The Republic still stands

When my mother wasn't sleeping well, she would pretend that she was traveling and so make the tiredness an adventure.

On Sunday we had a belated birthday party for Tess. Sandra had arranged for a Barbie birthday cake. Tess had seen the Barbie cake in the grocery store and pressed her nose against glass display case, admiring it.

I spent a lot of time yesterday, time I didn't really have, trying to understand why one of my small programs was producing unpredicted results. Finally, about 4:30, I figured it out and wrote a four-line workaround. For those of you who care about such things, wildcards in Windows behave unexpectedly. With two files in a directory, named test.htm and test.html, you'd think that dir *.htm would match only test.htm. It matches both.

C:\temp>dir /b *.htm
test.htm
test.html

My work no longer requires regular cell phone usage, which is a good thing at many levels. Some new research indicates that cell phones can lead to premature aging.

But I may not need to work much longer. The morning email brings the good news. "This is to announce today, 16th May, 2005 result of winners of our yearly SCIENTIFIC LOTTERY GAME PROMOTION held on 25th March, 2005. Your email address attached to ticket number 05-765204AC; with serial number 00349 draw the lucky numbers 5-9-31-20, and consequently won the lottery in category A. You are therefore entitled to a cash award US$1,500,000." In addition, I stand to win another $8M or so, according to a letter from Dr.Roland Themba, Director of Projects, South Africa Department of Minerals &
Energy. I only have to provide a small amount of assistance with an international transfer of funds.

And if those fall through, today's automated search for a technical documentation job has a lead on a position as an associate buyer for the Home Shopping Network.

HSN has to work hard if it's going to keep pace with eBay. For example, it's peak wedding season and HSN doesn't have even one John Deere wedding garter.

It's been a year since gay marriage became legal in Massachusetts. It's one of today's bigger non-news items. The Herald, example, has stories about the price of tickets for the upcoming Rolling Stones concert and the return of Oil Can Boyd to the pitching mound.

The Boston Globe has come out with the Globe 100, its annual survey of the best and worst performing Boston-area companies. A few years back, I worked for a startup that was the worst performing public company for the year. I'd include a link to the Globe's site, but they've adopted a very annoying login policy. It's free, but it asks more information than I want to provide. For certain premium resources, Wall Street Journal and Consumer Reports, for example, I don't mind paying for access. Those sites just want my account number and then I have the access I want. I'm not ready to drop my home subscription to the Globe yet, but I've stopped reading their web site.