we've been getting a lot of rain around the great lakes region lately, which has been raising the lake levels. this is big news around these parts because the lake levels have been dropping steadily over the years, which has a dramatic impact on shipping and tourism.

according to our local news the other night the lakes are up 3 inches in the past week, 8 inches in the past month and 11 inches over the same time last year. astoundingly, the news anchor stated that 380 billion gallons of water are required to raise the lakes each inch.

of course, if it's on the local news, it must be true.

the saga continues.

after discovering that my ibook was returned with new hardware that wouldn't run on anything but 10.3, i had apple send me install disks, which they said would take four or five business days to deliver; so i also decided to have my old panther install disks shipped overnight from chicago to ensure that i wouldn't have to suffer through a long weekend with a hobbled system. after an not-so-amusing series of mishaps with fedex, i finally get my hands on the old disks late in the day. as i start the install process, i can see that it's not working. my monitor is still on the fritz and i'm left wondering what i've done to so anger the computing gods.

after an hour on the phone with apple, i find out that the new motherboard is incompatible with all older retail panther disks and that you can only use the special ones that they forgot to send me earlier in the week. nobody can tell me why i didn't get the disks in the first place, nor why the techs didn't tell me that my old disks wouldn't work before i had them shipped from chicago. so, i decide to ask for the only piece of concrete information that i think of that could give me an idea of when i'd get the disks. a simple tracking number.

after fumbling through various support menus for twenty minutes, the tech gives up and says that he can't seem to get me a tracking number. so this is what it's come to - i can't even get a tracking number to verify that they've even shipped the disks. at this point i've had enough and ask to talk to his manager. i let him know that i'm not going to bad mouth him, but that i really, really need to register my displeasure with somebody.

i start by telling the supervisor the long and sordid repair history on my machine which has culminated in this particularly aggravating fiasco. does this strike him as reasonable, i ask? i mean, really, could he in all honesty say the situation had not gone way out side the bounds of normal? certainly, i say, you guys can't really enjoy losing the scads of cash that you're losing on me. his reply was a not-so-subtle insinuation that maybe i was a little harder on my laptop than your average joe. i can see this is going nowhere, so i decide that at the very least, i'm going t extract a tracking number from him. for fifteen minutes i listen to him stumble through screens in that way that managers who haven't had to use the support systems in ages are apt to do. finally, with no small amount of triumphant exasperation in his voice, he slowly reads the shipping number. as i hang up the phone on 5:10 p.m. on friday, i put the tracking number into google and discover much to my surprise that the fedex page indicates that the disks had supposedly been delivered mere minutes before.

perplexed as to why i didn't hear the doorbell ring, i walk downstairs and see that, indeed, the fedex person had stuffed the disk in the mailslot at presumably almost exactly the same moment that the support manager was reading me the number.

sometimes the computing gods have the dryest sense of humor.

i've had an itch for a digital slr camera for several years, but i haven't been able to justify the purchase since, until recently, nothing came close to the price and performance that i could get from my entry level nikon n50& nothing, that is, until i saw the the nikon d70.

while it's nearly a grand just for the body, i put the word out on the street that for for my birthday i was accepting contributions for a digital camera& i'll admit to resorting to telling grandparents and other unsuspecting relatives that i wanted a nice digital slr camera so i could send everyone pictures of the baby.

you have to do what you have to do, right?

the best thing about the d70 is that i can use the lenses that i already have for the n50. despite that and having a little birthday money burning a hole in my pocket, i still quite bring myself to make the purchase.; the pragmatist in me wants to wait until the price drops. we'll see how long i can hold out.

so, i get my ibook back from it's latest trip to the shop and i discover that, on what was a seemingly straightforward repair, they replaced just about every part in the ibook! again! this time, i got a new lcd screen and casing, yet another new motherboard, a new combo drive, a new keyboard and a new harddrive! that's right, they replaced my drive and wiped all my data, when - to the best of my knowledge there wasn't anything wrong with the drive went it went to them. nor, might i add, was there anything wrong with my keypad. oddly - i'm not the only one who has had their drive replaced for no apparent reason. sound suspicious? i called apple to see why they replaced a whole bunch of stuff that wasn't broken when it left and they didn't have an answer. now that's service.

sweet mary mother of perl. for those of you keeping track at home, that makes something like 4 motherboards, 2 drives, 1 airport card, 1 new combo drive and 1 new keyboard in two years. it's beyond ridiculous now, and i understand that this is just the universe having a good laugh at my expense. i just need to remember to breath, right? out with the bad air and in with the good. on the bright side, what else could possibly go wrong?

well, just to peg the insansity meter, apple returned my ibook with 10.2 ( jaguar ) installed. it went in with 10.3.3 ( panther ). of course, i don't have the panther install disks handy ( they're in chicago ), so i decide to temporarily upgrade to 10.2.8. much to my chagrin, when i reboot after applying the software update, i find that the monitor is on the fritz again! what fun! so i call apple one more time and they explain that they're terribly, terribly sorry but 10.2 should have never been installed on the computer because the new hardware requires panther! he! he! oh joy! watch as the universe gets a good kidney punch in, just as she squares up for a right cross...

hey, it's my 32nd birthday! not too much birthday excitement, which i guess is a good thing, when one gets to a certain age. we went out to eat at a perfectly mediocre steak house, kris made me carrot cake - which is my favorite - and now i'm enjoying a adult beverage or two. or three.

you might might remember that the snowdeal show ® required us to move into a large 3-floor ( well, 4 floors actually, if you consider the basement ) victorian which was built in 1890. naturally, getting a solid wireless connection throughout the house has been a top priority.

initially the access point and cable modem were placed on the third floor since that's where my home office is setup and where comcast dropped the "data" cable. an initial site survey showed that the signal strength was great on the third floor ( 4 bars on a mac), passable ( 2 bars ) with holes on the first floor, and nonexistant in the basement. given this data, i was initially just going to repurpose my aging linksys BEFW11S4 and slap on some range extending antenna's , but after some additional thought, i decided to just upgrade my ap to a linksys wrt54g and take advantage of firmware hacks to turn up the power to and get a little better coverage.

while there were a few close contenders, i ended up going with sveasoft's firmware . after you load the software on the ap, you're presented with an admin screen that looks deceptively like the stock screen, but with a boatload of new features , including the ability to turn up the transmit power. . you won't be able to turn the ap into a 200mw monster, but i've found you can increase the transmit power by 40 percent over the factory settings and get a reliable 50 mw signal.

with a little more power, i could get getter signal on the first floor, with the ap on the third floor but i still wasn't getting anything in the basement. rf signal propagation is a mystery to me and i've found that theory is worthless in real world settings, so the next logical step was to unplug the ap and start moving it around. i had a hunch that if i centered the ap in the first floor floorboards ( via access in the basement ) at about the middle of the house that i'd get good coverage across all 4 floors. and indeed, after a little empirical testing i had great coverage everywhere, thanks to one well-placed ap and the community behind sveasofts . although the firmware is gpl'd, for $20 you can subscribe to get a full year of firmware upgrades and priority support. while this is a slightly controversial approach to subsidizing open source code developement, it seems like a terrific bargain to me.

• Did Bill Gates shake the blogosphere
  [ "Bill Gates told Warren Buffett about blogging on Thursday. " ]
• Collegiality clause
  [ "Collegial competition is better than enmity." ]
• Longest scientific study yet backs Atkins diet
  [ "The claimed benefits of the controversial low-carbohydrate Atkins diet have been reaffirmed in two new studies, one of which is the longest study to date." ]
• Defamer Preview: Joey
  [ "The pacing of jokes goes something like this: Joey's dumb, Gina's tits...Joey's dumb, Joey's dumb, Gina's tits. Gina's tits. Whoa! Hot neighbor, Joey's boner, Joey's dumb, Gina's tits." ]
• Don't Worry About Imaginary Problems
  [ "Just do it, and worry about the imaginary problems when they become real." ]
• The Jesus Landing Pad
  [ "...apparently, we're not supposed to know the National Security Council's top Middle East aide consults with apocalyptic Christians eager to ensure American policy on Israel conforms with their sectarian doomsday scenarios." ]

ev wonders what the fuck happened to firefox? i'm wondering the same thing. since my ibook is in the shop (again) , i've been sneaking time on kris' ibook. for some reason firefox has turned into a crashing, unusable nightmare. we're both running 10.3.3. and have all the latest patches applied.

phil ringnalda: licensing matters.

hmm. i didn't know that sandra tsing loh was canned by her npr affiliate for an engineer's mistake [ the engineer didn't bleep out words that were meant to be bleeped ]. apparently, the affiliate was so freaked out that there would be a backlash, they fired her.

after listeners complained in droves, they tried to hire her back, but she refused. so no more sandra tsing loh because of the culture of fear being promulgated because of an exposed breast.

update: but hey - at least i can browse the snuff times and get my fill of dead bodies.

yowza. that's quite a spam bucket . i see "1000000 MB" on my screen as do a few others . a strange server error or a big ol' disruptive innovation? i gather we'll all know soon.

update: sniff. they took my terabyte away. i still can't tell if if was a "bug" that erroneously reported a terabyte that didn't ever exist or a "bug" that revealed plans.

i'm going to do it. i'm going to chime in on, you know, that licensing brouhaha . i've been writing a post for days, but it always devolves into incoherence, as i try to wrap together 10 different points in one easy to digest post. i thought about separating them into individual posts, but that'll never happen, so i'm just going to go with an "impressionistic" version that won't make sense to anyone.

i'm certain that dan bricklin is writing something with a much deeper historical perspective than i could ever muster about the licensing issues beyond what he's quickly put together . but even in that short piece, there's a nugget of wisdom that bears repeating:

"The thing to learn here is that the choice of how you differentiate between users for pricing is a key element in a product's feature-set. You had better be pretty clear about the philosophy behind that differentiation and change it at your peril."

it's fascinating to watch the different movabletype user groups talk past each other as they try to come to grips with how sixapart views them and institutionalizes that viewpoint in their product and service terms of use and pricing policies. of course, there's the howling masses who drank the ben and mena kool aid and merely prove the age-old maxim that "...releasing a free version of your software does not provide any information about how many people are willing to pay for it." but what's far more interesting is to see the reactions of the "personal power users" as they come to grips with the fact that while ben and mena might have found them useful at one stage of the company's development, sixapart doesn't and needs to find ways to "...[show] they're appreciated without actually creating *more* of them and the overhead they generate. That means a simple price drop is out. Go too cheap with too much and you start to cannibalize TypePad, after all. .

fwiw, [ which is probably close to nothing ], it looks like i'm closest to pete , kellan and mark , but only when i put a particular hat on. when i wear one hat, blogger , the manual typewriter of blogging tools , is "good enough". it works and it's "free-as-in-beer", but the decision to stick with it was made with eyes wide open. when i put another hat on drupal or wordpress get chosen because, to paraphrase mark, "free enough" is never free enough. roosters will always come home to roost and pipers will always ask to get paid and you have to ask yourself if you're willing to get left holding the bag.

sometimes i am and sometimes i'm not.

ahh. yes. nothing says spring time like the birds chirping, the trees "leafing out" and me needing a logic board for my ibook .

hmmm. how much is too much?

"The team has already found that the babies with higher fetal testosterone levels had a smaller vocabulary and made eye contact less often when they were a year old."

i think the really important question should be, what does too much estrogen do? i have a few hypothesis. it's a joke!

• spoofstick
  [ "...cool utility that will help users identify phishing scams and other site spoofing nastyness." ]
• writing for google
  [ "Neither of the last two articles were meant for you, however. They were written for Google." ]
• 11 eBay Categories Turnover More than $1 Billion
  [ "eBay's bigger If eBay were a country, its gross national product would be leaving Guatemala in the dust. " ]
• There is More Than One Kind of Startup
  [ "Amar Bhide makes the case that business initiatives can be classified according to three parameters: initial investment, irreducible uncertainty, and likely profit. In turn, each class of initiative can be characterized by a set of initial conditions." ]

forget that other impending ipo - it looks like xten went public today. o.k. maybe it's not as big an event as the impending googlemania, but congratulations to the folks at xten anyway.

hopefully the new os x release and the proposed audio quality fix will make the soft sip phone as good on my ibook as it is on a peecee, because xten plus voicepulse connect equals cheap and easy prepaid VoIP to PSTN calling.

update: it looks like xten "reverse ipo'd" through an adult entertainment company? the mind reels with thoughts of possible "synergies".

check. check. check.

update: i suppose that it's funny that i can't get comments working. i think i followed the directions. honest.

update: yeeesh. o.k. somehow i got some bad comment tags in the template. who knows how that happened. and after i fixed them i see a little comment link, but bad, bad things happen if you click on the link. i'm not really trying to make some kind of usability point. i really, honestly can't get comments working. if anyone has any ideas, er, i guess email me. i'm guesing that it has to do with the new fancy-schmancy pretty-url redirect scheme colliding with my relative url pointing to my css file?

update: o.k. don't use relative urls to point to your css files. otherwise the pretty-url redirect breaks. i don't think i like that. amusingly, now that i fixed the css problem, clicking on the "comments" link doesn't actually appear to do anything. i must be missing something obvious, because it can't really be this difficult.

update: that was painful, but it's working now.

• Internet Archive: Petabox via hack the planet
  [ "The petabox by the Internet Archive is a machine designed to safely store and process one petabyte of information (a petabyte is a million gigabytes)." ]
• quickmba via bblog
  [ "Topics are presented as frameworks and summaries in the various subjects of business administration, as taught in the world's top MBA programs." ]
• Why do links on blogger.com (and in comments) redirect through google.com and blogger.com? via ev
  [ "Comment spamming for PageRank will simply not work via Blogger comments..." ]
• The New Blogger
  [ "Can't say what else is in the pipeline for additions to the dashboard, but users can most likely expect many more changes and new features in the near future." ]
• google blog
  [ "We're going to post stuff here - regular bloggy things: What Larry had for breakfast. What Sergey thinks of that Hellboy movie. Which Dawson's Creek character reminds us most of Eric." ]

as undoubtably everyone will hear real soon, blogger pushed out a major update today. as phil notes, the biggest differences that makes a difference to the average user is comments. things are still a little rough around the edges though, since i tried to enable comments by clicking on the appropriate button in the preference pane. i received an automated reply that blogger couldn't automatically update my template due to an unspecified error and was given the "code" to manually update the template. when i viewed the template, i saw that despite the warning, i saw that the code had already been added. naturally, i decided to "republish" my site to let you see the results. unfortunately, blogger just whirred away trying to republish, to no avail. so my comments are enabled, but i've got no comments. sigh.

matt haughey has also posted a quick review. the first amongst many, i suspect. excuse me while i try to figure out how to really enable comments.

update: hmmm. the post published fine, but sans comments enabled even though the code is in the template. if i'm confused.....

with many friends and family involved in the auto industry in one form or another, and having spent a few of my formative years in [ well, near, actually ] flint, michigan at around the same time that michael moore's roger & me was released, i probably follow the latest michael moore controversy more closely than most.

anyone from flint knows that michael has always been ham-fisted with the facts. and he has a penchant for self-promotion that borders on the obnoxious. but he'd use these and many other tricks to tell an entertaining [ and often heartfelt ] story in a classic populist style. he might be a ham-fisted propagandist, but he was our ham-fisted, populist propagandist. nonetheless, over the years, i had found myself accepting an increasingly annoying caricature of moore which was reinforced by the press. while i found him entertaining, it seemed that we has straying from his roots. indeed, when bowling for columbine was released, others felt that moore had lost his populist heart. i will admit to refusing to watch the movie because i didn't think i could sit through an entire production from the "new" snarky-sans-heart michael. luckily, i eventually succumbed and found that the movie to be surprisingly good. was it created by a ham-fisted, populist propagandist? most certainly. but it was created by our ham-fisted, populist propagandist. [ as an aside, michael was recently invited to speak at a local church in my current hometown - grand rapids, michigan . for a variety of reasons, grand rapids is not the kind of place you'd suspect to find a lot of moore supporters, so kris and i decided to go 45 minutes early so that we could get good seats and perhaps say, "hi." as we approached the church on a cold, drizzly late winter day, we were surprised to that the line was several people wide, stretched around the entire block and continued down the street. we just decided to keep driving, since there were obviously far too many people in line given the seating capacity of the church. we later learned that michael stood outside and talked with those that couldn't get in for 30-45 minutes before his "official" talk began. ]

and so, it's with all this context that i read the latest headlines about moore's latest 'publicity stunt' . our ham-fisted, populist propagandist is at it again - michael responds :

"Eisner told my agent that he did not want to anger Jeb Bush, the governor of Florida. The movie, he believed, would complicate an already complicated situation with current and future Disney projects in Florida, and that many millions of dollars of tax breaks and incentives were at stake."

maybe we should have the icrc start monitoring u.s. prisons since it appears that "mistreatment" of prisoners is systemic and there are some familiar faces behind the problems:

"Physical and sexual abuse of prisoners, similar to what has been uncovered in Iraq, takes place in American prisons with little public knowledge or concern, according to corrections officials, inmates and human rights advocates."

"The experts also point out that the man who directed the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq last year and trained the guards there resigned under pressure as director of the Utah Department of Corrections in 1997 after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time."

and i'm sure it will shock, shock, everyone to know that some of the worst abuses have occurred in texas.

• Clippy and User Experiences via olivier travers
  [ "Some people have asked me to write about user experience design (as in the whole shebang, not just interface elements or features), and also about the Office Assistant (sometimes known by the default assistant, "Clippit" often referred to as "Clippy", or other ahem, "nicknames"). Since they are somewhat related, I'll cover both here." ]
• Automatically Generated Blogroll from NetNewsWire via brent simmons
  [ "NetNewsWire is my newsreader of choice, and thus I figured that if I were to have a blogroll, the data should come from it (as opposed to a hand-maintained list)." ]
• Q7503 Principles of Software Project Management via tj
  [ "Q7503 provides an overview of the roles, responsibilities, and management methods of the technology project manager." ]
• Automated Web Photo Galleries with iPhoto and Perl
  [ "What I wanted was for Rhonda to be able to work within iPhoto as much as possible and not have to worry about the actual publishing process to the web server. Since I travel a bit, it had to be a setup that didn't require me to mount disks, format photos, build SQL commands, or process email messages." ]

given my impending fatherhood, it's probably not surprising that i'm finding myself reading more and more online parenting resources as i try to get myself informed about being a dad. of course, i'm aware that anything i might think i know will blown away when "the boots hit the ground", but it's still good to start pondering this stuff ahead of time. take, for instance, tantrums. what the heck do you do about tantrums? we've quietly been taking notes over the years, and it seems that no matter how hard you try, tantrums are inevitable. and just as inevitable, it seems, are the gentle "power struggles" that emerge from tantrums. do you just let them play out? are you a bad person for letting your screaming toddler scream away in the beer aisle of the convenience store? in any case, Cry for Connection: A Fresh Approach to Tantrums seems to make a lot of intuitive sense:

"But what if, contrary to what we've grown up believing, tantrums and other expressions of feelings are actually useful? What if a tantrum is like an emotional sneeze--a natural reaction meant to clear out foreign material? Perhaps the usual struggle of parent versus child at emotional moments doesn't have to take place. Perhaps we can throw away the mental chalkboard on which every meltdown is a mark against our children or ourselves."

but what do i know? if anyone has any advice, i'd be mighty obliged. hey, john and snakehairedgirl [ and others ], i'm talking to you.

i have this idea for a new reality tv show. my own reality tv show. and it'll be much more real than the realest real because, well, it's real. we've already shot the pilot and have the first few shows in the can. based on intial audience response, it's sure to be a big hit.

of course, everyone loves babies, so the show starts when one of us gets pregnant . just to keep things edgy we'll thumb our nose at traditional medicine and have an in-home birth with a midwife . surely that'll keep the viewers coming back for more. a subplot develops where kris and i sell our house the "for sale by owner way". it has all the ups and downs associated with getting ready to sell your house, complete with tight close ups of me scowling as i wish that i had pitched this segment of my reality show as more of a "while you were out" type of thing. coyly, kris and keep where we're moving a secret .

eventually we let the audience in on the big surprise as they discover that we purchased a "4-flat" in the historic district. it's a huge old victorian built in 1890 that promises to hold many surprises. not only will becoming landlords offer many suspenseful subplots, but to keep the ratings going through the roof, the audience discovers that we co-purchased the house with our sister-in-law and her lesbian partner. that's right - we're moving in with a pregnant lebian couple who already have a two year old and are expecting another baby within days our own ! and they're having it at home too! sweet holy ol' hannah you can imagine the eyeballs we'll get on that episode. two births! at home! will it be on exactly the same day? you really can't make this kind of stuff up. you'll only see it on the snowdeal show ®. think of it as a "the brady bunch" meets "three's company" meets "friends" with just a touch of "the 'L' word".

in one amusing subplot in the first episode, we fret about the malamute escaping from the house and running up and down the busy street, not knowing that he no longer lives on a quiet cul de sac. of course, he escapes multiple times and hilarity ensues as we chase him up and down the block trying to keep cars from hitting the blissfully unaware malamute. in another long running plot, i wonder what i'm going to do with the galaxie 500 , as there's no room to park it in the back of building.

so stay tuned to the snowdeal show ® and watch as we discover how the tenants adjust to living with two new owners in the building, with four dogs, a baby, and two increasingly pregnant woman. how will i adjust to heretofore unknown levels of estrogen flowing through the house? will i go insane? will i be reduced to working on the galaxie 500 at 3 in the morning much to the anoyance of my neighbors? even i don't know for sure.

• Making Sun Policy
  [ "Today I'm posting the new Sun Policy on Public Discourse; this companion piece describes how we built it." ]
• PayPal Announces 'PayPal Web Services' -- The Whole Space Needs to Mature
  [ "You can either be an unrealistic moron trying to get all the attention and pissing your partners off, or you can acknowledge reality and work on making everyone's life easier." ]
• About.com Relaunch Shows Initial Success
  [ "Its U.S. marketshare of site traffic increased 43 percent on April 27 relative to the same day a week prior." ]
• EditCSS
  [ "EditCSS is a useful extension for web developers and web designers, that works for Mozilla Firefox. It allows you to edit current stylesheets of a page in live, and display the result as you type." ]
• A little chip in the concept
  [ "I don't much mind admitting that I don't really understand DTDs." ]
• Essentials [dive into mark]
  [ "This should not come as a raging shock to anyone, but I am becoming a technological curmudgeon." ]
• Writing Firefox/Thunderbird Extensions
  [ "This document describes how to create extensions for Firefox 0.9 and newer, and Thunderbird 0.7 and newer." ]

• XUL PHP libs
  [ "or how to build remote XUL apps fast with PHP" ]
• Thinking about software licensing for a small ISV and the issue of open source
  [ "I realize that there are readers who know more about each aspect of this area than I do, so I am looking for some feedback..." ]
• The Rise of Interface Elegance in Open Source Software
  [ "Rather than adding more and more features for the mythical "power user", or swing to the other end of the spectrum and dumb-down the interface for the mythical "average user", smart developers are learning that good defaults and elegant interface design makes software better for everyone to use, regardless of their level of experience." ]
• BBEdit: Its Unix Support Doesn't Suck Either
  [ "BBEdit is a rock-solid editor that offers many useful features and contains some very good support for accessing Unix commands, tools, and scripting languages." ]
• Proof that coupons "work" for companies
  [ "Offering them gives the perception of a great deal, but the low level redemption makes good economic sense for the manufacturer. It's like having a sale without actually having one." ]
• Blogger Moms
  [ "Whatever the reasons, mommy blogs are definitely growing in popularity." ]
• Poindexter Confidential
  [ "At some point, a US president will be in a Groove space or something comparable, sure." ]