June 2008 Archives

Tonight is Sam's third night in his big-boy bed. Sort of.

Saturday: we put him in the bed, he chattered & played. When he got out of bed and turned on the light, we gave up and put him in his crib. He went right to sleep.

Sunday: we put him in the bed, he chattered & played. He got out of bed and turned on Jake's Leapster. Again, we put him in his crib and he went right to sleep.

Monday: he's been in bed for about an hour now. We still hear occasional chattering on the monitor. As yet, the lights are still off, the Leapster is silent, and Jake isn't complaining.

We're quietly hopeful that this night won't end in the crib.

Update:

Around 10:30, we sneaked into the bedroom to check on Jake & Sam. They were sleeping, curled up together in Jake's bed.

Later - sometime in the single-digit hours - Sam woke up, very upset about something (loss of binky, probably). Jennifer put him in the crib, and he went right back to sleep.

So there's been some progress on the big-boy bed project. Perhaps one of these night's Sam will stay in bed until morning.

Had the notion to add a Plurk widget to the sidebar (replacing the Twitter widget). I created a new widget template, pasted in the code from Plurk, then added it to the sidebar widget set.

All done, said Movable Type. Just republish your site to see your changes.

Not if it's going to take all [censored] night. Stupid software.

Secure in its position on the list of things I don't want: the Tesla Roadster, http://www.teslamotors.com/:

First unveiled as a prototype on July 19th, 2006, the revolutionary Tesla Roadster generated an extraordinary response from people everywhere who were inspired by the vision that beautiful, high performance cars could generate zero-emissions and burn no oil.

Less than 2 years later, this vision has become a reality as Tesla Motors begins production of this breakthrough electric vehicle. The 2008 model year is sold out and Tesla is currently taking reservations for the 2009 model year Tesla Roadster. To date, over 900 Tesla Roadsters have been reserved in total.

I can think of two flaws in this business plan:

1. California - where they're selling these things - doesn't even have the generating capacity to keep the lights on. How are they going to keep all these electric cars charged up?
2. They cost $110,000. (It costs $5,000 - refundable! - just to get on the waiting list.) For the price of a Tesla Roadster, I could buy a $25,000 normal car - and 1,250 tanks of $4/gallon gas.

(It's also a two-seater: rather unpractical for a family of four.)

Took the camera & tripod out to Staley Road this afternoon, for a little experimental photography:

To assemble this, I had to install Microsoft Digital Image Suite 10 on mindy: that's the only panorama-stitching software we have. (Strange that iPhoto lacks so useful a feature....)

Curiously, Microsoft's photo editor, having created this image in the first place, now refuses to load it: says it's too big. ("Too many bytes," it complains, sounding like Emperor Joseph II in Amadeus.)

Yesterday afternoon, I decided the TypePad export file was in good enough shape for importing into Movable Type, so that's what I did.

It worked, more or less. There were no errors, and it looks like all 4,300 posts were imported successfully. But there were two big problems:

Republishing the site took something in excess of six hours. (I don't know how long, exactly, since I gave up & went to bed before it finished.)

The file names of the individual posts are different than they were on TypePad: it seems Movable Type requires unique base names across all posts, not just within a given directory. This means all the cross-reference links in the daybook are now broken & will have to be manually corrected.

Even so, the escape from TypePad is now complete.

I made it to the Fox Drive bus shelter before the worst of the rain hit, so I stayed relatively dry.

(The exposure in this shot is all wrong. Those clouds were dark.)

Nine years ago today, Jennifer & I were married.

Happy anniversary, my love.

The twenty most common words in the TypePad export file:

 the 27656
  to 14256
   a 13630
   i 11663
  of 10529
  it 8455
 and 8401
  in 7026
that 5900
  is 5488
 for 5139
  on 4387
this 3705
 was 3676
 but 3652
  at 3233
with 3169
have 2914
  my 2887
from 2794

There are approximately 28,000 distinct words. Some of them are numbers, urls, etc., so the number of actual words is somewhat lower.

635 words appear more than 100 times. Only 72 words appear more than 1,000 times. It seems my writing vocabulary isn't as large as my reading vocabulary.

I've been working, off & on over the last two weeks, on some Python code to read in a TypePad export file, parse it into some useful data structures, then write it back out.

This project was made considerably easier by the HTMLParser module, which I hadn't known about. Quite handy. (Also today I discovered the tarfile module, which proved quite useful for some work stuff.)

Things still to be done before the TypePad file can be imported into Movable Type:

1. Fix all the cross-references (i.e., posts that contain links to other posts). They all point to http://pzr.typepad.com/daybook, but should be http://patrick-rice.net/daybook. (I just hope Movable Type uses the same algorithm as TypePad when generating post urls from their titles, otherwise all the links will be broken. And I will be very unhappy.)
2. Move all 103 images from the TypePad photo lists where they now reside back to the Pair web server (where they were three years ago, during the Time Before TypePad). Alternately, I could upload the originals from iPhoto, then adjust all the links to undo TypePad's unfortunate name mangling on uploaded files. (Spaces and capital letters are perfectly legal in file names. *grumble*.)
3. Reformat the post HTML from the TypePad standard (best described as "line breaks only where you don't want them") to something a bit closer to human-readable. I might skip this one; if I can write some Python code to parse the HTML, then I don't really need to read it myself.

Perhaps I'll do another concordance, too. I did one long ago, probably during the FrontPage to CityDesk conversion project. It might be amusing to see how the word & letter distributions look with a few more years of blather added to the pile.

Last Friday, CNN said:

NEW YORK (CNN) -- Lifestyle guru Martha Stewart hopes to return to the United Kingdom as soon as a reported travel ban stemming from her criminal history is "resolved," the chairman of the company she founded said Friday.

Today, CNN says:

LONDON, England (CNN) -- DJ and pop star Boy George has been denied a visa to enter the United States, his Web site said Tuesday.

This reminds me a bit of the Cold War, when the U.S. & U.S.S.R. would take turns expelling each other's diplomats for being spies.

The roll of paper towel currently in the kitchen here at Stately Rice Manor has the curious property that its perforations are stronger than the paper towel itself: every time I try to tear off a sheet, I get just a corner instead.

I set up ping.fm so I can broadcast to Facebook, MySpace, Plurk, Pownce, Tumblr and Twitter. It works nicely. Life is good.

FriendFeed picks up all these new posts, and shows them in my feed. This also works nicely. Life is still good.

Then the FriendFeed application that I installed last month on Facebook picks up all the new entries from my feed, and plops them into my Facebook mini-feed. Redundancy results. Life is not so good any more.

It seems that I need to find a large piece of paper & draw myself a graph of all the sites I'm on, with arrows between them to show which ones forward content to the others. Otherwise, I'll never be able to figure out how to fix things.

Just now I remembered http://www.threedegrees.com/, released a few years ago by Microsoft to universal indifference and/or bewilderment, and wondered whether it was still around.

It isn't. The url doesn't work any more, and wikipedia says the project was killed way back in 2005.

In the inbox this afternoon, a chain letter:

With the price of gasoline going up more each day, we consumers need to take action. The only way we are going to see the price of gas come down is if we hit someone in the pocketbook by not purchasing their gas! And, we can do that WITHOUT hurting ourselves.

Here's the idea: For the rest of this year, DON'T purchase ANY gasoline from the two biggest companies (which now are one), EXXON and MOBIL.

If they are not selling any gas, they will be inclined to reduce their prices. If they reduce their prices, the other companies will have to follow suit.

This has no hope of working:

It's impossible to organize a boycott that large, and keep it running for that long. It won't happen.

It's not always obvious whose gas you're buying. It might say Joe's Gas on the sign, but maybe Joe buys from the local Exxon distributor.

But suppose it did happen: everyone finds out which stations sell Exxon and Mobil, and everyone refuses to buy from them. Exxon and Mobil lower their prices in a desperate attempt to bring in customers. What happens then?

If the boycott holds, the other stations have no incentive to lower their prices; if the boycott doesn't hold, Exxon and Mobile have no incentive to keep their prices low. Either way, everybody ends up paying $4/gallon for gas.

There's only one way to save money on gas: use less of it.

(No, I didn't forward the message to ten people. I don't do chain letters.)

Update: It turns out I got this exact chain letter two years ago. I wasn't impressed then, either.

Occasional thunder, all morning: a small knot of thunderstorms is wandering slowly southward across the county.

Not much rain, though.

Courtesy of Python's quite useful HTMLParser module, I can say that the entries in the TypePad export file use the following HTML tags:

         a   3202
         b      3
blockquote   1082
        br    836
   caption      5
      code    263
       del      6
       div     17
        em   4406
     embed      7
        hr   2718
    iframe      1
       img    441
        li    998
    object      6
        ol     82
         p  18975
     param     14
       pre     21
      span      3
    strike      4
    strong    547
       sub      8
       sup     45
     table     50
     tbody     15
        td    699
        th     90
     thead     12
        tr    276
         u      3
        ul    201

(This project also turned up a number of typos, mismatched tags and invalid XHTML, e.g., <img ... > instead of <img ... />, that sort of thing. All fixed now, yay.)

Over on plurk, I said:

I wish I had a phone with a decent web browser. So much coolness would be made possible thereby.

I got a response: "Define decent."

Mostly, I was thinking it would be nice to use sites like http://plurk.com/m. I have no great desire to sit on the bus and read http://cnn.com/ on a tiny screen. But what I really want is connectivity.

It's irksome that I can't read or send email from my phone. (Well, yes, I can, but only with some lame yahoo mailbox. I can't use my real mailbox.) I want to be able to post some blather here, or some micro-blather on Twitter (or Plurk, which lately is proving to be more fun that Twitter - more fun, and more reliable), or some pictures on Flickr - and do it from anywhere I can get a cell signal.

Such is possible - if you're willing to spend $200 + $80/month for an iPhone or $400 + $30/month for a Sidekick LX. Alas, I am not.

Once upon a time, I kept all my bookmarks in Internet Explorer. This was a problem, because I ended up with two different sets, one at work & one at home: mostly the same, but always the site I wanted was on the other computer. Then we got the iMac, and I had three computers to keep synchronized.

In the end, I moved all my bookmarks to del.icio.us: 511 and counting, equally accessible from all of the computers I use. (Four: two at work, two at home.) Life is good.

Except I still have to keep a set of bookmarks on each computer. They're mostly private urls for the various online services I use: Facebook, Movable Type, Plurk, Twitter, TypePad, etc., etc. At first, there weren't so many, and it was easy to keep them synchronized. But as I indulge my habit of joining any online service that Scoble joins, the private urls keep piling up.

I've been looking for a way to stash all these links online somewhere, while keeping them hidden from the rest of the world. Then I'd have only one url to remember on each of the machines I use.

Option #1: del.icio.us says it supports private bookmarks.

Option #2: add some kind of bookmark widget to my iGoogle page. I'm pretty sure the iGoogle page is private (unless you know my password).

Investigation continues.

Did a little tidying-up this morning on my TypePad export file: I replaced all the UTF-8 character sequences with the corresponding html entities. The post bodies are now entirely composed of characters in the range 0x20 - 0x7F.

I suppose it doesn't make much difference, really. Any program that's going to read this file will likely understand UTF-8. But using html entities means the file is now ascii-safe, and can be read even by programs that don't understand UTF-8.

And it always bugged me when TypePad replaced my &deg; entities with a UTF-8 ° character. So I took advantage of this opportunity to change them all back. (So there, TypePad.)

In passing, I did a little character-frequency chart. There are 3,670,486 characters in the post bodies of the TypePad export file. The most common is - of course - the space character: 515,544. Least common is ^: only twice. The backtick (`) does not appear at all.

Taking a vacation day today.

In other news:

Still having fun with Plurk. The timeline seems like it wouldn't scale: following 25,000 people, like Scoble does on Twitter, would make it hopelessly cluttered. But for somebody with less extravagant connections it's fine.

Messing around a bit with ping.fm. I have it set up so that I can use my phone to send a message to ping.fm & thence to both Plurk and Twitter. That's pretty cool. (Too bad my test message took three hours to show up....)

Occasionally fooling with the export file I got from TypePad. They've changed the format a little, but neglected to update the documentation. (Thanks bunches, TypePad.) Interesting that most of the posts have unix eol markers, but a few - five or so, out of 4,200 - have dos eol markers. How did that happen?

CNN says:

(CNN) - A severed foot - the sixth in 11 months - washed up on the shore of a Canadian island on Wednesday, police said.

(Foot #5 - the only left foot of the bunch - came ashore on Monday.)

Usually it's just the shoes that wind up on Pacific coast beaches, whenever a container full of them falls off a cargo ship during a storm.

There must be a set of footless bodies out there somewhere...but where?

Update: #6 was a hoax. CNN says:

A "skeletonized animal paw" had been placed in a sock and athletic shoe that was packed with dried seaweed, the British Columbia Coroners Service announced.

Somebody in Canada has an interesting sense of humor.

I keep my digital-camera photos & video on the iMac, in iPhoto: just over 13,500 images at present. (Yes, they're backed up. Time Machine is a wonderful thing.) A few of them - exactly 700, as of this writing - I've uploaded to Flickr.

One complication in this tidy workflow is that I can send pictures from my phone directly to Flickr. I have to remember later to download them to iPhoto, so I'll have my own copies in the event (one hopes unlikely) that Flickr loses them or goes offline.

Manual synchronization is really annoying, but I've yet to find any way to automate the process. (I'm sure I could write something myself. Flickr provides an RSS feed and an API, and there are all sorts of scripting & automation tools on OS X for exercising iPhoto. But I'm too busy and/or lazy to do that.)

Investigation continues.

Signed up this evening for an account on ping.fm. They're still in beta - like ZigTag - but the beta code "tastyping" unlocks the gates of pingery. At least, it worked for me.

It looks interesting: send a properly-formatted text message from my phone to a secret email address at ping.fm, and automatically post to Plurk, Twitter, Facebook, etc., etc.

(I wonder how the other sites feel about that. It seems like easy cross-posting would tend to dilute the appeal of the individual sites: wherever you go, you'll see the same blather from me.)

(The upside for the loyal readership is that there's nothing at ping.fm for them to read, so they needn't feel they're missing out on any blather by ignoring it.)

I'm a bit leery of giving ping.fm the passwords for my other sites. TypePad has the notion of an API key, which is a password that other sites can use to access the TypePad API. Too bad the others don't.

Testing the Flickr » Movable Type autoforward. (Seems to work.)

Could have gone for a walk at lunchtime. Didn't.

Could have put in a half-hour on the treadmill over at the fitness center. Didn't.

Spent the whole day sitting at the laptop - first at home, then at work - pecking away at some python code of interest to pretty much nobody besides me.

Took Mr. Explorer this morning to Norris Tire. "I think I need a new pan gasket on the transmission," said I.

"Let's go look," said the mechanic. We went out to the car, he crawled halfway underneath it and poked around the transmission a little.

"Your gasket is fine," he said.

Well, now. Last Tuesday, Mr. Ford Dealer said it was a serious leak, and the gasket ought to be replaced right away, for only $250.

I plan to check the fluid level every week or two, just to be safe, but for now it looks like Mr. Ford Dealer really was - as I suspected at the time - trying to pad the bill.

Last month, a little extra money dropped out of the sky. (Thanks for the cash, Mr. Bush, but I still won't be voting Republican come November.) What to do with it?

The answer varies with age, I suppose:

• Twentysomething: Think I'll buy some computer toys.
• Fortysomething: Let's replace the kitchen floor.

The local Flooring Depot opens at 9:00am on Saturday....

Many years - and several employers - ago, a cow-orker told me a story from his days at Bell Labs. He claimed to be on the team that developed the software behind call forwarding, and said that one night they decided to test the system by forwarding a whole series of phone lines: #1 forwarded to #2, #2 forwarded to #3, etc., all the way up to line #6, forwarded to line #7.

Then they forwarded line #7 back to line #1. The system immediately crashed.

I was thinking of this story just now, when I noticed that FriendFeed can generate an atom feed. Immediately, I thought: What would happen if I subscribed FriendFeed to its own atom feed? Would the infinite recursion cause the earth to collapse into a gravitational singularity?

I resisted temptation for all of thirty seconds, and then...nothing happened. FriendFeed just showed a few duplicate posts, until I unsubscribed from the atom feed.

I'd been hoping for something a little more dramatic.

Sam has decided books are fun. He'll bring one over to me and ask to read it.

He's learning Byron Barton's Machines At Work: if I ask him, and he's in the mood, he can usually remember what to say for each page.

Today, Machines At Work. Tomorrow, the Aeneid!

Update: Excuse me, I meant to say: Tomorrow, the Æneid!

Just now, I:

• Installed the cygwin subversion client, Paint.NET and Notepad2 on mindy;
• Imported the TypePad export file into the subversion repository on mork;
• Began work on a Python script to do some automatic cleanup on the export file to prepare it for importing here.

So now my 8.5 years of blather has been copied to three different computers and to a subversion repository. I think it's reasonably safe now.

The TypePad developers have managed to fix their export function. I now have in my possession a full backup - 4.62MB - of the old TypePad daybook.

Next I need to clean up the HTML in all 4,000+ posts (surely there are automated tools to do this), make sure all the cross-references (i.e., when one post contains a link to another post) point to the new site, then import here.

Then figure out what to do with all the pictures I uploaded to TypePad. Hm...they'll have to be moved back here, somewhere....

But it seems much more likely now that come December I will be able to cancel my TypePad account, thereby saving $50. How nice.

Dropped off the Explorer at Ford of Champaign this afternoon, for an oil change (and a first class experience).

The technician called a while ago: "You've got a leak in your transmission pan. Fixing it will cost around $250."

"I think we'll have to wait until after payday for that," I said, thinking: If the transmission is leaking, how come there's no schmutz on the driveway? You're just trying to pad the bill, aren't you?

I think tomorrow I'll take the car to Norris Tire & Auto for a second opinion. I still might end up paying $250, but at least I won't feel like I've been ripped off.

It's just a little bit suspicious that the new iPhone 3G retails for $199, while the 8GB iPod Touch - which is an iPhone with the phone & camera removed - retails for $100 more.

AT&T raised the price on the data plan: from $20/month to $30/month, so the end result is that the supposedly half-price iPhone 3G costs $40 more than its predecessor if you keep it for the full two-year contract.

Very sneaky, Mr. Jobs.

(I confess that I'll be checking tonight's lotto numbers with a little more interest than usual. If we match all six numbers, I'll probably order an iPhone 3G. Anything less than all six, and...sorry, Mr. Jobs.)

My close, personal friend Kymberlie reports that the TypePad export bug should be fixed by tomorrow afternoon.

I'll believe that when I see it, ma'am.

(Yes, I realize that I have been complaining about TypePad on a site run by Movable Type, both of which are Six Apart products. I can only hope that a different troops of chimps is responsible for Movable Type.)

Radar shows a line of storms - which extends, roughly, from Sault Ste. Marie to Amarillo - coming in from the northwest.

The current forecast says the storms won't reach Champaign until tomorrow afternoon, but it looks to me like they're ahead of schedule.

Jake's first swimming class - tomorrow morning - may be rained out.

Jennifer & I mowed the lawn this evening, while the kids played in the pool.

(I only mowed a little bit. Jennifer did all the hard parts.)

Alas, our pool - which cost all of $10 at Toys-R-Us last year - leaks a bit. Perhaps tomorrow we'll get out the duct tape and do a little patching.

My afternoon so far:

• Played Age of Empires. It was a glorious victory.
• Read the Sunday newspaper. I stopped reading the comics when they started packing advertisements into them, but the rest of the newspaper remains tolerable.
• Made some cofee (decaf!).
• Blathered a bit here.

Sam is sleeping. Jennifer & Jacob are at the library. My plan for the next hour - or until Sam wakes up - is to bookmark a bunch of genealogy URLs from recent issues of Family Tree magazine, so I don't lose them when the magazines get recycled.

Hot today: sputnik reports 89°, NOAA says 88°.

Did a little yard work this morning: moved the sandbox & bench into the recently-reseeded play area, washed off the patio all the mud and worms that had been lurking under the sandbox all this time (euww).

And then I brought out the clippers and pruning saw to do battle - once more - with the weed tree growing against the back fence. I cut it down a few years ago, leaving a stump just a few inches high; it grew back, and was a good nine or ten feet tall again.

It's about an inch tall now. That ought to keep it at bay for a while.

Sometime tomorrow, the New Horizons spacecraft will cross the orbit of Saturn on its way to a 2015 flyby of the ex-planet Pluto.

Saturn won't be there: it's about ninety degrees away. And New Horizons is only about one-fourth of the way to Pluto. So really the spacecraft is just passing from one bit of cold, empty darkness to another.

But I suppose when you're staring at another seven years of interplanetary cruise - i.e., cold, empty darkness - you'll take your excitement anywhere you can find it.

Jake has strep throat. He's on antibiotics (our old friend amoxicillin, again) and is expected to make a full recovery.

Pictures sent from my phone to Flickr aren't showing up.

Posts sent to Twitter aren't showing up in the sidebar here (or in the sidebar on the TypePad site, either).

The TypePad export function still doesn't work. (Way to go, chimps.)

Squabbling with cow-orkers. Wondering if either side in this dispute is as correct as it thinks it is, or as ill-informed & ill-tempered as the other side thinks it is. Perhaps not.

Web sites like FaceBook, FriendFeed, Plurk, Pownce, Twitter, etc., etc., all emphasize the social aspect of their services: Hang out here because your friends are already here, is the come-on.

It hasn't worked that way for me. Whenever I sign up for one of these sites, I find one of two things: either the ubiquitous Scoble & all his friends, or the same crowd of Wolfram Research cow-orkers who were on the last social-networking site I joined. With few exceptions, my friends and relations are nowhere to be found.

So none of these sites has that advantage over any of the others.

In the mail: a statement from the doctor, telling me that I owe $17.22 for durable medical equipment, specifically a WRIST-COCKUP SPLINT.

That's not what the doctor called it when she gave it to me....

Long ago, my mother told me that there's a Cherokee somewhere in the higher branches of the family tree - "five generations back," she said. I've been looking, off and on over the years, but as yet have found no trace of him (her?).

Mail yesterday from cousin-twice-removed J., who reports that Arenna Aldredge - my great-great-great-grandmother, wife of James Clinton Sturm - is the long-sought Cherokee connection.

I wonder where I might find some documentation for this. Perhaps an afternoon at the library is in order.

Poor Mr. Jake, he's still sick. Fever, sore throat, etc.

We're thinking it's strep throat. Off to the doctor tomorrow, I think....

(My own disease - no worse than a case of sniffles - appears to have cleared up on its own. Perhaps it wasn't a disease after all, just allergies.)

While lurking this afternoon under the eaves of the building that once held the offices of Computer Teaching Corp. (i.e., where I worked, two jobs and twenty years ago), I took a picture with my phone, and sent it to Flickr.

Alas, it never showed up.

Perhaps it will surface in a few weeks, and surprise everyone. It's happened before.

I have these conversations all the time:

Tech support, to me: User is having a problem.
Me, to tech support: Try doing X, and let me know what happens.
Tech support, to user: Doing Y will solve your problem.
User, to tech support: I did Z, and it didn't help.
Tech support, to me: X didn't work. Any other ideas?

Hours of fun!

Looking at the new daybook with various web browsers:

Internet Explorer 7: Generally looks good. Minor formatting problem in the post byline: "Posted by Pat Riceon June 6, 2008". There's a space in the HTML, but it's being styled out of existence.

Mozilla Firefox 2: Text looks a bit thing & grainy. No font smoothing. Pictures in the Flickr sidebar are against the left edge, instead of centered. But the byline is displayed properly.

Safari 3.1: Text is darker than either Internet Explorer or Firefox, but also a bit blurry: too much font smoothing? Pictures in the Flickr sidebar are not centered. Byline is correct.

It would be nice if the daybook looked the same in all web browsers, but it seems unlikely that it ever will.

Jake has picked up some germs. Just before bedtime, he had a temperature a little over 100°.

Poor guy, sick on his first week of summer vacation.

(I've been sniffling & sneezing all day myself, but whether that's a cold getting started or just allergies I have no idea.)

TypePad tech support avatar 'Kymberlie' - who may or may not be a real human being; I confess to a certain skepticism - replied:

Thanks for the note. Right now the export is being limited to 100 entries, so if you have more than that, you export is not complete. Only users with less entries are able to make a complete export at this time.

One wonders just how many TypePad users have fewer than a hundred posts.

One also wonders whether the TypePad developers will manage to fix this rather embarrassing bug before my account comes up for renewal in January.

Today's forecast calls for highs in the lower 90s.

The walk to the bus is going to be...interesting....

Another message from TypePad: 'Kymberlie' says that there is no combination of operating system / web browser for which export will work. Whether that's true for all TypePad users, or just for me, she neglected to say.

To make up for breaking their post editor, which made me want to leave TypePad, and then breaking their export function so I can't leave TypePad, 'Kymberlie' has awarded me...a free month of TypePad.

I just want my [obscene gerund omitted] data, you chimps.

Obama says he will be the Democratic nominee. Clinton says she's made no decision yet on whether to concede.

At least she isn't doing what Al Gore did in 2000: concede, then retract the concession, then dither for a month before conceding again.

We're hoping that tonight's storms manage to knock down our fence, so the insurance company will buy us a new one.

Renewed my epic struggle with the Movable Type widget machinery this afternoon, and managed to add a Flickr sidebar that actually works.

Yay me.

Thunderstorms rolled in around 5:00am this morning, and made for a soggy wait at the bus stop with Jake. (It could have been worse: Clay county was under a tornado warning at 7:00am, but here we just got rain.)

Today was Jake's last day of first grade. (And only an hour long, too: most likely to qualify for one more day of state funding, rather than to serve any academic purpose.) How the time does fly.

A second line of thunderstorms rolled in an hour or so ago. Jennifer, Jake & Sam all got rained on, according to a few text messages that popped up on my phone.

New blather is appearing at http://patrick-rice.net/daybook/.

Forget about http://pzr.typepad.com/, nothing new is going to show up here and it's going to disappear just as soon as TypePad fixes their thrice-bedamned export function.

Which currently doesn't work.

At all.

TypePad - acting through its avatar 'Kymberlie' - is deeply apologetic that I can't export my data from TypePad, but has no idea whether it will ever be possible for me to do so.

It's interesting that a google search for "export from typepad" returns exactly nine hits. So maybe I am the only person in the world trying to escape from TypePad.

I don't suppose the TypePad developers feel particularly motivated to fix bugs in a function that's so seldom used - and then only by people trying to stop paying TypePad $50/year. Alas for my blather, trapped on unfriendly servers.

Yesterday I signed up for an account on plurk. No, I don't really know why. Maybe just for the bragging rights: I had a plurk account before Scoble did.

A brief history of Wolfram Research company photos:

1993: Hessel Park. Having strained my back that week, I wasn't really capable of walking from WRI to Hessel Park - at least, not without considerable pain. So I didn't participate. (By a curious coincidence, this was taken the same week that Jennifer & I first met.)

1998: Krannert Center rooftop. Feeling guilty for missing the last one, I made a point of showing up. Somebody - Stephen? - didn't like the picture, so a do-over was declared. I skipped that one.

2003: Hessel Park. I was in this one, but it was ruined by photographer error (misplaced fill flashes, I believe). Again, a do-over was declared, and again I did not attend.

2008: Hessel Park, later this month. Given that over the last fifteen years Wolfram Research has a perfect record of using only the company photos in which I do not appear, I'm undecided whether to participate in the 20th anniversary photo. I seem to be a jinx.

NOAA reports 84° at 1:00pm. Summer is here.

Tired this morning. Unable to concentrate. Grumpy.

Wondering if the blather here on Movable Type is any different from what I wrote over on TypePad. Here, there's no audience (yet).

Probably not.

Twelve years ago, I read Jon Krakauer's Into the Wild; tonight, Jennifer & I are finishing the film version.

Interesting film.

I used to be fascinated by Chris McCandless' walkabout, with a hint of fear that the barriers keeping me from following the same path (to the same end) might not prove strong enough.

But now I am old, and less adventurous (even less contemplative of adventure). If I wandered off to Alaska to live off the land, people would just laugh at me.

It's been a quiet afternoon here at Stately Rice Manor.

Jennifer's off to see Sex and the City with some friends. Sam's taking a nap (I imagine he'll wake up any minute now). Jake's watching cartoons. I tried to watch television myself, but fell asleep during Country Fried Home Videos; when I woke up, Jake had commandeered the television and switched to a Scooby-Doo movie.

And now I am pecking away at the new & as yet unknown to the world daybook. The idea is to exercise it a bit and decide whether I really like it before redirecting the loyal readership away from TypePad.

Movable Type is...okay. Not insanely great, just okay. I can use it.

I tried to set this up yesterday, but it didn't work: Invalid Password, it kept telling me.

It turns out that Movable Type users have two passwords: one to log in, and one for 'web services'. Flickr was quite happy with the latter, so I can post pictures now.

The styles are a bit wonky, though: the pictures end up against the right margin, which looks funny. I'll have to see about fixing that.

Let's see now...

The new TypePad post editor stinks, and can't be permanently and globally disabled: it pops up now & then, just to scrozzle whatever unfortunate post you're trying toedit.

The TypePad export function doesn't work. There's no way to extract my data from TypePad short of some do-it-yourself site-crawling software (which I'm entirely too lazy to write).

Twitter isn't very reliable. (It's free: you get what you pay for, I suppose.) And it's overrun by spambots (of which I blocked two more this morning). But the alternatives all seem even worse.

The Movable Type post editor is good, but their template system is a twisty little maze of kludges (all different), the default site style is ugly, and the Flickr & Twitter sidebars don't work properly.

Jennifer's new computer - mindy - can play DVDs, but the brightness is way too high. The teletubbies - Sam's latest favorite - look even more hallucinogenic than usual, and there seems to be no way to fix it.