Category: Miscellany

Most of last night was spent visiting with family, eating dinner, and watching Pirates of the Caribbean.  Excellent movie, we’ll have to get our own copy of that one.

We walked home a few minutes before midnight and watched the ball drop in Times Square on TV — perhaps it was just me, but I found it rather humorous how the local reporters would “chat” with and “ask questions” of the NYC TV personalities that were pre-recorded two hours earlier.

2003 is now over and the new year begun.  Everyone gets the chance to stop for a moment, take a deep breath, and start off again with renewed vigor.

Happy New Year.

We were up at the crack of dawn — the boys were probably up much earlier — and watched while the boys excitedly tore into the gifts from Santa. Everyone else began arriving around Noon for our traditional Christmas smorgasbord and gift exchange. Nobody went hungry and I think everyone had a good time. Late afternoon, early evening, the boys and I went to Grandma’s house for more family gathering and gift-giving. It was well past their bed-times by the time we got back. A long, tiring, enjoyable day.

Excerpts of “Microsoft’s festive advice: Don’t plug our PCs into the Web” by Charles Arthur, Technology Editor of the Independent News:

Its slogan is “where do you want to go today?” But Microsoft asks that if you get a Windows computer for Christmas,don’t take it to one particular place: the internet.

. . .

Microsoft’s advice features in a new page on – inevitably – its website, entitled “Protect New PCs Before Connecting to the Internet”.

Anyone who manages to go online to read it without being infected will find the company warning users to obtain anti-virus software, and turn on a protection system called a “firewall” (which new versions of Windows include, yet the company leaves turned off) before they venture online.

But as Simon Moores, an internet consultant, pointed out yesterday, the software giant’s admonitions “place the world in a catch-22: you can’t be sure that it’s safe to go online unless you connect to the internet and get a huge file of security updates from Microsoft, and new anti-virus files – which are also only available online”.

Lots of Family and lots of food. We elected not to have turkey this year — we had a huge Honeybaked Ham, so I doubt anyone missed it.

Excerpt from “Frog eggs fall from the sky onto home in Berlin” by Kathryn Masterson on NewsDay.com:

In a scene that sounds more biblical than plausible, masses of amphibian eggs rained down on Primo D’Agata’s porch last month as the remnants of Hurricane Isabel moved through the state.

At first, D’Agata thought the thumping noise he and his wife heard on the back deck Sept. 19 was hail. But when he went outside to take a look, D’Agata discovered tiny, gelatinous eggs with dark spots in the middle.

. . .

Biologists from nearby Central Connecticut State University say the eggs are likely from frogs. And because no frogs in Connecticut lay eggs this late in the year, scientists and naturalists speculate they may have come up from North Carolina or another warm location on the winds of Isabel.

The A/C is fixed again, but not without incident. There was apparently some miscommunication between the builder and the A/C technician which led to very ruffled feathers between all of us. In the end, the house is cool again, but we’ve been left with hard feelings towards both of them.

The A/C on the South end of the house died again yesterday afternoon. Angela contacted the A/C technician yesterday, and he’s supposed to be here this morning by 9. Hopefully, we can get the unit back up and running again before noon — it’s supposed to be another warm (100F) day again today.

This is the THIRD time in four months that this unit has failed. The first was back in June, and the second in July. Although, to be fair, the July failure wasn’t really the fault of the air conditioning unit itself. We’ll see about this one once the technician gets here.

Angela had scheduled an Internet Chat last night with Brent Hartinger, author of Geography Club, for a Q&A session with other Arizona children’s writers. Unfortunately, just as we were getting started, our domain “disappeared” from the internet. People attempting to connect to the web-server were presented with a “Domain name does not exist” message.

After some investigation, I found that the entire PHOENIX.AZ.US Locality was inaccessable — including public libraries, schools, and some government web-sites.

Apparently there was a typo in a system change implemented on one of the delegate DNS servers last night that prevented the server from recognizing anything in the PHOENIX.AZ.US locality.

The Systems Administrators were quite happy to fix it this morning, once it was brought to their attention, but that didn’t help with last night’s Chat.

Obviously, it’s getting rescheduled.

Have you ever sat in the parking lot at work and watched people park?

I got to work a little early this morning and was listening to something interesting on the radio — I’m a talk-show junkie — so I had the opportunity to watch as others arrived, parked, and walked into the building while I listened. The parking lot was about a third full. I noticed that there are two kinds of people: Those that park as close to the building as possible, driving up and down all the lanes and circling to find the one space that’s closest, and those that park in self-assigned spaces out at the edge of the lot — the same space they park in every day. I fall into the second category.

There’s probably nothing that can be made of it, but I thought it was an interesting observation.

The home-grown spam filters I’ve been using have a success rate of approximately 75% with a false positive rate of about 10%. Not the best stats — I think we can do better.

In order to continue combating the increasing amount of spam being received, I’ve installed and configured SpamAssassin™ in addition to my current filters. It’s currently running in Identify and Mark mode. Once I’m happy with the results, I’ll set it to quarantine the spam instead.

Update 8/27/2003
So far SpamAssassin™ has been 99% accurate. Only one spam message made it into my inbox and it was relatively trival to feed it back to SpamAssassin to teach it that it was spam. So far there have been ZERO false positives.

Waiting in nearly stopped traffic on the freeway, while trying to get home from picking my son up from school, he asks “Why do they call this rush hour?”

Last night was the SCBWI Mad Hatter’s Ball. People were dressed in a wide array of hats. Some were store-bought, like the jester’s hat I wore, some where hand-made, like the White Rabbit hat carved from styrofoam. But the majority of hats were made on-site with the help of the Rad Hatter. The most interesting thing about the Rad Hatter’s hats are that they are all made from paper sacks. Grocery sacks. But they all looked wonderful. Angela wore her Tea-cup and Dorm-Mouse hat she created last week (picture to be posted later).

She and her hat were a big hit. At the hat judging contest, she won “Maddest Hat,” which the Rad Hatter told her later was the best of all the categories since it was, after all, the theme of the party.

Slow to finish getting ready to leave, we were on the road at about Noon yesterday — not quite the 8am target I was shooting for. The trip to LA was mostly uneventful, although I did end up driving in a circle because I thought we had made a wrong turn at the I-10/I-5 interchange and back-tracked a couple of miles to find out we had gone the correct direction the first time around. Traffic on I-10 was fairly smooth until the last 10 miles before our turn on the 405. Those miles were all bumper-to-bumper stop-n-go until just before the turn-off. We arrived at the hotel about 7pm.

We spent most of the day out shopping for things we need to get ready for the up-coming SCBWI conference. I’m exhausted … waiting for Angela to finish another layer on her hat before crashing.

This morning was a refreshing change. I’ve been in the habit of having a cup of coffee out on the porch in the mornings, but the heat these last several weeks has temporarily kept me inside — when the sun comes up over the distant mountains, it immediately gets too uncomfortable to stay outside.

But this morning was a little different. It rained. Not just the little sprinkle we normally get during the day, but a good hard rain. And with the bit of wind that accompanied it, it was coming down at a nice angle. The porch was covered in spray. The sun was still out, baking everything in sight, but with the mist blowing across the porch, it was quite comfortable to sit out there for the 15-20 minutes it lasted.

Yesterday, after work, I finished wiring the pool pump. When I threw the switch, everything worked. The trench still needs to be filled in, but I figured I’d get that over the rest of the week.

The pool’s water-level had dropped sigificantly from evaporation, so I tosed a running hose in it and left the pump running to start cleaning out the water. The pool was filling so slowly, I figured we could leave everything running over night.

About midnight, just before going to bed, I checked the pool again. I discovered that the hose from the return side of the pump/filter system had come loose from the pool and was laying on the ground, pumping water out of the pool into the impromptu lake that was forming beside it. I immediately got everything turned off, reattached the hose to the pool, and tightened it’s clamp significantly. But the water level had already dropped to just a little below what it had been before I had started the hose, and my trench was now filled with water from end to end. I’ll try to fill it again this afternoon.

The pool’s been “topped off” and the pump is running. I got a voltage reading and it’s definitely in the acceptable range. We shouldn’t have any further burn-out problems with the pump motor (fingers crossed!).

This morning, I still felt wiped out from yesterday so I didn’t get started on the pool pump electrical until after 10. Went to Home Depot again and spent more money than I would have liked to, but came home with everything needed to run the electrical line.

I went out to dig a trench for laying an electrical line between the breaker-box and the pool pump. The heat was killing me and I decided I’d be better off renting a small trencher from Home Depot. Unfortunately, the first trencher I brought home stopped working after about 10 feet — the engine would run, but the cutting chain wouldn’t. So it went back on the truck and back to the store. Fortunately, they had another one and were willing to reset the rental clock. Even using the trencher it was hot, dehydrating work. I got the job done fairly quickly, but had to cool down a couple of hours afterwards. Dry heat or not, 110+ is hard to take.

Okay, okay … with the Powerball at a Quarter Billion dollars, I know there’s not a snowball in Hell’s chance against the odds. But those odds are better, if only slightly, than if I didn’t play.