April 2008 Archives

Setting up a new Windows machine means re-enabling all the useful things that Microsoft disabled (because they were confusing), and disabling all the 'helpful' features that Microsoft piled on (because without them, Windows was too unsafe and/or confusing).

At no time during the process do I find myself thinking, This is so cool. I'm glad to be running Windows.

No, it's more like, Get the [censored] out of my way, you idiot 'softies, I'm trying to get something done here.

(Dunno why I'm so crabby lately. Too much caffeine, maybe.)

Still copying files to mindy from nessus. It's going slowly.

For some reason - I don't remember why, any more - I installed Microsoft Reader on mindy. Maybe I thought I'd someday want to read those Gardner Dozois stories I bought from Fictionwise, way back when. Tonight I thought I'd activate it. There were problems.

It turns out that you need Administrator privileges to activate MS Reader. Our accounts on mindy don't have admin privileges, because - as Microsoft so often points out - that's not safe. I guess nobody told the MS Reader team.

(I vaguely recall running into this problem once before, but I'm too lazy to search the archives for the exact date. Sorry.)

As it turns out, I don't have any DRM'd e-books, so I don't need to activate MS Reader. (It also turns out that dragging e-book files from an explorer window into the Reader window doesn't import them into the My Library folder, so I'm going to have to copy them from nessus a second time.)

I don't know why I'm wasting so much time on MS Reader. It's a dead product. There's probably no one at Microsoft still working on it - they've gone on to other opportunities, like the Internet Explorer team did when Microsoft let IE6 rot for five years.

In other news: I copied my bookmarks to mindy. (The first time you launch Safari on Windows, it helpfully imports your Internet Explorer bookmarks - and screws them all up. Oops. Fortunately, I exported them from Safari on nessus, and that file imported correctly.) Now I just need to remember the passwords for all the web sites where I have accounts, so I can log in again.

I meant to install the software for sputnik, so I can move the weather console over from nessus (lucky me, that mindy has a serial port); alas, I wasted too much time on MS Reader. Maybe tomorrow.

Just now I tried to send a picture from my phone; the phone trundled a bit, then said:

Sending Failed
Service not activated on network. Message canceled. Retry later from outbox.

So far as I know, Virgin Mobile doesn't have its own cellular network; they lease network bandwidth from other cellular companies.

Perhaps the lease is up for renewal, and there's some kind of contractual squabble going on. Or perhaps there's some kind of network snafu going on. Either way, my pictures are stuck in my phone.

If Microsoft had any [censored] clue how to organize the file system on Windows XP, there'd be no need for a Files and Settings Transfer Wizard (which, I note in passing, is completely useless). I could just copy the various home directories over the network from one machine to the other, and be done with it.

Alas, the 'softies have no clue, so I am stuck trawling the entire disk looking for all the dusty & undocumented corners where Microsoft applications have chosen to hide important user data (e.g., email).

This is going to take a while....

NOAA reports 39° at 2:00pm. Intermittent showers (which are interfering with my plan to do a few laps around Hessel Park sometime today).

It's almost May. It should be Spring by now, n'est-ce pas?

The developer of FlickrExport - which is what I use to get pictures from iPhoto to Flickr - says:

My bug tracking software, FogBugz, has failed me for the last time. I'm putting some new support arrangements in place for Connected Flow which I hope will improve the situation.

Perhaps I should check out the new support arrangements, and find out when/whether FlickrExport will let me upload videos to Flickr....

Curious web site: http://www.photophlow.com/:

Photophlow is a fun way to share flickr photos in real time. invite your friends, search together, chat and comment all at once.

Looks pretty cool, but I don't think I'll be asking to join the beta.

'Real time' is not how I use Flickr. I post pictures at the intersection of 'took some good ones' and 'have some time to run iPhoto'; I wouldn't expect the loyal readership (both of you) to be sitting at their computers, waiting for each new image to appear.

A brief visit with Mr. Doctor this morning, who said my hand looks 'very good'.

Later, a friendly lady removed the stitches. (This was a mildly unpleasant experience, but over quickly.)

The brace I've been wearing for the last two weeks is out in the car. The only thing between my hand and the mean old world is a big band-aid. "Keep this on the rest of the day," the friendly lady said. "But if it falls off on its own, don't worry about it."

I have two more weeks of physical therapy, then one last followup with Ms. Doctor (the one who did the surgery), and then Hand Adventure #2 will be officially over.

Memo to self: 10:00pm is not the best time for a new XP install's first visit to Windows Update. I installed 119 updates, then another 15 or so updates to the updates, then a half-dozen more updates to the updated updates.

Waiting for the updates to finish, reassembling nessus afterward, putting away mindy (so Sam wouldn't climb on / pound on / otherwise attempt to destroy her), plus various other impediments & distractions (that - alas! - must go unrecorded here), meant I didn't get to sleep until nearly 12:30am.

Got up at the usual time this morning, though. Judicious use of caffeine is keeping my eyes open, but I am moving - and thinking - a bit more slowly than usual.

Tonight's progress on the new-computer project, code-named 'Mindy':

• Managed to download video drivers from the IBM and/or Lenovo web site, despite what seemed like intentional efforts on their part to prevent me; mindy is now running at 1152x864, 32-bit color. My eyes are happy.
• Installed the network card (a $30 off-brand card from Champaign Computer); it works great. (It should - the AirPort is less than fifteen feet away, with only one wall between them.)

After a bit of foolery getting Windows activated, Microsoft Update installed, etc., etc., my first visit to the Microsoft Update site resulted in 90 critical updates in need of installation. (The 11 optional updates and 3 optional hardware updates I will leave to another time.)

It's been grinding away for perhaps half an hour, and has already installed 61 updates. Perhaps it will finish before bedtime.

Stopped at Champaign Computer today on the way home from work, to pick up a network card and a copy of Windows XP Home for the new (sort of) computer.

I just finished installing Windows; it took a little over an hour, most of which was spent reformatting the disk. (I probably could have skipped that step.)

Windows didn't recognize the onboard video, so it's running in VGA mode: 640x480x16 . I hope I can download video drivers from the IBM web site, because the XP desktop looks really bad in VGA mode.

I also need to install the network card, and get that running. (The machine has built-in ethernet, but I don't think Jennifer would be too pleased if I ran a cable from the living room down the hall into Sam's bedroom, where the AirPort is.) Once the machine is on the network, there will surely be nine-and-ninety Windows updates to be installed.

All in all, things are going pretty well. Perhaps in a few more days the new machine - officially named 'Mindy' - will be fully operational.

Jennifer's computer, nessus, is eight years old, which is a long time for a computer. We're running into things that it can't do very well: games that won't run on it, videos it can't play, etc., so for the last few months I've been on the lookout for a cheap replacement.

And now we have one: it's a 2005/2006 vintage Pentium 4 box, picked up over the weekend for a very reasonable price (i.e., somebody was going to throw it away but gave it to me instead).

It was missing a few parts: power cord, disk, keyboard, mouse, monitor. (I suppose that explains why the price was so reasonable.) Fortunately, nessus had a spare 80GB disk (which used to contain my iTunes music library), so this afternoon I installed that in the new machine. The iMac's old USB keyboard works fine (but looks rather funny attached to a PC); I didn't try the mouse, but I don't expect any problems with it.

Still to come: a copy of Windows - even if I wanted to run Vista (I don't), even if it would run well on the new machine (it wouldn't), I still wouldn't want to spend that much money on this project - and probably a network card. The remaining hardware - DVD-ROM drive, monitor, speakers, etc. - can be taken from nessus, so this new machine will end up costing us about $125. Not bad for a Pentium 4.

I'm thinking I'll name it 'mindy', since the iMac is 'mork'.

Messing around with Blog It (ugh...hideous word, 'blog'...), which lets me post to typepad and twitter from within facebook.

I'm not so sure yet that this is going to be useful. It's easy enough to go to typepad and/or twitter and post from there.

On the other hand, Blog It (ugh...hideous word, 'blog'...) will let me post to both, simultaneously. That might prove useful (albeit redundant, given that my typepad site has a twitter sidebar).

Update: speaking of redundancy, Blog It (ugh...hideous word, 'blog'...) posted this three times. (I have deleted the duplicates.)

The kids have been in bed for a while now. The television off, the house is quiet.

A basket of toys just slid off its shelf and spilled onto the floor with a loud crash: another earthquake, or a poltergeist, or - most likely - inept placement (by me) of the basket on the shelf during pre-bedtime cleanup an hour ago.

But then why did it take so long to fall?

USGS says there's been another earthquake in southern Illinois: 10:14am, magnitude 4.5, more or less the same location as the first one.

This one I did feel: perhaps being six stories off the ground helped a bit. It felt like the usual shimmy that the Trade Center building does whenever a freight train goes by (on the IC tracks just across Neil St.), only more intense.

My first earthquake.

(Hey, there's crazy old Jor-El, loading his son into a rocket ship....)

CNN says:

A magnitude-5.2 earthquake, centered 131 miles east of St. Louis, Missouri, shook southern Illinois early Friday, according to the U.S. Geological Survey.

I was here, but sleeping. Didn't feel a thing.

(The epicenter was beneath Mt. Carmel, a few miles up Hwy 1 from Carmi, so the folks in the Ancestral Home probably got rattled a bit.)

My first Flickr video, woowoo.

Curious web site of the day: http://www.removemybox.com/:

The goal of this site is to get people to donate $1 for each pixel that they would like removed, with the end result being a lovely picture of voluptuous breasts. How it works is like this:

You donate $1 for every pixel you'd like to remove. For every $25, I will remove one of the boxes in the grid. The grid only covers skin, so by buying a pixel, you aren't buying white space!

There are 100,000 pixels for sale. No, I didn't buy one.

(I vaguely recall a similar site that went live a year or three ago: a single page, on which anyone could buy a block of pixels and display therein anything they wanted. Alas, I've forgotten the URL.)

Had the notion last night to poke around a bit in the District Court's electronic case files, to see whether there'd been any activity on Mr. C______'s case. I didn't expect any, since his appeal was denied a few months ago, but I was surprised: Mr. C______ is working on a §2255 motion.

The Cornell University Law School's Legal Information Institute has a nice web site which describes the §2255 motion thusly:

A prisoner in custody under sentence of a court established by Act of Congress claiming the right to be released upon the ground that the sentence was imposed in violation of the Constitution or laws of the United States, or that the court was without jurisdiction to impose such sentence, or that the sentence was in excess of the maximum authorized by law, or is otherwise subject to collateral attack, may move the court which imposed the sentence to vacate, set aside or correct the sentence.

I'm not a lawyer, but I can't see how this could possibly end any differently than the appeal did, i.e., with the judge(s) taking a few pages of citations & legal reasoning to say, Go away, kid, you bother me.

But it means I can continue my unhealthy obsession with Mr. C______'s legal problems, instead of finding something more productive to do with my time.

I need to think of more interesting explanations for the scars on my hands, because carpal tunnel surgery is so 1990s: just last month, MSNBC asked, What ever happened to carpal tunnel syndrome?:

Remember when half your co-workers complained of "carpal tunnel" and wrist braces were the fashionable office accessory?

Cases of carpal tunnel syndrome, the white-collar epidemic of the '90s, have plummeted in recent years, according to labor statistics.

I guess I'm behind the times.

Anyway, the hand feels pretty normal. It's still very weak - this morning's physical therapy session was hard - but improving rapidly. (Much faster than the other hand did, last year. I have no idea why.)

I have a huge bruise on my palm, which is slowly spreading toward the back of my hand. In the right lighting, I look positively gangrenous.

Dear Cow-orker:

If you ignore repeated requests for a status update, don't get upset when the rest of us assume you're sitting in your office with your thumb up your [censored].

Thank you for your cooperation.

The other day I installed Safari on nessus. Today I exercised it a little. It works, sort of.

There's something wonky about the way it displays text: everything looks a bit fuzzy, and too dark, as if all the fonts have been bolded. And opening too many tabs, or even a single page that's a little too complicated, causes it to peg the CPU at 100% and stop responding to the keyboard & mouse.

I don't suppose Safari was designed with an eight-year-old computer in mind. Perhaps I should give Firefox another try.

Barack Obama apparently had a foot-in-mouth moment on April 6th, while giving a speech in California; since then, Clinton, McCain & the newsdroids have been milking it for all it's worth.

I've tried to find a transcript of the speech in question, to no avail. CNN claims to have one, but if so they haven't posted it anywhere. Even Barack Obama's web site doesn't have it.

What did he say? I don't want the newsdroids to tell me what they think he said, or quote the two sentences - out of an hour-long speech - that they think are important, or tell me how they think I should feel about what he said. Tell me what he said, and I'll make up my own mind.

I don't really care what McCain & Clinton have to say about it, either. A handy rule of thumb: whenever a politician is trying to get you mad at a specific individual - it doesn't matter who, and it doesn't matter why - said politician is trying to distract you, to divert your attention away from something important.

(It does bother me a bit that the Obama campaign hasn't released a transcript of the speech. Why not?)

Flick now accepts video uploads, which is pretty cool. There are limits: 90 seconds, 150MB, etc.; the idea is to upload short, minimally-processed videos recorded by a digital camera, as opposed to longer movies done on a camcorder and edited together with something like iMovie.

That's good for me, since I still haven't learned iMovie very well. (And I hear iMovie '08 is completely different from & incompatible with iMovie '06, which suggests learning '06 now would be a waste of time.)

A small but noisy group of Flickr users are deeply offended by the addition of video. Their chief objection seems to be that Flickr started out as a photo sharing site, and videos aren't photos. What a bunch of whiners. If you don't want videos on Flickr, don't upload any.

I have a few videos I'd like to upload, but - alas! - FlickrExport won't let me. Perhaps there's an upgrade available; I'll have to check, next time I'm on the iMac.

Wandering clicky-clicky across the internet this evening, I encountered http://clipmarks.com/:

With Clipmarks, you're always one-click away from sharing any piece of media you find on the web.

Like scissors for web pages, Clipmarks lets you capture the specific content on a web page that you want others to see.

Um. I dunno if I have much need for something like that....

Swelling's gone down a bit - my wedding ring isn't as loose as it was a week ago, but it's getting there.

The orange stains are nearly gone.

No pain, unless - for instance - I trip on one of the kids' toys, and crash left-hand-first into the nearest piece of furniture. Ouch.

Still, this hand seems to be healing faster than the other one did. But perhaps that's just wishful thinking.

Lots of chatter lately - i.e., over the last year or so - about Ruby and Rails as the ne plus ultra of web development frameworks.

So I bought myself a copy of the pickaxe book and the skateboard book, and - in between everything else that's going on these days - cobbled together a simple Rails application to keep track of my daily pedometer totals.

Then I thought to install my little web application on the iMac, since I've got Ruby, Rails and Apache up & running there. Alas, the 'deploying your app' chapter of the skateboard book pretty much says:

Ruby on Rails is slow. Think molasses in winter. Think continental drift. You will have to kludge up your web server with nine-and-ninety configuration hacks just to get tolerable performance. You'll never get good performance, so don't bother trying.

Meanwhile, chatter from the Rails camp is that the Coming Real Soon Now, Honest! version of Rails isn't terribly compatible with the current version. Ditto the next version of Ruby. So any code I have today will have to be rewritten tomorrow.

Sorry, fellas. I got tired of that treadmill when Microsoft was shipping a new database access library & object model every other week, way back in the 90s.

Doesn't hurt much, unless I try to use it for anything more strenuous than, say, holding down the shift key while typing.

Still a bit swollen, too. Must remember to spend some quality time today with Mr. Bag-o-Ice.

I'm hoping the orange stains - from whatever antiseptic they used on me in the operating room - wear off soon. It's rather goofy-looking.

Finished reading The Minority Report: The Collected Stories of Philip K. Dick, Volume 4 by - who else? - Philip K. Dick, which book waited on the shelf for sixteen years until I got around to reading it.

I guess I don't need to watch the movie Minority Report, now that I've read the story.

Back to the doctor this morning - at 8:00am! - for my first post-op checkup. A nice lady unwrapped my hand, scrubbed on it a bit with peroxide or some such, then sent me on my way.

I have a very stylish wrist brace that I'll be wearing for the next month. It's my security blanket: I don't worry nearly so much about tearing open my stitches when I'm wearing the brace. On the other hand (heh), I figure I'll be a one-handed typist for a while.

(And doesn't that sound naughty....)

Also this morning: my first physical therapy session, with the same fella as last time. It's surprising how difficult it can be to touch pinky & thumb together when one's hand is all swollen & recently operated-on.

I have six more p.t. sessions scheduled: three next week, three more the week after. The stitches come out in two weeks, and I stop wearing the brace after four weeks. (It'll go in the dress-up bin for Jake & Sam to play with.)

And then I'll be done with surgery. I hope.

Radar shows a narrow but intense line of storms coming in swiftly from the east. It's already raining here, but the worst is yet to come.

Getting some buzz today is http://sharethis.com/, which describes itself thusly:

It is becoming increasingly difficult to keep up with the growing number of web sites and social web communities. ShareThis lets you instantly access all of your profiles, blogs, friends, and contacts for easy sharing and updating. We think users should be in control of their online world.

Their product: the ShareThis button, which you stick on your web site so your readers can post links to you on whatever social-networking site they please.

Two interesting things about ShareThis:

The company name isn't ShareThis, it's Nextumi. Nextumi was based in Champaign until last September, when they moved to California. At the time, I said, "I hope the VCs give you lots of money."

Which leads to the other interesting thing: the current Nextumi CEO is a fella from some venture-capital company. So it looks like the VCs didn't so much fund the company as take it away from the founders.

Poor nexties, they went to California with such high hopes....

The other day I signed up for a LinkedIn account, mainly because Leland had one.

There's a definite progression of networking sites, from not so serious (MySpace) to slightly more serious (FaceBook) to very serious indeed (LinkedIn).

I'm on all three, so I'm prepared for any eventuality.

Messed around a bit more with Zigtag this evening.

I'm starting to dislike the sidebar. I can't seem to find anything useful to do with it. And main Zigtag page itself: it seems that the list of my bookmarks - management of which is the whole point of the site - doesn't get nearly enough space on the screen, while big chunks of the page are lying empty.

I do like the idea of displaying thumbnails of the bookmarked pages, though.

(Does it mean anything that when I bookmarked a few sites this evening, I put them on del.icio.us instead of Zigtag? Is it just inertia? Familiarity?)

If we had a spare $900 lying around (and if I weighed about half what I do), I'd want one of these:

Someday, someday...

So many things I could be doing, on this beautiful Sunday afternoon; even a few things I should be doing; but what am I doing?

Playing Age of Empires.

iTunes tells me there's a new Rush album to be released on April 15: Snakes & Arrows (Live). Normally a new album from Rush would be good news, but not this time.

Rush used to have a pretty reliable schedule: four studio albums, then a live album. They stuck to it for almost twenty-five years, from their self-titled debut album in 1974 all the way to Different Stages in 1998. After that, the schedule changed:

2002 - Vapor Trails (studio)
2003 - Rush in Rio (live)
2004 - Feedback (studio)
2005 - R30 (live)
2007 - Snakes & Arrows (studio)
2008 - Snakes & Arrows (Live)

It may be just an irrational prejudice on my part, but when a band releases so many live albums in so little time, I begin to wonder whether it's ceased to be an ongoing creative effort, and become instead a mere money-machine: a brand to be exploited.

That's what happened to Pink Floyd in the 1980s. Gilmour & Co. even went so far as to go on tour to support the live album from the previous tour, which is just ridiculous.

If Rush goes on tour to support Snakes & Arrows (Live), we'll know it's all over.

A bit of computing excitement just now:

I installed FireFox on nessus, so I could install & mess around with the Zigtag plugin (which is, for now, Firefox only; people who accuse other people of being browser bigots are so tedious). I fired up my iGoogle page, which wanted to install the Flash player; so I let it. Then I went to Zigtag and tried to install their plugin. After a bit of cancel-or-allow security warnings, it seemed that Firefox was ready to install the plugin. I clicked the Install link.

Poor nessus promptly locked up, dead as a hammer. Even the keyboard lights weren't responding. I had to hit the reset button to restart it.

I don't think the blame for this can be laid at Zigtag's door. I suspect there's a 10% chance it's Firefox's fault, and a 90% chance it's a bug in the Matrox video drivers. I upgraded them a week or two ago, in an attempt to run Jake's Lego Star Wars game. Perhaps the new drivers have a bug that's tickled somehow by the Firefox plugin installation process.

I suppose I'll try again, and see what happens.

Update: No problems on the second try. Dunno yet how I feel about a great big sidebar stuck on my browser window, but maybe I'll get used to it.

Grandparents coming today, so Jake can have a little more birthday.

Game night tonight.

(Today was originally even busier, but Jake's soccer game was cancelled due to soggy playing fields.)

Poked around in Zigtag a bit more this evening. I feel bad for grumbling about it the other day; it's really pretty nice.

(And those Zigtag people - do they have a nickname? ziggies? - are a friendly bunch.)

Next: import my del.icio.us bookmarks - all 445 of them - into Zigtag, without polluting their tagspace with my rather ineptly chosen & inconsistently applied tags; figure out how to post new bookmarks; and see whether there's some way to add a zigtag sidebar here.

(Zigtag is based in Edmonton. Leland & I drove through Edmonton in 1993, on our way to Yellowknife; alas, I didn't take any pictures & don't remember much about the place.)

The Library of Congress is posting scans of old pictures. Very cool.

Dear Cow-orkers:

Read the mail I send you. Remember the things I tell you. Follow the instructions I give you.

Otherwise, the resulting difficulty & confusion are your own fault, not mine.

Thank you.

Lots of chatter on the news sites today about Martin Luther King, on the 40th anniversary of his assassination: "Where were you when you heard the news?", etc.

I was 4 years old, living in a trailer park in Gary, Indiana, and not paying much attention to the rest of the world. I imagine it was quite a few years later that I even learned that such a person had existed, let alone that anything had happened to him in 1968.

Disturbing childhood memory involving Martin Luther King:

Once upon a time - in East Gary, perhaps; or Dyer - I was watching television. I don't remember what show it was, but they were running footage of Rev. King giving a speech.

Al walked into the room, sat down. "Change the channel," he said. "I don't want to hear no [censored] preach."

Sometimes Al was a nice guy. Other times he wasn't.

I've had my ZigTag account for twenty-six hours, and already I've received two friend requests from people I've never heard of.

Spammers? Overfriendly ZigTag users? Mistaken identity?

Update: One of the friend requests was from Reg Cheramy, founder of Zigtag. The other is from Greg Scratchley, Canadian. Reg & I are BFF now, but I'm still thinking about Greg.

Meanwhile, over on Twitter, Jason Calcanis has joined my list of followers. Why he's interested in me, I have no idea. Perhaps he has the mistaken notion that anybody Scoble is following must be interesting & important. Prepare to be disappointed, sir.

Update #2 (April 3): Three friend requests! I have accepted them all. Perhaps I am feeling more sociable today than yesterday.

Observed in one of the WRI breakrooms: a sackful of NutriSystem chow.

The top layer was mostly soup: broccoli & cheese, etc. Underneath were some breakfast items: scrambled eggs (plain, and also with simulated sausage bits) plus a few peanut-butter cookies (which disappeared very quickly).

Under other circumstances, I might've tried one of the scrambled-egg packages, just to see whether they're as nasty as they look.

Today various cow-orkers are demonstrating - in so many different ways - their inability to distinguish [censored] from Shinola.

Perhaps I am too irritable to be at work today....

Lots of footage lately on CNN & elsewhere of congressional committees, at which congressdroids interrogate various industry representatives in an attempt to persuade the voters that Something Is Being Done.

And I thought: Wouldn't it be interesting if the nameplates in front of each Senator and/or Representative included the three largest contributors to his/her/its re-election fund, and how much each one contributed?

Just imagine Senator Belfry explaining that drilling for oil in a wildlife refuge is perfectly safe & would never harm any of the cute fuzzy critters living there, all the while sitting behind a sign reading "Sen. Belfry, Exxon: $500,000."

The long-awaited ZigTag invitation arrived today. I now have a shiny new ZigTag account: http://www.zigtag.com/pzr. So far, I am not impressed.

The ZigTag registration page wants to install some kind of web browser plug-in, but they only support Firefox. (Not Internet Explorer? Not Safari? Browser bigots are so tedious.) ZigTag has groups, though it's unclear what they're for: I'm not allowed to view any of them - even the public ones. ZigTag has a friend-finder page, but I can't seem to find anyone with it. (All right, a search for last name 'Smith' did return a few hits.)

The ZigTag site is very pretty: nice graphics, a spiffy menu system. By comparison, del.icio.us is rather primitive. But del.icio.us works, most of the time.

Long ago on the Dr. Demento radio show, I heard Fish Heads and Three Drunk Newts by Barnes & Barnes. Ever since, they've been effective tools for irritating people:

Fish heads, fish heads
roly-poly fish heads
fish heads, fish heads
eat 'em up, yum!

It turns out that Barnes & Barnes have an entire album of songs - inexplicably titled Voobaha - and it's available on iTunes, only $9.99.

Oh, the temptation....

Today was Jake's birthday: number seven, if my arithmetic isn't faulty.

This year's present from Mama & Papa: a bicycle, with no training wheels. Mr. Jake is going mobile, once he figures out how to ride the thing.

Irresponsibly, I neglected to take any pictures.

Over on Twitter, Hillary Clinton says:

It has been a hard fought race but I have a proposal for the Democratic Party—I challenge Senator Obama to a bowl-off, winner takes all.

Two items:

The Virgle Project, http://www.google.com/virgle/:

Earth has issues, and it's time humanity got started on a Plan B. So, starting in 2014, Virgin founder Richard Branson and Google co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin will be leading hundreds of users on one of the grandest adventures in human history: Project Virgle, the first permanent human colony on Mars.

COBOL on Cogs: http://www.coboloncogs.org/:

LEGACY WEB DEVELOPMENT THAT DOESN'T HURT

WHO SAYS YOU CAN'T TEACH AN OLD DOG NEW TRICKS? COBOL ON COGS IS AN OPEN-SOURCE WEB FRAMEWORK THAT AIMS AT MAKING LEGACY INTEGRATION AS EASY, FUN AND LUCRATIVE AS FIXING YEAR 2000 BUGS.

Briefly entertained the notion this morning of writing a bought myself an iPhone, woowoo post, for a little April Fool's Day chain-yanking of the loyal readership; decided against it.