Daynotes 1999 week 27

Daynotes: Week of 5 - 11 July, 1999

Daily notes and commentary -- Week 27

* Link to: last modified 15:30 GMT+2 on 11.07.1999

Hi, welcome to this week's daybook page.

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Monday 5 July

Excuse the late posting, but I've been largely away from the keyboard for a while (see Sunday). Anyway, public holiday for Americans, so why not the rest of us? <g> The weather was hot and windy, so work of any kind was not an easy thing to contemplate today.

Yesterday's outing was more than just a social thing, it also provided a number of insights during discussions with others there -- in part from the understandings communicated by them, and in part from those gained when trying to explain things myself. A fair bit revolved around understanding other cultures. Only to be expected, since we were an international crowd, fluent in many languages and modes of thought.

Another interesting aspect had to do with "western riding" as opposed to "european riding", i.e. how the rider guides the horse. The kids by the way got a short horse ride and thoroughly enjoyed this. Wonderful horses.

Yahoo.geocities is still mucking about with autorespond replies to attempts to communicate with anyone.

... We have found that online help is the fastest and most efficient means of providing you with an answer. We feel that visiting the online help center is essential to your Yahoo! experience. If you still haven't found the answer that you need here, you will always have the option to fill out an online help form which will then be answered by a product support specialist. ...

Maybe so, but this did not address my demands and those help forms sure don't work for the old geocities members.

Finally, however, I found a tiny link at the end of a lot of new text qualifying the terms of service that took me to a form where I could request site removal. We'll see if that works.

Although the professed "we didn't mean it that way" in the text is supposed to calm our fears of content appropriation, and assure members that Yahoo only wants the best possible service for them, it is mostly backpedal for show. The actual terms still bite, even though Yahoo now phrases it as a "license". I am in any case no longer interested in having material hosted there, even legacy pages for free. It will clean up some of the search engine links in due time.

I have been using Netscape 4.6 some in my current Linux installation. It works. More promising however is that progress is being made on a Linux version of Opera (to be v4).

Tuesday 6 July

The day was largely wasted in many mundane and family details. Contrary to plan and expectations. So it goes.

To minimize disruptions I can in some way influence, however,I am carefully refraining from making any changes that might have consequences for my working NT4 system and so impact on the ability to write book chapters. If it wasn't for that, I would by now have tried to meld NT5 with the current NT4 setup. When the urge to play becomes to great, I now instead boot up in Linux.

BTW, some interesting writings on Open Source and Linux by Eric Raymond, and of course a lot of other themes. Many may already have this link, but I am sure other readers have not seen this material. Go ye forth, browse, and contemplate!

Life, n. A spiritual pickle preserving the body from decay. -- (tDD, Bierce)

Wednesday 7 July

Summer is here, and it gets pretty hot in the sun. I keep the balcony door open as much as possible, which isn't as much as I would like because of smoking neighbors.

The day was fully devoted to making some serious progress in my next chapter, while waiting for the O'Reilly verdict on what has been submitted. Heavy going -- lots of detail that needs to be organized, and it's not always obvious how to present it. I'm doing "shared menus", but there are masses of context variations that have to be handled, or at least investigated.

A brief interlude exploring Linux under KDE Gnome desktop in the evening. I like it. Lucky I have a three-button Alps Glidepoint that I can hook up. I've looked in the shops, and I have yet to find a real three-button mouse anywhere around here. Three buttons is recommended in X-windows, although emulation for two-button devices is supported. (What do Mac users do?)

Thursday 8 July

Another wonderful summer day. Therese has been running a high temperature/fever a couple of nights, which kind of limits the things we can do, however. She's much better today, and the plan is a picnic in one of the city parks, along with a few of the families who were also at the July 4 event.

Some pictures of the July 4 grillfest fun and games have been posted by a participant on this site. Especially neat is the picture of my wife Isabel in the potatosack levitation event :)

Good news. Our first two book chapters have received the O'Reilly blessing, so Tom and I can continue with shaping the other chapters without worrying about further tweaking to reach the acceptance milestone. This does not mean we don't have further tweaks to do there, but it does assure us that we are on the right track with all this, and can concentrate more on progress with new material than on simply rewriting.

Friday 9 July

(birthday -- another year of experiences gained)

Bob Thompson notes I didn't say how old I am. Please, I must refigure it every year... Anyway, my kids reminded me this morning that it is 47, so I won't have to do the math this year.

The picnic yesterday ended up being moved to our living room due to threatening weather and a cool wind. On the other hand, it then lasted until about 2 a.m. (kids included), so as a result I am a little bit less-than-alert this ~~morning~~ afternoon :)

Saturday 10 July

Now, today was what I would call a summer's day. Clear blue and hot. Unfortunately, one order of business today was a deep clean. Ok, so it became a semi-deep, perhaps ankle-deep clean :)

Another order of business was to finish shopping for kitten items. Tomorrow has been set as "Day K2" -- the day when two wonderpurr kittens are to be brought home; one for each kid. This is actually about 2 weeks earlier than planned, but both kittens have developed faster than anticipated, and are already clever enough to sneak out from their current home. So tomorrow, there will be lots of pitter-patter-flomp all over our floors.

It would even have been today, but we had already an outing planned. Given two years of really miserable summer weather, one gets quite gung-ho about outings when the weather so allows.

This evening, I also got my birthday cake. Finally. This is a recurring iffy thing, since although my wife promises me a cake every year, it does not always materialize. One thing or another gets in the way -- I tell you, July 9 is for some reason not a good date for cakes :) But this year I got it, only one day late.

These days when almost everyone is out in the country or beach or somewhere, the basement garage with its hundreds of spaces is quite empty (and cool). This, strangely enough, gives rise to reflections on the state of our economy.

One of the indicators of a country's economic state is, I find, the prevalence of oil spots on parking spaces. When times are good, there are few such. When times are tough, there are many. Currently, there are very many, very large indicators of cars bleeding their guts out. I find that this is a better indicator than the prevalence of newer cars (currently candy-red is a popular color), because cars are often bought on the never-never system. Car maintenance and repairs are however paid out of pocket, so this would then be one of the costs that quickly and accurately reflect the squeeze on people's personal finances.

Speaking of squeeze, there was this curious item in yesterday's paper about a car that had ended up in a ditch. This was a small car, a Mazda 121 (US readers: think really small, city shopping car), and turned out to have been carrying, not one, but two families, 10 13 people in all! It was specifically noted by the police that "not everyone had been wearing seatbelts" at the time -- geez, come on, give me a break, that factoid is obvious.

A longer ramble about failure and failings has been posted on the DisISay web, collecting some thoughts about something we often run into in our contacts with other people, but do not as a rule deal with very well.

Midden's Rule: Any sufficiently advanced civilization will have a non-trivial garbage disposal problem.

Sunday 11 July

Correction to last night's text. That mini car I wrote about actually contained 13 people, not 10 as I mistakenly typed in. Some of these were infants. BTW no-one was seriously hurt. I suppose they were packed in so tight, that there was not room enough to "rattle around" in.

* Well, the kittens have moved in. Salem and Nermal. (flompity-flompity-flomp) Life just won't be the same from now on...

It's another hot day, saved by a breeze. Not terribly helpful for thinking or writing, but as the afternoon progresses and evening draws near, things should improve. I hope to make some progress this evening in preparation for next week's applied efforts to complete the next chapter. My co-author Tom has been putting in a lot of effort into his Tasks chapter, as he notes throughout this week's journal page.

-- Timelapse thumbnail --

I noted last night that Timelapse installed and ran perfectly under Windows 2000 (NT5). Well almost, at some point since last I played, the CDs had received some serious scratches which has detrimental effects on the soundtrack. A shame indeed. My guess is that they fell out of the box sometime, or maybe more likely just came off the jewel-case hub and got scratched by this.

I read up some on CD tech not long ago, and I came away rather less than impressed at the way the standards evolved and how computer and audio data is stored. Ah well, it's at least better than 30 cps cassette tape :) My main problem with CDs is that the player in my notebook won't read all "blue" or "green" recordable ones. The root of the problem is probably the chosen laser wavelength and intensity. Worst are marginal CDs that seem to read ok, but where the signal drops out in various places. This plays havoc with CD speed regulation and head seek.

I've always wondered a little bit about the fact that most languages have a "mother tongue", but Germans have a "father tongue". Significant, somehow.

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