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...by the inmates...for the inmates...
Saturday, August 31, 2002Crystal's Bridal Shower
Maria and I cleaned and cooked all day for Crystal's bridal shower this evening. Dusting, cob web patrol, vacuuming, leaf blower to clean street, front walk, stairs, all decks. Washed all deck railings. Cleaned and refilled water fountain on deck.
Lots of food for the event, some supplied by us, others brought by a few helpers: nuts, crackers, artichoke antipasto spread, jello salad, letttuce salad, veggie trays, chicken marsala with mushrooms, lasagna, ravioli, carrot cake, chocolate cake. We had a group of roughly 15 women.
Crystal received many nice shower gifts. I found the list her dance teacher compiled during the opening ceremony: blow dryer, waffle iron, toaster, body cream, spray, leopard print lingerie, red lingerie, waffle iron, $50 gift certificate, g-string and jammies, blue lace lingerie, red lace and silk lingerie, soap container, candle, lotion, towel, bathroom trash can, silver pitcher,nested ceramic bowls, cordless phone, pans, salad items, chip/dip bowls, barbeque fork, spatulas, spice rack, large crock pot, $50 cash, Beanie Baby bears, and stainless steel kitchen cooking utensils.
Friday, August 30, 2002First Classes, Second Wedding Dress Fitting
Maria attended her first 8:00 a.m. class for Microsoft Office certification. She also taught the first evening class for her student teachers. The class has only 3 students.
Crystal went for her second wedding dress fitting.
Thursday, August 29, 2002Wedding Update and College Roommates
Email at work still dead all day.
Change in wedding flower vendor. Received quote for $850 from new, supposedly cheaper, vendor. This is several hundred dollars higher than expected, so we'll use the original vendor. Change in food plans. Instead of making finger sandwiches (and dictating choices for the guests) we will supply meat and cheese trays, rolls, fruit, and veggie trays. Guests will roll-their-own buffet "finger feast" of choice.
Nate blew off the driveway Tuesday in preparation for Crystal's bridal shower this Saturday. He changed the oil in his car and Crystal's. Took oil, and old battery from Crystal's car, changed a few months ago, to the dump. Crystal helped clean house. Nate and Crystal went to soon-to-be new apartment and bought dresser from outgoing tenant for $35.
Beau and Deb, old college roommates, sent email yesterday saying they are considering coming to Crystal's wedding. All of my family will already be staying at our house, and there are many last-minute preparations involved. It would be a shame for Beau and Deb to spend the money, and come this far, when we can't spend much time with them. Their past visits, when we visited wineries and just hung out, were always fun. However, this time would be extremely hectic.
Called Beau this morning and we chatted about their plans. He said they had already done this twice with other friends' weddings and, if they come, would be doing so while fully aware of the realities. He will be in Minneapolis on business just before the wedding and might try to change flight to a 3-leg. They also have a friend in Berkeley who they could see. He would be able to use frequent flyer miles and motel points to do the wedding trip for very low cost.
Spoke with Beau again in the evening again about their plans, his Linksys wireless network troubleshooting, and Microsoft Knowledge Base. They'll come visit another time instead. Beau recently bought a 30-year old Weatherby 12 gauge over/under shotgun with a flawless walnut stock. He shot the gun for the first time tonight. Also discussed wiring of house for sound and network.
Other Beau and Deb news: In the last year they installed new deck, heater, air conditioner, water softener, doors, and kitchen. They are now expanding master bedroom and bath into a suite, adding about 300 square feet. There will be a sitting area with a view.
Template To Do
Need to fix:
- Inconsistent randomizer button location on standard page template; should match home page template
- Duplicate site name on standard page template just above body text.
Wednesday, August 28, 2002Randomizer Relocated
Moved the jenett.radio randomizer button to the top of the navigation column. Other recent changes came close to pushing it "below the fold".
New Category Navigation
Added a navigation link to my Radio Fun site, which is implemented using the Radio "category" feature. One other category needs review before public release. The other two categories are behind the firewall at work.
New Archive Page Navigation
Added new links, in the navigation column, to access the consolidated monthly archive pages. For now, this was done only on the main web site; no navigation link changes in the separate category sites.
Monthly Archives
Activated the new monthly archive feature. This allows me, or my readers, to access an entire month of posts on a single page. Now I need navigation links so users can access the new pages. Rendering an entire month on a single page may be a bit slow for dial-up users, but will be a nice browsing tool for my own review of old posts.
Just One Of Those Days...
John A. Wheeler. "If you haven't found something strange during the day, it hasn't been much of a day." [Quotes of the Day]
Email Problems
Email at work down most of the day. I used to place server redundancy and fault tolerance on the MIS priority list year after year, and my director would support it. Each year he would place my concerns on the master priority list, but they were always considered "infrastructure", none of my concern, and were buried. After a few years, I finally gave up. "You Can Lead A Horse To Water..."
Tuesday, August 27, 2002Movie Night
Bryan and Katie brought the DVD of Mel Brooks Blazing Saddles to watch this evening. Katie had not seen it before. Katie's mother, Nanette, called to say the power was off in town.
Monday, August 26, 2002Sent Long-Overdue Email
A long-overdue email (18 months) was send to long-time friend John today. I really need to work harder at keeping in touch.
Here We Go Again
Bryan's first day back at college this semester. His girlfriend, Katie, goes back next week.
Sunday, August 25, 2002Ford Testifies to Stop Ride Sharing
Just the tip of the iceberg. Go read the entire article. Sound familiar?
http://www.bbspot.com/News/2002/08/ride_sharing.html
"Washington DC - William Ford Jr., CEO of the Ford Motor Company testified before Congress about the nationwide problem of ride sharing. Ford cited ride swapping as the number one reason for the the company's declining revenue. "These 'pool pirates are depriving Ford of rightful income. Three sometimes four people are sharing rides. Less wear and tear on the cars means fewer new car purchases. That's revenue that's being robbed from Ford."
A recent study by the Gartner Group supports Ford's claims that ride sharing runs rampant across the US. The study showed showed that children under the age of 16 were the biggest offenders. Almost 99% of children in that age group said they had shared a ride in the past week. The study also showed that ride sharing had spread to the Internet in the form of "Car Pool" message boards where the "Road Robbers" set up their swaps...."
Fair Use Is Dead, Killed By Congress. Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid.
Jenny, the Shifted Librarian, posted this at the end of July. Her excerpt is a great introduction. I recommend you read the entire Chronicle piece.
Copyright as Cudgel (emphasis is Jenny's)
[The Shifted Librarian]""When Congress brought copyright law into the digital era, in 1998, some in academe were initially heartened by what they saw as compromises that, they hoped, would protect fair use for digital materials. Unfortunately, they were wrong. Recent actions by Congress and the federal courts -- and many more all-too-common acts of cowardice by publishers, colleges, developers of search engines, and other concerned parties -- have demonstrated that fair use, while not quite dead, is dying. And everyone who reads, writes, sings, does research, or teaches should be up in arms. The real question is why so few people are complaining....
Back in the 20th century, if someone had accused you of copyright infringement, you enjoyed that quaint and now seemingly archaic guarantee of due process. Today, due process is a lot harder to pursue, and the burden of proof increasingly is on those accused of copyright infringement. For the copyright act, in essence, makes the owner of every Internet service provider, content host, and search engine an untrained copyright cop. The default action is censorship....
Besides prompting such censorship, the act has another major provision, which upends more than 200 years of copyright law that has, until now, served democracy well: the principle that what copyright law does not specifically protect remains available to all to use, for whatever purpose the user sees fit. The DMCA bars the circumvention of electronic access controls that protect online works, a provision that seems to block the use of even those portions of works that might be in the public domain....
As a result, course packets that used to be easy to assemble and affordable to students are now a hassle and a big expense. Professors are abandoning them in favor of prefabricated published readers or less-convenient library reserves. Getting permission to quote from a song or to include an old photograph in a scholarly publication is getting to be prohibitively expensive. Some professional journals are demanding that academic authors assign all rights in all media in perpetuity to them, then gouging subscribers and libraries for the right to read materials that academics weren't compensated for in the first place. Online journals are replacing paper volumes, allowing publishers to extort all sorts of user restrictions from libraries. And those are just the micro-horror stories, the short-term costs of current trends....
The second rhetorical strategy involves focusing on users of copyrighted material -- everyone who reads, writes, watches, photographs, listens, or sings. This is a more pragmatic approach, intended to warn people that the harmless acts they have taken for granted for years, like making a mixed tape or CD for a party, or 'time shifting' television programs and skipping commercials, are threatened by recent changes in law and technology. The organization digitalconsumer.org is promoting 'The Consumer Technology Bill of Rights,' which makes private, noncommercial uses positive rights instead of weak defenses to accusations of infringement....
We must be blunt about the current system's threats to free speech, intellectual freedom, and the free flow of information. We must be careful not to be trapped in nihilistic rhetoric about the 'end of copyright.' Copyright need not end if we can rehabilitate and rehumanize it. Our jobs depend on it." [The Chronicle, via LISNews.com]
Garden, Wedding Food and Day After
Watered hillside. Repaired hand on garden angel, which deer broke several weeks ago.
After reviewing finger sandwich costs with potential vendor, we've decided to make these ourselves. The vendor wanted $2.00 each for tiny croissants filled with various meats and cheeses. We expect about 200 people, so we'll need to make about 400 of these on Friday and stash them in the commercial refrigerators at the church. We'll use visiting family members to form a production line.
Crystal and Nate will not take a honeymoon. Instead, they will open presents at our house the day after the wedding. Since we would not let Crystal have the hamburgers and hotdogs she wanted for her reception, we will have a barbecue Sunday afternoon. This will be as small a group as we can manage. Hopefully just people staying at our house, the Shermans, the Kelseys, and the few people who might come from out of town.
Saturday, August 24, 2002Garden Work, Dinner With Shermans
More garden work: Maria planting and Bruce watering.
Dinner with the Shermans at "Michael's On Main" in Soquel. Ahi tuna for both of them, pistachio salmon for Maria and Bruce. Chocolate fondue for dessert. Due to a change in his position within his company, Steve now commutes back and forth from the San Francisco Bay area to the UK, near Reading, west of London. The company headquarters, and engineering department, is in the UK and Steve now heads the test engineering group.
Friday, August 23, 2002Wedding Update
Maria and Crystal spent much of the day on wedding stuff. The last wedding invitations were mailed today, except for the few for which we have no address. A new cake vendor will provide a 4-layer cake with pillars and flowers for much less money. Quote from the previous vendor was for only a 3-layer cake, no pillars, no flowers. Our flower vendor will also change. This second vendor, who originally was to provide only the table flowers, will also quote the rest of the flowers. The previous vendor was supposed to give us a discount based on a relationship with the groom's father. We examined the prices and they certainly were no discount, thus the new vendor.
Final Refinance Update: It's A Done Deal!
Our mortage refinancing closed this morning; funds were in our account via wire transfer this afternoon. This refinancing moved very quickly once we found the right lender. Costco/Lending Tree, HomeSide Lending, and Bank One all had web sites which could not handle the load. We tried, several times on each site, to either complete or modify their on-line applications. All sites failed multiple times, losing our business. We applied on-line through Bank of Internet late in the evening of Tuesday 7/30/02. The money was in our account by the afternoon of Friday 8/23/02.
We heard of the Bank of Internet from friends who were using them for a refi. Word of mouth from satisified customers garners yet another satisfied customer. If you want rapid turnaround and good service, contact Katy Grieco, Bank Loan Services, Katy@bankloanservices.com, 888-411-3246 ext. 40.
Thursday, August 22, 2002Refinance Funding, Wedding Invitations, Back To School, Gasoline Benchmark
Title company said that lender funded the refinance loan. The title company now has the money and the loan will close tomorrow.
Some wedding invitations were mailed out today. We sealed more invitations tonight, which will be mailed tomorrow.
Bryan starts college classes again on Monday. His government internship will be reduced from about 30 hours per week to 15 to accomodate his class schedule.
An insurance policy renewal notice, which I discussed with one of my readers last night, arrived in the mail today.
Gasoline price benchmark: 87 / 89 / 91 octane at one of the local independents was $1.549 / $1.649 / $1.749 per gallon.
Wednesday, August 21, 2002SQL Server, Wedding Visit, Refinance Progress
Very frustrating day at work with a vender’s SQL Server database schema.
Spoke to my brother Kirk, in Alabama, about his visit here for Crystal's wedding.
Faxed wire transfer instructions to the title company.
Monday, August 19, 2002Too Much Radio Fun
As usual, I'm still awake; reading RSS news feeds and reviewing wonderful Radio UserLand add-ons. Handy stuff. I added a second OPML instant outline behind the firewall at work today. This new outline is a software maintenance log, posted via FTP, from a category on my laptop to a test server in my office, and rendered to HTML using Marc Barrot's Active Renderer. Is it any wonder I'm tired all the time? ;-)
PGP Is Back!
As a multi-product paying PGP customer, I'm glad to hear this. I'm a big believer in, and user of, encryption. I've delayed moving one of my main machines to Windows XP Pro because PGP was not supported on that O/S.
PGP finds new home with startup. Security veterans take over technology [InfoWorld: Top News]
Directory Browsing Change
Added client-side forwarding to a category directory which was still on the Userland server. The category is now normally upstreamed to another domain I own.
Wedding Cakes, Stamps, Engagement Photos
Maria, Crystal, and Nate each sampled 6 cakes from one vendor and 4 from another. Maria bought about $135 of stamps today. The invitation list was pared down again. Many people will obviously not come from various faraway places. The "probably will come" list now totals 200. Crystal and Nate went to the beach in the evening with their photographer for engagement photos.
Sunday, August 18, 2002Garden Work, Wedding Invitations, Flea Bath, Laundry Changes
Maria and I worked in the garden again, replanting several items, moving rocks, relocating bags of bark mulch, folding the two large tarps previously covering the woodpiles.
Beautiful day again, only about 70 degrees. Gave Misty a flea bath. Happy hour on the deck again. Revised wedding invitation list with Crystal, making further cuts. Discussed refinancing with Bryan.
Told Bryan and Crystal that we need to reduce water load on the septic tank before the rainy season. Crystal and Nate will not do laundry here after the wedding and Bryan will also stop by then. Crystal knows someone with a new washer and dryer for sale. One possibility: We may take the new set and relocate ours to the house Bryan rents with friends. He thinks there is a hookup. Currently, Bryan does his laundry here, John does his at laundromat, Mike and Emily do theirs at one of the parents' homes. Nate and Crystal have a plan for their laundry.
RadioPoint
Installed the RadioPoint tool and tested it with the web log statistics class outline I started at work. Not pleased by the way RadioPoint handles "deep" outlines. Seems best-suited to outlines with only major headings and one level of subheading. Disabled the tool and deleted the slides directory it created.
Blog Post Title Rework
Reviewed all blog posts (but not categories) to add titles if missing. Posts without titles do not appear in the table of contents. I use several temporary categories to stash items for later review. I don't use titles on those posts, which keeps the table of contents cleaner.
Relative Font Sizes
Implemented home page template relative font sizing based on Mark Pilgrim's (diveintomark) accessibility suggestions. Now you can make text on my home page larger in Internet Explorer using View / Text Size / Larger.
Laptop Maintenance
It has been ages since I last flushed my Temp directory. I did that today and regained 5 GB of space on my 20 GB laptop drive. Now I'm running Diskeeper to defrag the thing. Maybe this willl make the sucker a bit more stable.
Saturday, August 17, 2002Registration, Birdseed, Notary, Moonstruck
Maria worked at the college in the morning for several hours, registering students for the upcoming fall classes. I watered the garden and hillside for over an hour, soaking many things completely as they were neglected for the last week or two.
Bill, our neighbor, said they buy 500 pounds of birdseed and 200 pounds of sunflower seeds per week for the various flying critters living in the redwood trees behind their deck. He was unloading another pile of 50-pound bags from his car at the time.
Beautiful day in the Santa Cruz Mountains. This was the view from the family room. Notary came to the house to get signatures on all the loan papers, all 287 of them, or so it seemed. In this age of electronic interaction, why can't mortgage lenders, banks, title companies, and their ilk deploy an industry-standard set of integrated forms? Most of the forms contained duplicate information. One even needed to be filled out by hand, but contained only a repeat of basic information already available on all the other forms. Jeeeeeez, talk about inefficient.
After happy hour on the deck, Maria and I watched the Academy Award-winning 1987 movie Moonstruck with Cher and Nicolas Cage. That was the first time we'd seen it and thought it was quite good.
On Monday, Maria, Nate, and Crystal have appointments to sample multiple wedding cakes; six samples at one vendor, four at another.
Friday, August 16, 2002Registration, Refinance Approval, Active Renderer
Maria spent several hours at the college today registering students for the new semester.
Lender emailed me that our refinance loan was approved. A notary will come to the house tomorrow with papers for signature.
At work, I made more changes to the Active Renderer templates and JavaScript. I tried several approaches to have node status graphics fetched from my system inside the firewall, to no avail. I finally wrote Marc, asking for a hint. He replied that Active Renderer did not have parameters allowing dynamic alteration of the image source location. However, he kindly pointed me to the code section for manually changing the path. This allowed what I wanted, but also changes the rendering for any other outlines I might use. It is decision time... do I fetch the graphics from outside the firewall or leave myself future outline flexibility.
Thursday, August 15, 2002External Hard Drive Testing
Tested Nate's external hard drive tonight. Downloaded current drivers for the Orange Micro USB 2.0 PCCard and the LaCie drive. After installing under Windows 2000, and a quick reboot, I plugged in the drive and it worked flawlessly. Very simple. Nate had the 40 GB drive configured as a single NTFS partition. He had compression turned on, giving him almost 80 GB of effective storage. I can't use the same configuration, as I need to use an external drive with Windows 2000, Windows XP, an iMac, and a PowerBook. This requires that I have at least one partition formatted as a FAT for the Macs to recognize. The drive seemed slow when writing my entire Radio UserLand directory tree to it. It was very fast when reading a single large file from the external hard drive to my laptop.
Radio Configuration Changes
At work, modified the active Renderer CSS file on my test category and training class outline behind the firewall to increase paragraph font size.
At home, after making another backup (duh!), made manual edits to the Radio weblogdata.root file to remove some post titles. Untitled posts do not appears in the "Index of Posts" that I implemented a few days ago.
Tested changes to the master item template to display the category under each post if other than the home page.
Removed the YACCS comment system. It caused pages to load too slowly. When the YACCS servers were toooo sloooow, a post link would not appear at all. It is unlikely that I would have received many comments posted here. People can still use the email link on the home page to send comments.
Added redirect pages in various subdirectories based on Rick's initial post "Prevent Directory Browsing in Radio" today and subsequent follow-up today.
Wednesday, August 14, 2002Contractors, Refinance, Apartment, Birthday, College Help, Celica
Maria hired a contractor to wash all windows in anticipation of wedding next month. Window contractor arrived several hours early, conflicting with pest control contractor. (Lions and Spiders and Bears, Oh My!) Since pest control spray is toxic (duh!) we had to reschedule the spraying. The pest control contractor is under new ownership. We had used the previous owner since we moved to the redwood forest 11 years ago. He finally retired, selling his business to another local pest contractor.
Faxed an authorization form to the refinancing company.
Maria, Crystal, and Nate visited the apartment with the landlord. Nothing exciting; just reviewing which items stay with the place when present tenant moves out.
Called my brother Scott for his birthday.
After work, stopped at the college to help Maria sort through old computer cables and software. Chinese restaurant for dinner. On the drive home, my Celica GTS hit 27,000 miles. Gas today at the Beacon station was $1.749 for 91 octane.
Directory Browsing Follow-up
Follow-up to Directory Browsing with Radio.A couple people have written in about my
directory browsing post earlier today. Some thoughts:Rogers Cadenhead reports that "The Python Community Server, the open source clone of the Radio Community Server at http://www.pycs.net, turns off directory browsing by default."
If you put index.txt in your "gems" folder, nothing will happen. This is because the "gems" folder disables a function in Radio called "rendering" - by which Radio transforms a simple text file into an HTML file and then uploads it to your web site. The gems folder is for any files you specifically want Radio to leave alone... so we need to create an HTML file called index.html that we can save in the gems folder. I've created one - download gems_index.txt (right-click, select "save as") and save it into your gems folder. Rename it index.html (in the gems folder), change the URL from http://your.blog.here/ to your blog URL, and Radio will take care of the rest.
By the way - rendering is a little-known feature in Radio. Create a folder in the "www" folder in Radio. Save a text file in there, wait a few seconds, then go to your web site. You'll have a file formatted with your site template - containing the text from the text file. Play with it a bit - it's a great way to save e-mails to the web, create static files for your web site (it's how I created the about page for this site), and other easy ways to add HTML pages to your site without thinking about it.
[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]
Directory Browsing
Prevent Directory Browsing in Radio.
I think this should be an option built in to Radio, but it's relatively easy for you to do on your own. Here's the issue: Radio is a web content management system - when you add content to Radio, it automatically uploads that content to your website. For many users, their web site is hosted at http://radio.weblogs.com/. (Others, like me, host it at their own domain.) Radio maintains its content in a hierarchical folder structure. But relatively savvy individuals can type in your URL and add folders they want to "snoop" on - and Radio doesn't prevent this.
There's an easy way to do this: drop a text file into any folder you want to restrict access to. The text file is just a couple lines, and it includes a meta refresh command that forces the browser to load a new page. Here's my file - save it as index.txt, and drop it into any folder other than your "www" folder.
To try this out, try going to someone's Radio weblog and adding /categories after the URL. You'll now see all the categories they've set up. This isn't necessarily snooping, but there may be some private categories they've posted. (There are other examples, but hopefully you get the idea.) If you're the individual maintaining the blog in Radio, adding this text file to the folder will automatically redirect the browser to your site's home page.
Memo to Userland: I'd like this to be an option in the application itself. If I disable directory browsing, Radio should automatically drop this text file into any folder it creates.
[tins ::: Rick Klau's weblog]
Tuesday, August 13, 2002Category Links In Posts
I added this feature to my template. Works as advertised. Cool...
[RadioFAQs]Question: How can I add Category Links to Radio Entries? Answer: Adding Category Links to Radio Entries. I'm attempting now to include a list of the categories associated with each entry, following a pointer from Matthew Ernest to a script by Marc Paschal. For me, this is like following a recipe without really understanding the stove, so if it doesn't work I hope it doesn't screw up the legibility of the entries. [Radio Free Blogistan] Answer: Putting a Radio post's categories on the web page..Jake Savin [jake@userland.com] posted in his comments pointers to:
- a macro: Drop listCategoriesForPost.txt into your Macros folder.
- the code for your Item template that calls it:
<%local (adrpost = @weblogData.posts.["<%paddedItemNum%>"]); listCategoriesForPost (adrpost)%>Thanks, Jake! A better way than mine: logic pushed from the template to the macro.
Thanks also to Rick and Roland for pointing the way.
[Phil Wolff: Blue Sky Radio] [dws.]
And A Little Mouse Shall Lead Them...
Disney Uber Alles aka Eldred v. Ashcroft
"The Congress shall have the power . . . To Promote the Progress of Science and the useful Arts by securing for limited times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries."
All opposing briefs have been filed in the Supreme Court case. Here is a short case summary from law.com for those not familiar with the theft, by our Congresscritters, of public domain works from "we the people." Your tax dollars, supplemented with Disney (and other) lobbying funds, at work. Mickey Mouse was about to become public domain property, as intended by the Constitution. Disney purchased Congresscritters to change the copyright act. No surprise, as Congress does not work for "we the people", but for "we the lobbyists" of deep-pocket corporations. Do not look behind the curtain, Dorothy, for I am the Great and Powerful Oz.
Stanford law professor Larry Lessig's copyright slides from the recent O'Reilly Open Source convention are very informative. This is a large (8.5 MB) file, so you probably don't want to try this on a dial-up connection.
"Create Like It's 1790" is one slogan from the Eldred site, as is "Free The Mouse". Why 1790? Earlyamerica.com has a short abstract of the first U.S. copyright act, signed by the Speaker and the President of the Senate on May 25, 1790 and by George Washington on May 31, 1790. The site includes a scanned image of the act as published in The Columbian Centinel on July 17, 1790. The "limited time" copyright term (remember that pesky Constitutional wording above?) was initially 14 years, with a right of renewal for another 14 years.
Congress, dancing under their puppet strings, continues to bypass Constitutional intent by effectively changing the words "limited times" to the simple word..... "forever." Does the Supreme Court have the balls and ovaries to tell Congress to stop stealing the public heritage? Oral arguments before the court start October 9th.
Monday, August 12, 2002Nasty Commute, Wedding Present, and Credit Card
A double-trailer dirt hauler overturned on the highway this morning, closing both lanes of a heavily-traveled artery. I re-routed through several towns and over winding forest roads to bypass the closure. This added 45 minutes to a normal 45-minute commute. It is only a 45-minute commute during the summer. When colleges open in the fall, it will be a 75-minute commute.
Crystal and Nate had dinner at his aunt's house tonight. His grandparents are here from Nevada, leaving tomorrow. They bought the kids a microwave oven from Emerson as a wedding present. 800 watts, 0.7 cubic feet, white.
Crystals' first credit card arrived but she may not activate it. It appears to have a high interest rate + initial $40 application fee + annual fee + you must keep a minimum savings account balance at the issuing bank. The savings account balance determines your credit card limit
Sunday, August 11, 2002Deer Trouble, Bad Check, Festival, Random Link, Radio Fun, Movie du Jour
Deer broke the arm off of an angel in the garden.
Last week Bryan received a $500 check from a former employer, which bounced due to a closed account. Probably an accident since the gentleman is relocating his business from our town to another. Bryan did router and server configuration, maintenance, and customer support for him. We'll see...
Maria and I attended our local art & wine festival with chihuahua Misty in a bellypack. Heard a local friend Mike M. perform; singing and playing guitar.
The jenett randomizer (the little blue button, top center on this page) took me to GIGO: words unreadable aloud, another Bay Area blogger. Found that he referenced my site last month, the first link of which I am aware. We are the same age. He also relocated from Southern California, but years earlier. One post on his site led me to John Udell's storyList macro and Marc Barrot's radioScan. I tested the storyList macro, Marc's modified version, on my stories page as a table of contents. It lists the stories (only those with titles), links most of them OK, but does not properly link to category posts. I'll check further. I added John's leading date text back to Marc's version, which may have caused the failure.
Last week I received my first YACCS comment from a post author whom I referenced.
Bryan and Katie brought a DVD to watch during dinner. Amelie, a French movie with English subtitles. We made more hot shrimp and Hawaiian chicken pineapple kabobs.
Radio Stuff To Try
John Udell's storyList macro
Saturday, March 16, 2002
Listing titled items on a storyList page
If I've got this right, posting this item should update my new storyList page, which enumerates all my titled items in reverse order, so that it also includes this item.
Hey, it worked. Cool. OK, here's how. First, a script which gathers all the posts that have titles:
on storyList()
{
local (s = "");
local (adrblog = radio.weblog.init ());
local (adrposts = @adrblog^.posts, i);
for i = sizeof (adrposts^) downto 1
{
local (adr = @adrposts^ [i]);
local (t = adr^);
try
{
local( title = t.title); // if none, skip to next post
local(d = date.year(t.when) + "/" + string.padWithZeros(date.month(t.when),2) + "/" + string.padWithZeros(date.day(t.when),2));
local( itemno = nameOf(adr^) );
regex.subst("^0+","",@itemno);
s = s + "<p>" + d + ": " + "<a href=\"http://radio.weblogs.com/0100887/";
s = s + d + ".html#a" + itemno;
s = s + "\">";
s = s + title;
s = s + "</a></p>";
};
};
return(s);
};
I saved this as /radio/Macros/storyList.txt. Then I wrote a story that contains nothing but a reference to the macro, in other words:
<% storyList() %>
So far so good. But how to make it update when new postings appear? I got the necessary ideas from Russ Lipton and Simon Fell.
From Russ, I got the idea for a script that touches the storyList, so it will re-upstream. From Simon, I learned of the callback that can invoke that script when an item is published. So, I wrote this:
on updateStoryList(adrPost)
{
on touch(path)
{
try
{ file.touchPath(path) }
};
file.visitFolder(user.radio.prefs.wwwfolder + "stories\\2002\\03\\16", infinity, @touch);
};
And I entered it as a script, called updateStoryList, in the table user.radio.callbacks.publishItem.
Nice. Now, I think I'll have a neat and automatically maintained list of my titled items.
One gripe, which I noticed again while doing this: the permalink's target (e.g., <a name="a146">) has been in the wrong place since the advent of titles. It should come before, not after, the title.
10:59:27 PM
Saturday, August 10, 2002Hawaiian Theme Night
Just returned from wonderful five-hour dinner party at Tom and Nanettes's with Hawaiian theme. Bryan and Katie were not there because they attended a concert with friends. We brought pupu balls, hot shrimp, and lomi lomi salmon tomatoes. Tom and Nanette prepared Chilean sea bass, Norm and Saint Sue brought dessert, John and Becky (Betsy?) brought salad, Barb brought dip. Barb's husband, a cop, was not there, flying back from Indonesia. Cigars for Tom, Norm, and Nanette.
Another Quick Apartment Note
Rent is $750/month + about $85/month for utilities. I have not seen it, but Maria has. It is not a studio, but a one-bedroom. Heard something about a small second room that Nate might be able to use for schoolwork? Glad this worked out for them. Things are tough enough when you're getting started on your own. At least they can afford this, and are not far away.
Maybe more details later. For now, to sleep, perchance to dream...
Friday, August 09, 2002Apartment: We Have A Winner!
Maria called this afternoon with good news. The landlord of the nice apartment came to her office and said Crystal and Nate could have the place. He will need first month rent plus $1,000 security deposit. The apartment will be available September 1st.
Thursday, August 08, 2002Active Renderer Rocks!
I've tinkered with the Radio outliner over the past few days. My main test outline is inside our corporate firewall, but a recent snapshot is deployed in my test category on my external FTP test site. This XML file in OPML format was rendered to HTML using the Active Renderer from slam. Very cool. I'll replace my current "Radio standard" blogroll with an Active Roll shortly.
Wednesday, August 07, 2002Refinance, Apartment, Old Friends, Morons, Hard Drive, Dinner Fun
Faxed supporting documents to lender. They acknowledged receipt and submitted package to underwriting committee.
Landlord for the nice apartment seems to be leaning toward Crystal and Nate, but would require us to co-sign on the month-to-month rental agreement.
Talked to Mark, my former director. Time passes so quickly; had not spoken to him in several months. Just about finished with all the changes to his castle on the beach. Discussed computers, our kids, stock market (boo, hiss)
On the drive home from work, some jerk almost ran me off the road by changing lanes while I was right next to him. Just missed taking out the side of my car. Great brakes on my Celica kept me out of the way of the bozo. Moron in an F150 type truck, thought he owned the freakin' road. He was trying to get around another vehicle, only to get off at the next exit. Idiot. Luckily, not a scratch on my car.
I have been researching portable hard drives, so Nate brought his over for me to try. Nice of him. Could not play with it tonight because...
Had great five-hour dinner and conversation with Craig and Nancy. Charles and Marty could not join us because they had tickets to a Mozart concert. Discussed Craig's new pressure washer, their three web sites, my small CMS system, kids, religion, fantastic famous furniture, new speakers and speaker enclosures...
Tuesday, August 06, 2002Active Renderer Outline Testing
More on this later too. Active Renderer rocks!
Refinance, Apartment, No Hawaii
Lendor needs supporting docs, but has not told us what they need yet. Found their UPS Express package on the porch when I returned home this evening. Gather documents. Problems with our corporate web-based system for W-2 copies.
A third person is now interested in the nice apartment.
Scheduling problems and lack of airline mileage award openings mean we can't go to Hawaii with Charles and Marty at the end of September.
Monday, August 05, 2002Apartment Hunting and Refinance Appraisal
Nate and Crystal looked at two apartments today; one crummy in another town, one nice in our town. The crummy one had a bedroom ceiling so low that Nate could not stand up all the way. Maria spoke twice to the landlord of the nice apartment, who works at her college, and who knows Crystal and us. There is also another single woman interested in the nice apartment. The landlord will start taking applications tomorrow.
The appraisers (husband and wife team) came to look at our place today for refinance application. They will submit their information directly to the lender, so we don't know anything yet. We are entitled to a copy of the final appraisal.
1937 Road Trip
I only viewed a few pages due to slow performance. Watching the traffic lights on my wireless NIC, I think their server is overloaded tonight. Cute fusion of history and modern presentation, but too hard to enjoy due to performance. Still, it got me thinking about some items from my youth that would be nice to post
"In 1937, Nebraskan Joycolyn Knapp took a road trip with her family; in 2000, her grandson put her trip journal on the web. In addition to a mileage log and a list of expenditures (229 gallons of gas: $40.02), the journal contains dozens of photos of Depression-era America, including Yellowstone, New Orleans, and San Francisco. The postcards Grandma Knapp chose to save and the things she chose to document are wonderful both in themselves and for their portrayal of the American road trip before the birth of the interstate highway system. (via Portage) [MetaFilter] [Ye Olde Phart]"