The Day After 'Tek's Day

Jason Varitek has homered on the last five May 20ths.

We had a quiet celebration of our anniversary. We exchanged some cute cards. (Sandra and I don't give each other gifts for holidays such as anniversaries, birthdays, or Christmas.) We had an early dinner at a nearby restaurant that wasn't as good as we'd remembered it. Back home for a couple of our favorite TV shows - Greater Boston and Washington Week, and a movie. It sounds like a quiet evening and it was. It was also a fun evening. We enjoy each other's company.

The weather forecasts are drifting between rain and not rain. We'll go to the camp anyway. We have several things to bring there and look forward to sauna again.

This will also be Marley's last weekend at the camp for a while. He's going to summer camp at PEI. When Sandra and Mike go to the Island, they'll leave Marley with Woody and Marian. They're excited about having him there. It's a great wide space where he can run. The property is on the ocean, so he can play in and around the water's edge. It will be a good adventure. Sandra and I will miss him. He and her parents are great friends.

Let me see if I've got this straight. A country, bordering Israel, still not recognizing Israel, in fact, seeks to limit nuclear inspections because they say they don't have nuclear materials, much. Oh, wait, I forgot. It's Prince Bandar's country we're talking about. Never mind.

[I let a note slip earlier. The longish explanation is that the key strokes that I use to add a link - Ctrl-Shift-A - can slip into Ctrl-S, which means Send. I'm sorry for the confusion.]

A spring in our steps

It looks like I've solved the programming problem that had been vexing me for several days. I need to run a couple rounds of more rigorous tests, but I think that I've got it.

With the proliferation of just about everything electrical, this could be really handy - electrical outlets that rotate.

There were 15 people in the room, beginning the second of two two-hour meetings yesterday. Amid the chatter, I heard one of the writers say to her friends across the table, "Do my lips look shiny? I plan to use them this weekend."

In these fractious times, it's good to see that wiser minds can develop a spirit of compromise for the benefit of us all.

If Dilbert needed to seek out a saint, who better than ....

Yesterday I learned that the requistions for permant jobs have been frozen at the place where I work. As a result, no permanent jobs will be opening up anytime soon. That doesn't affect my contract.

Today's automated technical documentation search results: U.S. Sanctions Advisor - reports to the [company] Anti-Money Laundering (AML) Officer. Perform research, analysis, and coordination necessary to support Anti-Money Laundering Officer responses to any regulatory or enforcement inquiries concerning compliance by any [company] entity with U.S. sanctions, 314(a) information sharing, special measures, or the Travel Rule.... Consult with government authorities, including prosecutors, Federal Bureau of Investigation, Department of Homeland Security, U.S. Treasury, and other agencies concerning possible and verified customer matches to 314(a) subjects in terrorist financing and money laundering investigations.

Happy Anniversary, Sandra. We've still got it.

Sunny, with a slight chance of car-swallowing fissures

Is it likely that there will be an earthquake in California today? The good news is that an earthquake is not likely. The bad news is that we have to ask the question.

Work remains a struggle. I'm a few days late on delivery of four small programs. The things work pretty much ok on my system, but they aren't stable enough to hand over to someone else. While donating blood last night, I had a chance to think about the project and have a couple of new ideas to bring to the office today.

The neighbors across the street are putting in a small parking area on what used to be lawn. The boys, aged five and three, sit on the front step and watch excitedly while the little tractor clears and smoothes the soil. We sit on a hill of sandy soil, but the neighbors have, at least in that spot, more than a foot of good topsoil.

Next week brings us the Memorial Day weekend. Lots of people will be traveling. Sandra, Mike, and Marley will go to PEI (more on this later), as will Scott, Val, and Russell. Gas, as we know, is expensive. Using Google Maps, Ahding.com can help us find cheap gas. It covers only the U.S. right now, but GasBuddy provides Canadian resources.

Let's see if I've got this straight. My doctor is too busy to come to the operating room for my operation, so he sends R2D2, whom he can control using a joystick while hanging out, oh, I don't know, here?

Unsolicited emails of the day:

• We found you contacts in our resume database. We are a Lithuanian company which sells software and electronic in the USA, Canada and other countries. We are looking for a Financial Manager. No special knowledge, no education required. You can earn up to $500 per week working only some hours a day.
• THIS WILL BE OUR ABSOLUTE NOTICE
  We have aimed to write to you on a lot times and now is the time to respond!
  Your current home loan certifies you for up to a 3.30% lower rate.
  However, since our previous attempts to write to you have failed, this will be our final effort to get for you the lower rate.

Today is the birthday of James Gosling. Although he's gained most fame for his design effort on the Java programming language, I think that his pioneering work on Emacs is a bigger deal.

Fwack. Gznort. Fluwabbaba.

No one epitomized Mad magazine more than Don Martin. There were other very good artists - Mort Drucker, Dave Berg, Dick DeBartolo, and others - but Martin was it, in all its manic glory. I gloriously wasted hours of my youth reading his stuff (as well as the rest of the magazine). Don Martin was born on this day in 1931 and died in January 2000.

This year's hurricane forecast does not look hopeful, calling for a strong season in the Atlantic. We're seeing some early development on the Pacific side. In addition, we learn that FEMA didn't exactly bring the A-Team when it was inspecting last season's destruction.

Last week I mentioned transcranial magnetic stimulation (TMS), a new treatment for depression. ABC News ran a story about TMS last night.

A friend observed that a mark of his maturity is that he's learned to speak up when he doesn't want to speak up, shut up when he doesn't want to shut up.

Today's automated job search for technical documentation positions brought, lo, a technical documentation listing. The morning mail also brought a job titled Manager, Custody Operations. It's not a job running a jail, but something to do with managing financial transactions.

Here's one more reason not to use your cell phone while you're off in the wilderness.

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.

omething for everyone

The sign in front of Kay's Dairy Bar has trouble keeping all of its letters in place, reminding me of the Fawlty Towers sign. We had dinner, chili dogs, at Kay's on Friday night. Coney Island Hot Dogs has little to worry about. We'll stick to the regular foot-long in the future.

The Gardner News has new by-lines on its front page, a crop of new reporters making just above minimum wage. Twenty-five years ago, I was a reporter for the Hudson Daily Sun (no longer in business). I asked for a raise to bring my salary more in line with the folks at McDonald's and Friendly's. I didn't get the raise and took a job in documentation group at Digital, where Sandra worked.

We opened the camp this weekend, cleaning up, unpacking things that had been in a big plastic barrel for the winter, turning the water back on. I crawled on the dirt and rock that is the cellar, the space just three feet high in places, to which the bump on my head will attest. I had to close the valves that I'd opened last fall. I was reminded that my father was 10 years older than I am now when he put in much of the plumbing. The plumbing system is cleverly engineered and is easy to fill and empty. You need just one tool, a pair of pliers. Well, there are a couple of other tools. One gadget, although I don't know if you'd call it a tool, is a one-pound coffee can (from the days when a one-pound can contained a pound of coffee), to which my father had welded a pipe fitting. We use the can to connect to a pipe to prime the pump. The other tool is a large spoon, with USN on the handle, brought back from the war. We use the handle of the spoon to lift the edge of the trap door that leads to the cellar.

The beavers have been sampling the young trees at the water's edge. Some of the cuts were very fresh, less than a day old. There was little other damage. The mice did chew into a half dozen plastic water bottles.

There's a disheveled house on a corner not far from the camp road. The tenants used to have a dog that they kept tied outside. Marley would, of course, have a lot to say to and about that dog. The family and the dog moved away last year. When Marley went out on Saturday morning to get the Finnish coffee bread, he let out a low growl. "And stay away!"

For the first time in nearly a year, my father made it up the steps to the camp. He has a pair of Nordic walking sticks (ski poles without the baskets) that he used to steady himself as he climbed the stairs. We had coffee, coffee bread, and cheese for lunch, talking about how the opening-up had gone. We also had visitors, first our next-door neighbors and then Jan. That was the cue for my father to leave. Crowds get to him very quickly. That evening a couple of friends visited us.

It was a busy and a social day. We had our first sauna of the season. The water, as you'd expect, was quite cold. It was probably just under 50°.

My father told a story of being at the camp alone in December. It was a calm day and the lake started to freeze. He watched as the shards of ice grew across the still surface.

A gap in the tree cover let Sunday morning's light rain fall on the two chairs on the front deck, leaving the rest of the deck dry.

Today's automated search results for a technical documentation position:

• Traffic manager for a major pharmacy chain: Leads four Traffic Associates in consistent on-time, on-budget, high-quality, client-focused creative services delivery for all Tier 3 Advertising projects...Demonstrate competency in DAM system usage...Acts as initial gatekeeper to the department...Determines appropriate tiering of project and manages routing to either Account Services or Traffic.
• Language Specialist Spanish (Temp-to-perm): Spanish Translator Native speaking individual from Spain or Spanish speaking countries to assist with Spanish language translation activities.

[I clicked the wrong key and so inadvertantly posted an early draft of this entry. My apologies for the confusion.]