January 2008 Archives
Poor Sam, around 9:00pm last night his dinner became too much of a burden for him, and he urped in his crib.
It wasn't a very big mess, and Sam seemed fine afterward (no fever), so I convinced myself it was just a random bit of barf: nothing to worry about. I cleaned up Sam & the crib, and got him settled down again.
Around 10:00pm he threw up again. And every half-hour or so after that. (Sam doesn't like to throw up. Each time, he cried miserably afterward.) By the time he finally stopped - a little before 1:00am - we had gone through quite a few towels, changes of clothing, etc., etc.
Today young Mr. Sam seems completely back to normal, but we're feeding him Pedialyte & Jell-O just to be safe. It would be good to know why he threw up - did he catch Jake's strep throat? some sort of allergic reaction to the hot dog he had for dinner? a touch of food poisoning? - but I fear we may never find out.
NOAA's current temperatures for Iowa:
Davenport - 46.9°
Des Moines - 27°
Sioux City - 3°
That's a pretty nasty cold front, and it's heading our way.
If I say I intend to vote for Barack Obama in the upcoming Illinois primary, people will say to me, "You sexist neanderthal! You just can't bear the thought of a woman president!"
On the other hand, if I say I intend to vote for Hillary Clinton, people will say to me, "You racist! You just can't bear the thought of a black president!"
And if I say I intend to vote for anyone else, people will say both.
(I haven't decided yet which one I'll vote for, but I can say with certainty that when I do, race & gender will not be considered. So there.)
Eleven years from now, when they're handing out awards to those members of the Class of 2019 who maintained perfect attendance through all thirteen years of their K-12 education, Jacob will - alas! - not be receiving one: he's staying home today.
He's much better this morning, but another day of rest will be good for him.
I finished our federal tax return this evening (our finances are really quite boring; mostly I just clicked Next and left unchecked all the Yes, we did something weird with our money in 2007 checkboxes), and decided to get started on the state return.
TaxCut wants a credit card number, and says it will charge me $30 for the Illinois program.
Hm. I already paid for the Illinois program, when I bought TaxCut Premium + State. Didn't I?
H&R Block's customer support page says that support agents are available 24/7; but I have doubts. Their (rather cheesy) chat page has been cycling through its set of please-wait messages for a good long while now, but the promised support agent has yet to appear.
(We can't actually file until mid-February: there are some important updates that aren't yet available. But I'd still like to get the Illinois return finished sooner rather than later.)
Update: After a long wait, had a brief chat with one Thomas C., who thought I was using the Windows version (even though I said in the support request that I'm running the Mac version); then, when he was trying to talk me through some probably-unnecessary tweakage to the OS X proxy settings, their cheesy online chat page died: it auto-refreshed to a 404 page, and nothing I did could resurrect the chat session. I suppose Thomas C. has already given up on me and is now 'helping' someone else.
I suppose I'll try the update again in a few days, but at some point it'll be easier to just fork over another $30 - and next year I'll switch to TurboTax.
Update #2: It appears that the Mac version of the Illinois program - which was supposed to be released on Friday - isn't actually available yet. (I note with some derision that the manual download page contains broken HTML, specifically in the Mac state section. FYI: <a/> is not how you close a hyperlink. You might want to have the web folks take a look at that.)
Jake's cough / cold / sore throat wasn't any better this morning, so off we went to Convenient Care (since the main clinic is closed on Sundays).
We weren't the first to arrive - seems like half of Champaign is sniffling & coughing just now - so we spent an hour in the waiting room before Jake was called back. (Then we spent a bit longer waiting in the exam room.)
After a while, the doctor - really a physician assistant, which is somebody who can do pretty much anything a doctor does, only the clinic doesn't have to pay them quite so much - showed up, looked in Jake's ears & throat (which she described as "nasty"), and prescribed some antibiotics.
Mr. Jake says he feels fine, and he just finished a big lunch (leftover macaroni and cheese). Perhaps he's already on the mend.
Poor Jake, he's sick: occasional fever, occasional sore throat, a bit of coughing now & then. We've been dosing him with Motrin & Tylenol, which seems to help.
He watched television pretty much all day.
I think tomorrow morning Jake & I will be off to see the doctor.
Sam doesn't have a cold, but his nose does seem a bit messier than usual.
Has has a lot to say, and can produce some fairly complex sentences when he wants to.
Jennifer's teaching him to sing: "Twinkle, twinkle, little star..." etc. Sam knows most of the words, but has a tendency to mumble.
This morning when I shut down the laptop (after the usual breakfast email check), Sam said, "Computer...all gone!"
Not much going on at Stately Rice Manor today.
Jake was sent home from school yesterday, for having a temperature (they did this with only an hour of classes left in the day; I don't see why they bothered). We've been dosing him with Motrin and/or Tylenol. It seems to help.
I've been playing too much Age of Empires. It's starting to annoy Jennifer.
Sam was sleeping, but now I hear activity on the monitor. Naptime is over, I think.
Finished reading Roadshow: Landscape with Drums - A Concert Tour by Motorcycle, by Neil Peart.
I get the feeling he couldn't quite decide which title to stick on his book, and in the end piled on all of them.
Disease update:
My nose is more or less unblocked, and I'm not reaching for the kleenex quite so often. Perhaps that's a sign that I'm finally getting the better of whatever viral nasties have been plaguing me for the last week. But every so often I get a half-dozen rather convulsive sneezes, all at once, so maybe the germs aren't quite ready to quit.
I've been dosing my face with vitamin A&D ointment (left over from last year's hand surgery), to deal with various chapped (from the crummy weather) and/or chafed (from constant nose-blowing) areas; I read the label last night, and discovered that the primary ingredient of my ointment is...cod-liver oil.
Yes, I've been smearing my face with fish guts for the last week. Euwww.
The current temperature is 21°, which isn't so bad; but the forecast for tonight & tomorrow is a little worrisome:
A FAST MOVING DISTURBANCE WILL MOVE ACROSS THE REGION THIS EVENING...BRINGING A BRIEF PERIOD OF MODERATE SNOW ACROSS THE AREA WITH LESS THAN AN INCH ACCUMULATION POSSIBLE. FRIGID TEMPERATURES IN THE SINGLE DIGITS BELOW ZERO COMBINED WITH GUSTY NORTHWEST WINDS... WILL GENERATE WIND CHILLS OF 15 TO 24 BELOW ZERO AFTER MIDNIGHT INTO THURSDAY MORNING. WINDS SHOULD SUBSIDE BY THURSDAY AFTERNOON WITH WIND CHILLS MODIFYING INTO THE SINGLE DIGITS BELOW ZERO.
Certainly the Champaign school administrators were cowed: they've already cancelled tomorrow's classes.
The germs are still with us, here at Stately Rice Manor:
- Sam's got a runny nose, but is otherwise unaffected.
- I'm still going through the kleenex, but seem to be a little better today than I was yesterday. (Perhaps that's mere wishful thinking.)
- Jake's daycare- and first-grade-hardened immune system shrugged off the germs with impressive speed.
Jennifer remains uninfected. Lucky Jennifer.
The low temperature overnight was -2°. (The water pipes are fine. Thanks for asking!) The current temperature is 16°, which isn't really much improvement.
I'm still dealing with a cold. Most of the time, my nose is completely blocked, which makes a surprising number of normally mundane activities - eating, sleeping, breathing - quite difficult.
I've been wasting hours each day on Age of Empires. Anything else seems to require more brainpower than I can muster in my diseased state.
Pity me, pity me.
Jake is in the other room, watching cartoons. Every now & then I hear some sniffling & coughing from him.
I'm in the kitchen, pecking away at the laptop. I am out-sniffling and out-coughing Mr. Jacob.
Sam and Jennifer remain uninfected, for now.
(And the temperature outside is 3°.)
Had the notion this evening to check on the progress of Mr. C______'s appeal. Bad news, I'm afraid:
Counsel's motion to withdraw is GRANTED, and the appeal is DISMISSED.
...and that's the end of it, unless Mr. C______ can come up with new (and nonfrivolous) grounds for appeal (which seems unlikely).
I guess there's nothing left for me to do but wait for another jury duty summons.
I've picked up a cold from somewhere.
I'd stay home today, but I've got vacation scheduled for Monday & Tuesday: no one would believe that I'm sick.
Today's mail included a letter for somebody we've never heard of. The envelope was hand-addressed (i.e., not a computer-generated mailing label) to one J____ P____, care of somebody else with the same last name.
Who is this person? And why does somebody think he lives in our house?
I suppose we should scribble Never heard of him, sorry on the envelope, and put it back in the mailbox....
Installed ViewVC on mork this evening:
- Unzipped viewvc-1.0.4.tar.gz & ran the viewvc-install script, which installed ViewVC into /usr/local/viewvc-1.0.4;
- Edited viewvc.conf (which is a ridiculous 619 lines long), tweaked a bunch of settings (which I really should have written down...);
- Copied bin/cgi/*.cgi to /Library/WebServer/CGI-Executables;
- Poked around in /etc/httpd/httpd.conf, decided I didn't need to change anything.
...and it worked. How nice.
Good news: today Apple announced iTunes movie rentals.
Bad news: they have the same annoying 24-hour time limit as Amazon's movie rentals.
P.S. MacBook Air: so cool. Want.
Jennifer & I went to see The Bucket List this afternoon.
For some reason, the voiceovers bothered me. And seeing Morgan Freeman in a bubble bath wasn't on my bucket list....
CNN says:
Saudi Arabia beheaded 137 people last year, up sharply from the 38 in 2006.
Somewhere in Associated Press headquarters there's a writer congratulating himself for slipping that one past the editors....
The never-played list on the iPod is now empty. The last song: Life is a Lemon and I Want My Money Back by Meat Loaf.
I suppose now I can listen to anything I want to....
Tiny Tim, singing a duet of I Got You Babe...with himself.
The never-played playlist on the iPod is down to a mere nine tracks - less than an hour of music.
Sam told a joke this morning:
Sam: Knock-knock!
Papa: Who's there?
Sam: It's mama!
...and he pointed at Jennifer, who was standing nearby (fixing Sam's breakfast, if I remember correctly).
CNN says:
Miami-based entrepreneur Estefano Isaias is using the [Adult Entertainment Expo in Las Vegas] to debut Fyre, which he is billing as the first set-top box to deliver DVD-quality adult movies on demand to home televisions. The Fyre simply has to be plugged into an Ethernet port in a broadband connection. Another plug goes into the TV, and voila.
Um. I don't think I'd want something that screams Big Box o' Porn sitting in my family room, thanks....
(Only Ethernet? No wireless?)
The online bus-tracker says that my ride home is running about fifteen minutes behind schedule. Do I -
- Assume it's going to be late, stay at work an extra fifteen minutes, and run the risk of missing the bus if it shows up on time after all; or
- Leave work at the usual time, and spend an extra fifteen minutes waiting at the (rather chilly) bus stop?
The latter, I think....
Google is a bit suspicious of dear old WRI this morning:
We're sorry...
... but your query looks similar to automated requests from a computer virus or spyware application. To protect our users, we can't process your request right now.
We'll restore your access as quickly as possible, so try again soon. In the meantime, if you suspect that your computer or network has been infected, you might want to run a virus checker or spyware remover to make sure that your systems are free of viruses and other spurious software.
We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope we'll see you again on Google.
I am not a spyware application, I am a human being!
I seem to have neglected to pack a lunch. I suppose it's the salad bar for me today....
Today's insanely warm weather - NOAA says 64° - brings with it a brisk south wind. This means that when I walked over to the Walgreens (on the northwest corner of Neil & Kirby) I was downwind of the McDonald's (on the southwest corner of Neil & Kirby).
The smell of McDonald's french fries - my favorite among all fast-food french fries - hung delightfully strong in the air. It was a terrible temptation, but I resisted.
Found a nice article on setting up a web-enabled subversion repository: How To: Manage Your Own Subversion Repository In Leopard. I typed in the (very few) mystic incantations, and - presto! - I have a new subversion repository, accessible over the house network.
(At least, the web interface works. I haven't tried remote access yet.)
Now I need to figure out how to migrate my old (local-access only) subversion repository to the new one. Shouldn't be too hard....
Update: Migrating a subversion repository is pretty easy:
svnadmin dump oldrepository >dumpfile
svnadmin load newrepository <dumpfile
I suppose the two commands could have been piped together, instead of using a temporary file. Maybe next time.
(But the web interface doesn't have any kind of version browsing, which is disappointing. Perhaps I need to install a different Apache plug-in.)
I just deleted my Plaxo account: it was quite useless. My online presence is now limited to -
- del.icio.us
- Flickr
- LibraryThing
- TypePad (defunct as of June, 2008)
- which is quite enough for me.
(I imagine I'll delete my Facebook account, one of these days - or just abandon it, since Facebook refuses to actually delete user accounts. It's mildly amusing, but not terribly useful.)
Messed around with file sharing on the iMac today: the idea was to have the iPhoto library accessible from nessus, so Jennifer can get at the pictures, but with the permissions set so that Windows can't sprinkle its annoying little Thumbs.db turdfiles all over the place.
Apparently the distinction between share permissions and file permissions is a bit vague on OS X, or I just wasn't paying attention, because I managed to make my entire iPhoto library read-only. iPhoto gets really cranky when its photo library is read-only....
(It's fixed now.)
I installed Ruby (1.8.6) and Rails (2.0) on the WRI laptop, then started following along with chapter 6 of Agile Web Development with Rails (2ed) by Dave Thomas, David Heinemeier Hansson and nineteen other people; everything was going great until I tried to run the test application.
When I pointed my web browser at http://localhost:3000/admin/, I got an unhandled exception instead of a product admin page:
NoMethodError in AdminController#new
Apparently this is because the Rails people moved scaffolding (whatever that is) out of the Rails core and into a (separately-installed) plugin.
Reading the online discussions of this problem, I'm left with the suspicion that backwards compatibility wasn't a big concern for the Rails 2.0 developers, and I'd be better off going back to Rails 1.2.6 until somebody gets around to writing a book about 2.0.
Thanks bunches, Rails people.
(I note in passing that Rails on Windows creates text files with unix EOL characters, which is rather annoying. Or maybe that's a bug in Ruby?)
The forecast calls for unnaturally warm weather the next few days: highs in the 40s & 50s, with rain and possible thunderstorms. (Thunder? In January?)
Just now there's a bit of drizzle outside. The temperature: 39°, which is quite an improvement over the single-digit temperatures we've had lately.
Upgrading to Leopard turned off Web Sharing (aka the Apache web server), so I turned it back on. It didn't work: You don't have permission to access /~user, quoth Apache.
Hm.
A bit of poking around in the OS X discussion forums - of which there are quite a few - turned up the solution:
sudo cp /etc/httpd/users/user.conf /private/etc/apache2/users
Then restart Web Sharing, and - presto - all is well.
(It seems upgrading from Tiger to Leopard doesn't copy this file from the old web server directory to the new one. Perhaps it should....)
Leopard also has up-to-date versions of Ruby, Rails, Python, etc., etc., so I deleted the ones I installed from MacPorts last year. The iMac is all nice & tidy now. How nice.
We took down the Christmas decorations a few days ago, packed up the Christmas tree ornaments, dismantled the tree & carted the pieces out to the porch for later boxing-up. (When I say 'we', I mean 'mostly Jennifer', of course.)
Today it was finally warm enough on the porch that we could stay out there for more than a few seconds, so now the tree is boxed up and tucked away in the corner (where it spends the non-Christmas part of the year).
The Christmas cards - which had been taped to the wall - also came down today. All traces of Christmas are now gone, and we're into the quiet part of the year between New Year's Eve and Valentine's Day.
(Well, yes, there's Martin Luther King Day coming up in a few weeks, but that one is a bit like Columbus Day: the US Postal Service takes the day off, but nobody else pays much attention.)
The copy of OS X 10.5 (aka Leopard) that I ordered from Amazon way back on the 28th finally arrived today (along with the previously-mentioned superfluous and non-returnable copy of Age of Empires).
Supposedly, this will be a painless upgrade. But I confess I'm a little nervous.
Update:Less than two hours later, Leopard is running happily on the iMac. Very pretty. No problems yet running any of the usual applications (Quicken, etc.). Looking forward to my first Time Machine backup (scheduled for 7:39pm).
I have two copies of Age of Empires: one from Staples (purchased December 28th from Staples), and one from Amazon.com (ordered December 27th, received today).
I'd return the latter, but Amazon charges a $4.98 shipping & handling fee for software returns. I only paid $9.99; is it worth the hassle to get a $5 refund?
I have until the end of the month to decide, but at present I'm thinking I'd be better off keeping it.
Official temperature this morning when Jake & I were out waiting for the school bus: 1°.
We saw quite a few contrails in the (pre-dawn) sky, and they were all much longer than usual. Perhaps that means it's winter even at 35,000 feet.
Also in the sky: a waning moon, creeping toward Venus. In another day or two there should be a nice conjunction to look at while shivering at the bus stop.
Alas, I have only two days of vacation left (plus the weekend), then it's back to work.
It's been a restful two and a half weeks. I've been keeping up with mail, and dealing with the occasional build crisis, but in general I've been avoiding work.
Mostly I've just stayed home: no road trips, no genealogy projects. (Midwinter road trips are no fun at all.)
Yesterday's forecast called for two inches of snow on the ground by this morning, but we didn't get any. (Apparently the storm tracked a bit farther north than originally predicted.)
Rather cold outside (19°).
