October 2008 Archives

Any message in one's inbox that has the word 'Snopes' in the subject line is a chain letter, and can be safely disregarded.

The stock market goes up 900 points one day, then it goes down 900 points the next.

It's just a big pile of cash, sloshing back and forth, accomplishing nothing.

Tried just now to send mail to my mother; it bounced:

Remote host said: 550 5.1.1 Not our Customer

There seems to be a little confusion here....

From today's Carmi Times:

Ted H. Matsel, age 83, died Thursday, October 23, 2008 at Wabash Christian Retirement Center in Carmi, Ill.

It would appear that Mr. Matsel was related somehow to Alice Matsel, who married John Sturm, son of James Clinton Sturm and Arrena Alldredge.

Alternately, the obituary says Mr. Matsel is survived by - among others - Mary Alice Brashier, who might be the widow of Vernon Brashier, who was the brother of Raymond Brashier, who - stay with me, now - was married to Lena Felty, who was the granddaughter (via Orlando Felty) of Sylvanus Felty, my great-great-grandfather.

Which, I suppose, means he's not related to me at all. But I figure I'll add him to my genealogy database anyway.

Barack Obama is young, charismatic, eloquent, inspiring, etc., etc. - and likely to be elected president eight days from now.

When I listen to his speeches, or see pictures of the huge, enthusiastic crowds at his campaign rallies, I wonder: is this what it was like in 1960, when John F. Kennedy was running for president? Or 1968, when Robert F. Kennedy was running?

(If so, does that mean somebody's going to shoot him before the end of his first term?)

I seem to have strained my back. Again.

It's been delicate for a while now. I think the final straw this time was carrying two boxes of magazines out to the curb, last garbage day. (Another example of how irrational hoarding behavior is bad for one's health.)

I've been trying to take it easy, these last few days, but - alas - my tortured spine shows no signs of healing on its own. I want pills, says Mr. Spine. Give me pills!

So my Friday morning commute will likely include a stop at Convenient Care, to impress the doctors with my wretchedness and plead for a few dozen cyclobenzaprine.

Earlier in the month, Jennifer & I let the TiVo accumulate quite a backlog of shows. We're working through them, slowly, one or two shows per night.

Currently, we're watching:

• Eleventh Hour - A bit erratic, as if the writers & actors haven't quite figured out the characters yet. I predict swift cancellation for this one.
• Fringe - Strange. Uneven. But growing on me. The star - Anna Torv - has a squinty, bewildered look that is rather distracting.
• Heroes - Season three is better than season two, but not as good as season one.

TiVo says we have two episodes left - one each of Eleventh Hour and Fringe - and then we'll be caught up.

Meanwhile, over on Twitter I have a new follower: the News-Gazette.

I wonder how they found me. Perhaps they're just following everybody whose profile mentions Champaign or Urbana.

(I followed them back, though not without some guilt: we just cancelled our newspaper subscription.)

Rather chilly this morning: a mere 37° when Jake & I were out waiting for the school bus, and only 2° warmer an hour later when I was out waiting for my own bus.

During last night's yard-waste rebagging project, the air smelled strongly of wood smoke: one of the neighbors has a fireplace, it seems. (Or, perhaps, was ignoring the city ban on leaf-burning.)

I need to line up some warmer clothing, now that autumn is here. Most of what I have is rather baggy these days. (Would it be wrong to wear suspenders with sweat pants?)

Last month, I said I wouldn't be signing up for an account on Twine.

This morning, I heard that Twine was out of private beta, and - having long since forgotten my promise - I rushed over to claim my favorite username.

Somehow, I'd gotten the notion that Twine was a bookmarking site, sort of like del.icio.us or Zigtag; but it isn't. It's more of a note-taking site, like EverNote (or OnFolio), plus a commenting / discussion system.

I'm not terribly interested in that sort of thing. I already have plenty of ways to share with the world any web sites I've found & commentary I may have on them. So that's a big never mind on my shiny new Twine account.

Sorry, Twine.

Tomorrow is the first city yard-waste pickup in our part of town, so this evening I dragged a half-dozen bags of leaves, branches, etc. out to the curb.

All of it had been bagged up last summer, then stacked behind Jake's basketball hoop (in the back yard) to await the fall pickup. (The garbage company will pick up yard waste any time, for a fee. I'd rather stare at yard waste bags all summer than pay somebody to get rid of them earlier.)

But yard waste bags are designed to decompose, so the original bags were quite faded and brittle, with a tendency to rip when moved. I had to dump everything out, and re-bag it. (I remembered to wear gloves this time, so my hands are - relatively - undamaged.) When I was finished, I had five rotted-out, torn-up bags to dispose of.

I briefly considered putting them in the trash, but decided instead to put them in a yard waste bag, out at the curb with the others.

After weeks of foolery & irritation, trying to persuade iTunes to synchronize my iPod without hanging, I hatched a desperate plan: reformat the iPod. It seemed likely that the repeated undock-sans-ejects to which I had subjected it had scrozzled its data to the point that a clean synchronize was pretty much impossible. My only hope was to start completely fresh.

Last night, once the kids were in bed (which in Sam's case took rather longer than it should have), I took the iPod & its dock out to mindy, which - surprise! - has no FireWire ports. I tried the WRI laptop; no FireWire there, either.

So this morning I took my iGear to work, and tried it on the Vista machine. The iPod reformatted with no difficulty. Just to be thorough, I moved it to the iMac - which, in theory, is running the same version of iTunes as mork - where it again reformatted without complaint.

This evening, after some post-dinner kitchen tidying (and a bit of Sam cleanup - we're in the really messy stage of potty-training, but I think we're making progress), I plugged the dock back into mork and gingerly docked the iPod.

iTunes happily begin copying all thirty-odd gigabytes of music back to the iPod. I wanted to stay and observe the entire process, but Sam was having a meltdown. (No, little boy, Mama's sewing machine is not a toy, and you're not allowed to play with it.) I can only hope that when next I have an opportunity to check on it, it's still copying (or - dare I hope? - has finished, successfully).

So, after a few weeks of music-less workdays, I may once again have some tunes to occupy the non-coding portions of my brain. Yay.

Adding two tablespoons of molasses to a batch of crock-pot oatmeal lends a disturbing brownish tinge, but doesn't have much effect on the flavor. (Where did I get the notion that molasses is sweet? It isn't.)

Still messing around with mint.com. It's no replacement for Quicken, but I think it will prove useful - if only for the notifications it sends out when large charges / deposits appear in our accounts. (Which will spoil the surprise of the WRI annual bonus. Sorry, Stephen.)

Poked at my pedometer web application thingy; patched in some rather spiffy script.aculo.us tricks. (A few months back, I bought a copy of Prototype and script.aculo.us by Christophe Porteneuve; it's written in a curious style but is proving helpful enough.) I don't suppose my pedometer application will ever see the light of day - my Pair account doesn't provide Python cgi scripting - but I'm using it at home, which is enough. (And learning a bit about writing web applications.)

Played Age of Empires once. It seems there are two ways for a game to turn out: too easy (i.e., boring) and too difficult (i.e., frustrating). Either way, I seem to be losing interest. (Won't Jennifer be pleased....)

Jennifer found a crock-pot pumpkin spice latte recipe; since we had all the ingredients on hand (except, alas, for whipped cream), I started a batch. It's bubbling away in the kitchen, nearly ready to consume.

Just now, I have the house to myself: Jennifer, Jake & Sam had a party to attend (I was invited, but declined; I don't suppose anybody missed me), with a stop at Curtis Orchard afterward. I imagine they'll be home soon.

Another vacation day today: and so while everyone else's weekend is just beginning, mine is already half over.

I must confess, it was not the most productive of days. I updated Quicken, I read a pile of genealogy magazines, I played Age of Empires (way too many times). I even checked on work a few times: fixed a few bugs, answered some mail, made sure the build was running more or less smoothly.

Jennifer & I tried to make some bread this afternoon, in the bread machine. It was supposed to be whole-wheat with cran-raisins (a last-minute substitution for currants); but the dough never really came together (too dry?) and the yeast failed to produce any rise at all. The result was not so much a loaf of bread as a small, charred lump with a gummy center.

After chiseling through the outer layers, I ate more of the interior than was perhaps wise; then Sam & I tossed the remainder out the back door. Maybe the birds will eat it - or maybe it will sit, weatherproof through the autumn and winter, until the spring rains finally dissolve it.

I took a picture of it:

Update: After a day's aging in the back yard, the disaster loaf proved irresistible to a member of the local squirrel population.

I had an account on http://rudder.com/ this evening, for about ten minutes.

It's pretty enough, I suppose, and the what's-left forecasting is very interesting - but there are no categories. Rudder will tell me how much money we have left after paying the bills, but it can't tell me how much we spent on groceries this month.

That's pretty much a deal-breaker. Sorry, Rudder.

In other news, the chimps at Intuit have reduced the price for Quicken Online from $2.99/month to...free, presumably in response to all the other free services that have popped up recently.

Alas, after suffering with Quicken for the Mac over the last two years, I have quite a bit of hostility towards all things Intuit, and probably won't be trying Quicken Online.

Amazon.com says:

As someone who has shown an interest in Camera, Photo & Video, you might like to know that, through September 30, we're offering special 12-month financing on top digital SLRs, lenses, video cameras and more.

I have two reactions:

• Why did they send this two weeks after their financing offer expired?
• There may be people in the world whose willingness to spend money on camera toys so far outstrips their cash on hand that they'd jump at the chance for twelve-month financing; alas for Amazon, I am not one of them.

Maybe I should figure out how to unsubscribe from these silly mailings. I've been receiving them for months now, but Amazon has yet to offer anything remotely tempting.

Carried two boxes of National Geographics out to the garage this morning; they'll be going out with the trash later this week. The rest - all in slipcases - are lined up on top of the living-room bookcases. Getting rid of them will be slightly more difficult.

Wondering if there are any used-book stores in town that buy used hardcover science fiction, of which I have rather a lot I'm looking to unload (Orson Scott Card, that sort of thing). There used to be a place in Urbana that bought used paperback science fiction; if it's still there, I imagine I'll be visiting one of these days.

Made some adjustments to my Amazon wishlist. I hope Santa hasn't made an early start of things this year.

http://www.flickr.com/gift/

Poor Mr. Jake, he's caught some germs. (Most likely, the same germs I've been dealing with for the last week.)

He had a temperature of 101° yesterday, and again this morning.

No school for you, young man. (And on the first day after fall break, too.)

Walking through the living room just now, I noticed the Dell Axim X30, sitting in its dock. It had been there for a month or two, because the battery won't hold a charge any more.

I'm tired of looking at this [censored] thing, thought I. It's useless.

So I undocked it, removed the memory card (just in case), and zeroed the memory. Then I crawled under the desk and unplugged the dock.

And then I threw it all in the trash.

Shortly after I graduated from college - not quite twenty-five years ago - I did two things: I signed up for the Book of the Month Club, and I subscribed to National Geographic.

I joined BOMC with the idea of discovering new & interesting books that would be hard to find browsing in the average bookstore. It was a way to build my library while avoiding the best-seller lists (on which the worthiest books seldom appear).

The first thing I bought from BOMC was Will & Ariel Durant's Story of Civilization: ten enormous volumes, spanning the entirety of human history. (I never read them; a few years back, we unloaded them at a garage sale.)

Once upon a time, I was a regular customer; I accumulated nearly a hundred book-dividend credits (then was cheated out of them when BOMC discontinued that program). But then I lost interest. These days, few BOMC mailings get opened & read before they go in the trash. I can't remember the last year in which I bought two books from BOMC.

And National Geographic...everybody subscribes to National Geographic. It's obligatory. I read them, I collected them; I even got in the habit of paying an extra $20/year for some cheesy faux-leather slipcases to hold the magazines once I'd finished reading them.

But then...I lost interest. Most of 2007's issues went unread into their slipcases. I've been better this year at keeping up, but my heart's not in it any more.

So last week, I cancelled them both. No more BOMC mailers to throw away, no more yellow magazines to sit accusingly on the nightstand, no more piles of slipcases to clutter the closets.

There's a difference between tradition and inertia; BOMC and National Geographic ended up on the wrong side of the line. And so they went.

Looking at online personal financial-management sites:

• Buxfer: No forecasting. Tracking IOUs to other Bufxer users is a curious gimmick, but not terribly useful.
• Expensr: No forecasting. And the whole dropped penultimate e business has been done to death: Flickr, Blippr, Expensr, etc., etc.
• Geezeo: Very pretty. Haven't looked at it much.
• Green Sherpa: Trapped in an unending private beta. Might be interesting, if I'm ever allowed into the clubhouse.
• Mint: Interesting.
• Rudder: Has forecasting, which is the #1 feature I want from financial management software.
• Wesabe: No forecasting. Strange emphasis on community, as if my chief reason for managing our money were to chat with other people about it.
• Zero: Amusing slogan - Here the bloody hell we are - but they're an Australian business bookkeeping service. As we are neither Australian nor a business, Xero is of limited value to us.

Things I want from financial management software, either desktop or online:

• Automatic downloading of transactions. I hate data entry, if only because I keep making mistakes. I'd much rather let the software handle the grunt work of fetching transaction data from the bank.
• Sensible categorization. Every package I've used has its own slightly-different set of categories. I'd rather use my own set, laboriously worked out over years of using MS Money and/or Quicken. (It would be really cool if I could export my categories from Quicken, then upload them to the online service. Alas, I don't think any online service supports this.)
• Forecasting. The single most important question any financial management service has to answer is: Do we have enough money? If I hit the grocery-store salad bar this week, will the mortgage payment bounce next week? MS Money was pretty good at forecasting; Quicken is barely adequate. Only Rudder has anything similar.

I've been experimenting with Mint, but not really getting into it. The transaction downloading is slow & unreliable, the automatic categorization doesn't work very well (and the categories themselves aren't what I'd prefer), and there's no forecasting.

I might poke around a bit with Rudder, if I get sufficiently motivated.

Way back when I still used a film camera, I always took my film to The Finish Point to be developed. They were nice people, they did good work.

But in 2001, I bought the Kodak DX3500 digital camera, and I didn't do nearly so much film photography any more. In 2003, the Nikon N8008's camera back failed, and I no longer had a film camera to use. Buying the Nikon Coolpix 3700 in 2004 pretty much guaranteed that I'd never buy another film camera. For a while, Jake was really into taking pictures with disposable film cameras, but even that fizzled out when Jake started using the DX3500.

So for a few years now, we've had no reason to visit The Finish Point. But this morning I happened to be walking past Old Farm, and had the notion to peek in the window & see what's happening there these days.

Nothing much, it seems. The store was closed, even though according to the posted hours it should have been open; and there was a note on the door from the Old Farm management: We received a report of utility problems with your store, but were unable to contact you.

It was dated August 29th.

A search of the Champaign County Circuit Court's online case records turns up a number of disturbing matches for The Finish Point's owners, J__ & T___ M_____, but I don't think either of them is behind bars just now.

It looks like The Finish Point is no more, but its demise is proving to be a messy and protracted affair. Alas, Finish Point.

Are three positions which:

• Have unusual wardrobe requirements;
• Are generally held for life;
• And prompt endless speculation in the press as to which incumbents are likely to die in the near future.

Some experimental photography from the recent vacation:

These were assembled with Microsoft's Image Composite Editor, which was released a week or two ago. It works quite well: just drag the images onto the editor window, and - after a bit of grinding - the assembled panorama appears.

(Judging from the sine-wave appearance of my panorama shots, I really need to work on holding the camera level.)

Vacation 2008 is, alas, over.

Thursday we drove down to Louisville; Friday we visited the Patton Museum in Fort Knox, then drove up to Indianapolis; today we visited the Children's Museum, then came home.

The kids had fun, most of the time. There was much swimming in hotel pools. There was occasional drama. And there's an O'Charley's restaurant in Louisville to which we can never return, since one of us threw up just outside their front door (after a regrettable overindulgence in chocolate milk). The car held up well. (I confess to a certain surprise at this.)

A few pictures can be found over on Flickr.

NOAA reports the overnight low in Champaign was 39°. How autumnal.

It occurs to me that I haven't yet done the annual survey of warm clothing: what still fits, what hasn't deteriorated to the point of unwearability. Perhaps I should work on that before the snow falls.

I'm hoping to wear my army-surplus field jacket this winter, for the first time in ten or fifteen years. I imagine a visit to the dry cleaner for field jacket re-waterproofing & general refurbishment might be in order, unless it would cost too much. Must investigate.