barking dog.

We gave him some medicine, and let him watch most of Finding Nemo - his new favorite movie, and a huge improvement over Bear in the Big Blue House or (horrors!) Teletubbies - then got him back into his crib sometime around midnight.

This morning, we took Sam to see the doctor, who gave him the usual going-over and (continuing unperturbed whenever Sam turned off the room lights, even though we were in a windowless exam room) declared, "He's got the croup."

We have some over-the-counter stuff for Sam's cough, and some prescription something-or-other to keep his airway from getting too constricted; there's nothing else to do but wait for his immune system to kick in. He should be fine in a week or so.

Poor little guy.

(Mark Twain wrote a story titled Experience Of The McWilliamses With Membranous Croup, but in those days 'croup' meant 'diphtheria', which disease Sam most assuredly does not have.)

Facebook reports that the UIllinois network includes 95 members of the University of Illinois Class of 1984.

Alas, I don't recognize any of their names.

Facebook has networks for university students & alumni; as I fall in the latter category (class of 1984, though I was long gone by the time the rest of them went marching onstage for the scrolls that looked like diplomas but weren't), I thought I might join the University of Illinois network (which is somewhat awkwardly named UIllinois).

Sure thing, said Facebook. Just enter your uiuc.edu email address.

Er...I don't have one. I'd be surprised if anybody had one, twenty-three years ago when I was a student.

A bit of poking around turned up the useful fact that alumni email addresses are also acceptable. Alas, I don't have one of them, either. Perhaps I can get one?

Indeed I can: http://www.illinoisalumni.org/ will hand them out to anybody willing to answer a bunch of nosy questions. After a moment's hesitation, I filled out the form - declining to answer truthfully in a few instances - and was granted my very own illinoisalumni.org email address.

(There was a brief snafu with the password I'd chosen. It was too long, and their parameter validation machinery chose to truncate it instead of throwing an error. It took me a while to figure out what was going on and get myself logged in. Silly programmers. What's it to them if I want a sixteen-character password?)

After all this foolery, the UIllinois network better be completely amazing & wonderful....

The fancy online bus-tracking system tells me that the bus I take to get home is running only five minutes late. Usually it's ten or fifteen minutes behind schedule.