February 2008 Archives

Listening to Summertime Dream by Gordon Lightfoot.

Twenty-nine years ago (more or less) Brian Anderson, Keith Doering & I were in the same creative writing class at Buffalo Grove High School; Keith copied the lyrics of the song Summertime Dream and turned them in as his own work for a poetry assignment.

The teacher - whose name was Schneider, but we called her 'The Mouse' for some long-forgotten (and probably disrespectful) reason - didn't notice.

Myself, I turned in a bit of doggerel from John Brunner's novel Stand on Zanzibar...

What shall we do with our fair city?
Dirty and dangerous, smelly and shitty?
If you're a friend of New York town,
You'll find you a hammer and smash it down.

...and got dinged by the Mouse for naughty language.

I signed up for a FriendFeed account today: http://friendfeed.com/pzr.

No, I don't really know why. It might be useful; then again, it might end up going the way of all my other weird online accounts: last.fm, Plaxo, Pownce, Remember the Milk, Tumblr, etc., etc., etc.

Finished - last night, rather later than perhaps was wise, given how early the alarm goes off in the morning - reading His Share of Glory: The Complete Short Science Fiction of Cyril M. Kornbluth by (who else but) Cyril M. Kornbluth.

It's a big book - 670 pages, with the last hundred or so pages set in small type so as to pack in more text.

Reading fifty-year-old science fiction is a guilty pleasure. The writing isn't always top-notch, the science is occasionally way off, but the stories are great fun to read.

And now I think I've finished all the books I received as gifts last year, with no prospect of receiving more until Father's Day. What to do, what to do....

The five stages of medical conditions (diseases, injuries, etc.):

1. "Come see the doctor, when it's convenient."
2. "Come see the doctor right now."
3. "We're sending an ambulance."
4. "We're sending a helicopter."
5. "We're sending the coroner."

I signed up for a Windows Live SkyDrive:

No, I don't know why. It was free, I couldn't resist.

(I suppose it might prove useful as a means to deliver videos to the grandparents....)

My last.fm account, which I deleted two months ago, lingers in a half-alive twilight state: the other day I got a friend request from somebody in Russia, dutifully forwarded by last.fm to my (as yet unknown to spammers) mailbox.

I ignored it. I don't know anybody in Russia.

Went to the UI Ice Area yesterday, to watch Cousin Lily (actually, she's cousin to Jake & Sam, not to me) compete in some kind of speed-skating event.

I took quite a few pictures, but somehow Lily didn't make it into any of them. Oops.

(I'm told that Lily won all of her races, and took home a trophy & a fistful of blue ribbons. Congratulations, Lily!)

CNN says that the successor to recently-abdicated dictator-for-life Fidel Castro will be...Raúl Castro.

Meanwhile, Time says that Anne Rice, who swore some years back to never again write a vampire novel, is writing...a vampire novel.

Since my old email address, pat@patrick-rice.net, has been hopelessly compromised by spammers (just now I downloaded 399 messages from the server, all spam), I have dropped a virtual M80 in that mailbox.

It's gone now. Any mail sent to it will be automatically deleted. I'll never see it, nor even know it existed.

Apologies to any non-spammers out in the world who don't know my new email address. Add a comment here, and I'll send it to you.

CNN says:

(CNN) -- A B-2 stealth bomber crashed early Saturday morning local time in Guam, according to the Air Force.

I sure hope the crew (who all safely ejected, by the way) weren't responsible for turning two billion dollars of airplane into a smoking hole in the ground.

That would be a seriously career-limiting move....

The four stages of cold-weather gear:

1. You hate it, because it makes you look like a dork, but your mother makes you wear it.
2. You refuse to wear it, because you'd look like a dork. Your mother has given up arguing with you about it.
3. You wear it, because it's cold outside. Your wife & kids laugh when they see you all bundled up.
4. You don't go outside when it's cold.

I figure I'm at stage three, creeping toward stage four. Which stage are you?

(With the hood up and my glasses dark - they're much more uv-sensitive than any other pair I've had - I look rather like that old FBI sketch of the Unabomber.)

Woke up to an inch or so of snow on the ground this morning.

Waiting for the bus (with Jake) was windy & cold, but not quite so windy & cold as yesterday morning.

I seem to be feeling the cold a bit more this winter than I used to. I grow old, I grow old....

Rather cold at the bus stop this morning: 6°, according to NOAA, with a brisk west wind.

I could see the airflow through the subdivision, by watching the snow streamers running down the street. Pretty cool. (No pictures, though.)

The definition of 'affordable' changes over time:

• Childhood: there's enough cash in the piggy bank.
• Twentysomething: the credit cards aren't maxed out yet.
• Married with children: there's a little extra money in the budget this month, and there's nothing more important to spend it on.

Woke up this morning to a rather peculiar bit of snow on the ground: instead of snowflakes, we got tiny little spheres, like the styrofoam pellets used to stuff beanbag chairs.

Very strange.

Tonight's Lotto winnings: $3.

That's the third time this year. Pretty soon it'll add up to real money.

Poor Sam, he's sick again. Sort of.

He seemed very sleepy at lunchtime, and didn't want to eat, so we put him down for nap. He woke up around 2:30pm with a fever (somewhere between 102° and 103°) and a case of the screaming crazies. Poor little guy.

It seemed like a good idea to get him to the doctor right away, so off we went (Sam and I) to Convenient Care. Mysteriously, Sam settled down as soon as I got him in the car, and he chattered away about whatever he could see outside the car.

Unlike last time, there wasn't much of a wait. (Another difference: Sam didn't scream the whole time.) The doctor looked in his ears & throat, then prescribed another bottle of amoxicillin. (Between them, Jake and Sam have surely consumed a gallon or two of the stuff over the years. We should just schedule regular deliveries....)

Sam's been perfectly normal since we got home (around 4:00pm). He's been playing - the house is a mess - and he even ate a little dinner. I'm wondering now just how sick he is. But if he isn't sick, why did he have a fever?

Children are mysterious.

Paid a visit to ludicorp.com just now:

Warning: mysql_connect() [function.mysql-connect]: Access denied for user 'www-rw'@'127.0.0.1' (using password: YES) in /export/crawlspace/web/ludicorp.com/config.php on line 5 Could not connect to database

I wonder how long it's been doing that....

CNN says:

PRISTINA, Kosovo (CNN) -- Kosovo has formally declared its independence from Serbia and become the world's newest state in a move opposed by Serbia and Russia but backed by many western governments.

One is left wondering whether there will be any two people left in the Balkans who are citizens of the same country...

The Flickr sidebar thingy is back to normal.

My theory - based on my vast knowledge of web site design (i.e., just enough to be dangerous) - is that the Flickr people broke their badge, and now they've fixed it.

The Flickr badge is just a chunk of css, plus a reference to a JavaScript file back at Flickr HQ that generates the actual photo list. The css rules are all Flickr-specific - I don't think the TypePad folks would use class names like 'flickr_www' - so a conflict with TypePad's styles seems unlikely. So all that's left is the mysterious http://www.flickr.com/badge_code_v2.gne.

(Now that I think about it, badge_code_v2.gne is probably some page-generator language that generates the JavaScript that generates the photo list.)

Update: Wikipedia has the story behind the gne extension. It comes from an abandoned online game called Game Never Ending:

Ludicorp, the game's developers, received wide press coverage while they were making the game. Through the long development, it was pondered whether GNE was yet another example of vaporware. Although development of the game was later cancelled, the tools built for GNE later evolved into Flickr, a widely-hailed photo-sharing service. Occasional signs of this legacy are visible, such as the '.gne' file extension appearing in Flickr's URLs.

Something unfortunate has happened to the Flickr badge over there on the left side of the page. Perhaps the TypePad people have updated their stylesheets.

Must investigate further, sometime when it isn't 10:30pm.

If I were paying for Twitter, I'd be mildly annoyed by the recent outages. But it's free, and I don't use it for anything more important than posting random micro-blather from the bus stop, so I don't really care if it drops offline now & then.

Perhaps the Twitter folks should introduce Twitter Pro or something: $20/year for a more reliable Twitter. I'd probably sign up.

Usually when I take Mr. Explorer to the Ford dealer for an oil change, they find something urgently in need of (expensive) repair. I've had oil changes blow up into $600 repair bills.

Ouch.

Today was different. Total cost: $12.58, about half the usual price for an oil change.

Some people might be happy about this, and think that the Ford dealer has lowered their prices; but I'm a little worried. This is the dealership that didn't notice a set of failing ball joints on the left front tire, but charged me $160 for looking.

So now I'm wondering whether they did anything to the car.

The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission says:

WASHINGTON, D.C. - The U.S. Consumer Product Safety Commission, in cooperation with the firm named below, today announced a voluntary recall of the following consumer product. Consumers should stop using recalled products immediately unless otherwise instructed.

This recall involves the remote-controlled helicopter toy "Fun2Fly Microcopter" with item number 91001. The helicopter comes with a transmitter that controls and recharges the helicopter. The helicopter is made of foam and plastic and measures about 6½ inches by 2½ inches. The transmitter measures about 4½ inches by 5 inches. "Fun2Fly" and "Microcopter" are printed on the packaging. The item number is printed above the UPC label.

Apparently they have a tendency to burst into flame while recharging.

Jake has a helicopter that looks quite a bit like this one....

First Yahoo, now this: Microsoft is buying Danger, Inc. (Press releases here and here.)

Why are they doing this? There's just about 100% overlap between the Sidekick and various products Microsoft already has.

I can't see Microsoft abandoning Windows CE (even though they should; it's nasty), so perhaps their plan is to buy Danger's customers, then forcibly move them to Windows CE devices. Ugh.

Perhaps it's just as well that I didn't buy a Sidekick LX last year.

Now we're all sick.

This is so annoying.

Most of us are sick here at Stately Rice Manor:

I've got a cold - not the cold that I had two weeks ago; a new one. It's not as bad as the last one: I can breathe through my nose, most of the time.

Sam's got a cold, too: he's coughing and his nose is running (better catch it!). At least he isn't throwing up any more (that stopped a week ago). We're still giving him the antibiotics, even though it seems pretty clear that he doesn't have strep throat after all.

Jake has a bit of a cough, but seems otherwise healthy. We give him some cough medicine at bedtime, and he's fine.

Jennifer is the only healthy one in the house. She hasn't been getting much sleep lately, what with taking care of everyone else. Poor Jennifer.

For those who have outgrown the ordinary:

Eating a bag of M&Ms at 2:00pm can keep me awake for quite a while past my usual bedtime: another reason (as if I needed any more) not to indulge.

Really dense fog today: newsdroids reported that visibility in some places was down to twenty feet. (It wasn't quite so bad when Sam & I were driving around this evening.)

The good news is that the fog is gone now. The bad news is that it was blown away by a line of rather scary-looking thunderstorms coming in from the west.

We're in for some noisy weather, shortly after bedtime. (Of course. It wouldn't do to have thunder & lightning while we're all still awake....)

Sam woke up from his nap with a nasty cough, so after dinner he & I went off to Convenient Care to see just how sick he is.

The drive to get there was interesting, with the fog, but we managed to avoid running into anything on the way.

I had the foolish notion that the combination of a Monday night and really crummy weather would keep all the other sick people at home, and Sam & I would have the doctors to ourselves; alas, everyone else in town had the same idea. We waited about an hour before they called us back.

Poor Sam got really bored and cranky, and complained at full volume while the doctor tried to examine him. The diagnosis: strep throat, probably caught from Jake. (The doctors don't even do the five-minute strep test any more. One look in the throat is enough.)

Mr. Sam has his own prescription of antibiotics now. He seems to like the flavor, so medicine time won't also be wrestling time. (And that's a good thing.)

Poor Mr. Sam - who has adopted the nom de maladie Monkey Face -  was cranky & miserable all day. Around 6:00pm we gave him some Motrin, and he fell asleep.

This presents something of a dilemma. Will Sam...

• ...sleep all night, and wake up at the usual time?
• ...wake up in the middle of the night, and refuse to go back to sleep?

I hope he'll sleep a long time, and wake up feeling much better. But somehow that doesn't seem very likely.

Good news:

We hit the Lotto last night: another $3 for Sam's college fund.

Bad news:

Sam's throwing up again. Poor little guy, we thought he was recovered from the Wednesday night barf attack.

Jennifer & I bundled up the kids this morning, and went outside to do battle with the snowdrifts across the driveway and sidewalk.

(I suspect it takes less time for NASA to prepare an astronaut for EVA than it took me to get Sam into his snow gear.)

We managed to clear the driveway, and the short sidewalk (the one leading up to the front door), but we didn't get to the sidewalk out by the street. Maybe tomorrow, or maybe we'll just let it melt on its own (Monday's forecast calls for a high around 50°).

Later a snowplow came down the street, and blocked the end of the driveway again. We'll be out there tomorrow, digging out. Again.

(We must get to the store tomorrow: I neglected to put diapers on the shopping list, and so supplies are running critically low here at Stately Rice Manor. [In fact, we have only five left. This is a crisis.])

This just in: Microsoft wants to buy Yahoo.

I fear for the future of my Flickr account: I suspect that - if this acquisition goes through - Flickr will be shut down, and all users forcibly migrated to whatever crappy online photo thingy Microsoft has.

Perhaps it's time to move to SmugMug....

Update:over on Flickr, somebody is speculating on what might happen if Microsoft buys Yahoo: