What's coming to Burlington, Iowa without a fish fry? Tom Stimpson (my grandmother's nephew) got himself a new electric fryer, so of course we tried it out. There's not much of a sense of scale here, however, so there is a LOT of food currently around the house. I think we'll be eating fried catfish for a few days... Let me tell you though, the fried sweet potatoe wedges are superb!
Tom's son Clinton came over with Crystal (his girlfriend/fiance - I'm not sure which) and their two year old daughter Neveah. She was a cutie, although shy around Ben, Karen and myself. Louise's whole family is just sort of a half-generation of time off from Lela's - Tom is older, but not really old enough that we ever called him Uncle, and Clinton is younger, but not young enough that we ever called him a nephew. Ah well. It's about the only part of my extended family that still calls me "Joey" too. Not sure how on earth that happened.
Lela's continuing to do better - eating more, getting rest, and moving about more each day. Its really positive. She's napping now, but I'm really encouraged by the fact that she ate more today than any day we've been here previously.
Looks like we might head up to "the farm" on Monday with Tom and Clinton. I'm not sure where to pinpoint it with Google maps, but I think it's in this area. Those dark green fingers are all wooded land on the bluffs overlooking the Mississippi. The farm fields all to the east of there (over to the river) are the old flood plains, although levees keep all that floodwater back (nice and bottled up for lower on the river) these days. My grandfather was a staunch opponent of the whole levee system for years, and I still keep some of that with me. It has made fields and land more arable, but it seems like a generally short sighted goal, and I generally think you can never control a river like the Mississippi completely. She's just too darn large and wild. Shoot - I just think back to "Lake Missouri" and the floods of 1993 to prove my point.
We've been watching the Denver vs San Diego football game today too. Ben's rooting for Denver (duh, he lives there) and it's been a pretty reasonable game.
I hope you all have a great New Year!
I little bit of skapeti is planned for dinner tonight (yeah, John - that's normally Spaghetti - but I spelled it wrong intentionally). Karen's in the kitchen cooking up a sauce from scratch that smells like it's going to be terrific. I did some chopping of the onions and garlic, and am currently engaged in a hollering match around the concept : "There's no such thing as too much garlic." Like I said, it ought to be really tasty.
I'm using my grandmother's PC to get connected and do some work remotely. VPN connections established, software all loaded, connections made... but the killer is the font settings. Somewhere she's enabled components of IE into a large font mode that's outside of the themes. It's making using IE a tad difficult. The end result is that I'll have a pile of things to uninstall before I leave - heh.
Meanwhile, we're chasing my grandmother all over the house. We dragged her out to the dining room for breakfast this morning, and then chased her into the living room to watch TV for a while. I took a nap (i.e. went back to bed) for a short bit, and completely missed picking up Ben from the airport. Fortunately, he's not shy about calling - so we ran and got him immediately. It's also a good thing Burlington isn't too big - he didn't have to wait long for us to get across town.
Karen and I flew into Burlington, Iowa today - not a bad flight at all really. We had to get up at a rather unholy hour, but the trip was smooth (bounce through St. Louis with a few hour layover) and uneventful. Unfortunately for us, the majority of the US was covered with clouds today, so there wasn't really much to see. Karen sometimes gets great photos from the plane. While breaking beneath the clouds on the decent into Burlington, we did get a lovely view of the Mississippi river. Its currently awash in ice flows that have largely broken up. We found out on the ground that the river had been heavily iced up here this winter after a really cold snap earlier this month. And aside from the clouds, today has actually been the nicest Burlington has seen in a while. No snow, rain, nasty cold, etc.
My grandmother (Lela) is doing well - she was sitting up and watching TV in the living room when we arrived. Yesterday she was so tired she didn't really make it much out of bed. The docs have her on medication to keep her blood pressure really low, but the combination of that and having spent nearly a week in ICU at Iowa City have left her really weak. We had some takeout chinese (from Great Wall) for dinner, and chatted with her sister Louise and their friend Ed.
Tomorrow we plan to chase her around the house some - the doctors want us to get her up and moving around, walking as much as she can. A nurse is going to be stopping by tomorrow morning to check up on things too.
I spent some of this Christmas holiday (and break from work) playing Halo 2 on Legendary mode. Actually, I played it co-op in legendary mode with Dan, my Co-op player of thanksgivings and christmas'. I gotta tell you - that's darn hard! We spent an hour with the game mostly handing us back our guts.
Heh - so then we dropped down to normal and moved way forward and finally finished the co-op game we started way-back-when (something like two years ago I think). When we watched the final screens roll past, we were sort of stunned and couldn't figure out that we'd just finished the game. It also happened to be 6:30am and we'd been playing since 10pm - so I suppose it is completely legitimate that we were both pretty stunned.
We've been scooting around and taking on levels at "heroic" since that finish, which has also been pretty good. It is sort of annoying that "Legendary" difficulty makes you both stay alive or reset to the last save point. Of course we use that to our advantage in the lower levels.
I was getting pretty good at accuracy pitching the grenades, but my sniping has gone way down. Dan was definitely the better sniper this time around. The most amusing point was when Dan accused me of driving terribly while he was firing a gun on the back of the jeep - only to realize that an NPC was driving and I was running along behind trying to catch up to them when they left me! (we got our butts kicked there too - never let computer controlled AI drive the jeep...)
Nope, not snow. Chaos flurries. With my self-imposed electronic divorce, I didn't hear that my grandmother was admitted to cardiac intesive care on December 22nd. As of today, she's back home, but the prognosis isn't very good. I'm going to talk to the doctor and get the full details, but there's been some sort of terrible anueryism (spelling may be off there) that has split on her aorta, and she's not a candidate for surgery. I don't have anything formal on the prognosis, so I'm just playing it by ear right now.
I had a ton of voice mail messages on the cell phone when it got back in range and recharged. Only one was from work - boy, do I feel like a heel for not having been in touch (electronically) like I usually am.
I'll post more when I have more detail.
Aside from my little "Merry Christmas" note, I'm ending my self-imposed "unplugged"/computer exile for the holidays. It's always a good thing to do I think - just disconnect thoroughly from everything for a little while. No cell phone, no email... I even avoided reading the RSS feeds. But now I'm back, albeit quietly.
For whatever reason, I woke up with a killer headache at 4am that hasn't stopped dancing on my brain - so I'm actually heading back to sleep for a while after another round of advil.
MEAT
MEAT
MEAT
That's what's available at Ipanema Brazilian Grill. Down where Wolfgang Puck's used to be - we headed there for lunch today. It was sort of a special day - had some very unexpected news that deemed that it was time to take someone to lunch. So off we went. I'd been avoiding the place because my coworkers typically come back from there stuffed and useless. And yep - I came back from there stuffed and nearly useless.
So tonight, dinner is mushroom soup and a roll. And it seems like a lot - I'm still full.
But oh my - are those meats good! I especially liked the garlic steak - just amazing.
I don't normally say much about these, but I was really impressed with Jeffrey Nelson's Wireless Grapher Widget. He's done a wonderful job of the widget, and it works beautifully, taking advantage of all the things you would sort of expect an expose widget could. Buried in the core, he had a wireless graphing bundle that looks like it's in Objective-C - it polls the data would be my guess.
Great job Jeffrey!
Hrm. That's a bummer -
del.icio.us is down for emergency maintenance. we'll be back as soon possible.
Hope they're back soon, and that everything is "OK"
Courtesy of a link from Digg - a lovely cartoon from the geeks at UserFriendly:
Geek Gift prediction flowchart
While scanning my RSS feeds this afternoon, I caught the headline Traffic Shaping in Mac OS X. Very cool. I knew Dummynet support couldn't be super far away from the Mac, but frankly I'd never looked.
When I wanted to drive a network connection down the 28.8k modem speeds, I found a POS intel box and slapped FreeBSD on it. This was all for testing purposes - it's a lot easier to "make" a 56k modem connection than to purchase a landline these days. In fact, I wrote a fair bit about it back in June.
One of the things that came to me when I was reading Clark's article was that making a little shell script for your Mac could make for a really quick and easy test setup if you're developing or testing websites. You can slim down your own network connections and either host the site from your laptop, or you can do the reverse and see how your site looks from Safari or Firefox. Just remember to make a script to underdo the traffic bandwidth restrictions, or you'll be hollering in no time.
At my last job, there were several times when I was doing some crazy network connection testing in the field and needed a backchannel. Fortunately, an iBook with a bluetooth telephone nearby made it all work when we couldn't get the satellite link to establish.
It's the end of saturday, and I can happily report that I haven't done much of anything today. I shipped out a pile of Christmas packages, had some lovely green tea, and ate an awesome dinner with friends. And that is what counts as an incredible "not much of anything" day for me.
Ran across a link to Jim Getty's blog where he's talking about the hardware specifics associated with the OLPC project. Pretty cool - and definitely a blog to watch.
Tonight was a night to get out of the house. When I came home, Karen had clearly come down with a cold and wasn't feeling well, which I thought would kill those plans for the night. But she sacked out really early and told me to go out anyway, so I spent most of the evening down at El Diablo, ensconced in a comfy chair and reading a science fiction book I bought next door instead of doing the journal writing I thought I might do. Not exactly what I intended, but it worked out well.
I just got home a little bit ago, and Karen has been back up and looks like she might have a little insomnia to top it all off. I think its really just a big stress relief thing from her finals and finishing up classes. She took it well, but she was pretty cranked up over the whole "finals thing".
While I was walking home, I noticed one thing for sure - there wasn't ANY fog. In fact, it was a crystal clear night. Yeah - in that midwest sense, it was also pretty darn chilly out there. Not mid-winter-missouri chilly, but below freezing - which is really pretty uncommon for up here.
So no journal writing (or at least not much), but it's been a nice evening, and the stars were pretty on the walk home.
"How do you tell if someone learned a topic" was the dinner-time question tonight. Karen finished her classes for the quarter (I keep wanting to call them semesters), and one of her finals left her really depressed and kinda wigged out. The instructor (who I shall not name) was "ok" by all repute, but not awesome - and seemed to have a flair for showing off how much he knew more than focusing on making sure his students added to their knowledge. At least, this is my (somewhat brutal) synopsis based on hearing many evenings of "I can't believe he..." things.
So it wasn't really unexpected that the final in the class was equally baroque and difficult to comprehend. And I'll get a little more specific, because for those of you in the "know" about programming languages - this'll just top it off. The class was about Perl. To my mind, there's only one language that can be more viscously obtuse than perl - and that's C++. So after a quarter, giving students a final where the questions included some of the finer points of this or that function call seemed a little more like "Cool Perl Trivia" quiz than actually attempting to determine if the students learned anything. And just to pour on the praise - if my sweetie had a hard time with this final, I expect the remaining students would have darn near guaranteed to bomb it. (yeah - she's a pretty smart lady - and she had the benefit of having done perl in the past!)
So how would you determine if someone's really learned the language? Or enough to use it? Do you think it'd be a fair test if they knew and could quickly look up the answers to the questions? At this point, I think that's a pretty fair way to deal with similiar things in an interview (albeit not a class test) situation - I want to hear when someone doesn't know exactly, what their guess might be, but most importantly how they'd solve the problem - where to look or what to do.
Having taught a little previously, I know the challenge of determining "how much someone has learned" and "how much they know" of a language. Frankly, it's often really tough doing that even with coworkers that you're around all the time! Getting a gradation of knowledge through a test - well, it's damn tricky to do that reasonably well. And when it comes right down to it - I don't know what I would have written as a test of someone having learned perl. I think I probably would have gone into debugging questions and tried to get the students to explain why the code generated the results that it did, and what they would need to do to make it work "correctly". Yeah - essay test. A pain to grade, but I think you need more granularity and detail than you can get off a multiple choice...
I wandered about the house sort of aimlessly this evening - Karen's out at a holiday party. It wasn't until recently that I actually looked outside though - and saw that it was a "dark and foggy night". It immediately put my in mind of some lovecraftian horror story. Heh - yeah, perfect when you're wondering when your sweetie is going to be home.
It's definitely a thick pea soup out there this evening. I walked outside a bit - and it has the weird echo-y sort of feel the air too. It's that time of year in Seattle where fog is common, but this year seems to be having a bit more of it than I recall from earlier years.
More geekstuff...
If you're into screencasts (typically of a demo of how to use some technology) - then you should hear about the Django Screencast. It's nothin' official like from the Django maker folks, but it is pretty slick. 7Mb, H264 codec (meaning you'll need Quicktime 7 or VLC to view it).
A little evening geektalk from the testing world.
I was determined to play with Selenium a bit tonight, and while I was wandering around in FAQ land, I stumbled upon SeleniumRecorder - a firefox extension that records sessions and generates Selenium test scripts (or at least the basis for them). How freakin' awesome is that! Yeah, yeah - I can hear it now: This guy is excited about a TESTING TOOL!?!?
Well, let me tell you - its a place where the tools cost a freakin' fortune, so getting things you can really use on a budget (like, er, working in a startup) is damn difficult! And Selenium has rolled out and made the whole testing process for web pages just about 100 times better than it had been previously. I mean, sure - you can still write the automation pieces that drive HttpUnit, or take advantage of Pamie or Watir and drive IE through it's COM interface - but this just trumps the lot as far as I'm concerned - because now you can let javascript driver SEVERAL DIFFERENT BROWSERS actually through the site to help identify cross-browser compatibility problems and functionally test the lot.
Its not a completely "do everything" for you tool set, but it is really very complete.
Today we saw Pride and Prejudice - the latest remake with Keira Knightley. They did a good job with it, but I've got to admit that I've was very spoiled by the BBC's version of it. While I liked the acting a great deal, there was just so much more development of the characters in the 6-hour miniseries that a two hour engagement just couldn't quite come to fulfill the depth that I'd come to look forward to from the movie.
The article is horrifically short for coming to a conclusion, and I haven't read enough to make my own concrete judgement, but the first thing I thought when I read the comment about the $100 MIT laptop from Intel's Barret was fear. Fear of getting gutshot and underpriced by something that is sufficient as opposed to all the twiddly gadgetry that gets embedded today.
I can't help but guess that the vast majority of processing time in a modern CPU is used more for pretty graphics than anything else. So if you trimmed out the fashionable GUI stuff, there's no real reason why a $100 laptop with wireless couldn't be built and produced. (Now, mind you - I LIKE that fashionable GUI stuff)
Of course beyond all that AMD is on the laptop project - Intel isn't. At best, Intel is sour graping the whole thing. Because AMD is getting in a little PR ass kicking on them.
It's hard to find many concrete technical details on this baby, but it's processor speed is actually right in the same realm as my iBook or my desktop - 500Mhz. (Yeah, I've got some out-of-date hardware, huh?). It's running linux - or some variation of an open source OS - maybe it's BSD. Like I said - finding the geek details is a little tricky.
I think is that this is really opening the door to a fairly large disruption in technology. If we can produce these laptops for even say - $200, then suddenly snagging one and doing any sort of wacky modding to it because easily in the realm of feasibility for hackers and makers. The linksys was a perfect example of this - $75 and hack away boys! It's not much processor juice in there - WAY less than a 500Mhz x86 style processor - but it's enough for some focused work.
You know, the one laptop, one child thing is just a darn cool project when it comes right down to it.
It was a very long day today, and I'm completely bushed. You know, one of those days that just leaves you completely drained...
Even still, I wanted to write briefly that Karen and I took in Narnia tonight, and we both thought it was really well done.
I'd been a little hesitant after the papers made such a big schpiel about it being a "christian movie", but really the movie stuck to the book and wasn't any more or less overtly "christian" than the text. Alegorically, yeah - but it was also just a good (classic) story with well played actors and actresses and some really nice special effects. I especially liked the griffons. As far as acting, James McAvoy (played the faun Tumnus) did a great job, and I thought his facial expressions were near priceless. Not hilarious or stupid or anything like that - just really right on for what I expected in the role.
Now I think I'll go pass out. Tomorrow bodes decorations, and Karen has already extracted a promise of hanging and setting up of the various holiday decor thingies we have.
It's always amusing, sometimes in that not-so-funny-way, to see the drama that can come out from reviews of API, technical projects, and the like. A classic case in point is Aaron Swartz' rather nasty and overblow review of trying to use Django.
The very best part of the whole page are the comments - "Letters to the Editor" as he has them labelled. The first two comments are from two of the creators of Django - both incredibly well constrained and positive feedback for the attack they received. It's the fourth that I found most amusing - Paul Graham called him out on his complete lack of followthrough in his writeup - that he never actually defined a "real reason" for switching.
Well, I have a rather positively biased fondness of Django, simply because I think what they're doing is cool, and it was driven by need which is easy to see. It compares very closely (in my mind) to Ruby on Rails - except using python. Of course I haven't used it on any projects yet (other than piddling things), but it's clearly standing up to the pressure with the Washington Post and ChicagoCrime...
My favorite market ever has lost it's lease. I'm so incredibly bummed about this. Apparently the owners of the land where Metropolitan Market has stood for 40 years have signed over the space to QFC and a big ole' development, slated to be in place by the end of 2008. Metro Market's lease ends December 31, 2006. One year and a few days from now.
Is that the SUCK or what?
The little filling station across the way is also in line to get demolished (albeit quite a bit earlier) - to make way for a 4 story apartment complex. Parking is about to get a WHOLE lot worse in Queen Anne. It's not as bad as Capitol Hill - but its clear it's going to be heading that way.
All this was really decided years ago - before we even moved here - when the city zoned a section of the top of Queen Anne as "Urban Village". That cranked up the allowable heights and density, so you know it's going to happen - it's just a matter of when. In 2002, the owners of the land where Metropolitan Market sites tried to redo that space - and the backed down after neighborhood pressure "and market factors". Lord knows what outcry will happen for the neighborhoods favorite store now.
I really, really hope they find a location to move to nearby. I hate to admit it, but I'll probably shop at the QFC if it's a reasonable grocery. Or maybe I'll just continue to shop at Safeway. I'll go out of my way to shop at Metropolitan Market if it is anywhere nearby. There's stuff you just can't find anywhere but Metropolitan Market - lord knows where we'll go if it's just "gone". Maybe start driving over to Whole Foods...
suck.
Last night I went to dinner at Toyoda Sushi with a friend, the first time I'd been there. We sat at the Sushi bar, and Sen (I'm probably mispelling his name) started serving us up a wonderful meal. I couldn't even tell you what all of it was (I don't track that fast), but one part in particular stands out - a tempura spicy tuna roll. Wow, that was nice.
The environment was a bit tight, but that didn't detract much from the experience. They served miso and a noodle dish as an appetizer, and it just went from there. Definitely a place to go again.
I think Gus has the perfect embodiment of "agile development". Heh. I hate it when that happens too...
Karen loves doing them, and I view them as sort of a necessary chore. Something you just "gotta do" over the holidays. Even still, the hard truth is you've got a much better chance getting a card from us if your last name is near the beginning of the alphabet. I get annoyed after so many card writings at one sitting and just refused to do any more. As is the case at the moment.
But hey - I can write here, and that's a LOT easier than the little notesy writing that typically makes it into a card. For one thing, I can type a LOT more than I can easily write. If Karen wouldn't shoot me, I'd be tempted to write one of those "to everyone" little letters, print out a couple hundred, and fold those into cards. Cheap, easy, efficient. But I guess that's not quite the name of the game with holiday cards. Ah well.
Since I was determined to spend the day not doing much of use, I headed over to the UVillage Apple Store to see all the toys. Although they've been out for a bit, I hadn't actually played with an iPod Nano previously. Man, those things are small. That's quite a bit of compute packed in there, and soooo light. I thought the mini's were impressive. For just sheer technical shrink and packaging, the nano has it beat.
Then I went and played with the new iMac G5's. Oh my lord, are those pretty. And those larger screens - oooh... it's enough to make me think that this whole laptop thing is just silly, because that screen real estate was just beautiful. I've not given up on my trusty iBook, not yet...
But I'm beginning to really see the age. Since I used the iBook daily (it's the 533Mhz G3 white iBook), firing up Safari and browsing to a page on that iMac was amazingly fast. Of course I had to play with the built-in camera thing too, which was amusing. And the remote for it. Wow - that's really quite the punch towards moving into the living room. Add some built-in PVR software to that set - and you've got yourself one killer setup. And if you do it - go for the 20" display. It's so obviously worth it.
The only downside was the cable setup. Although it's a really clean look, the cable setup is not conducive to a clean layout. I foresee cables spewing out from behind the right side of this critter in no time at my desk. I wish they'd done that a little better - and at least put one USB connect on the side - or the front. That would make using the camera or thumb drive SO much easier than having to twist all that crap around to get to the port.
Of course the G5's with the 30" monitor sort of took the cake. That amount of visual real estate in front of you is - just awesome. Wow.
Sooner or later, I know I'm going to need to upgrade my Mac. At least one of them. And I use the laptop FAR more than the desktop. But the powerbooks just don't even seem to compare to the G5 iMacs, so its a darn hard choice. And I'm not at "that point" yet, so I'm waiting. Maybe the intel based macs will hit the streets in the near future and make the choices even more difficult.
I was piddling around today, it being a sunday and all, and I started digging into a project I put on the "backburner" just a little bit ago. Only I realized that "just a little bit ago" was around 20 months back - March of 2004. Hmmmm... so maybe more than just a little bit ago.
It was a little web application I was playing with, written in python. I had a baseline setup for it, some unit tests, and I'd even started using it. I'm not sure why I moved away from the project when I did - I can't remember exactly what happened in March of 2004 that swung me so far away from it. I think maybe that's when I joined CoCo Communications, and then I lost that summer and following fall pretty darn quickly to the chaos of the startup environment. Yeah, thinking back at it all - that's just about exactly the timing, so that is undoubtably what pulled me off and away.
The most amusing part of this was going back in and reading all the python code and ideas that I'd scribbled down about it. It is just amazing how much the tools have transformed in the past 20 months. Most of what I'd written was the same thing that everyone wrote with a web application - the object mappings, some quick business logic, and a lot of view/layout stuff. Today I think I could replicate the whole thing in Django in just a couple of days, or try out the same concept with TurboGears or move it into Ruby with Ruby on Rails. So much of the work that I'd really done is now "dealt with" by a Django model, or a Ruby ActiveRecord.
Pretty interesting what 20 months distance puts on the original ideas as well. Definitely a different point of view.
hidden apps in MacOS X
There are a number of helper applications hidden away in MacOS X. Sometimes just little things used by the built in applications, sometimes a bit more powerful. Many of them you'd never really want to run interactively, but there is one that I wish was more obviously available:
Network Diagnostics
This is the application that can get launched from Safari (or some of the other applications) when you don't have an active internet connection. I see it periodically at coffee shops when the wireless freaks out. Today I decided to really hunt it down.
You *can* run it any time you want using the terminal:
open /System/Library/CoreServices/Network\ Diagnostics.app
It has a great little red light/green light status list that gives a quick view on how things are doing with connecting to networks. Kinda neat.
I do wish it was in the /Applications/Utilities folder. Guess maybe I ought to submit a bug or somethin', huh?
I've heard the whistle of Google Analytics since it was released a little while back, but Tim Bray's article on it is the first that I've seen someone really dig into it - even just to show it off with some of his own comparisons based on his site. Kind of interesting...
Spotted this through Make today: Moleskine Notebook Hack. I almost always use a pen anymore, but its still a neat idea.
There's one less dungeness crab in the world today, the fault of Nathan and I - but boy was that tasty! We actually made a pretty incredible day of it - wandering here and there, chatting and munching, talking up a storm from one topic to another.
We ended the by seeing AeonFlux - from which we really only agreed that Charlize Theron looks great wearing just beads.
Well, I dove back into the world of SOAP services and Objective-C recently, digging back into things and trying figuring out how the pieces could all work together a little more easily.
I guess the most general thing to say is WSMakeStubs (Apple's code-generating tool for SOAP service proxies) is just sort of broken. It works for the simplest cases, but that's really it. And to make matters even more frustrating the WebServices CoreFoundation pieces just really don't have support for SOAP literal encoded document message encoding.
And with SOAP getting more and more excessively complex (I'm really not a fan of SOAP, I'm just trying to figure out how to make the best of an icky situation), the WebServices APIs are just not up to strength. The whole WS-* field of crazy XML based permutations is just enough to make your head spin.
The good news is that Tiger now comes with a really nice XML api library: NSXML. It's not perfect either mind you, but its pretty effective and complete. And best of all, between NSXML and NSMutableURLRequest, you can pretty much put together your own SOAP proxies without too much pain. Yeah, I'd really rather have a library to make it all easy. But at least I'm not having to go down to the sockets level to make this work.
Now I still haven't made the breakthrough I'd been hoping to - faking out the default ASP.NET web services into talking with my code - but its a LOT closer than it was previously. My particular target has some extra validation components that I'm not yet satisfying, so it's still bitchin' at me. Ah well - that's what weekends are for, ja?
In the meantime, I've got a quick "make all these changes" minidocument stored away in a VoodooPad 'document' pending whatever I decide to do with the darn thing.
AIM has been flaky a lot lately. Every time I turn around, it seems to have logged me out or otherwise disconnected me. And I'm seeing it happen periodically to others. What's up with that?
-joe
First snowfall of the year. Downtown I wasn't sure anything was really happening because it all melts so fast at sea level, but there's about an inch of untouched white wet snow on my front porch.
And the usual number of "Oh my god I can't drive!" crashes as I made my way home.
Dear Spamming Pieces of Shit,
I've disabled trackback now too. Are you happy? You damn jerks.
I'm going to have to dump this blog mechanism and do something else. WordPress is a possibility, writing something myself is too (although I'm lacking a bit o' time for that right now).