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Sunday, 15 April 2001 — Easter
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<RANT> "Religious" holidays get my goat. I just can't find the good part about them, other than family get-togethers, for which the holiday merely provides a convenient excuse. For people who are genuinely spiritual, every day is a day to celebrate God. And for those who aren't actually interested in "religious"-type spirituality, it's hypocritical to celebrate days set aside to honor something in which they don't believe. And of course, in America at least, all holidays have been enthusiastically hijacked by people whose absolute sole interest is to sell things. If I could pick a religious holiday that I would enjoy celebrating, I'd create a new one, celebrating the day that Jesus kicked the moneychangers out of the temple. Let's see 'em turn that one into a sale-fest.
As far as Easter goes, apparently the only popular elements in the celebration were borrowed from Babylonian festivities of great antiquity, revolving around Ishtar/Astarte, who was reputed to be the wife of the Biblical Nimrod. Easter bunnies are of course simply fertility symbols, for their noted fecundicity; and colored eggs go way back as well. Chocolate... well, who needs an excuse to eat chocolate?
As for the resurrection itself, the ostensible center of the celebration — I believe that Jesus Christ died, was buried, and rose again after three days and nights, as prophesied in scripture. So why don't we have a holiday called Resurrection Day? Or better yet, just remember every day that Jesus rose, and live in a way that takes that into account?
OK, I'm through. We now return you to our regularly scheduled programming. </RANT>
After church I went to my sister's house for dinner. Her four kids remind me of what it was like when we four were growing up together. For lo these many years I've usually been in quieter surroundings. I got married and lived with a wife and some cats. Then we had a child, and the family was three. Now I live completely alone. To plunge for a few hours back into the roiling hullabaloo (that word has just got to be Aussie, doesn't it?) of my sister's four kids is a refreshing reminder of other days. Refreshing to visit, and refreshing in another way to go back home alone. It's good to have both. My littlest niece (three) was drinking cold milk from a covered "sippy" cup. Then she pulled off one sock and slipped it onto the cup from the bottom. She turned to me, triumphantly waving her innovation, and said "Now I'm not cold any more!" A homemade sippy cup cozy, apparently. Kids are great.
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Monday, 16 April 2001
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Two different Win98 notebooks this morning refused to see the network. One inexplicably straightened up after a reboot, but the other is steadfastly refusing to play ball. Microsoft is a great company. Their bulletproof operating systems are the best ever seen on the planet. I never have trouble with Windows computers. Everyone should give Bill Gates all their money and property. He's made of this world an earthly paradise.
LATER...
Well, apparently the notebook connectivity problem was simply mechanical. A couple of the pins in the XJack connector were bent back, and the CAT 5 connector wasn't plugged in ALLLLLL the way. Urged the offending pins back in the proper direction with a little screwdriver blade, made sure the ethernet connector actually made that neat clicky noise when inserted, and Robert is your parent's brother.
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Tuesday, 17 April 2001
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Last night at church my cousin gave me a little pin for my upcoming birthday. It says: "DON'T BOTHER ME — I'm trying to figure a way to drink coffee for a living." Heh. I love it. In some circles I'm famous for my devotion to the caffeine molecule (Our Friend), and coffee in particular. Last year the same cousin gave me a refrigerator magnet that says: "No Coffee No Workee." I like good coffee, but even poor coffee is better than no coffee. And "free-ness" instantly raises coffee quality by at least one notch. For instance, here at work the company provides unlimited free coffee. They buy those bulk Folgers 1-pot pouches. Rip off the top, dump it into a fresh filter, and it makes ten middling-weak 5-ounce cups. But because it's free to me, I'm as happy as if it were actually made to a manly strength. Hey, if it's weak, drink more. Good for the kidneys.
I remember a couple years back when I was working on a project to migrate all the upstate New York file servers at CellularONE (now Xingular) from Novell to NT. I spent a lot of time for a couple months driving from Rochester to Buffalo, or Syracuse, or half a dozen smaller towns every morning. Buffalo is about a one-hour drive from Rochester. I would stop at Starbucks (which one of my CellularONE cohorts referred to as "the mother ship") before getting on the New York State Thruway. I would buy two "Venti" (that's Italian for "takes two hands to lift it" I think) Redeyes. A Redeye, as some of you may know, is when Starbucks takes a cup of their already-fairly-strong coffee, and adds to it a shot of espresso. What you end up with tastes not at all unlike road tar. This must then be doctored appropriately with half-n-half, and optionally with a few of those "raw" sugar packets that Starbucks has. The result is 20 ounces of zippy, eye-popping morning goodness. Double the recipe (as I did) for winter morning travel. I guarantee that nobody in that office was any brighter-eyed than yours truly.
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Wednesday, 18 April 2001
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Our little old Exchange mail server has gotten flakier and flakier over the past few weeks. The past couple of days, the Internet Mail Service has needed to be stopped and restarted before messages would leave our outboxes for their destinations on the Wibbly Wobbly Web. And something from Symantec (presumably pcAnywhere, since removed), keeps popping up a plaintive error message that WOW.VDM has failed to start some process. I ran RegClean to try and remove anything malodorous from the registry, but no joy. I manually edited the registry with RegEdit, removing every reference to Symantec. No joy again. And then this morning I got the message that the server's C: drive was almost full. And so it was indeed, with scarcely a floppy disk's worth of free space ("The Final Frontier") remaining. Ack! So I freed up some more space, and made the initial swap file size much smaller, and generally Made Room.
The most inexplicable thing is that when I tried to reinstall pcAnywhere, for the express reason of getting a clean uninstall, it wouldn't let me run the program, saying I didn't have the rights. I tried it logged in as the domain admin, and then as local admin, but no joy some more. I don't think I like computers anymore. But I have this recurring craving to buy groceries, so I guess I'll just have to keep getting smarter so they'll keep giving me money.
On the home front, I picked up the keys to my new apartment on Monday after work. None of them seem to admit me to the basement, where the laundry facilities live, nor do I have access to the gas meter, to give the power company an initial reading. All of which problems are capable of solution with application of the appropriate effort... But I can't help wishing that every so often, something would just work right the first time. Hey, it could happen, right?
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Thursday, 19 April 2001
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Played hookey — Happy Birthday 2 me.
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Friday, 20 April 2001
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Got the Jornada back on Wednesday afternoon. According to the repair ticket, they replaced the LCM, which I assume is the screen, and the main logic as well, and something else that was only referred to as "Other." So now I have a $700 pocket PC that can't be carried in a pocket without fracturing. What to do next? Well, the only thing I could think of was (drumroll please...) spend some more money on it! This is America, after all. So I surfed back to the HP online store and increased my investment in immature, poorly-designed information technology. This time I went low-tech, however. I bought a package of "screen protectors" and a leather carrying case. I figure I can't carry it in a pocket, but I still want to have it with me... those belt jobbies are mostly annoying, so I'll try the "carry it around like a little notebook" route for a while. If that also proves too cumbersome, then we'll go to plan C. As soon as I figure out what that might be. Once again, don't miss the next exciting episode.
LATER...
BTW, had a nice birthday yesterday. Went to church and prayed at 6:00 a.m., then went back home to make up for some chronic sleep deprivation. Got up at the disgracefully decadent hour of 11:00 or so, and steadfastly refused to be ashamed about it. Went to the bank and ordered checks with my new address on them, went to the post office and filled out a change of address form. I told the postmaster to only forward my mail for three months. That's because I've heard that if you tell the postmaster your address change is permanent, he automatically makes your new address available to anybody who ever had the old one. Including all those stupid catalog places and long distance companies and credit card companies... But (the theory goes) if you say that your address change is only temporary, then that "show the whole world" database doesn't get your new address. Of course, during that temporary period of mail forwarding, I need to contact every single company or person that I want to have my new address, and give it to them.
Then my ex-wife made me supper, and my daughter decorated a lovely cake (double frosting yum yum), and I was polite enough to have seconds. I often say, politeness will be the death of me one day...
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Saturday, 21 April 2001
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No entry.