November 2003 Archives

Jennie points out a great book, "A Baker's Field Guide to Christmas Cookies". This sounds like a fabulous idea.

I often find myself frozen like deer in the headlights, unable to decide at the Christmas treat table which cookies I should take. I am stuck attempting to remember if I like lebkuchen or is it really a pfeffernuse. No more, I can whip out my handy cookie guide and immediately discover which cookies I should be eating.

A field guide might also promote being able to track a "life list" of cookies I have eaten and where I was when I ate that cookie first.

A new vocation is born, "cookie-ing". I am a "cookie-er." To be a real cookie-er one must learn about where to find the cookies, the sound each type of cookie makes when bitten, geographic differnces in cookies, etc.. This is the beginning of the next big thing.

Cookie-ing -- The act of seeking out and observing cookies in their native habitat.

Cookie-er -- One who seeks out and observes cookies in their native habitat and generally understand migration patterns of cookies.

Perhaps one should form an "American Cookie-ing Assocation" to promote this past time, with rules on how the life list of cookies can be properly recorded.

Members who submit lifelist and annual list totals submitted to the American Cookie-ing Association for publication in the annual ACA List Report must observe the ACA Recording Rules. A cookie included in totals submitted for ACA lists must have been encountered in accordance with the following ACA Recording Rules:

1. The cookie must have been within the prescribed area and time period when encountered.
2. The cookie must have been a species currently accepted by the ACA Checklist Committee for lists within its area, by the I.C.A. Checklist for lists outside the ACA area and within the I.C.A. area.
3. The cookie must have been alive, wild, and unrestrained when encountered.
4. Diagnostic field marks for the cookie, sufficient to identify to species, must have been seen and/or heard and/or tasted and documented by the recorder at the time of the encounter.
5. The cookie must have been encountered under conditions that conform to the ACA Code of Ethics.

(with apologies to the ABA who provided the template for that bit of parody.

found this stange little program called n-Gen, which generates art once you supply some text. It's fun to play with. Hopefully, it's not some virus. It's odd but easier to deal with than hyperscore.

I took the week off of work. Yesterday I painted the bathroom a deep burgundy color. The paint color is actually called "Scarlet Fever". I'm not really sure why anyone would name their paint after an infectious disease.

Cable guy came yesterday. We now have Comcast phone, broadband and digital cable all for less than I used to pay for local phone service from qwest. So as soon as I switch cell-phone providers (which will be very soon thanks to number portability, maybe this week) I will be qwest free. It took a few minute to get the Tivo talking to the digital cable box. It works now, but there is a little lag when you press the Tivo channel up/down button. The way it works is that the Tivo has a little cable that plugs into the back of the Tivo and sends an IR signal to the Digital Cable box. Now that I have all that working I want the Tivo to do the volume control for the receiver. Unfortunately, that doesn't seem to work ... yet.

I have also cleared out some significant drawers and cupboards in the house that were collecting junk. The good news is that the upstairs and main floor are now a lot neater and organized, even where the guests can't see, but the basement has a few more junk piles. On an organizing note I have finally (re) organized the PC cables under the main computer desk. I hate PC cabling so much. There is always too much cord and those power supplies for peripherals aren't very covenient, and don't get me started on wall-warts. (I need to break down and order some of these.)

I have been thinking of simple ways to play music on different floors in my house without schepping (and losing cd's). I came up with an easy and cheap solution. On the main floor, I put an el-cheapo DVD player, $37.99 after rebate which does MP3's, WMA's, DVD's, SVCD's, CD's full of JPEG's and CD's. Hooking that into the reciever first allows me to play the tunes, MP3's in my case, without the TV on. It also made me hook up the TV to the reciever, something I had been meaning to do for 2 1/2 years. While it's not nearly as slick as the gateway solution or the linksys offering it's way cheaper. The side benefit is that I don't have to move my DVD player from floor to floor depending on who want to watch a movie where.

For the upstairs I am considering re-purposing a PC with Freevo, but need to find a cheap and simple remote to go with it.

I have always had a healthy respect for Amazon's implementation of the "shopping experience". I have used it since it's top 100 list were composed mainly of technical books, before the 'net took over. Today, I rarely buy a book without consulting the posted reviews. I was pretty impressed with the "Search Inside the Book" feature since it is both audacious and well implemented. But tonight was over the top, I wanted to add a few things to an order and it was so easy. I cancelled one item and added two more, and it only took a few minutes. It was far better than any meat space shopping experience lately.

I got a comment on an old entry on smart mobs. The commenter claimed that they were having trouble seeing my style sheet in Safari. I just about emailed them when I realized the email address and web site were probably a spam trap. For shame, using my own mercy for non-mainstream browsers to get me to confirm my email address.

I have also noticed an uptick in spam referrers in my httpd logs. I have seen this periodically in the past but it seemed pretty random. Now it seems like they are using some of the services like technorati to get the url when I post.

We had a nice snow last night. The kids and I went out and sledded down our hill. What a blast now that Matthew is old enough to really enjoy it. I am planning to build a banked track for sledding this year if the snow is favorable. Minnesota is plenty miserable in the winter, but having snow makes up for the cold for the most part. The last few winters were pretty pathetic snow wise. Hopefully, we'll get a good one this year. (Note: If that wish comes true then I'll probably be grumbling about shoveling and snowblowing by mid-January.)

Joel holds forth on the software approach of the day.

This is an interesting post in a variety of ways. It points out how little is really known about some aspects of s/w engineering even until today. I laughed out loud when I saw the quote, " They wawa regularily and their stock is up 20%!" I remember one over zealous management type at my office who said "... the stock price is a reflection of your hard work." Whatta moron. This was in 1999, well before the bubble burst. Even then I knew that it wouldn't last forever, and our stock price was a reflection of a fundemental imbalance where there were more buyers than sellers temporarily. While we were working hard in 1999, we worked harder the following two years when the stock declined drastically.

Reminds me of what a wise software engineer said to me. "You can be sure that someone is lying if they know exactly what day software will ship and exactly how much it costs."

Should one finish a book that you aren't enjoying? I often do. I think I do it out of guilt more than anything. What is stanger still to me, is that I will often pick up another book by the same author a year later and see if the next book is as bad. In some cases this has worked as I really like "Red Mars", "Green Mars", "Blue Mars" by Kim Stanley Robinson, while I loathed "The Years of Rice and Salt."

There are so many good books, I probably shouldn't finish books I hate. It's not that I think it will get better just around the corner. It's that I don't want to be a quitter. If it's really stinko, I'll skim. When it's over I'll know the character went to Prague, but I won't remember exactly why.

I am reminded of something I both heard and read Garrison Keillor say when he was talking about which poems he had included and excluded from his anthology "Good Poems."

Just finished "Journal of the Dead: A Story of Friendship and Murder in the New Mexico Desert, by Jason Kersten. It's a good journatlistic look at a very strange murder in the New Mexico desert. The story is fascinating to me. The basic deal is that two guys went camping in the desert who were unprepared. They get lost . Four days later the boys in brown go looking for them. They find one guy half crazed with dehydration, the other guy dead. The first guy admitted killing him, but claimed his buddy begged him to.

Makes me think I gotta think twice about inviting people to go camping with me.

I've been reading through "Google Hacks". Good stuff there. Sometimes I wish I could make a living as a researcher. Finding data is so interesing to me. Of course, that's part of what my job is now, I suppose.

I finally tracked down a cassette tape I have been looking for. It's the infamous bootleg "208 in Concert" tape from my fifth grade class. The tape had been lurking in my box of cartridges and tapes for my TRS-80 computer.

I tried to make an MP3 file, but ran into some problems. I'll keep working on it. If nothing else, I believe my friend Todd can get the groove out for me.

I'll post the MP3 as soon as I get it.

Last night we were treated to a display of the northern lights aka the aurora borealis. Ever since the unusual recent weather on the sun, I have been waiting to see them around the Twin Cities. Last night they finally showed up. They were an intense green, with unusually sharp edges and creases. I wanted to get some photos but I hadn't spotted them until 10:45. I tried with the digital camera, but the 4 second exposure just wasn't enough. Annoyingly my camera has a bulb setting, but it requires one to keep the shutter depressed and there is no way to set it with a timer or use the remote in that situation. So if you want photo's check out SpaceWeather.

There are some natural phenomena that really capture me. The northern lights are one. I can almost hear music when I see them.

There isn't nearly enough computer related poetry. Here is a recent example I came across while skimming through slashdot comments.

           Algorhyme

        I think that I shall never see
        a graph more lovely than a tree.
        A tree whose crucial property
        is loop-free connectivity.
        A tree that must be sure to span
        so packet can reach every LAN.
        First, the root must be selected.
        By ID, it is elected.
        Least-cost paths from root are traced.
        In the tree, these paths are placed.
        A mesh is made by folks like me,
        then bridges find a spanning tree.

                         Radia Perlman

This is course is a poem about the "Spanning Tree Algorithm."

Excuse the dust.

I have tried to rebuild most of my missing entries from an RSS feed I had laying around. I didn't have the dates, so perhaps some are appear out of order, but it's no big loss. If you are getting 404's on the main site it's still being rebuilt. Hopefully, I'll get it all and running tonight.

I think I'll have to be more cognizant of backups in the future.

Rebuilding after hosting problem. Test post.

Looks like I lost some stuff. Hopefully I'll be able to grab it from a local copy of the rss or something.

John Sundman has his whole novel available now for d/l under a Creative Commons license. I have read the first few chapters a while ago and thought it was pretty good. Better than some other books I have read. He has a harrowing account of writing his first book on-line as well.

Also of note Christopher Moore has a web site. I read "Fluke", over the weekend and liked it quite a bit. Not as much as "Lamb", but it was still all right.

I finally got around to the Matrix Revolutions. I had read a number of reviews, all uniformly rotten, before going to the movie. So what did I think?

I like it but it sure didn't reach the heights of the first movie. First my complaints.

There was very little surpise in this movie. The whole train station scene didn't seem that meaningful and a little drawn out. The dock scene was filled with characters I had very little attachment to.

What did I like?

Seeing old friends.Let's face it sometimes we keep the franchises going just because we like to see the characters who become like old friends. Seeing the "rain" fight scene. Seeing Neo and Trinity go the surface. Ambiguity at the last scene. Is Neo dead? Will he come back?

What do I wish was better?

I wish the scene with the Oracle had been better. Some surprise explanation of of why Neo has powers outside of the Matrix would have been good.

While I enjoyed the movie I hope they are done.

A long time ago, Jennie, sent me an url for Jon Udell's LibraryLookup (bookmarklet).

I finally got around to "installing" it and it's fabulous. I can get all the goodness of amazon with it's user reviews and what's related functionality, and be able to borrow the book instead of buying it.

Note: For ramsey county library, I had to change the 'ISBN' in the java script to 'ISBNE'. Then is worked as slick as can be.

On the surface it's an IDE, but it's capable of much, much more. I have looked at it several versions and plugins, but frankly I still don't get it. If you like IDE's and/or java maybe it's a nice environment. I like vim and scripts myself. The problem is that it while it's purported to be a powerful framework it feels much like walking into a house with all the framing done and no walls up. One really great feature is that it's free and folks who want to spend their money on something other than nifty but expensive tools can make this a real working solution.

Just picked up Sarah McLachlan's, Afterglow album. I don't buy much music lately. I rip all my cd's to MP3 as the music listening I do is on the computer. The annoying this is that everytime you stick this disc into a PC it tries to install software. I didn't ask it to do that. Then music match my current preferred mp3 ripper doesn't even seem to recognize it. Thankfully after a little playing I found that itunes and cdparanoia had no problems.

How did I like the album. It's nice but no home run. I have a thing for moody music sung by moody sounding women.

Hopefully, this will keep me one step ahead of the evil spammers.

If this works half as well as SpamAssassin I'll be delirious.

I have been talking about selling some stuff on ebay.

Well now I have gone and done it. Don't every one bid at the same time!

This first item a 3com ISA NIC, 3C503, featuring AUI and BNC connector was stylin' hardware for it's day. I think it even works.

Today was my first game of the company chess league. I played a valiant first half of a game, but then blew it badly at the mid-point.

I must study more.

Of note today (or was it yesterday)"spinning-jennie :: what's next?" relates fond memories of a Wisconsin Delicacy.

I too enjoy the guilty pleasure of "cheese curds". I prefer my white and my favorite supplier is Rybicki Cheese in the Mall of America, smugled in fresh from the homeland.

I'm headed to the the homeland this weekend to visit my Grandpa.

Today's music will be "Message in a Box", The Police, box set. Sometimes when I hear music that I enjoyed as a kid I think that it sounds dated. I might still enjoy it like Nena's "99 Luft Balloons", but it sounds so corny. The Police on the other hand see a bit more timeless to me. Perhaps they were simply ahead of their time. Their hair in the extensive liner notes are dated though. (Reminds me of how cool I thought this one kid Mike Shibilski was when he showed up with spiked hair reminiscent of Sting. He was the coolest.)

I so hated Iduro, I didn't think I would pick up another Gibson book, but I am really enjoying "Patten Recognition". Hope it holds up until the end.

Yesterday was our first real snow. The kids were thrilled to get their boot, hats, mittens, and coats on and play on the deck. I mean they were really thrilled, like I would be with a new car or something. That's one of the best thing about kid's being able to experience those thrills again vicariously. It's not that I don't have those same peak emotions periodically, but it takes a little more to get me there. I have seen the snow before, for some reason I don't like playing it as much as I used to, and I certainly don't feel thrilled to see it. I can see the beauty in new fallen snow, but it's more of a mental experience.

The Packers won at Minnesota last night. It was great to see them play so well. Farve was on his game, and most everything was clicking. Here's to hoping the rest of the season is as sucessful.

I got more blog spam today. I hate it.

We have been reading "Little House in the Big Woods" to the kids at night. I love this book. I know it might seem like a "girls" book, it might be outdated, etc.., but I just love the simple life the family lives. Sometimes I yearn for that kind of simplicity.

I mowed the lawn for the last time this year, hopefully. It was looking pretty shaggy and defied mulching. That meant a trip to the county compost pile. I had never been there, as I don't generate much in the way of yard waste. I mulch the grass, and have my own compost pile at home. Evidently, it was "take your leaves to the compost pile day." I had never seen so many leaves in one place. It was all I could do to not jump on the bug piles and shout. The fact that it was likely rotting in the middle tempered my desire. I am going to have to get some compost out in the spring and cover my lawn with a thin layer. My chem lawn neighbors will love that, no doubt.

Halloween came and went without much incident. Some children couldn't identify their own costume which I thought was a little sad. I like the home made ones best. Kids who show up in their hockey uniforms don't get much candy from me. No child said "is that all you have" this year. My plan was to fill their little bag with hot maple syrup if they did. I don't mind begging for candy, but be gratefule for what you get for pete's sake.

The great web migration project is done. Although my humble little K6-2 450 hummed along for the better part of six years, I think. I was glad to get it out of the colo. Shared hosting was so much cheaper and relieves me of certain concerns like making sure that I'm not an open relay, or checking on net attacks, or keeping up to date on patches.

I finish "Lamb" by Christopher Moore. I can't recall the last time I read a novel so funny and still thoughful in a variety of ways. Two thumbs up.

CNN.com - Rumsfeld unsure of missing 'mojo' - Oct. 31, 2003

I would love to shake this reporters hand. Donald Rumsfeld has to be one of the oddest characters to have been in public office in recent memory. His way of talking to the press is so strange. Perhaps you have already seen his poetry.