Good Neighbors

Last October, my mailbox, which has been standing for over fifty years, started to wobble. I was going to have Derek replace it while he was here in November, but Delia insisted that she wanted to look into an alternative to the replacement I had in mind, a plastic kit available at the local Walmart. While Derek was here, no mention was made of the project.

The condition of the box continued to deteriorate. It went from a simple wobble to having to lean on one of the boxes on either side for support. Delia still insisted she was going to take care of it. She did look at the boxes available at Walmart but indicated, vaguely, that she also wanted to look elsewhere.

The woman across the street is a widow, living on the remains of her husband's phone company retirement. She was living there when we built our house and she has a daughter just slightly older than me. The neighbors help her out a lot. The fence in front of her house needed some repairs, so my next-door neighbor replaced the defective wooden posts and cross-members, staining them to match the rest of the fence. Then he pulled out my mailbox, dug a new hole, re-seated the mailbox in the new hole and painted the post.

It looks like it'll hold up for another fifty years, unlike me.

It's nice to have neighbors who do good things without being asked.

Blog

I dislike the term 'blog'. I prefer its parent term, 'Weblog'. 'Blog', like so many other four letter words being overused, sounds disgustingly like a prohibited act or filthy refuse. It also has connotations of the general illiteracy that has plagued writing on the Internet by juveniles and those who have not practiced their writing skills. Fortunately, many of the less literate efforts being produced are one-shot deals, their creators quickly losing interest in generating the effort necessary to produce even such marginal results.

What is a Weblog?

It isn't a journal or diary. Or, rather, it can be a journal or diary but with an added dimension: participation. You write a journal for yourself and keep it to yourself. You usually try to keep your diary secret. You throw your Weblog open to the world, inviting comments and dialog. It is a community project.

A journal is a solitary work, a tool useful for communicating with your subconscious mind. A diary is a repository for secrets. A Weblog is like a garden, where you plant seeds, tend and water the plants, remove an occasional weed -- and others add plenty of fertilizer.

A newsletter is something else. A newsletter may be the work of a single individual or of a community, and it is usually distributed by email or snail mail, often on a regular schedule. When it is a community effort, there are usually one or more moderators or editors.

A Weblog will require two word processors, usually a fairly sophisticated one for composing the original submission and a simpler one for composing comments thereon, and it will require a host to display the results. There are no end of hosting services available, some free and some asking for paid subscriptions: Xanga, LiveJournal, Lycos/Tripod, Blogger, WebCrimson and JournalScape to begin with. Plus there are packages you can run yourself, on a hosted site, that allow you to become the host for a new group of Weblog clients. There are many different Weblog packages, each with its own characteristics and features. Many of them are free.

Is anything ever truly free?

You don't have to pay money for the packages and services, but they come with advertising for their sources built in. If you use the product, you advertise the product. That, eventually, provides some income for the people who invested the time and effort necessary to produce the package or service. It may not give much of a return on investment, but these things are often labors of love. If we don't give something back, the quality products we've been using may all disappear. Or they may never be improved upon.

But that is another topic.

I'm writing this particular Weblog entry on Xanga. I was going to write it on LiveJournal using my Sony Clié PDA and the AvantGo linking software ... but when I tried to write it, I found a message from AvantGo saying they suspended my account. I hadn't been reading the feeds they downloaded to my PDA. Not for several months (probably closer to a year). So I have to activate my account again before I can use the PDA to write LiveJournal Weblog entries. That's slightly annoying, but they want me to read their advertising once in a while as payment for using their service. I suppose that's fair.

I got LiveJournal because I could use my PDA with it. But I got a free subscription, which has limited features. One service I'd like but would have to pay for (it isn't terribly expensive) would be to have the Weblog show up on my Am0.us Web page like my Blogger-based Am's rAMbles does. LiveJournal also has a large number of editing options, making it easy to generate entries and comments. One that is particularly interesting is a notification message sent out when a comment or reply to a comment is made, the message itself containing the editing mechanism for generating a reply to the latest comment made.

I've had a free Web site with Tripod since before they merged with Lycos and became Lycos / Tripod. Some time back, they added a Weblog that had an RSS (Real Simple Syndication) feed capability. When I write and submit an entry there, I can also push it onto the RSS feed. Then it goes into syndication services like newsisfree and NewsMonster, which process all news feeds world-wide, not just the RSS, and combine them into a super newspaper. My little articles can sit there next to the articles from BBC and Reuters ... but mine seem to get ignored. Well, the mechanism for commenting is lost when you submit to newsfeed, so there is no feedback. But perfect strangers may have read my words about words.

I write a lot. Much of what I write never gets read. At least, nobody comments on a lot of what I write. My wife and daughter don't read my stuff at all. It took a long time to get my son started reading and writing Weblogs, and he often ignores mine. Others who write Weblogs get dozens to hundreds of comments on each entry. Some even get paid for their submissions, enough to make a living by it.

Despite the paucity of feedback, the Weblog is my preferred vehicle for writing.

Dead Things

My computer died last night. I had been reading my email and the screen started blinking a little faster than once per second. Nothing would respond to the mouse or keyboard, so I had to power down. I switched operating systems, but the problem was independent of which hard drive was in the computer. It would try to start up, the screen would start blinking and I would have to power down manually.

The problem continued this morning.

Before that, my Am0.us Web site stopped responding. It isn't healthy again yet, but at least the address now resolves.

But the strangest one of all was the phlak (Professional Hacker's Linux Assault Kit) Web site. They have an ISO of a DVD for an improved stand-alone Linux system similar to Knoppix that was featured on Tech TV. It seemed like a good idea to download the ISO and burn it to DVD+R and then play with it for a while. The estimated download time was 1:31 but the system kept getting slower and slower until, when I reached 99% at 2:40, it stopped.

I tried to start the download again, to get that last fraction of 1% that I was missing. I got an Error 404. That means the browser couldn't find the site. Then I got a message saying that no such Web site existed.

I guess lots of people were watching Tech TV. Although there were four mirror sites for downloading in the U.S. and two in Europe, I suspect they were overwhelmed and pulled the plug.

ISPs will pull the plug on sites that exceed their allowance of bandwidth. Some ISPs are very unforgiving and very unreasonable. They don't advertise in advance that they will pull the plug on you -- they just do it, giving you no chance to buy additional bandwidth before being shut down.

It sucks.

And I was so close to finishing.

Now, this evening, my computer is working again. But I don't trust it.

Why?

I shouldn't be awake at this hour of the morning. There is absolutely no excuse for it.

A few weeks ago I downloaded the Lindows 4.5 ISO file and installed it over my previous Lindows 3.0 installation. This, of course, destroys everything on the system ... but I didn't have anything there that I wanted to save. That was by design. But I discovered that the central Lindows system remembered all of the programs I had downloaded to my system and I could download everything again with just a couple of clicks.

I didn't want everything, of course. I went through the list and selected just those programs I wanted and "restored" them to my new system. It was just a matter of going through the list, placing a check mark in front of the programs I wanted to have available to me, then telling the system to download them. It didn't take very long.

Then I ignored Lindows for a few weeks. I didn't do anything again until shortly after midnight this -- what? -- morning.

They got a few more things right this time. The system doesn't force you to run as root, for one thing. I defined a user and I'm running as that user with no problem. That's almost the way I would run with a real Linux system. The 3.0 version had Netscape as the default browser (a somewhat modified version, but still Netscape) while the default browser on the 4.5 version is Mozilla, a great improvement (in my not-so-humble opinion). And their Click-N-Run system basically works now, where previously it flopped more often than it flew ... plus there is a lot more software available in their "warehouse" than there was before.

The Warehouse thing is a bit strange. When you buy your copy of Lindows, you can also buy a subscription to the warehouse for a year ... but if you don't subscribe, they give you a subscription for a month or two anyway. During the term of your subscription you can download any free software you want from the warehouse or purchase the non-free software at member prices, usually substantially lower. That software is then yours and you can download it or its upgrades free even after your membership expires. You can also upgrade your operating system free while a member, as I did in going to version 4.5.

Now here's the part Windows users have trouble with: you aren't restricted to a single machine. You are allowed to load the operating system and your selected programs onto all of the computers in your "household". You are expected not to abuse the definition of household in doing so. Yeah, I know that Windows people have been ripping off Microsoft for extra copies of software ever since day one. But Microsoft doesn't like it when you do that. They keep trying to come up with new ways to make it difficult for you to use a program on more than one computer. They work so hard at it that much of their software doesn't work well on any machine.

I got an email message recently announcing that Lindows is going to be selling 300,000 laptop computers pre-loaded with their operating system this year. The specifications on the machines looked pretty good, with reasonable upgrade options available. The base price for the low end model was under $700, and the machine was not stripped-down by any means. It has a good display, a decent processor capable of good speeds, plenty of memory and lots of other goodies.

Meanwhile, in Europe, Microsoft is trying to prevent sales of Lindows products by having their armies of lawyers initiate suits in multiple countries claiming that the name "Lindows" is too similar to "Windows" and is infringing on the purity of their product. They have gotten injunctions in a few countries where the courts are particularly technologically backwards and they have many European Lindows dealers scared. They tried the same trick here but their cases got thrown out of court on the basis that "Windows" is a generic term anyway, one that Microsoft has no particular right to. Hopefully that same conclusion will prevail throughout most of Europe.

But that isn't what is keeping me awake.

Why am I still awake?

I'm having fun.

UF Speaks Out

As a geek, I have a fondness for geekish humor. I get my daily dose from a feature called User Friendly, which deals with the fictional ISP Columbia Internet and its little band of misfits.

In today's strip, the guy wanting more playable games is one of the Tech Reps, a position similar to that I recently held. The guy defending the dumbing down of civilization is the marketing person for the company.

Enjoy!

Christmas Party

Yesterday we drove the 99 miles up to Huntington Beach to attend the Christmas party given by our friends Pat and Gisela Driskill. We were supposed to arrive before 16:00 so we planned to leave no later than 14:00. Things rarely go as planned around here and I wasn't ready until 14:20. But when I got upstairs, Delia was still in her sleepwear and Cathy was still in bed, sleeping. Delia had done nothing about wrapping the gifts she was bringing (my few token presents were ready) and had yet to start cooking the food she had promised to bring.

We were going to be late. When we left home, at 15:45, I refused to be rushed. I filled the tank with fuel and drove at a reasonable speed, mostly about 70 to 75, knowing that additional speed would probably result in our being later and that we could never arrive early.

The drive went well until we reached El Toro, just before the I405 branches off from the I5 freeway. Then the heavens opened up and the rain poured down, the downpour pausing only when we reached our destination.

The Driskills, knowing us, had planned to serve the meal at 18:00.

Gisela has an extensive collection of Nativity Scenes that she brings out and sets up each year. I photographed a few of them while we were at the party but Xanga wouldn't let me upload them. This is not even ten percent of what occupies every available surface every year, and the collection continues to grow.

Bladder Buster

Before you go, you had better get one of those incontinence appliances, one that allows you to pee freely and catch the liquid in a large tank. No human bladder can stand the strain and you can't depend on Depends to have enough capacity to hold you through the whole show. And there is no pause button if you see "Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King" in the theater.

Normally I would have waited a few more weeks, to avoid the sold-out showings and the long lines of people parading into the theater. Or I would have purchased my tickets on-line, to be sure I got them for the time I wanted them. But we were winging it because we didn't know until the last minute how many of us there would be. We were standing in line to buy the tickets when the dreaded "sold out" started flashing for our chosen show time. Quickly consulting, we chose the next available show time, 45 minutes later, for just the two of us, Delia having informed us she was unable to join us.

Cathy decided she needed to eat in the time now available to us. I didn't really want to, as Ruby's has little that I could consume or wanted. Their food is perfectly healthy for most people, but healthy food gives me problems. Vegetables, dairy and seafood are particularly bad for me. I hadn't planned on eating and hadn't brought my Beano, my protection against vegetables and fiber, so I settled on a cup of chili and a basket of fries. Cathy ordered one of their big burgers. I had a cup and a half of coffee, probably not too bright considering we were going to be watching a movie they listed at three and a half hours actual showing time, not including the time standing in line to get in (even with tickets) and waiting for the movie to start. I took what precautions I could, but it was going to be an ordeal.

We went from the restaurant to the theater about 25 minutes before the movie was to start. They wouldn't let us in. They told us we had to get into the line that would enter to the right of the theater entrance. However, the end of the line was all the way around at the left of the theater entrance, having wrapped itself around the ticket booth in front of the theater. We were only in the line a couple of minutes before we saw the front of the line begin to move but it was at least five minutes more before our end of the line started to move. The movie was being shown in two theaters at the extreme right of the complex, numbers 17 and 18. We got auditorium number 17.

When we found our seats, Cathy said something about being worried about getting a nosebleed. The seats weren't really that high up, but the air was dry and she felt a tingle in her nose. I hoped she had napkins or kleenex stashed in that little purse she carried. As it turned out, she had no problem. Still, as Frodo, Sam and Gollum made their way up the hidden stairway I couldn't help thinking we had a similar view from our seats.

We didn't have to put up with much of the preliminary propaganda slide show, getting in having taken so long. There were just a few attempts to convince people to fortify themselves with snacks and soft drinks, the latter probably leading to very uncomfortable consequences, and repeated pleas to audience members to turn off their cell phones. Then we were subjected to the usual barrage of previews, the only one of which I remember having to do with Viggo Mortensen starring in a movie about a horse race across a desert.

The movie began with Smeagol (who becomes Gollum) as a hobbit-like creature and how his acquisition of the ring transforms him. The movie ends with the heroes riding off into the sunset. Lots of things were left out between the beginning and the end. If they hadn't been, the movie would have taken over five hours rather than a bit over three. What was left in was very satisfying to watch. Characters were developed; it was done differently than Tolkien did it but it was a good alternative for the medium used. There were stupendous special effects, many of which flashed by so quickly you couldn't be sure what happened, which is more of a virtue than a vice. That is, real life doesn't have a slow speed instant replay -- the demented pace added to the realism.

When the movie was over, I was almost unable to stand up. I felt like an overfilled water balloon. I knew the theater complex had at least four sets of bathrooms, the nearest ones being the most likely to be crowded enough to cause a delay -- so I headed for the most distant one where I would probably find little delay. Nobody else seemed to have the same idea. The bathroom was almost empty. It was also mostly non-functional, with plastic bags taped over half the equipment and signs announcing that things were "out of order," a phrase that I find particularly meaningless to describe the situation. After all, the things were not working, disorder or bad sequencing having nothing to do with the problem. Anyway, enough was working for me to reduce the pressure to normal levels and become comfortable again.

The extended version, when it is released in a year or so, will doubtless come on two or more DVD disks. This allows for intermissions to improve viewing comfort. It will be worth getting.

Christmas Tree Pictures

By popular demand, I have added the software to my computer that allows me to download the pictures from my camera and am showing a sample of the Christmas tree photos here. The first photo is obviously that of the tree itself.

The second photo is that of the tree's creator, my wife, Delia. The lighting was very bad. The vest she is wearing was bright red but appears almost blue because the spotlights shining straight down from the ceiling leave lots of dark areas and shadowed areas.

Delia has a small bottle of Very Irresistable Givenchy attached to her necklace. It is almost invisible in the picture, its light violet color lost in the shadow against her dark sweater, only the crystal cap showing up well.

The pictures look better on paper than they display on a monitor screen.

The third and final picture simply shows some detail of the tree's decoration. There is a little model "House of Givenchy" in the center near the bottom; above it, almost invisible, is one of the glass tubes of perfume given out as samples that appear as icecycles. The little things that look like golden teapots or oil lamps are perfume bottle tops.

Christmas Tree

Companies that sell things frequently have contests among their salespeople because that improves sales. Delia has a contract with Givenchy. Givenchy decided to ask their contract sales promoters to compete in producing the best Givenchy Christmas tree.

Delia got to build her tree in the Robinsons-May store in Mission Valley. The store even provided her a little tree. It was a pathetic little thing, slightly over three feet tall but with the longest of its thin, widely separated branches being only about eight inches long.

Delia has been saving the decorative tops from the tester bottles of fragrances she has used in the store. She got out the hot glue gun and glued wire hooks to the bottle tops for decorations. She also used a variety of samples, tied to hooks with red ribbon, for decorations. Some of the samples that come in little glass tubes looked like icecycles. She cut out letters from gold-colored cardboard and I hot-glued them to a wire to spell out the company name. She took all of her decorations to work with her this morning and, when she had the tree ready, she called me to come and take pictures.

The tree was in an awkward spot for photography, behind the display of a competing product and in bad light. However, I did manage a series of photos, some capturing the tree close-up, some the tree and display and a few that included the people involved.

When I finally arrived home, I removed the memory card from my camera and placed it in the printer. Then I printed off an index sheet and a set of larger low quality prints. I also printed off three full sized glossy prints that I knew Delia would want. When Delia arrived, not much later, I found out what she wanted and ran off an appropriate set of prints for her to submit as her contest entry. I also wrote up the following little description: "A spindly little Charlie Brown type of Christmas tree adorns our display, decorated with samples, fragrance bottle tops, several Houses of Givenchy and a small amount of tinsel. A length of sheer Givenchy ribbon serves as a golden garland. A bottle of Very Irresistable Givenchy serves as an angel at the top, its golden wings spelling out G-I-V-E-N-C-H-Y."

All of the printing was done by the printer alone, without the computer being involved. One of these days I'm going to get my memory card reader working so I can read the photos into my downstairs computer (where I'm writing this).

For the moment, though, you'll just have to take my word for it: the photos worked out pretty well. I would guess that Delia's funny little tree stands a good chance of winning.

"Please sum up your thoughts about me in one word and leave it in the comments. Then post this in your own weblog to find out what everyone else thinks of you."