July 2008 Archives

I want a new cell phone.

I've had a cell phone - one kind or another - for a long time. (Ten years?) At first, they were just phones: you called other people, and talked. These days, they're tiny internet terminals. When I was a kid, I used to read about devices like cell phones in science-fiction novels; now I have one in my pocket, which is seriously cool.

I hardly ever talk to people with my cell phone any more. I take pictures, and send them to Flickr (then cross-post them to Movable Type); I send text messages to Twitter; I send email to Ping.fm, which forwards them on to Plurk, Twitter, and a half-dozen other sites.

But my phone has two big problems.

The pictures it takes just aren't very good. They're grainy, they're overcompressed. And sometimes they're too big to get out of the phone, which is inexcusably dumb. More than a few times I've taken a picture I really liked, or that caught something fleeting & worth remembering, only to be told: Picture too large to send. Sorree!

It has a web browser, but the screen is too small. Web pages - even pages designed for mobile devices - don't look very good. And using the web browser costs $1/day, which adds up quickly. Too quickly.

I can read email, with a nasty little Java email client - but I have to use my Yahoo mailbox. (I didn't want another mailbox, but Flickr forced me to sign up for a Yahoo ID, which also serves as a mailbox.) I'd rather use an account on my own domain.

That's three problems, sorry.

So I've been doing some research, trying to find an affordable phone that does everything I want. The short answer: the good phones aren't cheap, and the cheap phones aren't good.

Virgin Mobile has cheap phones, and they're all junk. The one I have is the best of the lot, and it's not good enough.

The iPhone does most of what I want. The camera isn't as good as I might like, but the rest of it is very cool. Too bad an iPhone + the mandatory two-year contract costs $2,000.

The Blackberry Curve has a better camera, and can record video. Some models include GPS & mapping software. It can connect to any POP server, so I could use my own mailbox. But the Curve costs $400, and T-Mobile's Blackberry plan is $40/month (plus whatever fees, surcharges & miscellaneous bill-padding T-Mobile springs on their customers once the contract is signed).

The Sidekick is also pretty cool. It has a bigger screen that the Curve (but smaller than the iPhone), can do email as well as either, and - in the latest model - can record video. (I don't know why I want to record video on my phone. I just do.) The Sidekick is $300, which is cheaper than either the Curve or the iPhone, but the data plan is $30/month.

I've been trying to convince myself that the Sidekick data plan - advertised as $30/month, but probably closer to $35 or $40 per month - wouldn't be a budget-buster. But - alas! - I fear it would be.

Just to make it abundantly clear: JAKE IS NOT SICK. This picture was taken SIX MONTHS AGO.

This morning at the bus stop, Jacob and I talked about...dogs.

I told him I've seen Great Danes big enough to put their paws on my shoulders; big enough to look him - Jake - in the eye.

"That's impossible!" said Jake.

Then Jake said he wants to cross a Great Dane with a weiner dog. We decided to call this new breed the Great Weiner, which made Jake laugh.

I cackled a bit, too, though perhaps not for quite the same reasons as Jake....

Much chatter lately about http://www.cuil.com/, so I thought I'd give it a try:

It's flattering that the #1 hit for Patrick Rice is my LinkedIn page, but I don't know where that Evans Scholar badge came from.

The only academic distinction I earned during my seven-semester time at the Big U. was not flunking out....

Had the notion this morning to try Zigtag with Firefox and/or Safari (both of which are installed on the WRI laptop); the results were...interesting....

I was right: the post-to-Zigtag bookmarklet is supposed to put up an overlay page; alas, Internet Explorer fails to render it correctly. It works pretty well on Firefox, but seems a bit laggy on Safari.

The post page does suggest tags for incoming bookmarks, but they're strangely inconsistent: www.23hq.com got 'Web 2.0', but Facebook got 'web2.0'.

Safari can't get to the Zigtag discussion forums: I get bounced to a login page, but the post-login page redirect never fires. I'm stuck at the login page.

I imagine I'll keep exercising Zigtag, in a half-hearted sort of way, but for now I thnk my bookmarks will be staying on del.icio.us.

A bit of chatter today about http://www.4colorvision.com/:

This site presents the new, and COMPREHENSIVE ELECTROLYTIC THEORY OF THE VISUAL PROCESS.... The theory shows that the ARCHITECTURE OF ALL VISION IS TETRACHROMATIC. Although traditionally called trichromats, it is shown that HUMANS ARE BLOCKED TETRACHROMATS.

Etc., etc., etc.

Apparently, this theory says that the human retina is sensitive to ultraviolet light, but the lens is opaque to ultraviolet. Except for the lucky(?) few who've had one or both lenses removed, we're all UV-blind.

I'm UV-blind? I never knew. I'm just devastated.

There may be some interesting or useful science behind http://www.4colorvision.com/, but to me it smells more like just another crackpot site, like http://www.aspartamekills.com/.

The ziggies sent me some email the other day, saying - more or less - You signed up for the beta, but you're not using the site very much. Why not?

Various reasons.

The Zigtag model is very different from either del.icio.us (which I'm using now) or even the Internet Explorer Favorites system (which I used before del.icio.us; and still use, for some things). It's not always easy to figure out how to do things the Zigtag way.

One example: a save-this-page bookmarklet. I use the del.icio.us bookmarklet all the time: visit a page, think I should save this, and a few clicks later the page has been saved & I'm back to reading.

I only recently discovered that Zigtag also has a save-this-page bookmarklet. (Maybe it's new, maybe it's been there all along.) Alas, it doesn't seem to work quite right. I get a mostly-blank page, with a few display and/or edit fields, but no save button. It looks like a pop-up gone slightly awry. (It wouldn't surprise me to learn that this is due to some heinous bug in Internet Explorer 7.)

Another example: tags. Zigtag has two pages, Explore My Tags and Manage My Tags. The former is for looking at the pages you've saved; the latter is for modifying the tags you've applied to the pages you've saved. It seems strange to separate the two options like that. Perhaps that's because I think of tags as properties of pages, but in the Zigtag world the tags are primary; pages are subordinate.

(I discovered the hard way that if you delete all the tags applied to a page, the page is also deleted. That was a bit unexpected.)

I have quite a bit of familiarity & momentum with del.icio.us, even though I haven't been using it terribly long (just over a year). So pretty much any speed-bump in Zigtag is enough to send me back. That's not really fair to Zigtag - I'm sure del.icio.us had its speed-bumps, last year - but that's how I am.

(Perhaps the ziggies will delete my account, since I'm not using it as much as they'd like. If they do, I'll understand.)

Strangely cool today: the high was only 75°.

It's been a nice break from temperatures in the 90s.

We've been having this conversation with Sam quite often lately:

Sam, are you a little boy or a little girl?
Little girl!

Silly boy.

Finished - last night - reading Fatal Revenant by Stephen R. Donaldson: book two of The Last Chronicles of Thomas Covenant.

It's a long book (590 pages), and rather intricately plotted. I think just about every character and location from the first two trilogies is going to show up in this series before it's over. Keeping them all straight is proving difficult.

The first hundred or so pages dragged a bit: too much angst & chatter, but nothing much happening.

Donaldson managed to pull of a pretty impressive finish, with a cliffhanger that'll keep the fans chattering until book three (Against All Things Ending, coming one of these years).

A few things about this series are starting to bother me, though:

The Land is a pretty stagnant place. The current series is set seven thousand years after the first trilogy, but the Land hasn't changed much. It's still largely empty, with just a scattering of small villages.

Insane characters, wandering through the story & muttering incoherent foreshadowings of Bad Things To Come, seem like a cheat. I didn't mind Adept Havelock in Mordant's Need, but for some reason Anele in Fatal Revenant was just annoying.

(Updated, 7/24.)

Rain this morning, then the sky cleared and the temperature shot up.

At 4:00pm, it was 87°, dewpoint 72°. Given the conditions, it was probably unwise of me to walk two-thirds of the way home from work, but that's what I did. (It always makes me cackle a bit when I catch the bus for home closer to home than where I catch the bus to work....)

Just now, thunder rumbles outside. Jennifer reports frequent lightning. (I'm too lazy to look out the window, myself.) Radar shows a thick band of ugly weather, coming at us from the west.

We're in for a noisy night, I fear.

Mail today from TypePad:

We've created a short online survey about TypePad that should take no more than five minutes of your time. We'd like for you to complete the survey by Wednesday, July 23rd.

I took their survey. Among other things, I told them that their new post editor was so incredibly vile that it drove me off TypePad entirely. I haven't written a new post over there in nearly two months.

(I'm not terribly thrilled with Movable Type, either. Their editor is nice, but the application as a whole is creaky & slow. I suspect - but have no proof - that half of this is due to Pair's use of underpowered hardware to run their web servers. The other half of the blame lands squarely on Movable Type itself. But it's the low bidder, so I'm stuck with it.)

NOAA says that at 7:00pm the temperature was 86°, and the dewpoint was an astonishing 75.9°.

So I went outside and mowed the lawn.

A bit of lawn-mower excitement: at one point, I hit a rock with the mower. The rock was expelled from the mower at a speed & angle sufficient to tear a large hole in the screen door - but fortunately not sufficient to shatter the glass door behind it.

So now we have something else in need of repair at Stately Rice Manor.

(I'm just glad nobody was standing in the doorway at the time. That would have been Very Bad Indeed.)

Looks like Plurk is down.

Plurk's reliability used to be one of its advantages over Twitter; alas, Twitter's uptime has been improving lately, while Plurk's has been heading in the opposite direction.

Too bad. I like Plurk.

Update: In the brief interval between clicking Save on this post, and viewing the results, Plurk came back.

An update on the Canadian Foot Mystery: CNN says:

VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) -- One of five feet that have mysteriously washed up on the shores of British Columbia over the past year has been linked to a depressed man who disappeared a year ago, police said Saturday.

I wonder if the others have a similar explanation....

Grilled cheese and fries: the standard restaurant lunch for Mr. Sam.

Poor little man. Crushed by despair & misery, he has hurled himself to the floor.

I've had a spiffy pedometer for several years now, but I only started using it last year (May 8, 2007, to be precise): I carry it in my shirt pocket through the day, then record each evening the day's numbers.

For various reasons - but no very good reasons - these numbers were living in four different places: in an Excel spreadsheet on mork, scribbled on a sheet of paper kept on my dresser, in a MySQL database on mork populated by a Ruby on Rails application (an experiment that failed), and in the spiral notebook I've been carrying around for the last two months (to replace the moribund Axim X30).

Yesterday I decided to consolidate my pedometer data into a new Excel spreadsheet. This wasn't too difficult, except that apparently the data for October through December of last year was written on a piece of paper tucked into my Ruby book, which is at work. I'll have to retrieve that on Monday.

Some preliminary results: since May 8, 2007, I have walked 1,004,871 steps and 499.25 miles. (Plus whatever I walked in Q4 2007.)

I've been using this as my profile picture on the nine-and-ninety accounts I maintain scattered about the internet. Jennifer hates it: she says it makes me look like a grumpy old man.

If the shoe fits....

This morning, I was on the northeast corner of Parkland Court and Springer Drive, waiting for the #6 bus. I noticed a bus-stop sign, half a block eastward, and decided to walk over there and wait for the bus at an official bus stop.

(This strange behavior is a legacy of my days riding the RTA buses in Arlington Heights. The driver of the #690 bus was a real stickler for protocol, and would drive right past anyone not waiting in exactly the right place. Then again, maybe he was just obnoxious.)

Three or four steps toward the bus stop, I snagged one foot on a piece of scrap lumber and went down like one of those Imperial Walkers in The Empire Strikes Back. It was a three-point landing: left hand, right knee and computer bag.

After a curious moment in which I couldn't quite remember how to operate my arms and/or legs, I managed to get back to my feet. I just had surgery on that [censored] hand, thought I. Then I cussed a bit more, and waved my hand around. After a while, it didn't hurt so much.

A bit later, the bus finally arrived. A half-hour of air-conditioned comfort proved quite restorative, and I made it to work without further incident.

The laptop was undamaged. The same - alas! - cannot be said for my hand & knee.The hand is developing an impressive bruise on the palm - a bit like the one I had post-surgery, last April - and the knee is a bit scraped up.

Pity me, pity me.

Once upon a time, I had a problem: I use four different computers, but it seemed that no matter which one I was using, the software and/or data I needed was always on one of the other ones.

So I:

• Switched from CityDesk to TypePad (and now to Movable Type).
• Created an account on del.icio.us, and moved all my bookmarks there.
• Created a Google Calendar account, and moved all my appointments / reminders / etc. there. (Then I bought a Spanning Sync subscription to synchronize Google Calendar with the iMac.)
• Created a Remember the Milk account, and moved all my to-do lists there.
• And - finally - set up an iGoogle page for myself that presents all of the above, along with a core set of bookmarks that I use every day but don't want to publish on del.icio.us. (And some fun toys like a moon-phase calculator.)

Now comes Microsoft's Live Mesh into the mix. They're handing out invites to the technology preview (i.e., beta), so I joined the waiting list.

My invite came through last night, so I am now the proud owner of a shiny new Live Mesh account.

All the press coverage of Live Mesh seems to carry a rather peevish undertone from the 'softies: It's not just about file synchronization, they keep saying. It's so much more.

I dunno. All the web pages I saw last night, all the online help I perused, talked about nothing but file synchronization.

This is rather unfortunate. I don't need to synchronize files between computers, I need to synchronize information: bookmarks, to-do lists, calendar items. Possibly email, someday. It would appear that Live Mesh doesn't do any of that.

Perhaps I'm wrong. I suppose I'll poke around a bit further, and maybe change my mind.

6oz of IGA salad-bar veggies, plus 25 calories of salad dressing. Yummy!

Under the category of Do-Not-Want:

I briefly entertained the notion that the Wild Card would be useful for sending email and/or text messages; unlike the iPhone, or the Blackberry Curve, or even the Sidekick LX, I might actually have enough spare cash lying around to buy one.

I saw a display model in Target yesterday, so I finally got a close-up look at one. It's small. Too small. The keyboard is an itty-bitty thing, with slippery shiny plastic keys that look to be quite impossible to operate. And the screen is just about the same size as on the phone I've got now. If I'm going to spend the money on a new phone, I want it to have a big, bright screen, not a postage stamp.

So that's a big never mind on the Kyocera Wild Card. And the quest for a useful, affordable phone continues....

If a newspaper, acting with reckless disregard for the truth, publishes statements that are false and damaging to one's reputation, that's libel, and the newspaper is at fault.

If a credit bureau, acting with similar disregard for the truth, publishes in its credit report statements that are false and damaging to one's financial reputation, that's identity theft, and the credit bureau is completely innocent of wrongdoing.

The financial industry was very clever to come up with the notion of identify theft: don't say that the bank failed to properly authenticate the criminal who applied for a credit card in your name; say rather that the criminal committed identity theft, and the bank is just another victim.

NOAA says:

TODAY
MOSTLY SUNNY. HOT. HIGHS IN THE LOWER 90S.
LIGHT AND VARIABLE WINDS EARLY IN THE MORNING
BECOMING SOUTH 10 TO 15 MPH IN THE LATE
MORNING AND AFTERNOON.

It may be cheaper to take the bus to/from work instead of driving the Explorer, but it's not always more comfortable.

iTunes is having a special on Comedy Central shows: 99¢/episode.

Having already purchased the first five episodes of season one of South Park - in a series of impulse buys, spread over the last year or two - I resisted for at least thirty seconds the temptation to purchase the remainder.

(Jake knows how to run the Apple TV. For now, he's only interested in watching all the Pixar movies I bought in January. If he finds the South Park episodes, that could prove awkward.)

Some time ago, I messed up the file permissions in my home directory on mork. I was trying to set things up so that Jennifer could more easily access the iPhoto library from her computer; instead, I disabled all access. (Oops.)

Apple is maddeningly vague as to what the file permissions on ~/Pictures ought to be; in the end, I decided that

cd ~/Pictures
chmod -R og+r *
find . -type d -exec chmod og+x {} \;

would be reasonable.

In theory, Jennifer can get to the pictures again. Sorry for the delay, m'love.

Steamed broccoli. No, not so much 'steamed' as 'warmed slightly above room temperature'. I ate it anyway.

A year ago, I did a light bulb census of Stately Rice Manor, and made a list of all the different kinds of light bulbs we use here (and in which rooms they're used).

I need to find that piece of paper, because we've run out of spare bulbs. I'm reasonably certain it's on my desk, somewhere.

The balance on my phone dipped below $5 today.

The cause: a new 15¢/day charge for email access. I use email on my phone to send messages through ping.fm to plurk; it's the only way to get them delivered in a reasonable amount of time. It's not my regular mailbox, it's some lame yahoo account. No, I won't tell you what it is. I don't want anybody to get in the habit of sending mail to that account.

I thought I had my Virgin Mobile account configured to automatically ding my credit card for $20 whenever my balance hit $5, but for some reason that wasn't happening. Very strange. Rather than have my phone deactivated, I decided to log in to the Virgin Mobile web site, and pay there.

It claims to have charged my card, but also claims that my account balance is still $4.90. Perhaps I should check again in the morning, and see whether they've cleared whatever blockage is affecting their billing system.

(Virgin Mobile keeps changing their calling plans, in ways best described as Pay more, get less. Sooner or later, I'm sure, they'll find some excuse to terminate our current calling plan [i.e., the cheap one], at which point we'll probably switch to some other provider; if/when that day comes, you can be sure I'll write it up in a daybook post titled Virgin no more! I'm so juvenile.)

More from the RCMP on those feet that have been washing up on the beaches of British Columbia. CNN says:

The British Columbia Coroners Service said Thursday that DNA tests indicate a right foot found on February 8 and a left foot found on June 16 were from the same male. The office also determined that a right foot found on May 22 belongs to a female.

The question that's haunting me is: Why only the feet? It seems likely that there are four dead people out there, somewhere. What happened to the rest of them?

The other day, Sam got a catalog in the mail from Toys to Grow On. (His very first junk mail. All together now: Awww...) He's obsessed with this picture:

Sam fears for the health & safety of the little boy in this picture. "Oh no!" he says. "He's stuck!"

We try to reassure him. "No, Sam, he's just playing with the blocks. He's okay."

It doesn't work. "Oh no! He's stuck!"

I now have the same set of bookmarks on all three computers that I use (i.e., mork, mindy and the WRI laptop).

I also have a single list of passwords for my eleventy-dozen online accounts. It's kept in the subversion repository on mork, with checked-out copies on mork, mindy and a thumb drive that when needed can be plugged into the WRI laptop.

And I have set up a nice iGoogle home page for myself, with yet another copy of my bookmarks, plus some widgets for Google Calendar, Remember the Milk and ping.fm.

...all of which means that pretty much all of the online stuff I do is now doable from any of the computers I use.

Aaron Stebner says:

There is not an officially supported way of checking for the presence of a range of .NET Framework versions. There are supported ways of checking for each version that has been released, but this logic can only be used to determine whether or not that exact version is installed. This logic cannot necessarily be used to infer anything about other versions of the .NET Framework. In particular, it is not possible to know ahead of time what types of detection logic will be needed for versions of the .NET Framework that have not yet been released.

Did it just never occur to the 'softies that developers might want to do the same kind of version-checking on .NET as they do on Windows? Did they learn nothing from thirty years of system requirements like Requires MS-DOS 5 or later and Requires Windows NT 4.0 or later?

(Perhaps the justification is that developers should target their applications at specific versions of .NET, and ignore any other versions that might exist. But that's pretty dumb, too.)

Dear Cow-orker:

If you weren't comfortable with having that cell-phone conversation at your desk, you probably shouldn't have had it in the break room, either.

Next time, consider going out to your car.

Thank you.

Jennifer took Jake & Sam to see Alvin and the Chipmunks this morning at the Savoy 16. (Alas, I didn't get to go.)

We haven't had much success taking Sam to movies. He'll sit for a while - half an hour, tops - then try to get up & run around, then throw a fit when we don't let him. Usually I end up taking him out to the lobby, while Jennifer stays in the theater with Jake.

At this morning's movie, Sam was attentive and well-behaved - until the popcorn ran out. Silly boy.

I'm told Jake was very understanding about having to leave early....

Sites where I have accounts:

23
del.icio.us
Facebook
Flickr
last.fm
LibraryThing
Lifetick
LinkedIn
MySpace
Ping.fm
Plurk
Pownce
Remember the Milk
Swurl
Tumblr
Twitter
Zigtag

I tried to delete my last.fm account, but it refused to die. I did delete my accounts on Pownce and Remember the Milk, but later created new accounts.

Some of these see more activity than others. (Some would be completely dormant were it not for Ping.fm's handy broadcasting service.) But I visit each of them on a regular basis.

Perhaps seventeen accounts is too many. At least most of them are free. Some aren't: Flickr is $25/year; LibraryThing was $25, but that bought a lifetime membership; various others - 23, Lifetick, Pownce, Remember the Milk - offer Pro accounts at various price points, but it seems unlikely that any of them will prove useful or important enough that I'll want to pay for them.

Last year, I created - and then deleted - an account on Remember the Milk: "I can't think of a single reason I need an online to-do list manager," I said.

This morning I came up with a reason. Fortunately for me, my favorite user name hadn't been taken by somebody else in the seven months since I deleted my original account. So my RTM account is back from the dead. Yay.

At present, I have only one item on my to-do list: Buy coffee. I used the last of it this morning. There is no caffeine in the house. Crisis! Panic!

This morning the Apple Update thingy on the iMac popped up an invitation to install OS X 10.5.4. Generally speaking, I'm a big fan of operating system updates; but this one said Includes fixes for iCal, which made me nervous.

It seems like every time Apple touches iCal, all my events & appointments get scrozzled, and I have to recreate them by hand. It's happened twice now, once when I upgraded to Leopard, and once when I installed the 10.5.3 update.

So I dithered a while, then told it Sure, go ahead. But first I turned off automatic synchronization with Google Calendar, and backed up iCal. That way, I figured, I'd have some hope of getting my calendar back without a lot of typing.

The updater downloaded for a while, then installed for a while, then...wedged. The system was still responsive, but the progress bar stopped moving. I waited most of an hour, then went for the power button. The power button on an iMac is purely advisory; if the system doesn't want to shut down, it won't. But it did, then came right back up.

It says it's running 10.5.4, and Apple Update says there's nothing new to install, so it looks like the update succeeded.

(I wish I'd written down the status line from the frozen progress dialog. Something about writing a receipt, I think.)

iCal whined about a few synchronization conflicts; curiously, all of them were from the US Holidays calendar, and most of them were from the start or end of Daylight Saving Time. (Martin Luther King Day got a conflict, too.) In all cases, I let Google Calendar's entry (i.e., the correct one) replace iCal's entry (i.e., the broken one).

It seems like something in iCal is doing one too many time zone conversions on event times. DST doesn't begin at 1:00am, nor does it end at 7:00am. But sometimes iCal thinks it does.

Silly software.

I can't find the serial cable for my GPS receiver. The most likely explanation is that I threw it away during one or another recent closet-cleaning project.

Garmin still sells cables for the eTrex Legend: $38 each.

As Charlie Brown would say, AUGH.

If you have a 173,240-line Movable Type export file containing 4,365 posts (plus a smattering of comments), and generate from it a new file with the posts sorted by timestamp, then try to compare the two using SourceGear DiffMerge, poor DiffMerge will suck up all available memory & CPU, thereby rendering your computer only slightly faster than a dead snail.

Who'd have thought?

This looks interesting: TrailRunner, http://www.trailrunnerx.com/:

TrailRunner is a route planning software for all kinds of long distance sports like running, biking, hiking, inline-skating, skiing and more. If you ever asked yourself how long your workout routes are and what route you should choose for this evening - then TrailRunner should be your training-partner. TrailRunner can calculate a route for your desired distance and export directions onto your iPod, giving you a detailed orientation while you are on your way.

Perhaps there's some way to connect my GPS receiver - a Garmin eTrex Legend, purchased several years ago - to the iMac, and have it play nicely with TrailRunner.

That would be cool.

Heard a thump on the monitor just now, followed by silence.

More fireworks? I wondered. Did something fall off a shelf in the kids' room? On the theory that silence is more ominous than noise when children are involved, I decided to investigate.

I turned on the hall light, opened the door, and peeked in. Sam was on the floor, mostly asleep. Apparently he'd decided to go snuggle with big brother Jake, and then fallen out of bed.

(I suppose he might have been pushed....)

He seemed uninjured, so I tucked him back into bed. Poor little guy.

I vaguely recall falling out of bed once, when I was about Sam's age. (Lyndon Johnson was President then.) I also recall that my brother & I had bunk beds, and that I had the top bunk. And that I had neglected to put away my legos before going to bed.

Ouch.

Importing my blather from TypePad to Movable Type didn't require too much work: just a bit of parsing, reformatting, error correction, blah blah blah.

But there's one problem still to be corrected: apparently Movable Type uses a different algorithm than TypePad for generating the url from the post title. (Of the two, Movable Type's algorithm seems more robust.) So all the daybook entries that link to other daybook entries are now broken.

My parser script says there are 257 separate urls (spread over 308 links) in need of repair. The quick & dirty url-fixing script I just wrote didn't work (oops); now I'm thinking I'll have to export the entire site and run that through a more carefully-written parser.

In the meantime, there are 308 broken links sprinkled around thd 4,300+ daybook entries. Sorry....

Jake is back from a few days' visit to the grandparents. By all accounts, he had a grand time.

In another hour or so we're going to head out to the driveway to watch some fireworks.

Rain overnight; everything is a bit soggy outside.

It looks like we're going to the Independence Day parade this afternoon. Fireworks tonight, but we won't be going anywhere: Dodds Park is close enough that we can watch from the end of the driveway.

Sam is watching Cars again. He's obsessed with that movie.

I signed up for an account on Swurl. I already have an account on FriendFeed, so it's unclear why I need another feed aggregator.

Still having fun with Plurk. I'm getting used to the horizontal timeline thingy - though having older posts scroll off to the right still seems weird, English being an emphatically left-to-right language.

Started a Movable Type site republish over on mindy last night. I haven't checked on it yet, but the site seems ok.

This evening, Jennifer was reading to Sam: Miss Spider's Tea Party, a cute counting book.

Sam pointed at one page, and said, "That's a nine!" Then he turned the book upside-down and said, "That's a six!"

Clever lad, is our Sam.

Observed today that the Blackberry Curve 8330 is a pretty spiffy phone: camera, video (playback and record), GPS, email, web browsing, text messages, etc., etc. That's just about everything I've ever contemplated using a phone for.

Also observed that they cost $500 (more or less), and not very many carriers in town offer them. The ones that do - Verizon, for one - want to shackle their customers to long-term, exorbitantly-priced contracts.

I didn't get too far into reading the terms of Verizon's data plan. The feelings of revulsion and ripped-off-ness got too strong.

Too bad. It's a nice phone.

This just in to our newsroom: when CVSROOT/history hits 2GB in size, your cvs server starts responding to all cvs commands with:

Terminated with fatal signal 25

Like I needed more distractions & obstacles today.

*grump*

Every night, there's less post-bedtime rowdiness from Sam. I think he's getting used to the idea that his new bed is for sleeping in.

Four years ago Jake made his own crib to bed transition. The first night, we put him in his new bed, and he slept. All night.

We had been hoping - without actually saying anything, so as not to jinx it - that Sam would do likewise; but children will surprise you. Even if you expect surprises, they'll still find something you weren't expecting.

Realized this morning that republishing a Movable Type site isn't an all-or-nothing affair: it's possible to republish just the index files. So I added my Plurk sidebar thingy, and republished only the site index.

So my plurk blather now shows up here. How nice. Someday - when I have the need, or the patience, to deal with an all-night site republish - it will also show up on all the individual pages.

(One wonders why deleting a post requires a site republish. Deleting a post is just the inverse of creating one, and that doesn't require a site republish.)