Tuesday, June 18, 2002 Link
Monday I might have reprised the Sunday morning entry because once again the ISP slowed to a crawl on Sunday evening. However, I reserved my dudgeon—high, low and in-between—and even kept a civil tongue on Monday morning when I phoned the ISP to complain that on both Saturday and Sunday evening their services had crept, and to explain that yes, I was reasonably certain that neither my computer nor my phone line was at fault because I'd tried to connect from another location (the local senior center) only to experience the same results.
And when I received the "first I've heard of it" response from their tech services folk after I'd waited through thirty minutes of busy signals, I did not gasp in disbelief, but merely restated my experience on the two previous evenings. Although their representative said only that he would "look out for" (not "look into") the problem, on Monday evening there was no recurrence of the previous nights' slowdown.
My reward for my forbearance as the karmic go-arounds come around: the sight, both on the way to work and on the return, of a red-headed woodpecker in all his U.S. Marine dress-uniform finery; my punishment for my sins of thought: a spouse stationed near spirea, yew, juniper, and quince and armed with a monster set of hedge trimmers.
Sunday morning I called the dad. After I reported on his grandchildren I heard his report on the fallen of his generation, one just a name from his working years and my childhood, the other the same, but also father to one of my childhood friends: Dale Williams, gone (Alzheimer's/heart attack); Willis Poulter, gone (Parkinson's/stroke). Even a life well spent might ill prepare us for its ending, Pafessor Erikson.
8:15 AM CDT (GMT -5)
Sunday, June 16, 2002 Link
Earlier in the month, my locally owned, nearly trouble-free, patron-friendly ISP sold out to poseurs who append an "LLC" to the name of their enterprise. Here on the middle coast, when liability is limited, we prefer to see "inc", thank you very much. One of their immediate improvements was a reduction in weekend hours to zero for customer service and zero for tech support.
Thanks in part to these cost-saving changes, I spent whatever on-line time I had Saturday night trying to reconnect after the ISP disconnected time and again: surf for five minutes, reconnect for ten; hold my breath for five minutes, bite my tongue for ten.
But hopeless Web junkie that I am, that's exactly what I did.
11:45 AM CDT (GMT -5)
Saturday, June 15, 2002 Link
As I sat at the computer early Friday evening, I noticed that the hard drive was working far more frequently than I thought was necessary, when—lo and behold—an error message flashed on the screen announcing that a failure had occurred in a program unfamiliar to me called Keylogger.
A key logger is a program that detects and archives all strokes made on a keyboard, and Owen and his co-conspirator Safa had downloaded one such program from the Web on Thursday.
I do not imagine that such a program has many uses that are anything but reprehensible. Okay, maybe spying is sly and fun in a way that idle fifteen-year-old boys appreciate, but after I'd destroyed the log and removed the program, Owen, Safa, and I had a discussion (more of a monologue, really—okay, it was a harangue) about privacy.
08:05 AM CDT (GMT -5)
Sunday, June 9, 2002 Link
Until today (or very soon) a search of the Internet for the term "vasty bigness" would have yielded no complete matches. Oh, the words "vasty" and "bigness" appear separately in a translation of Lucretius as he unfolds the nature of things, and again in Booth Tarkington's The Turmoil.
And from Shakespeare, of course, the words "vasty deep" appear in King Henry IV, Part I (Act iii. Sc. 1):
GLENDOWER: I can call spirits from the vasty deep.
HOTSPUR: Why, so can I, or so can any man;
But will they come when you do call for them?
A sarky stichomythic snippet, but a "deep" doth not a "bigness" make.
Lewis Carroll, perhaps? Nothing.
I'm left believing—rightly or wrongly—that Bullwinkle first spoke the words "vasty bigness."
Small things amuse small minds. 'Tis the nature of summer sloth.
10:05 AM CDT (GMT -5)
Sunday, June 2, 2002 Link
Recent joys: many, many kid-lit gems; an H. Potter DVD; O Brother, Where Art Thou? (the Coen brothers' movie); distance-running successes for Taylor; long hours of daylight; the occasional good sense and humor of teenage boys (Owen, for instance); and the NBA playoffs.
And the concerns: the NBA playoffs; the facts of war and the rumor of more; looming cutbacks at work; and the whine of boys out of school for an entire week already—"What can I do, Dad, that won't be a bore?"
8:05 AM CDT (GMT -5)
Thursday, May 30, 2002 Link
For those few who might be curious about why my jumble now adds a link to a newspaper from Santa Fe, New Mexico, I'll mention that I followed Alex Heard's "Dispatches From the Santa Fe Drought" in Slate earlier in the week. The Slate three-part series concluded on May 28th, but news of the drought still fills the front page of the Santa Fe New Mexican.
8:15 AM CDT (GMT -5)
Tuesday, May 28, 2002 Link
Owen and Taylor fell prey to the abiding appeal of the 1962 film To Kill a Mockingbird as the videotape played and played again on the small screen in the kitchen this weekend.
7:00 AM CDT (GMT -5)
Fair warning: In just 45 minutes Owen begins drivers ed.
7:15 AM CDT (GMT -5)
Thursday, May 16, 2002 Link
These pages are not intended to exist as a demonstration of the classic schedules of reinforcement employed in operant conditioning.
Although this is plainly a morsel, you, friend, are no pigeon.
Life has been busy!
7:00 AM CDT (GMT -5)
Sunday, May 12, 2002 Link
There is so much to catch up on! Soon. Promise.
1:20 PM CDT (GMT -5)
Tuesday, April 23, 2002 Link
"To act knavishly in a good cause is to act foolishly". From "Terrorism and the Philosophers: Can the ends ever justify the means?" by Jim Holt, in Slate, Monday, April 22, 2002 (11:25 AM PT).
9:45 AM CDT (GMT -5)
Sunday, April 14, 2002 Link
I offered this computer my blood, toil, tears, and sweat, and I had it up and running again last Sunday; however, I haven't quite found my way back to these pages in any substantive way.
Okay, so the problem of substance here is not a new one; then I'll blame my tardy return on the reading I had started (kid lit and Steinbeck) while the household was off-line, on the handful of new pages I have considered adding to this site (none of which have seen the light of a public pixel yet), and on the fact of spring.
Today, I'll moisten a toe by recording a few brief items of personal interest:
- I spent Saturday afternoon at a regional music competition at the high school. My job was to usher contestants and accompanists to the appropriate judge at the proper time and then to prohibit entrance to the room once the contestant's performance had begun. I thoroughly enjoyed the task and look forward to doing it again. Through the closed door, I heard about twenty seven-minute performances (solo female vocalists); all were good, but three were extraordinary.
- In the next twenty-four hours, Owen will turn fifteen.
- Lured by his friend hyphenated Ben and by llamas, Taylor has decided to join the Boy Scouts. A leader of the small troop he has joined raises llamas, and the boys learn to care for them and to use them as pack animals.
- In the upcoming week, we must see an edyewkaytor about Taylor's IEP for the gifted program.
7:00 AM CDT (GMT -5)
Monday, April 1, 2002 Link
While the household remains offline, I've spent time coursing through some Steinbeck (Cannery Row, Sweet Thursday, Tortilla Flat, Travels with Charley), and have only peeked into the Internet from computers at work or at the local senior center.
No doubt about it—I miss it. But I've also taken advantage of the time away from the Internet to catch up on old technology (i.e., to read books).
Yesterday I took a break from Jay Parini's biography of Steinbeck to read a bit of juvenile fiction that one of the boys recommended.
One could do worse than to spend an afternoon or an evening with Jerry Spinelli's Maniac Magee, the 1991 winner of the Newbery Medal, and perhaps the most magically engaging of the many fine bits of juvenile fiction that I've read recently. It's the one that has kept me saying "Damn, I wish I'd written that!"
Since reading Maniac Magee, I've returned to the public library to pick up three others by Spinelli: Wringer, Who Put That Hair in My Toothbrush?, and Knots in My Yo-yo String: The Autobiography of a Kid (Spinelli himself).
12:55 PM CST (GMT -6)
Monday, March 25, 2002 Link
During Sunday night's Oscar presentations, Sidney Poitier set the standard for American public oratory. Here is the text of his address.
12:55 PM CST (GMT -6)
Friday, March 22, 2002 Link
I don't understand why good computers go bad...which is why I'll be seeking outside help, I suppose. After I formatted the hard drive, the blinking machine would not recognize the CD-ROM, so I cannot reload W98. As a result, I'll be slow to update for the next few days (like that's new).
I'll mention very quickly that last Saturday in the St. Pat's Day two-mile run, Taylor came in third in his age group (he's eleven, so his results are grouped with boys ten to thirteen). He ran the two miles in 13:40, thirty-four seconds faster than he ran the same course last year, and about a minute less than I would take to walk one mile. He beamed into the camera at the awards ceremony (photos forthcoming someday), and he sleeps with the medal (he'll deny this).
2:30 PM CST (GMT -6)
Tuesday, March 12, 2002 Link
The Merriam-Webster Collegiate Thesaurus distinguishes "deft" from a passel, batch, bunch, bundle, cluster, constellation, group of synonyms as a word that "emphasizes lightness, neatness, and sureness of touch or handling." A fine example, illustration, instance, sample, specimen of the figurative sense of the word exists here.
7:30 AM CST (GMT -6)
Monday, March 4, 2002 Link
Steinbeck says that "change comes like a little wind that ruffles the curtains at dawn" (Sweet Thursday).
Poof!
Yesterday, I added the right-hand column to store bookmarks for a few sites that I haunt. In the 'jumble' portion at the top, I'll lay away without comment the links to other sites or items that catch my attention.
So there's not much here today. But the Steinbeck was worth something, wasn't it? Here's the rest: "... and it comes like the stealthy perfume of wildflowers hidden in the grass."
Sounds like spring.
7:30 AM CST (GMT -6)
"It's better to like what you like and then change your mind than to let some culture maven scare you into never liking anything that does not have some official coolness quotient." — from John Carroll's March 4th column, "It's all a matter of taste".
8:30 AM CST (GMT -6)
Tuesday, February 26, 2002 Link
I have missed it in its earlier incarnation(s), so Confessions of December is a new journal to me. The pages are in the midst of a very attractive (and very orderly) redesign. In addition to sections for the journal, photography, books, travels, music, crochet, recipes, and the kitchen sink, the site includes a copy of the Billy Collins poem "Cliche" (among others), increasing the probability that I'll have to visit again and again.
7:30 AM CST (GMT -6)
Tuesday, February 19, 2002 Link
A link to bookmark beside snopes.com, a site debunking urban legends (and a site which is actually reached at snopes2.com): Hoaxbusters, a site that identifies e-mail and Internet hoaxes (gleaned from the February 18th entry at openbrackets).
This section of the site has seen such scant activity this year that I'll just tag February onto January and pretend that I've got something substantial here.
11:15 AM CST (GMT -6)
Saturday, January 26, 2002 Link
"...and yet a certainty remains through all the chaos, a certainty that the value of our attachments to each other is greater than anything else we can conjure up."
� from the January 25th entry at Evaporation.
9:00 AM CST (GMT -6)
Sunday, January 13, 2002 Link
After hearing an NPR interview with the author on Sunday morning I have added Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos by Robert D. Kaplan, to my someday-maybe reading list.
11:15 AM CST (GMT -6)
Saturday, January 5, 2002 Link
From E.B. White's essay "Home-coming":
The spruce boughs that bank the foundations of the homes keep out the only true winter wind, and the light that leaves the sky at four o'clock automatically turns on the yellow lamps within, revealing to the soft-minded motorist interiors of perfect security, kitchens full of a just and lasting peace.
I recalled that passage from the sainted Elwyn Brooks while motoring by Web this morning through John Bailey's new pages � a handsome set of pages that shows off his home in West Somerset.
10:45 AM CST (GMT -6)
Friday, January 4, 2002 Link
Small things amuse small minds so a friend had me pegged when she told me about small time industries: entertainment for the masses (that would be me � the mass). Even though I understand how this works, instead of surfing journals this morning, I've frittered an hour playing Guess the Dictator/Sit-Com Character. At my current rate of play, I might take days to work my way down to "Mass Poetry" or "Unchat", other diversions at the site.
8:45 AM CST (GMT -6)
