...big deal.
I'm supposed to think about important things that happened this year, reflect on the valuable life lessons I've learned, wax optimistic for the future, etc., etc., blah blah blah.
Maybe next year. This year, the laptop battery is nearly drained - 17%, and falling fast - so there's no time for pointless blather.
I'll probably just read another story or two from the C. M. Kornbluth anthology I'm currently working through, then go to bed sometime prior to midnight.
Yesterday I wondered whether the words napkin and apron were etymologically related. It turns out that they are.
For napkin, the OS X dictionary says:
ORIGIN late Middle English: from Old French nappe 'tablecloth' (from Latin mappa: see map) + -kin.
For apron:
ORIGIN Middle English naperon, from Old French, diminutive of nape, nappe 'tablecloth,' from Latin mappa 'napkin.' The n was lost by wrong division of a napron; compare with adder.
Handy things, dictionaries.
Jennifer & I went to see Walk Hard this evening, at the Savoy 16.
A truly demented film. It made me think of the Seinfeld episode: "There's good naked, and there's bad naked...."
The homunculus in charge of irrelevant questions whispered in my ear just now: What's happening with the Perl 6 project?
A bit of clicky-clicky led me to a Perl Buzz article: Where is Perl 6? The question that won't die, which I would summarize as follows:
Once upon a time at dear old WRI, I was nursemaid to a big pile of nasty old Perl code; but it was long ago rewritten in Python. The newer build machines don't even have Perl installed on them. So I don't suppose I care much whether Perl 6 ships tomorrow, next year, or never.
I'm trying to think of a reason to keep my Plaxo account.
There's one thing about Plaxo that's really annoying: the login cookies expire way too soon. It seems like every other day I have to dig out my Plaxo password & log in again. (The drawback to using impossible-to-guess passwords is that they're also impossible to remember.)
And Plaxo itself isn't terribly useful - at least, in four and a half months of messing around I've yet to find any compelling use for it.
Went to Staples this afternoon, to pick up a twelve-pocket accordion folder; noticed a copy of Age of Empires lurking in the cheap section of the software aisle, so I bought it.
I ordered exactly the same thing from Amazon just yesterday; but since Amazon said they didn't expect to ship my order until next Wednesday, I figured I'd have time to cancel it. Alas, no: when I got back, there was a Your order has shipped message from Amazon waiting for me.
Perhaps Amazon will accept returns.
This is the third time I've bought Age of Empires - fourth, if you count the time I bought Age of Empires II. I feel quite the chump.
Jake likes Age of Empires. I let him play a game mostly by himself this evening: he had a great time building things & directing his villagers around the map. (He was also amused by the army of nuke troopers I created for him, using the not-very-secret cheat code 'E=MC2 TROOPER'. They blew up quite a bit of the enemy village before the cavalry killed them.)
On the other hand, Sam felt a bit left out. Poor little guy.
NOAA says that what's happening outside is 'light snow', but to me it looks more like rain.
iTunes says:
The Gift Certificate or Prepaid Card code you entered has not been activated. Please return to the original point of purchase for assistance.
No movies for me, alas.
Started hearing a strange noise while driving home from Normal: most every time the car hit a bump, a curious squeeee noise would emanate from somewhere in the back half of the car.
It got worse. The squeee noises got louder, and lasted longer. Sometimes they would start at one bump in the road, and not stop until the next.
I imagined another trip to the mechanic, and wondered how much it would cost this time.
Nothing, as it turned out: the mystery noise was coming from one of Jake's Christmas presents, which didn't get turned off before it was boxed up & packed into the back of the car.
The last time Jennifer & I went to the fitness center for a treadmill party, I left a card in the suggestion box. My suggestion:
Fewer naked men in the locker room,
more naked women.
I'm so immature sometimes....
NOAA reports that the temperature dropped 31° - from 51° to 21° - between midnight and 7:00am.
We didn't get any snow, though.
I grew up reading science fiction: Isaac Asimov, John Brunner, Robert A. Heinlein, Frank Herbert, Larry Niven, etc., etc.
The stories I read as a teenager were all so optimistic. The human race would of course perfect itself through technology:
Alas, it hasn't worked out that way.
From today's Carmi Times:
Lester Lionel Chastain, 87, of Madison, Ala., formerly of Carmi, faithful husband, loving father, grandfather and great-grandfather, went to be with his friend, Lord and Savior Jesus Christ at 8:20 p.m. Thursday, Dec. 20, 2007 at his home in Madison, Ala.
Mr. Chastain was the brother of Robert S. Chastain, who was married briefly to my great-grandmother Dorothy Sturm (née Dean), from 1975 until her death in 1978.
Small world, etc.
(The obituary says Mr. Chastain had two brothers and five sisters. I knew about the brothers - Robert and Carl - and four of the sisters - Dorothy, Doris, Louisa and Jean - but it's news to me that he had a fifth sister. I suppose that means I have something to research, next time I'm in the library.)
It occurs to me that I haven't quite finished my Christmas shopping yet.
Perhaps Jennifer will let me sneak out for a few hours tomorrow afternoon and finish up....
Noticed the other day that the garage door wasn't closing all the way: one side of it was stopping an inch or two short.
A bit of investigation revealed that the topmost roller on that side had somehow worked itself loose, and was getting stuck halfway through the curve in the roller channel (or whatever that bit is called).
I messed around with it for a while - getting nasty old garage-door grease all over my hands - and managed to tighten the bolt back down with the roller in (approximately) the right position. The door closes all the way now, which might help to keep certain unwelcome wildlife (i.e., mice) out of the garage (and hence, out of the house).
Sam's been in his crib for about half an hour now. He's supposed to be napping.
Instead, he's chattering and bouncing.
I guess he's skipping the nap today. Might as well go fish him out....
In the U.S.:
Alaska: 570,380 square miles
Rhode Island: 1,045 square miles
Alaska is 545.8 times bigger than Rhode Island.
In Canada:
Nunavut: 1,936,113 square kilometers
Prince Edward Island: 5,660 square kilometers
Nunavut is a mere 342.1 times bigger than PEI.
On the other hand, before Nunavut was carved out of Northwest Territories (in 1999), the latter province weighed in at 3,119,198 square kilometers - a more impressive 551.1 times larger than PEI.
I just deleted my accounts on last.fm, Pownce, and Remember the Milk: I never used them, I couldn't imagine finding any use for them in the future, they were just pointless clutter.
And so they went.
The Westinghouse customer service department - which I suspect is one person, with an answering machine and a computer in his basement, who checks for messages & sends replies only when there's nothing good on television - has the following advice:
Thank you for contacting Westinghouse Lighting Corporation. Please contact a local electrical distributor or lighting showroom in your area to see if they will order a replacement for you.
That's so helpful.
If Westinghouse has replacement parts for this light, why won't they sell them to me? Perhaps the explanation is that there are no replacement parts, just as there is no customer service department.
Sooner or later, we'll be forced to replace the entire fixture. The new one surely will not come from Westinghouse. (There is no Westinghouse any more. The company's been sold so many times that there's nothing left of it. It's just brand necrophilia.)
For three days, I managed to resist buying God Bless Tiny Tim, by Tiny Tim (who else?), from iTunes. Then I caved.
Poor Jennifer will now be subject to Tip Toe Thru' the Tulips With Me whenever she least expects it....
Some years ago, two of my least-favorite software companies got into a legal squabble. After the initial flurry of press releases & displays of righteous indignation, there was no further news. I've been wondering ever since what happened.
Now, courtesy of a 10-Q form filed with the SEC - way back in 2004 - by Altiris, Inc., I know:
In June 2003, InstallShield Software Technologies, Inc., or InstallShield, filed suit against Wise Solutions, Inc., or Wise Solutions, in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Illinois Eastern Division. In December 2003, the Company acquired Wise Solutions by means of a merger transaction, with Wise Solutions surviving as the Company's wholly owned subsidiary. InstallShield claimed that its suit arose out of a criminal investigation of Wise Solutions conducted by the U.S. Attorney's office in Chicago, Illinois and the FBI. Management believes the government investigation concerns the same facts and circumstances upon which the civil suit was based. In July 2004, the parties entered into a settlement agreement that resolved all claims made by the parties in the civil litigation, and the Court has dismissed the case with prejudice. The Company accrued for this settlement as of June 30, 2004. In September 2004, the Company received written notice from the U.S. Attorney's office in Chicago, Illinois, informing the Company that the Chicago
office had closed its investigation of Wise Solutions and that it had not filed nor sought to file criminal charges against Wise Solutions.
Nothing happened. No crimes were committed. All that big talk from the lawyers was just hot air.
All week I've been tracking a storm system heading our way from California, wondering whether it will interfere with the grandparents' planned visit on Sunday.
The latest forecast sounds like the nasties will get here on Saturday, and mostly in the form of rain. So there's hope that Christmas #2 will happen on schedule. Christmas #3 won't happen until Tuesday; and I think that will be the end of it for this year.
(Christmas #1 was supposed to be in Peoria last Saturday, but was - alas! - cancelled due to the previous storm system out of California.)
One of the halogen bulbs in the kitchen exploded a few months ago, taking with it the glass shield that covered the bulb; ever since, we've been running on only four lights (three now, since one of the survivors recently burned out). I had the notion today to order a replacement shield.
This turns out to be more difficult than it sounds. The Westinghouse Lighting web site is very pretty but quite useless. The customer service telephone number goes directly to an answering machine. There's an email address, but there's also no telling when / whether / by whom it might be answered. But it was my only option, so I sent them mail.
(I also left a rude message on their answering machine: "So, you don't actually have anyone answering the phones? That's not very good customer service, is it?")
I want to make a fruitcake. (I don't know that I want to eat any of it; I just want to make one.)
Because I'm lazy, I want to use the bread machine: put ingredients in machine, push button, wait for the beep that says yummy fruitcake is ready to eat.
Alas, I can't seem to find any reasonable-looking bread machine fruitcake recipes. (I did find the Icelandic Fruit Cake recipe - a very special Christmas experience....)
There's a nice fruitcake recipe from Good Eats (which show I used to watch) over at www.foodtv.com, but the ingredient list is quite long, and full of things we don't have in the house: stockpiles of dried fruit here at Stately Rice Manor are pretty much limited to the box of raisins I put in my oatmeal.
Perhaps the fruitcake project will have to wait until I can get to the grocery store.
...except for a bit of ice here & there, which our snow shovel could not shift. We're out of salt, too, so the ice will likely remain until Wednesday (forecast: high in the 40s, rain).
The new snow shovel - a $5 special from Menards - is already falling apart. I doubt it will survive the winter. (I doubt it will survive another snowstorm, for that matter.)
The wind threw a substantial drift across the driveway. Memo to self: when shopping for our next house, consider prevailing winds and snowdrift formation. Don't buy a house where snow + wind = an extra hour of shoveling.
Jake had a grand time playing in the snow. (Sam had to stay inside. He was not happy about this.)
Quite a bit of snow on the ground this morning. The forecast called for five to eight inches, but I don't think we got quite that much.
The plows have already been down our street, so there's a snow-wall at the end of the driveway. I suppose we'll have to dig ourselves out, one of these days.
I want to bring in the mail.
There's an inch or two of snow on the ground outside.
My shoes are in the bedroom. Jennifer is in there now, sleeping.
Should I -
What to do, what to do....
I have a Pownce account, but I never use it.
There's no way to post from my phone. I can post from the web site, or download & install the desktop application and post from that; but not from my phone.
The desktop application uses some half-baked (i.e., still in beta) application runtime called Adobe AIR, which sounds like either yet another Java clone or maybe a p-System for the 21st century. Whichever it is, I don't want it. (It probably wouldn't run so well on nessus, anyway.)
There's no way to add a Pownce sidebar to my TypePad site. For good or bad, TypePad is my primary online presence (gack, what a pompous thing to say!). My other accounts have to play nicely with TypePad, or they'll die of neglect.
Maybe I should delete my Pownce account, so somebody else - somebody who actually wants a Pownce account - can have one.
Not very much just yet, but the storm is just getting started. NOAA says total accumulation of six to eight inches by Sunday morning.
The Miller Christmas party in Peoria has - alas - been cancelled due to the weather.
In other news: sometime in the night, pixies left Christmas cookies on our doorstep. There are no footprints in the snow, either.
Boring old work stuff:
I downloaded script.aculo.us 1.8.0 the other day, and finally got around to installing it on one of the web servers here at dear old WRI - where 'installing' means 'copying six .js files up to the server'.
Then I typed in the Ajax.Updater example from the script.aculo.us wiki, and it didn't work. I poked at it for a while, tried adding/removing various attributes from the <script> tags, and nothing worked. The only error message Internet Explorer was willing to divulge: 'Ajax is undefined'.
Stupid web browser, Ajax is defined in prototype.js. It's right there. What's your problem?
Just to see if it was a problem specific to Internet Explorer, I tried it on a convenient OS X machine. Same problem. But I looked at the Safari activity list, and saw:
.../prototype.js forbidden
.../scriptaculous.js forbidden
Er...forbidden?
The file permissions were wrong on the web server. One
chmod 644 *.js
later, Internet Explorer was happy.
(I would have thought that when the web server refuses to serve a requested file, that would be an error worth reporting to the user. Apparently the 'softies think otherwise.)
A quick calculation in Excel informs me that April 12, 2007 marked a curious milestone: it was the halfway point between my graduation from college (December 20, 1983) and my projected retirement date (August 4, 2030, under current Social Security guidelines).
If I'd been paying attention, I would have thrown a half-career party or something. Oh well.
The real reason for last week's launch delay.
It's comforting to know that fire hydrant elevations in Champaign are being measured so precisely.
Amazon tells me that last October Tor published Fleet of Worlds, by Larry Niven "and Edward M. Lerner".
Before I read Building Harlequin's Moon (September, 2006), I would have responded to this news with: Another Larry Niven novel, cool. But now I find myself uncharitably wondering just how much Niven had to do with the writing of this book.
Not much, I suspect.
(And I confess I've developed a certain reluctance to re-read any of Niven's older work. What if it's all as bad as the newer stuff, only I was too young & foolish to notice?)
Woke up this morning to a very icy world outside.
NOAA says more ice is coming tomorrow evening, and warns that power outages are likely. (Not in our subdivision, I hope: the trees are too small, and the power lines are all underground.)
I don't suppose conditions are as bad yet as the big ice storm of February, 1990, but we're staying home today anyway.
...your code doesn't work.
...your code doesn't work, and you have no [censored] idea why it doesn't work.
...you fix your code, but the fix doesn't work, either.
...your code breaks whenever you or anyone else tries to change it.
Yes, I'm thinking of one of the cow-orkers. No, I won't tell you which one.
Sam, on his way to the changing table for a new diaper, stopped in the middle of the living room, pulled down his pants, pointed to his knees and announced, "Knees!"
Other body parts Sam can name (and/or jam his fingers into): ears, eyes, nose.
Lots of chatter lately about the Flip Video camcorder: it's relatively cheap ($180 for the super-duper model; less for the not-so-super models), tiny (about the size of the Nikon Coolpix 3700), and records up to an hour of pretty good video (better than the Nikon, judging by the sample videos on the Flip web site).
Rosie O'Donnell has four, and loves them.
I've been reading the fine print on the Flip web site, and two things bother me:
Apparently I can't just plug the thing into the iMac and use iPhoto to pull video off it; I have to go through the Flip Video Program. It's been my experience that when hardware companies try to write software, they do a terrible job of it. (The synchronization software that came with the Kodak DX3500 never did work very well, and the dock was completely useless. The video-transfer and -editing software that came with the JVC camcorder was just as bad.)
The videos are in a nonstandard format: you have to install the 3ivx 5.0 MPEG-4 decoder before they'll play on your computer. I don't think Grandma would like that very much: Here's a cute video of Jake & Sam, but you'll need to install some mystery software before you can watch it. What happens ten years from now, when I want to play my old videos? Will 3ivx still be around? Will they support whatever computer I have then?
Perhaps I'm getting all worked up over nothing. Maybe the Flip Video Program is spiffy & wonderful. Maybe 3ivx will be around forever. Maybe the Flip Video camcorder lives up to the chatter. Alas, at present there's no room in the household budget to buy one & find out. (No, this is not a hint for any of Santa's helpers who may be reading.)
NOAA says:
FREEZING RAIN WILL DEVELOP THIS EVENING...AND CONTINUE THROUGH SUNDAY MORNING. ICE ACCUMULATION WILL REACH UP TO TWO TENTHS OF AN INCH BY LATE MORNING ON SUNDAY. ROADS WILL QUICKLY BECOME VERY SLIPPERY THIS EVENING...WITH HAZARDOUS TRAVEL CONDITIONS CONTINUING THROUGH SUNDAY MORNING. THE FREEZING RAIN WILL CHANGE TO RAIN BETWEEN 9 AM AND NOON ON SUNDAY.
(Apparently the NOAA computer system predates the invention of lowercase letters. Perhaps it's time for an upgrade...?)
If I get through the coming winter with no fractures, sprains or other slipped-on-some-ice injuries, I will be very happy - but also a little surprised.
A half-dozen times over the course of the evening, the thought has occurred to me: It's not Friday. I have to go to work tomorrow.
Checked the Court of Appeals docket sheet just now, to see how Mr. C______'s appeal is going. Not well, it seems:
Alas, the ORDER isn't available for download, so the exact reasoning behind it must remain a mystery.
It's taken longer than usual to get the Christmas tree up & decorated - my fault, for not buying lights on Sunday - but it's finished now (and very pretty).
This year we went for the 70s retro look: great big colored lights, instead of the tiny whities (which phrase sounds more like a style of underpants than of Christmas tree lights) we'd been using since...erm...since Jennifer & I put up our first Christmas tree (1995?).
Sam is very interested in the ornaments, so all the fragile ones are way up high. Even so, we've already lost one: it wasn't quite high enough.
Only twenty days until Christmas. I really should get started on my shopping....
Finished - last night, before bedtime - reading A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous 14th Century by Barbara W. Tuchman.
A wonderful book, full of fascinating detail about 14th-century Europe. Somewhere in the last hundred pages or so it occurred to me: this book is about the Hundred Years War. I read a book about the Hundred Years War, a few years back (the first half of May, 2003, to be precise).
James Burke once described the French knights at the battle of Agincourt as "full of Death or glory! and Me first!". That pretty much sums up the French nobility of the 1300s. (Not that the English were much better....)
I have a strange desire now to read Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and/or Froissart's Chronicles.
On the other hand, I have a stack of unread Analog magazines on the dresser: I subscribed to have some light reading for the bus rides to & from work, then got distracted by A Distant Mirror. Perhaps I should get caught up on them before starting another book.
I also have one last birthday present still to read: His Share of Glory: The Complete Short Fiction of Cyril M. Kornbluth. It's a big book, entirely too large to be carting around town on the bus; perhaps I'll read it at home, and Analog on the bus.
Sounds like a plan.
I note with some amusement that Stephen Wolfram has returned to my Facebook friends list.
Just took an oatmeal / chocolate chip pan cookie out of the oven. Smells good, it does.
Jennifer is at a quilting thing this afternoon. Sam is sleeping. Jake is watching television. I am sitting at the kitchen table, pecking away at the laptop (which I retrieved from work on the way home from lunch).
It's been a dark, rainy, unnaturally warm day today: NOAA says the high for Champaign was 59° at noon. (Since then, the temperature has dropped 17°, and is exprected to drop another fifteen or twenty overnight. I hope the roads & sidewalks have a chance to dry up before they freeze, otherwise tomorrow's walk to the bus stop will be...interesting.)
Currently:
Pity me, pity me.
Yesterday: freezing rain.
Today: 58° and windy. Chance of thunderstorms.
Tomorrow: highs in the 30s.
Finished - last night, around 10:00pm - reading Two Early Tudor Lives, edited by Richard S. Sylvester and Davis P. Harding: an two-for-one deal, containing The Life and Death of Cardinal Wolsey, by George Cavendish; and The Life of Sir Thomas More, by William Roper.
A very difficult read. The differences in vocabulary - e.g., people were astonied instead of surprised; they did things incontinent (heh) instead of immediately - weren't nearly as much of an impediment as the organization of the two narratives. Apparently chapters weren't invented until sometime after the sixteenth century; both biographies are long, unbroken slabs of text.
Even so, both were interesting. (Not that I expect to read either of them again any time soon, mind.)
A while ago - July 14, to be precise - I wondered about the line of succession to the British throne: who's on the list, and who's last?
It turns out that the royal family has its own web site, http://www.royal.gov.uk/, which includes a very helpful page on the line of succession. (I was bemused to see that even now, five hundred years after Henry VIII's squabble with the Pope, Roman Catholics are still ineligible to be Sovereign.)
The current line of succession numbers forty people: from Prince Charles all the way down to the Earl of Harewood, who really is last in line to the British throne.
The Christmas tree is up.
This was considerably easier than in recent years, because there are no lights to bother with. (Pre-lit trees are of the devil. Flee them!) I did most of the assembly, Jennifer & Jacob did most of the fluffing.
Sam's taking a nap, so he missed all the fun.
Now we need to go buy some lights to hang on the tree. We're hoping for a few strings of retro-look big-bulb multicolored lights (with LEDs instead of bulbs), to have a little nostalgia over Christmas trees from when Jennifer & I were kids.
Today's forecast calls for freezing rain, sleet and other assorted winter nasties.
We had plans for today, too. Instead we're going to stay home.
