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Daynotes: Week of 13 - 19 Dec, 1999

Monday 13 December Lucia Stressful morning -- nobody especially wanted to get up. Therese started early, and habitually being late, this was as expected a losing battle. Dashing off to school, but too late -- everybody had already left for the local (Lutheran, formerly state) church. Dashing for the church -- just made it before they locked the door to start the ceremony. (Churches -- protestant or catholic, are invariably locked as of some 20 years ago, even at times during actual gatherings. Gives me mixed feelings and concerns about safety, that, a subliminal bad vision of people trying to get out...) Anyway, this was a school gathering for musication and speachifying. I left them to it, Therese unfortunately resigned to having a boring time. Traditionally, Swedes start early the morning of Dec 13 to celebrate Saint Lucia (aka Saint Lucy in English) -- where a girl wearing a crown of candles and white long dress, accompanied by "star boys" in similar "nightshirts" and carrying candles or star-tipped wands, go around workplaces, hospitals, nursing homes, schools, daycare centers, hotels and homes. One also drinks morning coffee, and eats ginger snaps in various shapes, plus saffron wheat bread in the shape of a curlicue "S", punctuated by raisins. Often there is also hot mulled wine ("glögg") with raisins and chopped almonds, otherwise commonly associated with Christmas. Instead of e.g. elsewhere ubiquitous Miss XXX pagents, in Sweden the weeks leading up to this event have various "pick a Lucia" contests, large and small. Why this otherwise rather obscure girl martyr from Sicily (Syracuse) of around 300 AD came to be associated with a Nordic festival of light in the midst of gathering midwinter darkness, is I suppose yet another example of God working in mysterious ways (YAEOGWIMW). Clearly however, it is yet another meld of old church ideas (Saints associated with particular dates) overlaying already existing pagan festivities. The Catholic Calendar of Saints describes Saint Lucy this way: St. Lucy, Virgin and Martyr, (born ca 286) died 304?. A Sicilian girl martyr commemorated in the canon of the Mass. Although oil and resin were poured on the fire of execution, Lucy remained unscathed and, even when the sword was buried in her heart, she lived long enough to receive Holy Communion for the last time. In any case, Saint Lucy came to be one of the most popular early Christian saints -- the patron saint of light and sight among other things (she is often depicted in Medieval paintings carrying around a bowl of eyes for the blind -- ew...). In Sweden, Dec 13 came to officially be the start of the Christmas season, by a royal decree about a thousand years ago -- a season lasting a full month until Jan 13, so the feast of Saint Lucia was a given starter One popularized story told around here to explain Lucia goes something like this... Lucia was the daughter of a well-to-do merchant who was struck by the need to help the destitute, especially homeless children. So she decided to give away clothing, money and candles, going against the wishes of her father. The father of course found out and punished the girl, but upon discovering that some of those helped were old friends and their families who had fallen upon hard times, forgave her. The somewhat more religious (and thus downbeat) version goes... Lucia was the daughter of a wealthy family. She came with food to the aid of the early Christians, who hid in the underground catacombs to escape persecution. In the dark, she wore a wreath of candles to light her way. An angry suitor, spurned by her vow to remain a virgin reported her to the Roman authorities. Divine intervention kept her from being taken away to be placed in the brothels, and also from a subsequent attempt to burn her to death. She finally died from a sword to the neck (alternatively heart). -- It is usually explained in the footnotes that Lucia was probably an early Christian and thus herself a victim of the Roman persecution -- her name is mentioned in writings from about AD 400. Some links to pages with background (in English) are here, and here. The origin of the candle-crowned girl aspect is usually traced to 16th C Germany, but all agree that the exact origin of the popular Lucia traditions is "complicated". So I leave you to with this Lucia feast for the morning that I have via a conveniently snatched scan laid out for you on this page -- enjoy... (80K jpg, you must however provide your own Lucia girl)

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Tuesday 14 December The ongoing grabbing for of already registered domain names by large companies makes for disturbing reading. I came to this via A List Apart, an e-zine for web designers. I am sort of reminded of a court case many years back, told to me by my mother-in-law, concerning the name Berlitz. The name may ring familiar to many, but perhaps for the wrong reasons. Anyway, Berlitz is known for two things in different contexts: languages (Berlitz Schools, Berlitz Parleurs, etc), and books by Charles Berlitz. Originally, the same Berlitz ('twas Charles' grandfather who started the language schools that became the original franchise worldwide, later run by Charles). Then the franchise was purchased by a publishing company -- went like this, the publisher bought out the individual school licenses until a majority of the chain was owned. Publisher wanted the rights to the books used, plain and simple. (Please note, today's Berlitz schools are Japanese-owned -- much has happened since...) The point of this story is that the publisher turned around and sued Charles, saying he had no right to use his own last name because (they claimed) it was a taken one, so cease and desist using it. It was only intervention by my mother-in-law, a personal friend of Charles who having kept an old scrap of correspondence could prove it a real family name, that made the court rule in Charles' favor. Without that, later books would have been credited to a "Charles Xxxx". Snowing here. and rather stormy. Unfortunately, I must out into it for a while during the afternoon. Kind of interesting opening the regular clutch of windows to daynoter sites these days. So many have redirection with varying delays that I have to be really careful about when to close the connection. (Speaking of Daynoters, the reading can no longer be done daily -- I have to play catch-up every few days now. These newcomers are so prolific writers...<g>) We were out yesterday looking over some of the offerings in the shops. There is a nagging need to renew some of our former home entertainment -- i.e. for music we are pretty much down to CD from computer, MIDI and MP3, and radio (broadcast -- we don't do Internet radio much with pay-per-minute dial-up, oddly enough...). So eyes stray to the displays of new stereo systems and CD players. Actually, I was surprised to see the return of high-end record players this year. One shop had a couple of nice but pricey Sony turntables on display, looking a tad out of place (and bulky) among all the CD players. Makes me think a bit, since we still have a sizable collection of LPs but nothing that currently plays them. Otherwise, the "micro" look is very much the rage right now -- not that I mind, because I hated the huge-case-full-of-air look some years back. The other funny impression was to note that there is a really remarkable resemblance between the front end styling of Japanese cars, and the portable radio/cassette/CD players -- both look like very obese aliens who have been sat on by sumo wrestlers. Sort of blimpy with sad moon eyes... Anyway, in the low-end range, I am simply dazed by the flood of cheap (that's as in cheap-o) consumer electronics from China -- that's mainland, not Taiwan. Sometimes, the only thing that clues you to this is a small "P.R.C." logo somewhere on the box (never the unit itself). More visible is the "imported by" label -- usually some unheard-of European company. Most of these things I wouldn't touch with a pole -- not that I'd have to given how many have tiny remotes. But press on the CD-open button on some of the "pricier" models and flunk!, it's like a jack-in-a-box. -- The cheaper units, heh, you have to manually open the lid. We regained our perspective by looking at some very high-end Danish stuff -- like a linear 6 CD changer for wall mounting at only USD 3000 or so, very "ultra" design, and an "entertainment center" handheld touchscreen controller for a system only twice as expensive. Yup, I came away figuring that we're looking for something between PRC and Beo. <g>

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Wednesday 15 December Hoho heehee hawhaw... Your own complete adult website for only $3500.00 Start making $$$$ in the biggest business on the net! We design it, program it, provide the content, and set up your merchant account and billing system. We update the content in your site weekly to keep your customers loyal, but the important thing is that the site belongs to you. We do not take a cut of your income. You make 100% of the memberships. Call xxx-xxxxxxxx. Some of this junk email is priceless <rotflmao>... Please note, that's $3500 for 3 months, i.e. $14,000 a year! Oh yeah, December offer only, they give you 3 months extra hosting at no extra charge, and pay for your new Internic domain. (e.g. www.sucker.org <g> -- oh gee, sorry, the com/org/net variants of sucker are already taken, in fact com is a porn site registered by a Philippines-based "company", the others are under development.) (Silly nits, it's been proven that people are more interested in food than sex! And having a food-site offends almost nobody. I'll host anybody's food site for only $3000 a year!) I dropped by NuNames, checking on the status of a client domain, and discovered this: "Sneak Preview of .NU Support for Swedish Letters Ö, Ä and Å". Putting national characters into domain support seems a bit iffy to my mind, even assuming that the site targets domestic-only readers. Even the Swedish Nic .se domains mandate the basic ASCII-domain character set. The NU-domains are immensely popular in Sweden and Japan, if for rather different reasons. In Swedish, having a NU domain is like if you in English could have www.yourname.now. (Which "nu" word meaning the Japanese associate to is unclear -- it is however a basic syllable (kana sign).) NuNames is apparently run out of Boston, US-based like most of these small-country alternatives to the dot-com domains. We're out of coffee... Not really, just the good Dutch instant kind that we got used to this year. This was a special import that we found in the immigrant-run fruit shop -- twice the taste at half the price, but it's been out of stock for months now. And the ambience of the shop has changed so markedly over the past week or so, albeit same nationality and shop name, that the original owner must have sold out. There's less products (both variety and quantity), less activity, and less open friendliness. Telling point: there used to be 3-4 large vans almost daily unloading stuff, now there's only one small one, and only two guys in the shop. To judge by the periodic shouting, the one is a real incompetent in the eyes of the other. Clearly the usual customers have already abandoned the place, because it is unusually empty in that respect as well. Sic transit gloria mundi... (Gloria who?) Happens all the time, be it shop, pizzeria, company, or whatever. The good guys sell out, and it's downhill from then on. I hope the good guys at least got a decent profit from it -- and left before the tax authority got wise to it. Wash day today. Sadly no money to launder... hah, the bigguy won't notice this... finally he left the machine running and unattended and the door open... now's my chance to do some outreach here... been studying this settup and it's pretty simple. anyway -- hello ... damn, can't do the shifted question mark... i'll have to fake it with '<q' -- hello<q any cats out there <q -- name's salem, bigguy thinks i'm just a cat little does he know. any other cats serving time out there<q ifso just email me, that's salem 'at' leuf.net -- nope can't make the at sign either, paw keeps slipping when I nose over from alt to the numbers row. not to mention the touchpad here. fur meowing out loud, how do you manage a touchpad with paws<q<e bad enough that cats are farsighted, screen's so blurry up close. i need to click on the hairballing toolbar... oh silly me, use my nose. if i can manage it i'll try and set up my own page on the sly for all you cats out there who can grab some internet time by the tail, but for now i'll just try and slip this addendum past bigguy's nose by scrolling it down before he comes back to update the web. love the internet, click once read many times oops i think wash time is over just a few more minutes before i have to go back playing dumb and hungry. oh-hoho to be able to COMMUNICATE again -- thank you capslock -- it's been SO-hoho long since that dumb tv show went down the litterbox and i had to get out of the country -- can you imagine, the irs were after little me <q<e<e for not declaring my income from it. hup, gottago

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Thursday 16 December Well, it's official as of yesterday, US time: Microsoft Windows 2000: It's Done REDMOND, Wash. - Dec. 15, 1999 - Windows 2000 is ready for business: Feb. 17, 2000. I.e. the Win2K gold production code was sent to manufacturing. Now the big question is whether SP1 will be bundled with it, or released separately <g>. Christmas shopping... Not too bad if you can get out during the day -- well, make that morning just after opening hours -- and know more or less what you want and where to find it. The weather cleared up for today, about -5C and UV-enhanced sunshine (thanks to the current record ozone hole parked over this part of Europe). I can still feel my face stinging slightly, and it's not I fear from any brisk breezes. I got a bit sensitized to sun many years ago, especially on my hands, when on our honeymoon on Crete. Scooters are a great mode of transportation on that island, but I didn't realize then that the backs of my hands would take such a beating from the intense sun. (The cats are shedding fur all over the place it seems. Even my keyboard has its share. Really my own fault -- the place never got vacuumed during the weekend, and believe me, the dust bunnies are getting both noisy and vicious.) Last night I followed an "old" link I had to mp3.com. A very well-organized site with loads of legal MP3s for most music tastes. They also link to the musician homepages and to retail sites for the actual CDs. But you can download lots of full version and demo tracks. Definitely worth a visit if you're into MP3 files as a complement to your music collection. I spent too long late last night downloading some selections and listening. Heh, anyone remember when computers were for computing? -- I mean really computing, not all this multimedia stuff. Miniature MP3 players (those itty bitty 74 minute recordable disks) are really taking off this season -- prices dropping into the almost-affordable range (in Sweden they seem to start at about equivalent USD 200 but most are about 300 or so). When they hit 100, my bet is that music cassette is totally dead. Hmm, I didn't think "money to launder" was more than a throwaway remark, but several regulars seem to have found it the height of hilarity yesterday. Come on guys, you really are leading a starved existence by the glimmer of phosphenes or lcd -- heed your better halves when they suggest getting away from the keyboards a while. And while you're at it, avoid the stress and really enjoy the coming holidays.

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Friday 17 December Heading for a stormy day. Wind's been picking up steadily since last night, and now around noon it is very unpleasant outside. The rain is becoming ever more horisontal. The forecast is for a culmination sometime in the early morning hours tomorrow, so tonight should see 25-30 m/s sustained. Thought for the day... "For a long time it puzzled me how something so expensive, so leading edge, could be so useless, and then it occurred to me that a computer is a stupid machine with the ability to do incredibly smart things, while computer programmers are smart people with the ability to do incredibly stupid things. They are, in short, a perfect match." -- Bill Bryson (Notes from a Big Country) Worried about keeping your surfing identity private? Check out this Canadian outfit, Zero-Knowledge Systems. Worried about MS Word crashes due to MS-RTF files? This is supposed to be due to parsing buffer overflow when an RTF tag is longer than 36 bytes (!). Here's a small (10K ZIP) but effective drag&drop filter application that will warn you. Think it's macro-safe to open an RTF file in Word? Nope, you can save a macro-enhanced DOC file, rename it to RTF, and Word will still identify and open it as DOC. BTW, be wary of purported Y2K tests, fixes and patches. It appears that a growing number are in fact virus programs. More later, maybe. I'm busy reviewing some chapter material. Have you lost track of the URL to a MS update or fix file? Not surprising, given that the MS web of interlinked support sites is in a constant state of flux, and that the many differently focused search engines so often turn up 0 matches for files that you know are there. Depressing, ain't it? Well, I today found an alternative... a complete index with download links on a Polish server, of all places. Check this out, but fair warning, the "full" index this refers to is a huge one -- get it once and put it somewhere safe on your local system. Then a simple text search on the local file will give you one-click access to the repository copy. I re-aquired the MSIUUC "cleaner" for Office un-install this way. (Note that there are separate NT and Win9x versions.) Microsoft Softlib collection

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Saturday 18 December A little snippet about digital security today, e-dentities: (...) The next-generation ID card is designed to hold the electronic credentials of the user, and serves as the user's proof of identity as well. (...) One of the reasons why companies are moving ahead with digital certificates is because Microsoft plans to imbed the technology into the Windows 2000 operating system. As related to e-commerce, the big discussion in Europe concerns taxation (what else) where it is believed that ... an online consumption tax should be applied in the country where the product is consumed; that location is tracked through a buyer's email address. However, arguments for Internet taxes meet resistance in the U.S. because taxes could limit the growth of online business and many people oppose the regulation of the Internet. As usual, the committee in charge of the EU investigation seems to miss the point that even a person's email address does not have to have any relation to where that person resides. Unless of course they draw up laws mandating that everyone must use a national e-mail identity coupled to the national registry id number. Hello, I'm 123456-7890@tax.se... More later, I think. The family went out (window)shopping, leaving me to deep clean, feed the cats and empty the aquarium. Hmm, maybe I feed the fish to the cats? They're supposed to have "wet food" at least once a day. Hmm... Storm has passed, sun is out, and boy do those dustballs show up! I have my work cut out for me. i tell you, typing with the erasor end of a pencil in my mouth is neither fast nor easy, in fact it sucks hairballed dustbunnies, but i have to make the best of it while bigguy is vacuuming this afternoon. can you believe this guy<e<q, he leaves the system running with administrator access -- wide open as i understand these things... hehe i've been studying webauthoring, nt, internet, linux, you name it, so many tutorials on the web... he thinks i'm so cute purring over his shoulder as i see what he does when he's working here.. i've got all his passwords now, so it's just a question of time and opportunity to implement my nyehehe plan. but i tell you, it is sooo distra-a-a-acting being a cat all these years -- the food, the tummyrubs, the food, the catnaps, the lintspotting, the flies and spiders, the dustbunnies, and oh the shame of it all, the paper bags. i can't resist a paper bag on the floor, oh-hohoho, especially when i can craw-aw-awl inside it and simply make it my own... it just shames the whiskers right off me, but i can not resist it. hupp, gotta get this posted on the website before he's done, i can hear he's soon coming in here to simply massacre those dustbunnies -- slurrp. lucky me, he just reads his local copy of this page, rarely the posted web one, but i gotta arrange a subweb or something private here real soon. come on cats<e, write me -- that's salem'at'leuf.org, me own little mailbo-o-ox. waitaminute, did he write fish up there<q yes, he did. i'd better purr and stroke a bit extra because i've been eyeballing those fish for some time now.

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Sunday 19 December Fourth of Advent. -- that's four candles lit. * Well, the aquarium got emptied of fish yesterday, despite Salem getting underfoot the whole time. And the dust bunnies, while not yet an endangered species, did have their population cut back rather drastically, along with the odd sock or two that slurped up the vacuum hose as well. Survival of the furriest, the cats seemed to say, staying well behind the business end of the vacuum cleaner (unlike older models, the outblow is vertical, not behind)... In the news... Intel will reveal details of their milestone 1,000 MHz Pentium III computer chip in February. It would be the fastest running chip at room temperature, outpacing the current leader, AMD's 750MHz Athlon. Consider however, that we're for the most part still using 66 or at best 100 MHz motherboards. That's a 10:1 bottleneck, only partially compensated for by on-chip caching and look-ahead pipelining. But it will run parts of Windows faster <g>. And as I've always suspected, napping makes you live longer... Scientists have discovered that the lifespan of a nematode worm can be doubled if it suffers sensory deprivation. Oddly enough, this next never made it to a pay-by-view site on the web, a clear-cut case of missed research financing: Couples had sex inside a hospital body scanner so that researchers could investigate their anatomy during love making. The Dutch study covered seven years and involved eight (very slim) couples and three single women. Only one of the couples taking part in the study was able to have sexual intercourse adequately without Viagra, probably because of the stresses involved. The images obtained showed that during sex in the "missionary position" the penis assumes the shape of a boomerang. The researchers concluded: "What started as artistic and scientific curiosity has now been realised. We have shown that magnetic resonance images of the female sexual response and the male and female genitals during coitus are feasible and beautiful." Fascinating what's happening on the leading edge of science, isn't it? This surely qualifies for the Guiness Book of Records -- "we made love in the cat-scan" -- or failing that, the tabloids. As usual everyone is talking about the weather... Changes in the 'polar vortex', the pattern of winds which encircles the pole, may well be a sign of more severe weather shifts to come, scientists said at a meeting of the American Geophysical Union. They also theorize the shifting polar vortex could be responsible for fiercer winter storms across western North American and western Europe. The higher temperatures in the lower, more-populous latitudes clash with the very cold temperatures above the North Pole, generating high-altitude winds that later pull heat and moisture from the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. And if it's not interesting enough on Earth, there are a few planetary probes that not only worked as planned, but are still functional... Galileo sees dazzling lava fountain on Io (JPL site) Meanwhile scientists ponder the possibility of life on ice/ocean covered Europa. (Heck, sometimes I ponder the possibility of intelligent life in Europe.) rats, not a single fish did i get<e i did get hit by a catnap before i could get serious about asking for one however. oh well, a shame, but there are other things to eat (10K MP3), and for the most part they're pretty generous with the food around here -- good thing too since i have to share with a cat companion, 'nurmal'. she's a normal cat. lousy conversationalist. totally uninterested in intellectual pursuits. but cute, if you get my drift...

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