(Jake would have preferred to stay home & play Half-Life 2. He’s pretty much old enough to be home alone – for a little while – but apparently the quiet & empty house creeps him out. So if the rest of us are going somewhere, Jake comes along.)

Watching a half-dozen first-graders following the tour guide was rather entertaining: pack is certainly an apt description. They were very attentive and well-behaved, marching along in what was supposed to be – and occasionally was – a line. I think we all learned a little about how the Post Office works.

Behind the counter is a single large room (there are a few offices along the north wall). It’s full of route stations, each comprised of three shelves of cubbyholes. The mail – what couldn’t be sorted by machine – is manually distributed into the cubbyholes.

I should have taken pictures. Oops.

I was expecting more automation, rather than a bunch of people pushing baskets around & manually sorting mail. I assume all the machinery is at the Mattis Ave. Post Office, which is much larger and newer.

Either way, there’s something very last-century about trucking pieces of paper across the country. I’m surprised that so many people are still doing it.

Nothing like that is going on this time. (Thanks for asking!) Mostly, it’s just laziness.

That, and a tendency to post my blather elsewhere. These days, I have quite a few elsewheres to receive my blather: some public, some not.

NAME
       say - Convert text to audible speech

DESCRIPTION
       This tool uses the Speech Synthesis manager to convert input
       text to audible speech and either play it through the sound
       output device chosen in System Preferences or save it to an
       AIFF file.

And I wondered what would happen if I logged in to Jake’s computer (via ssh) and entered a few commands:

say Hello, Jake.
say This is your computer talking.

The results were…amusing.

Maybe they’re upgrades, I thought. Amazon has done that, once or twice: spontaneously offered to download to my Kindle an updated copy of some book I’d bought months previous. I thought about downloading them, but dithered. I hadn’t noticed anything wrong with the current files; why ask for trouble by updating?

(Unnecessary ‘upgrades’ cause endless problems on Windows. I’ve learned to be a little cautious.)

This evening, I decided to download the new files. The results were…disappointing. The ‘new’ files were all 128kbps & DRM’d. The old files are 256kbps, no DRM. At least iTunes kept both, so I can delete the one & do my best to forget they ever existed.

(I suspect this is some kind of licensing squabble between Apple and the record labels: I bought the tracks during the brief-but-happy time when they were available in iTunes+ format – 256kbps, no DRM – then Apple was forced to revert them to their pre-iTunes+ state. Silly record labels, screwing your customers is not a sustainable business model….)

I read the stories; they were pretty good. Somehow, though, I was never motivated to buy any more.

Years passed. The Axim went away; then Microsoft pulled the plug on MS Reader (after years of ignoring it). I figured my .lit files were gone forever.

This evening, I happened to log in to Fictionwise (never mind exactly why); it turns out all those stories I bought in 2004 are now available in .mobi format (i.e., they’ll work on the Kindle). And I still have the $1.90 credit left over from the purchase.

So I downloaded all the stories (again), and will (one of these days) figure out how to move them over to the Kindle.

Who knows? I might even buy a few more, if I can find anything for $1.90….

What’s so great about a pair of shoes that you’re willing to get up early on the Friday before Christmas and wait in line for them, with no guarantee you’ll be able to buy a pair?

My anwer:

Nothing. Only an idiot would do that.

Aaron Forth, head of the Personal Finance Group at Intuit since last June, apparently sent mail today to their long-suffering OS X users:

As you may know, Quicken for Mac 2007 does not currently work on Apple’s latest operating system, Mac OS X 10.7 (Lion). I understand the frustration this may have caused you and have put a team in place to address this issue. I am happy to announce that we will have a solution that makes Quicken 2007 for Mac “Lion-compatible” by early spring. There are still details to be worked out, so I ask your continued patience as we work through these. In the meantime, you can find more information on our Mac FAQ page.

I very much doubt that they’ve managed to build an Intel version of Quicken 2007. Far more likely is that they’ve licensed Apple’s PowerPC emulator, and are even now duct-taping it to the same old Quicken 2007 for release next year.

Intuit should have had an Intel version of Quicken ready & waiting when the first Intel Macs went on sale – six years ago.

It carries a whiff of the Life of Brian catch-22:

“I’m not the Messiah! Will you please listen? I am not the Messiah, do you understand? Honestly!”
“Only the true Messiah denies His divinity!”
“What? Well, what sort of chance does that give me? All right! I am the Messiah!”
“He is! He is the Messiah!”

If I feel privileged, then I am proof that male privilege exists. If I don’t feel privileged, it means that I have the additional privilege of being oblivious to all my other privileges.

There’s no escape – no possibility that some men aren’t privileged, that some women aren’t oppressed.

There is no magic pixie dust of male privilege falling from the sky, landing exclusively on men & conferring upon them wealth, power & status. “Male privilege” – if the phrase means anything at all – exists whenever one person behaves differently toward another because somebody, somewhere is male. So who’s doing this? I want names, dates, places. Not vague accusations.

The code needs to talk to a MySQL server, so it needs login credentials: user name, password, etc.

Login credentials are supposed to be secret, so they mustn’t be kept in a semi-public Mercurial repository. On the other hand, they’re also important, so they must be kept someplace with revision control, change history, backups, etc.

I decided some months ago that the best place for login credentials is in a private Mercurial repository, kept in the home directory of the relevant account: all the benefits of source control, all the security of private files. Yay.

The problem: the web server process doesn’t know where “the home directory of the relevant account” is, so my code can’t find the login credentials it needs. (This embarrassingly-unanticipated problem caused a brief but spectacular site disruption yesterday afternoon. Oops.)

The solution: the login credentials somehow must be packaged with the Python code, so the latter can find the former by means of a simple relative path. And the best way to do that is with a Mercurial subrepository. It works, sort of.

What doesn’t work? This:

Subrepos don’t automatically track the latest changeset of their sources. Instead, they are updated to the changeset that corresponds with the changeset checked out in the top-level changeset. This is so developers always get a consistent set of compatible code and libraries when they update.

Thus, updating subrepos is a manual process. Simply run ‘hg pull’ and ‘hg up’ in the target subrepo, test in the top-level repo, then commit in the top-level repo to record the new combination. The onsub extension can be used to automate that.

Technically, it does work, at least using the command-line Mercurial client on Windows; but how do I do that in Eclipse? It appears that the Eclipse Mercurial plugin knows nothing of subrepositories, which is…unfortunate.

Investigation continues.

We walked around a bit: checked on Zorba’s (still not open), discovered the cookie store on Sixth Street is still there (it was open, but we didn’t go in), fended off a panhandler or two (there are homeless shelters in town, fellas; try there), and ended up at Cocomero for some froyo.

It wasn’t the healthiest of snacks: not so much because of the yogurt, but rather all the toppings: chocolate chips, M&Ms, etc. But it’s very tasty.

After Cocomero, we hit the game room in the Illini Union basement. We never actually play anything there; Jake & Sam – mostly Sam – just works the controls & pretends. (This time, though, he found a pinball machine with a free game on it, so he got to play for real. All I can say is, his technique needs work.)

And then we took the bus back to the train station, got in the car & drove home.

I think the kids had fun. If not, at least they got some froyo for their time.