Monday - November 29, 1999

The morning mail brought great news, I think. I've been given provisional membership into the Daynotes.com gang. For the two of you out there who have not yet heard of them, they are a loose collection of writers, scoundrels and rogues (you know who you are). The thread that holds everything together is the use of computers but that does not mean topics can't range from the meaning of life to what do you do if a psychiatric patient won't take their medication. Check them out at the address above.

The start of the shopping season was this past weekend and I did my part to help the local economy by buying a Sony S330 video DVD player. To test it, I also got a copy of the Rolling Stones "Bridges to Babylon" concert DVD. It really is amazing how sharp the picture is and how good the sound is. Especially if you have an "S" video connector in your TV. I switched back and forth between using the S-connector and the separate audio and video RCA type plugs. The S-connector wins hands down. The picture is sharper and the colors appear to be truer with little or no color bleeding. With prices dropping below $175, there is no reason I know of for not getting one soon.

This morning's paper has an article (note the link changes at the end of today) about how the University of Hawai'i web page does not meet accessibility standards for the disabled (mostly the blind). I'm not sure what those standards are or if they come under the Americans with Disability Act. But if they do, perhaps this is something that the industry will have to take a look at. Locally, there is at least one lawyer who makes a living on filing cases under this Act. And since most people settle rather than go through a long and expensive trial, a pretty good living it is. You have been warned.

***** Noon Update *****

OK, Dr. Jim, I will check my email over the weekends. I promise. Really, I will. On the other hand, I have no control over rabid dogs who just MAY eat my diskettes. And of course, you should have no GUILT over the fact that doing the mail over the weekend will take away time from God and She Who Can Not Be Disobeyed <g>.

I see that Tom Syroid is continuing his work with Linux. His revelations from his Saturday November 27, 1999 log is worth book marking (as soon as someone tells me how to bookmark a page that changes names at the end of each week! And in fact, this link will expire as soon as he starts this week.)[This has been fixed. - ed.] for those of us trying to get our feet wet in Linux. This is good stuff. At least print it out for reference later as I have.

The Winter cold season has hit our office and I am coming down with something. It started as a runny nose. Then an ear ache (first one then the other). And now I'm coughing. Sigh. Wheeze. Sniff. Cough.

Speaking of Winter, which is difficult to do when it never gets below 68°F (20°C or 293°Kelvin), Christmas will be upon us before you know it. The radio stations have started playing Christmas carols and the trees have arrived with only a few strange animals attached. "Bah humbug!" as She Who Can Not Be Disobeyed, would say. I think the season will be a rough one for my wife. Within the last year-and-a-half her Dad and Grandfather have died so she is not in a very jolly mood. Friday is the funeral for her Grandfather so I can not say for sure if I will be able to get a posting done. I will try though.

Aloha!

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Tuesday - November 30, 1999

Access yesterday was extremely slow. I'm talking two to three minutes for a page to appear. Even email was very slow in sending. I guess our IT folks here at work are having problems again.

Inforworld's Brian Livingston column talks about Windows tools such as the PowerToys from MS. He also talks about a freeware program by Abtons Shed called TweakAll that has even more power than MS's TweakUI. But with that power comes some responsibility so remember to backup your registry before trying any of these tools. Powerful they are. Trouble they can be. Recommended for Jedi Power Users.

Mail from Tom indicates how to link to his daynotes:

Dan,

My "current" page changes at the end of a week (ah.. ahem... is supposed to -- I'm working on it), but there is always a reference page in place. For last week it is:

http://www.syroidmanor.com/syroid/insights/1999/19991122.htm

So the bookmark you want is:

http://www.syroidmanor.com/syroid/insights/1999/19991122.htm#Saturday

My index page links all my weeks in the YYYYMMDD format.

Cheers,
/tom

I should have known this since this is what I've been doing myself. Only my file names reference the end of the week. Must be that Asian influence and reading backwards...Another advantage of having a shadow file to "current.html" is that I can do an index of the directory that holds all of my daynotes files and not my "home" directory (which is where current.html lives). While it isn't a necessarily bad thing if I were to index the home directory, I figure why create an even bigger index than needed?

My mailbox was filled this morning with daynotes mail that had times stamps in the early a.m. Even accounting for the time differences, these people must be vampires (they only come out at night). One of the points of discussion is that we are supposed to have pictures of ourselves at the top of our pages. Hmmm. While I do have a picture that would be suitable, thanks to the Honolulu Police Department their mug shots are great for this kind of stuff <g>, I'm not sure I want to suck up all the bandwidth from here to Hana (that's on Maui for those who don't know). And if they are vampires, you can't take pictures of them can you?<g> So who's pictures are they using?

Last night was eaten by roaches. The big flying kind. I mentioned earlier that I had helped the local economy by buying a video DVD player. Well, yesterday I added even more to the economy by buying an Sony STR-935 AC-3/dts receiver (110 watts per channel, all channels driven into 8 ohms at 0.09 THD). It has all the twiddly bits as Dr. Keyboard-less would say. So much so that I spent three hours taking out my old stuff (Sansui integrated amp. and Yamaha tuner) and trying to hookup the new. The problem with the new is that it includes inputs for video as well as audio. And with these new fangled fiber optic cables (which are VERY expensive starting at $40 USD per meter) which you do NOT want to bend, mutilate or fold, it got very messy very quickly. I have wires from the DVD, VCR, cassette, and next week Scientific Atlanta Explorer 2000 Digital Cable, and wires going to the front and rear pairs of speakers (I still need to hookup the sub-woofer and center channel speakers) I finally gave up for the night and will try again after my evening walk tonight. Sigh. The things I do to help the economy.

***** Noon Update *****

Just when I think I have it right, Brian Bilbrey and Robert Bruce Thompson go and change their daynotes pages. Arrrg! See what happens when I open my mouth? In fact, people actually seem to read my pages and do stuff based on what I say! The world has truely gone mad. Mad I say.

Using slight-of-hand, they are redirecting people from their current page to another. I can't explain it as well as Bob does so I will refer you to him. But essentially, it is to provide a static page which you can link to instead of one that changes each week. What I have to do is take a look at their html and see if that is something I want to do (i.e. plagiarize profusely doh!). Note that the W3C REC-html40-19980424 (pg. 60) specifications states only that "Some user agents support the use of META..." What worries me is "Some". I try to write code that will work in ALL browsers, or what the W3C call user agents. But I guess you can't continue to write to the lowest common denominator all the time...

And the advantages, upon further reflection, appear to outweigh the disadvantages so expect to see some changes Real Soon Now. Well, maybe not real soon since I have to go to a two-day training on facilitating meetings tomorrow and the next day (Stop right there Brian/Bob. Yes I know that when you are hired you are supposed to know everything that your job requires. But. Things change so you have to keep up with what is new and improved.) So I will be gone Wednesday and Thursday (and actually Friday also). Productivity? I don't need no steenking productivity! But I will do updates anyway for my now, twelve readers...

Quick Notes
Bo has a news item about how astronomers have discovered a bunch of new planets in the distant solar system. What he doesn't mention is that the telescope that was used to find these planets was the Keck I scope on the top of Mauna Kea volcano on the Big Island of Hawai'i. Read the rest of the story here (as always, this link will self-destruct in 30 seconds).

A big Mahalo (thanks) to Dan Bowman (now reader number 13, for the letting me know a couple of the links above were coded wrong. Sometimes I forget to type in the "http://" part of a link. If I don't do it right, the link points back to my domain. Sigh. When will computers do what I intended and not what I did? On the other hand, maybe not. Thanks again Dan.

And Dan Bowman checks in again to ask the question; What does the (T-32), as of this writing, refer to at the top of the page? Well, glad you asked (and you are the first to do so). It refers to the number of days until the new year. Remember to have your electrical generators ready to go and food for two weeks (I am just KIDDING here. I an not a FEAR MONGERER like one of the TV networks when they ran a program that they say could happen). OTOH, it might be prudent to have those things just in case...

And finally, the debate among Daynoters continue to rage as to whether it is a requirement to have an actual photo of the actual author of the page. There is a lot of research on faces (follow this link here) and the perception of that face. Most of it shows that people will read all kinds of emotions into a face when in fact, the person was not feeling those emotions at all. Given the common misperception of facial expressions, one wonders why it is important to have a picture at the top of the page. Notwithstanding that, I will put up a link sometime in the next couple of days to my picture. But right now, that's all I am willing to do. If it's a waste of bandwidth to have an animated gif then is even more so to have a picture of oneself.

Aloha!

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Hump Day Wednesday - December 1, 1999

The roaches were eating again last night. Almost literally. Oh I got the DVD hooked up OK. As Dr. Pournelle pointed out yesterday in his column, 90% of PC problems are cable related. And sure 'nuf. Even if this isn't a PC, fiddling with the fiber optic cable from the DVD to the receiver brought the Rolling Stones to life (they are dead aren't they? Or is it they just look that way sometimes? ;>).

And I even got the center channel and sub-woofer speakers hooked up OK (though its a rats nest of wires soon to get worse). Still to be done is the cassette and VCR. I would have finished those also except for the fact that in the middle of my befuddlement, I mean work, we got a call from one of our tenants saying the toilets were backing up and flooding the carpets. Sheesh. As if I'm actually going to do something about it. What do they think I am anyway? A PLUMBER (paging Dr. Jim, paging Dr. Jim). So I called Roto Rooter and they said someone would be there in about an hour.

Since the tenents were getting a little hysterical over a little sewer water in their living room, my wife and I ended up mopping up the mess which, as we found out later, was probably caused by the tenents trying to flush the city of Calcutta down the toilet. Eventually, the Roto Rooter man showed up and began to run his metal snake through one of the sewer line clean outs. Apparently, no joy. So he went around the house to the other clean out and ran it again from there. Again, apparently no joy because he could still see standing water in the pipes. But then before going into the house and ripping out the toilet to run the snake through there, he decided to test things to see it they would back up again. Thank goodness everything was working fine at that point and he figured he probably cleared the blockage the first time around. So, two hours and a lot of mucky water later he was on his way home. And so were we. Needless to say, I slept very well last night (and I'm sure those dreams about huge flying roaches will go away eventually).

Quick Notes
Email/Spam Harvesters trawl along the web trying to find email addresses to add to their databases of hapless people. Since the web is so huge, your site may not have been hit, yet, by one of them. But at some point they will. When that happens, you will know it because you, or anyone elses address on your site will begin to get Spam (Gamble Online at our Casino!). Take a look at this site which gives some interesting information on how to try to stop this. Especially if you are running an Apache server. Or you can take a look at this site.

Today is the first day of the two day training on facilitating meetings so I do not know if I will be able to do a noon update. Check back if you have time, otherwise see you folks tomorrow!

Aloha

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No noon update yesterday (and probably none today) due to the training course I am taking. And there may not be any post at all today due to our great IT department which can not seem to keep the router going. No mail. No internet. No update.

I have a scan of myself since this now seems to be a requirement of Nightnoters. You can see it here. It's about 10K and I make no apologies for the size nor the quality. You asked for, and you got it.

The great stereo tribulations are over. Everything is hooked up and working. The only thing left is the digital TV cable hookup from the cable company which is scheduled for next week Wednesday.

We've been having strange weather for Hawai'i. We haven't had a good thunderstorm for awhile but it looks like we may be having one now. Even though where I am, everything is fine, there are parts of the island that are starting to flood. Even though I feel for anyone stuck in this kind of weather, there is nothing more fascinating to watch then lightening flashing across the sky. Talk about the power of nature...

So, in the midst of this weather, where was I? Well, at 5:30am I was picking out our Christmas tree! They unloaded the containers of trees from the Pacific northwest yesterday and put them on sale this morning at 5:00am. There is nothing like a bunch of people scrambling to find the perfect tree. Mine was the second one I found. I very rarely spend a lot of time pondering which tree to take. If it looks half-way decent it's mine. Since She Who Cannot be Denied is not in a Christmas mood, we agreed to get a small 4-ft. (1.2 metre) tree and not spend a lot of time decorating it.

Tomorrow we go to a funeral for SWCBD's grandfather so whatever I post will probably be short. Ye have been warned.

Even though ftp access seem to be back, there may now be a problem with the mail server that Misc. Ramblings uses (mail@seto.org). I can connect to the server, login, get a listing of the mail there, but when I try to retrieve it - nothing happens. So for now, anymail sent is either getting bounced back or is sitting there, unread. Sorry but other than notifying 9netave.com, there's nothing I can do.

***** Noon Update *****

Email is running again. Don't ask me what the problem was but everything seems to be OK now so keep sending those cards and letters in. Of course, since I am in the training seminar I won't be able to respond in real time. But, as always, all email will be read and replied to. Objects appear larger than they are. Your mileage may vary. The dog ate my diskette.

Aloha!

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Aloha Friday - December 3, 1999

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