Monday - December 06, 1999

It's Monday. Thank Goodness. I really did try to do an update on Friday but the dog ate my diskettes. Really. I'm not making this up. OK, maybe I am making this up. There are continuing problems with my new (and soon to be former) ISP. Not only are there problems with ftp access, which is why I couldn't do an update, but when dialing in, I've had busy signals half of the time and 28.8 connections the other half. Not quite good enough. I hope access through the cable modem to be installed on Wednesday will be better than this. Pants, as someone else would say.

The funeral on Friday for my wife's grandfather was different in that it was a Buddhist service. I can't recall ever having gone to one, although they are quite common here given the large Asian population. Since this was a new experience, it was interesting to see all of the ceremony and symbolism (I'm not sure what the significance is of having the family walk three times around the room). While I was aware that food, especially oranges are laid out as sustenance to the departed, I had forgotten about the part about the burning of money (or more accurately, pseudo money). And of course, the chanting and incense. Definitely a different experience.

I knew pictures would be the downfall of the Daynotes Gang. First it was images of themselves (just so people would know what we looked like). Now it's pictures of where they work. What next, pictures of the kids? ;>

By now, it is clear that NASA can't seem to shoot straight. At least as it relates to Mars. First it was a mis-conversion between English and metric measures. Now, who knows? Perhaps it was a Y2K thing.

The World Trade Organization meeting in Seattle ended last week in what is described as failure. The local angle is that Honolulu was in the final two as to where to hold it. In the end, I guess it was a blessing in disguise that we didn't get it. That kind of publicity, we don't need. We have enough problems with tiger sharks chewing on the rears of tourists as it is. Oh, disregard the previous sentence. Tiger sharks will chew on any dangling part(s) that they see.

Aloha!

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Tuesday - December 07, 1999

December 7th, a day which will live in infamy. Among other things, this day should be a symbol of how the US was prepared for the wrong war. We were more afraid of internal subversion, which never occurred, or war in Europe, rather than the possibility of an air and sea attack from the East. Many good men paid the price of that miscalculation.

On a personal note, my dad was a civilian worker at Pearl Harbor at the time of the attack. In fact, he was supposed to have been at work that day but instead called in sick. The next day, when he reported for work, he was interrogated as to why he didn't come in the previous day. Now, perhaps anyone who didn't come in the previous day was so questioned, perhaps not. Remember the paranoia during this period and remember my Asian surname (Which is Chinese by the way, not Japanese. A distinction not made by many non-Asians). In either case, he, along with a bunch of other Americans of Asian decent, mostly Japanese, soon joined the Army (the U.S. one ;>). I don't remember the actual unit but it was most likely the 100th Infantry Battalion. Of course, most people also know of the 442nd Regimental Combat Unit known as "Go for Broke" for their single minded determination to stop at nothing to reach their objective.

Remember Pearl Harbor or many more men and women will have their lives taken from them for no good reason.

There won't be a noon update because I will be away from the office facilitating a meeting on revising the core curriculum for the volunteer guardian ad litem program. These are people, who are appointed by the court to represent the interests of minors in cases in which custody of the child is taken from the parents due to child abuse or neglect (PL 93-247).

Aloha!

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Hump Day Wednesday - December 08, 1999 Dr. Keyboard seems be updating more regularly than I am lately. Ahem. Hmmm. Must be that the cold air in France allows the electrons to flow downward easier than all the heat we have here. Or maybe not. In either case, he mentions all of the new Daynoters, of which he is a member emeritus, OBE. So it's Sir Keyboard to us commoners (Hawai'i may not have been a colony of Great Britain, but Capt. James Cook did take credit for discovering it. Of course, my ancestors threw a BBQ, with Cook as the main course, but I digress). And of course, one of the newer members is [sorry. Dr. Keyboard has moved his site and this page is missing in action. Really. It is. - Ed.] myself. But please be clear, I am not a sumo wrestler. I just look like one. A BIG one. So watch your step Sir Keyboard, OBE. And welcome to Dan Bowman, the newest member.

Speaking of limeys, may I be the first (or maybe second) to say that I have to agree that Sir Keyboard has it right by having a daynotes vs. a weeknotes site. I've thought about it for awhile and even though I like being able to read a weeks worth of logs at a time, it does make for a messy way of linking to it. Even if you use highlights to guide people to specific days it seems simpler to just have a specific day per page and then link to a general index page as something like our current.html page showing links to each day. Comments are welcome and if someone can come up with a better way of doing it let me know (and I'm sure someone is already working on it).

The cable modem is scheduled to get installed today so I will only be working half-day (OK! That's it! No more snide remarks from the peanut gallery about gov'mint "workers" not working. I do work. It just looks like my eyes are closed. But I'm really pondering the impenetrable questions of our time. Like what time is lunch around here?) If it gets installed I will give a report tomorrow. In fact, if it doesn't, I will give an even longer one on the evil empire more commonly known as the cable company. Hawk. Spit. Needless to say, even though I need to say it, there will not be a noon update.

A belated congratulations to June Jones, University of Hawai'i football coach of the year according to the Western Athletic Conference, the Sporting News, and CNNsi. Well done and much deserved. Here. Here.

Aloha

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The Motorola cable modem is installed and running hot and true (And I do mean hot. Whatever is in there generates heat. Lots of it.) I haven't tried to do any speed tests yet but I downloaded a 2MB file in less than 10 seconds. Your mileage may vary. Of course, if the server you are trying to get to is already overloaded, having a fast connection to it only means you get a busy signal that much sooner. But it sure beats a 56K modem.

They also installed a 3Comm NIC. And therein lies one of the installation woes that the technician had. For whatever reason, Windows didn't like the drivers on the diskette that came with the card. Instead, Windows insisted on loading its own drivers and of course, they didn't work with the card. Sigh. After rebooting three times, with each time Windows first saying it didn't want the diskette drivers, then loading its own, then continuing the boot, only to say that the NIC was not working and to check the drivers. Big sigh. Eventually, Windows did accept the diskette drivers, don't ask me why or how, and the installation then went smoothly. Windows recognized and configured the NIC and Bob's your father's brother, we were online.

But not so fast say you. What other installation woes were there? Well, Symantec/Norton virus detection had to be turned off because it was locking up during the installation of the NIC drivers. And the BlackIce firewall appears to be causing problems with ftp access. In fact, this may be the source of problems when I couldn't do a get or ls using whatever ftp client I used. By configuring ws_ftp to do passive transfers all was well. Otherwise, I could log in, but not get a listing or transfer any files. I need to check on this more but this does appear to be the problem.

I'm also having very long delays (over a minute) in retrieving mail outside of the Road Runner network. Inside, no problem. Outside it takes a *long* time to get anything. I need to continue testing this to see what can be done.

Digital TV is also up and running. We have two Scientific Atlanta Explorer 2000 boxes installed. That means we can now surf through over 20 digital channels, 30 analog, 20 pay-per-view or premium channels and 40 channels of digital audio. Right now, the boxes are connected through the VCR to the TV. When I pick up a couple of "S" video cables I'm going to try to hook them up via the Sony Dolby Digital audio/video receiver that I recently got. It's supposed to be able to switch between the DVD and the digital cable box but we shall see.

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

I've been assigned to do some statistical analysis on the results of a survey done by one of the facility related offices in the Judiciary. In scanning the 'net for anything related to what they are looking at, I found the Alternative Traffic Sign Page. If you have the time, there are a couple of chuckles (but no more than that) there. Or similarly, you can take a look at this site here.

Microsoft PowerToys 3.0 for Win CE has some interesting utilities in it. For all two of you out there who actually use a handheld that runs Win CE, check the link here for the latest version. Some of the included utilities in this version of PowerToys are a Registry Editor, Flight Scheduler, and Business Card transfer via infrared (Sounds cool. Just point and shoot your business card to someone elses CE). What will they think of next?

P.S. I've fixed the links on the Diary Index page. Sorry for the problems there.

Aloha!

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Aloha Friday - December 10, 1999

It's Friday!

If you haven't been over to Brian Bilbrey's better half, AKA Marcia, by all means go as soon as you get a chance. Let me be the first to predict that she will be the first female on the daynotes page (If she doesn't first start one of her own for women only. Hmmm. What would a good name for that site be?). She says she doesn't have the time to update it every day so maybe daynotes is a misnomer. But then, Sir Keyboard, OBE, doesn't either.

I see that the vampires were at it again last night. My mailbox is full of stuff about which of the daynotes sites still have gifs as opposed to jpg or png files. I won't name names but his initials are Tom and he says he is righting a book (probably with a spill checker). The other subject seems to be relating to DNA but much of the thread must have been daynoter to daynoter. [Dan Bowman emails to point out that the DNA reference is from Matt "The Tux" Beland's site. Oh. Well, when I tried to view his site the response time was so slow I bailed out before it got past Monday's posting. My error. I should have tried again before inserting my foot into my mouth. Mea culpa.]

The cable modem continues to run with no problems at all. Amazing speed that. I downloaded 7.5MB from MS, which is notoriously slow, in under two minutes.

On the TV front , having so many TV channels to choose from can get annoying when you are trying to surf through all of them quickly. The box takes about a second to display a picture once you've changed a channel. And what with about 120 channels, that's two *minutes* to get through each from one end to the other. She Who Cannot Be Disobeyed is not pleased. On the third hand, the digital channels come in as clear as a DVD. So I guess that's the trade-off. Slower surfing, but sharper picture.

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

A quick look through the other daynotes sites found me at Dave Farquhar's site. Part of his current log was a discussion on statistics as they relate to deaths caused by physician error. That got me interested, being a stats kind of guy and how I used to work at the Hawai'i State Health Department. So I surfed over to one of my old haunts. The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta. They keep all kinds of stats including the Top Ten Causes of Death (sounds like a skit from Letterman - one you don't want to be included in).

The top two causes are - diseases of the heart and malignant neoplasms (i.e. tumors). The others in descending order are:
3. cerebrovascular diseases,
4. chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases and allied conditions,
5. pneumonia and influenza,
6. accidents and adverse effects,
7. diabetes mellitus,
8. suicide,
9. nephritis, nephrotic syndrome and nephrosis, and
10. chronic liver disease and cirrhosis.

These top-two outweigh all the others combined. If we were allocating funding for research and treatment based on frequency in the population we would be spending the most on these right? Wrong intern breath. For example, of the approximately $3.7 billion USD total, appropriated in FY 98 for the federal Health Resources and Services Administration, fully $1.2 billion USD was for AIDS services. Do you see AIDS listed as one of the top 10 causes? Neither do I. So why does it get one-third of the total budget of a federal agency?</rant>

Over on Doc Jim's site I was reminded of my adventures in plumbing earlier and that the saga continues. I failed to mention in today's post that last night was eaten by roaches again. This time, it was plumbing problems in the other tenant's house. This particular toilet has been a problem for about a week and I've already changed everything there is to change in the tank. That fixed some of the problems but it seems as soon as one thing is fixed another pops up (as it were). Will this never end? Stay tuned.

Aloha!