September 2008 Archives

The photos go round and round:

• Jennifer and I (though more Jennifer than me, lately) take pictures with the Nikon; I import them into iPhoto; some few then get uploaded to Flickr.
• Meanwhile, I take pictures with my phone; most of them are mailed to Flickr; then, as I have time, I download them to iPhoto.

Keeping iPhoto and Flickr synchronized is more difficult the more I use my phone camera. It can take quite a while to track down a month-old picture on Flickr that isn't in iPhoto.

This afternoon I finally got around to fixing the problem. What a pain.

I had the idea recently have Flickr tag all incoming phone images with 'to_download', so - in theory - tedious foolery such as today's will not need to be repeated.

Recently, the Arbitron people talked Jennifer into signing up for a week of radio listening data collection. They sent us some paperwork, and a pair of diaries in which we're to record all the radio we hear: not just what we listen to on purpose, but whenever there's a working radio within earshot.

The Arbitron people are sure to find my diary - which Jennifer is filling out for me - quite disappointing. Aside from a few seconds every weekday morning when the alarm goes off, I don't listen to any radio stations. Not at home, not in the car, not at work.

I'm sure my listening diary will be discarded on the theory that it's inaccurate - that I must have heard at least some radio programming over the week in question, but neglected to record it. Which is funny, in a strange sort of way.

Woke up at 6:49am, in a panic because the alarm hadn't gone off. Then I realized: it's Saturday. No alarm today.

I got up anyway.

Jake was already up, watching television. He gets up earlier on weekends than he does during the week, which is a bit peculiar.

Available from Amazon.com:

Perhaps we should stock up, so when civilization collapses - due to gross malfeasance in the financial sector - we'll have better things to eat than the neighbors' dogs (or, even worse, the neighbors...).

Today is Jack LaLanne's 94th birthday.

Happy birthday, sir.

(Tomorrow is Wilford Brimley's 74th birthday. Coincidence? I think not!)

My half-baked pedometer web application thingy tells me that in the last thirty days I've walked 183,699 steps: just short of 87 miles.

No wonder my feet hurt.

The autumnal equinox was last Monday, but the weather since then has been more summer than autumn: highs in the 80s, lots of sunshine. It's made walking rather difficult. On my way home this afternoon, I had to stop at the grocery store for some water: I was feeling a bit dehydrated & unsteady.

(My first choice was Gatorade, but Gatorade turns out to be loaded with sugar: 200 calories per bottle. That's only half as much per ounce as Coke or Pepsi - but Gatorade comes in 32oz bottles, not 12oz cans, so Gatorade has more sugar. No, thanks.)

Incidentally: since pedometer record-keeping began (in May of last year), I have walked 1,440,313 steps, or slightly over 680 miles. If I keep to my current pace, I should hit a thousand miles sometime next year.

I will be insufferable when that happens....

Two items:

1. The other day, I received a clinic bill for $42, for something I had already paid for. (It was on my last credit card statement: already cleared, already paid.) On page two of the statement, they admit to having recevied a $42 payment from me, on the same day as the unpaid $42 expense - but they're not sure that my $42 payment was intended to cover the $42 expense, so they'd like me to send them another $42, just in case. Nice try, chimps.
2. Recently, WRI switched to a new administrator for our flexible spending account program. The new administrator has just a few new requirements that must be met before they'll fork over the cash; specifically, for physician visit copays, they apparently require an EOB document. Apparently they neglected to pass this requirement along to the doctors, from whom we have never received any EOB documents. I faxed them the usual paperwork (which for the last eighteen months has sufficed), just in case; but I am not hopeful.

There seems to be a variant of Murphy's Law at work here: if there's any possible way for these companies to screw their customers, they will.

Meanwhile, over on Facebook I have:

• Two group invitations;
• Two (lil) green patch requests;
• One knighthood invitation;
• Two my city invitations; and
• One tinyadventures invitation.

Supposedly, there's a way to block application spam on Facebook. Perhaps I should find out how....

Mentioned recently by the ubiquitous Scoble: Twine. The Twine folks have this to say about themselves:

Twine is a new service that helps you organize, share and discover information around your interests, with networks of like-minded people. You can use Twine individually, with friends, or with groups, teams and communities.

Powered by semantic understanding, Twine automatically organizes information, learns about interests and makes recommendations. The more you use Twine, the better it gets to know you and the more useful it becomes.

I won't be joining.

I keep my bookmarks on delicious.com. I tried Zigtag, but kept running into problems. (And Zigtag's browser plugin wanted way too much screen space for what it did.)

I've joined too many social-networking sites over the last few months, and most of them have been half-baked and not terribly useful. I'm a little burned out on the whole idea of social networking. (I suppose I never was very sociable to begin with.)

I think from now on it's going to be a little harder for new sites to persude me to sign up.

One of the drawbacks to sharing a computer with small children is the accumulation of smudges, smears and general gunk on all surfaces.

Jennifer's computer has been getting more & more filthy lately; today I decided a bit of cleaning was in order. I windex'd the monitor, and took a scrubby to the mouse (which was sticky, with some unidentifiable schmutz that mere windex had no power to remove).

All is clean once again. (For now.)

Drove down to Arthur this morning, to meet some friends at the Great Pumpkin Patch.

It's a curious place. Pumpkins everywhere, all different shapes, sizes & colors. Trails, mazes, gardens, random crafty displays. (They do sell pumpkins there, but I didn't see anybody buying any.) An old county schoolhouse, currently being restored by the Moultrie County Historical & Genealogical Society. And - of course - all sorts of ways to spend money.

They sell fudge, but we didn't buy any. Various pictures were taken. Most are already on Flickr. (Should I be surprised that the device had a good, strong signal two miles outside Arthur? I didn't think the Amish had much use for cell phones....)

Jake and Sam had fun, most of the time. (Sam was rather grumpy at first, but cheered up after a while.) On our way out, we bought them a couple of small orange gourds.

Lunch was at the Amishland Buffet in Tuscola. Their salad bar wasn't as fancy as I'd hoped, but I managed. (Why, yes, I did sneak a little macaroni & cheese. It was delicious.)

There were rain clouds and thunderstorms scattered all through the county, but we managed to avoid getting rained on.

For a while now, I've been messing around with a Python + MySQL web thingy to keep track of my pedometer data. (Yes, I could use Excel. It would probably be easier, and Excel certainly has fancier data-analysis tools than anything I could hope to create for myself. But half the reason behind doing this is to learn how to write a model-view-controller web application. And it's fun.)

This morning, I patched in some code to save new records in the database: fill out the form, hit the Save button, and - presto! - new record.

But it didn't work. No errors, no warnings, no messages of any kind - but also no new record.

Executing the REPLACE statement manually - by pasting it into a MySQL command-line session - worked just fine. But executing it from a Python script refused to create the new record.

I thought maybe the problem was my table design. Maybe using a date column as the primary key isn't allowed, or maybe there are bugs in MySQL / MySQLdb. So I added a numeric column and made it the primary key. No improvement.

I changed the table definition from the InnoDB engine to the MyISAM engine, and - surprise! - suddenly it worked. But why won't it work with InnoDB?

A bit of searching turned up somebody out in the world who had the same problem: his code seemed to work, but never actually modified the database. The very first reply to his cry for help:

InnoDB tables are transactional. Are you committing your transactions after inserts and deletes?

Um. I knew that.

One commit statement later, I can save records into my database.

Pat Buchanan says:

What we are witnessing today is how empires end.

The Last Superpower is unable to defend its borders, protect its currency, win its wars or balance its budget. Medicare and Social Security are headed for the cliff with unfunded liabilities in the tens of trillions of dollars.

What we are witnessing today is nothing less than a Katrina-like failure of government, of our political class, and of democracy itself, casting a cloud over the viability and longevity of the system.

How strange, to find myself agreeing with Pat Buchanan.

Today's pedometer numbers: 19,074 steps; 9.03 miles.

My feet only hurt a little bit.

Walking has an unexpected bonus: it's an hour (today, closer to three hours) of thinking time. No email, no computer, no phone. (No children.) Interesting ideas come to me as I'm trudging down the sidewalk. Solutions to various coding problems, that sort of thing.

Even so, I don't think a 100-minute commute (one-way!) is sustainable. I'll have to find a way to get to work that's faster than walking, cheaper than driving, but still counts as exercise. Hm....

Yesterday, I stopped at the grocery store on the way home from work and picked up a brick of tofu. This evening, I had some for dinner.

The original plan was to marinate it for a while in some Italian salad dressing; alas, the fridge was bare. Plan B: slice the tofu into slabs, spritz with a bit of olive oil, sprinkle with black pepper & garlic, and grill.

The results were edible, but I would not go so far as to say I enjoyed eating the stuff. (Memo to self: next time, use a recipe. Don't improvise!)

Rather chilly at the bus stop this morning: a mere 49°, according to NOAA.

(Before the temperature drops too much further, I need to find myself a new jacket. The one I wore last year doesn't fit so well any more.)

Long enough ago that I don't remember exactly when it was, Scoble mentioned http://www.strands.com/: so of course I requested an invite to the beta.

Today, my invite arrived.

I don't know anybody on Strands, so there's nobody for me to follow. Even Scoble seems to be staying away.

Within ten minutes of activating my account, I had two people following me. That's just a little creepy. (Maybe they work for Strands? Just about all my 'friends' over on Zigtag are people who work for Zigtag.)

Strands has filters: you can ask to see books people liked, movies people disliked, that sort of thing. But apparently nobody's been clicking the thumbs-up / thumbs-down icons, because filtering by liked / disliked doesn't filter anything.

I imagine I'll poke around a bit more in Strands, looking for a reason to stick around. But at present I am not hopeful of finding one.

CNN tells me that Rick Wright, keyboardist for Pink Floyd, has died.

Most of my favorite authors have died over the last twenty years; now, it seems, my favorite musicians are also starting to expire.

Went for a walk last night, with vague plans to walk down to County Market to pick up some coffee (having run out of decaf yesterday afternoon).

Somehow it escaped my notice that it had been raining heavily all day long (sputnik recorded four inches of rain yesterday), and that my preferred route to County Market crosses a small creek.

The creek wasn't so small last night. No coffee for me, alas.

Rain this morning, as the remnants of Hurricane Ike make their way north after stomping on Texas the other day.

No thunder or lightning that I've noticed, just a strong, steady downpour.

Briefly entertained the notion of installing the FireEagle plugin for Movable Type; alas, it requires a crontab entry to run its polling script. Pair's FTP account - aka the cheapskate account, which is the one I have - doesn't include cron.

Upgrading to an Advanced account would double the monthly cost; I don't think it's really worth $8/month to have a sidebar thingy saying "Pat is in...Champaign, Illinois".

I'm always in Champaign.

I picked up my wedding ring from the jeweler this afternoon. As before, it's shiny clean, unscratched, and no longer in danger of falling off my finger. Unlike last time, I had to pay $40 to have it resized, and I didn't get back the metal that was removed.

I don't mind having paid. But I'm rather annoyed that Mr. Jeweler has pocketed a chunk of gold that 1) belongs to Jennifer & me; 2) has great sentimental value; and 3) also has non-trivial cash value: gold is selling for about $24/gram these days.

I suppose it's too late to do anything about it, except grumble here.

Update: It occurs to me that perhaps Mr. Jeweler made more extensive modifications to my ring than just snipping out a few millimeters of metal & welding the ends back together. The underside of my ring - i.e., the palm side - used to be noticeably thinner than the top, but now it's the same thickness all the way around. So perhaps there never was any leftover gold to be returned, and my grumbles were unjustified.

John McCain, Sarah Palin, Joe Biden & Barack Obama are all intelligent, honorable, patriotic and well-intentioned. It seems likely that each has the intellectual wherewithal to serve as President. (As opposed to, say, myself. My administration would put to shame all previous contenders for the title of Worst President Ever.)

When I hear someone arguing that one or another of these four people is stupid or criminal, I think: Stop wasting my time.

This campaign shouldn't be about who can sling - or dodge - the most mud. It should be about ideas, about what's wrong with this country and what must be done to put it right.

It's possible for people to disagree without impugning each other's intelligence or patriotism. This time, let's all give it a try.

Apparently the Green Sherpa folks are still recovering from their Big Show at this year's Demo conference, because their promised September 9th public beta has yet to materialize.

Still no word on how much it's going to cost, either.

Um...Sherpas? Mint is available now, and it's free....

Interesting gizmo of the week: the Fitbit Tracker, http://www.fitbit.com/:

The Fitbit Tracker contains a motion sensor like the ones found in the Nintendo Wii. The Tracker senses your motion in three dimensions and converts this into useful information about your daily activities. The Tracker measures the intensity and duration of your physical activities, calories burned, steps taken, distance traveled, how long it took you to fall asleep, the number of times you woke up throughout the night and how long you were actually asleep vs just lying in bed. You can wear the Tracker loosely in your pocket or clipped to your clothing, even bras.

That's pretty cool. I can collect interesting statistics about myself, populate a database, and do charts & graphs - with no manual data entry.

There are only two problems:

1. It's not available yet. Late December, early January, according to the web site.
2. It costs $100.

At work. Still sniffling, though not as much as yesterday. (Perhaps the DayQuil has had some effect on that.)

Chopping an onion is much less painful when one's nose is stuffed up.

Still listening to speeches from the Republican convention. Audio remains a bit ratty, and the endless throat-clearing remains a distraction. (Laura Bush did not clear her throat at the end of each paragraph: instead, she made strange little grunting noises that were even more distracting.)

Overall, the Republicans seem nastier than the Democrats: more prone to personal attacks; with an ugly, sneering tone in too many of their speeches.

The folks at Green Sherpa have fixed their web site problems: no more Django error pages.

Green Sherpa looks interesting, but their web site is a bit short on detail. What kind of accounts can it manage? With which banks can it synchronize? What kind of forecasting & reporting tools does it provide? How much does it cost?

Alas, the Sherpas aren't telling. The Big Launch isn't until tomorrow, so I suppose the secrecy is understandable. But it's also frustrating.

(It's interesting that the Green Sherpa business plan says they're going after the 30 - 55 crowd: people who are serious about managing their finances, as opposed to those scatterbrained twentysomethings who buy Quicken or Microsoft Money & never use it.)

Home now. Still sniffling.

I checked my temperature a while ago: 99.4°. Not much of a fever, but perhaps a sign that I've picked up some kind of germs....

Much sniffling & sneezing today. Perhaps I am catching a cold.

The ubiquitous, indefatigable Scoble linked to a VentureBeat article about Green Sherpa, a new entry in the online personal finance management market.

The Mac version of Quicken is pretty lame, and also pretty much abandoned by Intuit. I'm on the lookout for a viable replacement, so I thought I'd check out Green Sherpa.

Alas, there were problems. Most of the links on the Green Sherpa web site lead to Django error pages. Even the 'About Us' link doesn't work.

Perhaps I'll check out Mint instead.

CNN is running an article - video only, because they can't imagine an internet that isn't just like television - headlined: Palin's sex appeal a double standard?

Um. How is Sarah Palin's physical attractiveness relevant? (Assuming, for the sake of argument, that she has any. I, as a happily-married fella, have taken no notice.) Will it make her a better vice president? Or, if it comes to that, a better president?

I'm not in the habit of judging candidates by appearance. Why does CNN think that I should?

(I suppose CNN might respond that they're not encouraging people to be distracted by Sarah Palin's [censored], they're merely reporting that some people are distracted. But even more people are interested in Ms. Palin's ideas. Let's have some reporting on that.)

The sullen youth from down the block was walking to his own bus stop as Jake & I headed out.

"Good morning," I said.

Grunt, said the sullen youth.

I suppose one shouldn't expect more from a teenager than the occasional grunt.

http://pzr.typepad.com/ is no more: I have cancelled my TypePad account.

My TypePad account has been dormant for several months now, ever since I migrated all my blather here to Movable Type; the expiration date was still a few months off, but I thought: Why wait? Better to pull the plug now, rather than risk forgetting and finding an unexpected $50 ding on the credit card come December.

(The TypePad people already sent me the obligatory customer-satisfaction survery. I gave my chief reason for cancellation: The new editor stinks.)

I'm in a tidying-up mood this afternoon. Perhaps I will also pull the plug on the sillier web sites I've joined over the last few months.

The chatter is ramping up on 'Oslo', a coming-soon project from Microsoft.

Don Box says:

We're building "Oslo" to simplify the process of developing, deploying, and managing software. Our goal is to reduce the gap between the intention of the developer and the actual artifacts that get deployed and executed. The approach we're taking is to move more of the definition of an application into the world of data, where we (and you) can more easily make queries as to the developer's original intent.

Douglas Purdy says Oslo is:

A tool that helps people define and interact with models in a rich and visual manner. A language that helps people create and use textual domain-specific languages and data models. A relational repository that makes models available to both tools and platform components.

I have no idea what these people are talking about.

It sounds like something so hopelessly abstract as to be completely useless - not so much a solution to a problem, but a tool to create tools to create solutions to problems. Or something.

Surely the 'softies wouldn't waste years of their lives on something that silly? I must be missing the point of Oslo. I must be dumb.

But I wouldn't be surprised if Joel Spolsky writes about Oslo, and makes liberal use of the phrase architecture astronauts when he does.

It's pretty much back to normal. A bit tender negotiating steps, but it feels mostly normal most of the time.

I'm baffled that an injury could hurt so much, yet heal so quickly. For a while on Thursday, I was sure I'd snapped a tendon or something.

Perhaps I should cancel my followup with the orthopedics department. I'd feel quite the chump showing up with no symptoms or impairment & trying to explain to the doctor what had been wrong with me two weeks previous.

Option #1: let the kids watch videos on the Apple TV.

Problem #1: the kids lose the remote, then throw a fit when they can't watch Cars for the thousandth time.

Option #2: let the kids watch DVDs, either on the television, or on the computer.

Problem #2: the kids render the DVDs unplayably scratched and/or smeared, then throw a fit when they can't watch Monsters, Inc. for the thousandth time.

(Also: when I'm king of the world, designers of DVDs will wake up one morning to discover that every single device or appliance that they use - televisions, toasters, toilets - will play two minutes of unskippable commercials every time they try to use it. Yes, that's a cute animation you've come up with for the main menu on your DVD. No, I don't want to sit through it every [censored] time Sam wants to watch the movie.)

The day so far:

Last night, we told Jake, "Sleep in tomorrow. Don't get up early just to watch cartoons. You need sleep more than you need to watch cartoons."

"Okay," said Jake.

Mr. Jake was up & glued to the television at 6:30am. That's later than usual for a Saturday, so I suppose he tried to sleep in.

Sam is having oatmeal for breakfast, and playing legos. (Legos are a type 1 toy: thousands of tiny pieces, dumped on the floor and kicked under the furniture. Sometimes Sam even builds things with them.)

I am sitting at the kitchen table, messing around on the computer. I really should check on the build, but I'm procrastinating.

Breakfast (for me) was a big bowl of couscous, with applesauce. And coffee. (Coffee is very important. Some days the only personality I have comes from coffee....)

Bright & early this morning, I tootled off to Convenient Care, to see how much damage I'd done to my knee.

Madame Doctor - a new one; I didn't recognize her - poked around a bit, grabbed my leg & tried to bend it in various strange directions, then pronounced: "Your knee is stable," by which I assume she meant I'd done no serious damage to the joint.

She gave me a knee brace to wear, and told me to call my friends over at Orthopedics - the same folks who did the hand surgery last April (and last August). Alas, no fancy pain pills or anything. "Just take some Aleve," she said.

I wore the brace all day at work. It didn't help all that much. Instead, it kept sliding down around my ankle and getting in the way. I took it off before coming home, since it's rather difficult to get in or out of Mr. Explorer if I can't bend my knee.

The knee feels a bit stiff, a bit achy. Moving it in certain ways still hurts, though not as much as yesterday. I haven't needed any Aleve yet today.

The ortho folks are booked solid for the next two weeks, so by the time I get in to see them I imagine I'll be entirely back to normal. (Or as close to normal as I ever get.) This will lead to a rather awkward patient interview:

"Where does it hurt?"
Well, it doesn't, any more.

I'm hoping they'll at least want to do an MRI or something....

This afternoon, Mr. Bus Driver started the bus moving before I'd managed to sit down - I was juggling three bags and an umbrella, hence the delay.

The sudden accelleration hit me at an awkward angle, my knee gave a small pop, and There Was Pain.

The remainder of the ride home was interesting, but not in a good way. The bus stopped in front of the News-Gazette building; just as I was wondering why, the driver shut off the engine and announced that the bus was having mechanical problems & a new bus would be along presently to carry on with the route.

Climbing off one bus and onto another was rather more walking than I felt like doing just then. But I managed. (An umbrella makes a passable cane, provided one doesn't lean on it too hard.)

I made it home, and after an evening of ice, non-steroidal anti-inflammatories and general laziness the knee feels considerably better.

Even so, I imagine I'll be visiting the doctor tomorrow.

I have re-enabled anonymous comments here on the daybook.

If / when the spammers find out, I may have to make further adjustments, but for now the loyal readership - both of you - are encouraged to comment freely, behind whatever nom de plume strikes your fancy....

Much chatter lately about http://www.factcheck.org/, an organization that describes itself thusly:

We are a nonpartisan, nonprofit, "consumer advocate" for voters that aims to reduce the level of deception and confusion in U.S. politics. We monitor the factual accuracy of what is said by major U.S. political players in the form of TV ads, debates, speeches, interviews, and news releases. Our goal is to apply the best practices of both journalism and scholarship, and to increase public knowledge and understanding.

I must confess that my initial reaction to this site was suspicion.

There are too many organizations out there using exactly the same description as a cover story behind which they're engaging in the same old dirty tricks and voter manipulation.

Orson Scott Card once observed that the phrase "I'm not an idiot" is never uttered except in demonstration of its falsehood; perhaps it's wrong of me to believe the same of "I'm not lying", but I do.

My left hand is temporarily ringless: my wedding ring is off at the jeweler's, getting resized.

I had this done once before, way back on June 24, 2000. Then, it was because I'd lost a bunch of weight; this time, I'm not sure why my finger is so much thinner. I don't weigh that much less than I did eight years ago (only about 30 pounds).

I keep having little panicky moments where I realize that my ring is missing. Then I tell myself it's not lost, it's at the jeweler's, and I calm down a bit. Until the next time.

Mr. Jeweler says he'll have it finished by the 13th.