Today we're taking Matthew into Boston to see Blue Man Group. Like the plane trip to PEI for their 10th birthdays, this is a coming-of-age gift for the grandchildren. Matt's 13th birthday was in October. The weather will be good, bordering on the warm. We'll walk over to Faneuil for lunch, visit Jack's Joke Shop, and then go to the show.

A couple of job leads came my way yesterday. I'll follow up this weekend. After that burst of activity in mid-December, things have gone quiet. That's alright. I'm enjoying what I'm doing. With my current project schedule, I won't have much time for daytime interviews for the next month or so.

Chevy is running a series of television ads that promote their new line of cars. The background music is a 40-year-old Yardbirds tune, Over, Under, Sideways, Down. It's as though they played ragtime when they announced the Corvette back in the 50s.

I don't think that it's a complete waste of time to find out about worldwide weather, but my day, and the day of my family and friends, probably isn't greatly enriched by my knowledge of the deep cold (-30C) in Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia. It has been, however, a good exercise of the network tools on DNS Stuff to try to find out why the Mongolia tourism web site isn't accessible. Google reports that it was available a couple of days ago. It looks like a problem with the DNS server that supports the Mongolian government sites. Other Mongolian sites are reachable.

The saga of email notification continues. I am trying different hammers until the email works reliably.

I stayed late at work yesterday, until nearly 6:30. (I should have read this article earlier.) Sandra was having dinner with friends, so I used the time to work on a tricky little problem. As it turned out, I solved the problem while driving home and was able to verify it while watching the Simpsons. (For those who care about such things, I can now build a FrameMaker document (either a stand-alone file or a book) from a database-driven script. Some of the content is coming from the database itself, merged with existing files.) The solution has some Rube Goldberg qualities, but I've had fun and learned things that will help me waste time in several new ways.

The house is thumping from the cold. We live in a house that was originally built in 1816. (Sandra researched the history of the house for a college paper.) The core of the house is that old, while several rooms have been added over the years. The most recent change was in 1982, when we moved here and had a wing built for the MacGregors. Sandra's parents had owned the house and renovated it completely in the late 70's with new insulation, windows, walls, electrical work, siding, and roof. We moved in to a very new old house, for which we were and are grateful.

Like any old house, this one has noises. The stairs and floors in the older parts of the house creak underfoot. The teenaged boys who used to live here knew the parts of the floors and stairs that didn't creak and so could come home late at night without waking their parents. Wasn't that thoughtful? There are ways to get out and in the upstairs windows, too, but we won't get into that.

There's so much stuff out on the net that you can drown very quickly. When I started browsing the Web in 1993, it was possible to visit every public web site. Now, even enormously fast computers can't keep up. Google's index is roughly 8 billion pages, but that's not even close to the whole web. So, we need some help finding information that's useful and interesting. This has the makings of a promising trend, a way to find weblogs and other resources that focus on particular topics. In this case, here's a page about work.

Oh, by the way, here's an article about procrastination for later reading.

And, don't forget - the 2005 Bloggies are coming.

With a half a foot of snow down yesterday (and much more on the Cape), we're now settling in for another cold spell. There was no school yesterday, so Michael Francis and Joe went plowing with Mike for the day. Mike said it was great to have their company. There's always some shoveling and the extra help was welcome. Mike told all of his customers that it was his birthday.

We had a nice party in the evening - a pan of lasagna from a local restaurant and a nifty cake from MRM. She got the word from her surgeon yesterday that she no longer has to wear her brace and that she doesn't need to see him again regarding the surgery.

AOL is up and running on Mike and Lynn's computer, much to the joy of Michael Francis and Matt, who have been reunited with instant messaging again. I stopped trying to be clever and just reinstalled the AOL software.

In this cold weather, the air can get very dry, leading to static electricity. After years of working with computers, I'm usually pretty good at grounding myself before touching anyone. Usually isn't often enough, though, when it's your 10-week-old granddaughter. When the spark jumped from my finger to her cheek, she looked more surprised than hurt. She wasn't too keen on having me hold her after that.

A network was once described to me as a system somewhere not doing something you never heard about that keeps you from doing what you want to do. So it's been as I try to figure out why email notification of these journal entries is working sporadically. Some people report that they have received mail on time, as expected, while others receive delayed messages or none at all. I won't go into the gory details here, but the links between the blogging site, the email server that handles the notification list, the server that actually sends the mail to me, and the site where I read the mail all have their own, um, challenges. This morning everyone's behaving like they have stones in their shoes.

I didn't quite meet my deadline yesterday afternoon. I was supposed to have something included in the next software build, but I couldn't get my files in through the usual channels. If I'm lucky, one of the engineers was able to check in the files for me. If not, I'll have to spend a part of this morning groveling to get permission to check in the stuff late. I told my boss that I'd have some other pieces completed by tomorrow afternoon. When people come to my office, looking for help on interesting problems, I have to say no or, at least, not now.

As a newspaper reporter, it was no problem to write under pressure. That was the job. I most admired the wire service reporters, whose deadline was always now. They would write their stories on a long, skinny notepads and dictate them while standing a pay phone. The pressures are the same now, perhaps even worse, while the technology changes. Now they have laptops, cell phones, and PDAs. Journalism, as it's often been said, is the first draft of history.

Happy Birthday, Michael Alan. It's a special day, but also a regular day filled with high energy, positive spirit, and solid faith.

We'll have a birthday party at his house tonight and hope that he can join us. He coaches Joe's basketball team on Wednesday evenings. And then, some snow is starting fall. The forecasts are a bit varied, but we could certainly pick up a plowable amount by day's end. Usually Mike plows driveways during the overnight, but this is a daytime storm, so people may want clean driveways when they return home from work.

For the first time in oh, so many years, Worcester is getting a professional baseball team this spring. More on this as it develops.

The pace at work has picked up quite bit. We have six weeks to finish our current product's development, with several interim deadlines on the way. I have to have some work completed by the end of the day and so will go in early. Dunno if the pressure would be any less if I hadn't been sick or if I hadn't been sidetracked by interesting dead ends during the past couple of months.

One excursion out to the Web brought me to an announcement of a technical conference in April. The presenters include many people I know, some of whom I would like very much to see. Seeing other names on the roster, however, stirs up less healthy emotions. Candidly, they're doing interesting work that I would be doing if, well, if I had handled some things better at my previous job. Good for them. They're getting it done. I wish them well. I'm also glad that I'm not going to that conference.

Today is the day traditionally reserved for the Robert Burns supper. When we were in Scotland a few years ago, I developed a fondness for haggis, although, as any haggis diner will tell you, the less you think about the contents, the more you're likely to be able to finish your serving.

In the early 90s, Sandra and I, along with our dogs, Bob and Raye, drove to Prince Edward Island about this time of year. We were going to visit the MacGregors and to attend a dinner in honor of the Bard. We left after work on Friday night. The forecast said that we would see some snow, but we believed that we could outrun it. By the time we reached Calais, Maine, however, the snow was falling heavily. At a coffee shop, the truck drivers who were heading south reported that it was slow going on the Canadian side.

Onward we went. Our little Subaru, with four-wheel drive, held steady on the snow-covered roads. The visibility was deteriorating, however. At one point, between Saint John and Sussex, we got behind a snow plow and followed its tail lights. The trouble was, the visibility was so bad that the light we were following stopped being the snow plow and turned into a light on a farm house on the side of the hill. Sandra brought this fact to my attention just before we went off the road and into the deep culvert. At that point, we decided that we needed to find a place to stop for the night.

The Bluebird, a restaurant and motel in Sussex, New Brunswick, will forever be on our gratitude list. We arrived at three or four in the morning, had a bite to eat, and checked in to our room. Two days later, we were able to leave. (Weather forecasting in New England is a competitive sport, but not so elsewhere. We heard precious little about the weather on any of the radio stations.) The storm closed the highways in all directions. Even the snow plows were ordered off the road. A few other people, including the restaurant staff, were stranded with us. By good fortune, the cook had just made a full supply of pies for the weekend. We ate well and stayed warm.

The Moncton newspaper reported that we'd received 1.5m (about four and half feet) of snow. Drifts were to the rooftops of many houses. By the time we were on our way, the roads were snow-covered, but passable. We made it to the Island and learned that the Burns dinner had been postponed because of the storm. We attended the rescheduled event a few days later, with one of Sandra's cousins as the master of ceremonies, and sang Auld Lang Syne.

We can take comfort that misery is scheduled to peak today, so things will be getting better.

The full Wolf Moon is shining over the cold (-1 °F / -18 °C) and snowy landscape. Snowfall reports vary widely around the state. We picked up about 20" (50cm); places on the coast nearly doubled that. We weren't able to open our usual doors because of the snow; instead, we had to jump off the front porch and make our way through knee-deep whiteness. After the long cold stretch, the snowblower needed some coaxing, but finally started and performed admirably. The whole household, along with reinforcements, participated in cleanup. Mike and Matt returned mid-morning to plow the driveway. By noon we were ready for a world that wasn't ready for us. That was ok. There was plenty to do inside and, later in the day, there was football.

Many schools and government offices in eastern Massachusetts are closed today. (Our local school district is open.) The state and some businesses are using that delightful phrase, "Nonessential workers should not report to work."

A raised coffee cup in memory of Johnny Carson, David Nyhan, and Rose Mary Woods, each of whom has made our lives more interesting in their unique ways.

There's a snowstorm out there, for sure. I can't get the door open to measure the snow that's sheltered from the wind, but it looks like we have more than a foot with even more to come. Mike's plowed our driveway once and will come back at least once more, perhaps twice. The street light shows that the high wind has sculpted the snow around the neighbor's car. The snow is light and the wind rearranges it easily.

As noted earlier, though, the eastern and southeastern parts of the state are really getting clobbered on this one. As a result, the governor has declared a state of emergency, restricting non-emergency travel. Places on the Cape have received two feet of snow and day is still young. Already the commentators are likening this storm to the Blizzard of '78 . We may very well get there. And, like that earlier storm, it was primarily an eastern Massachusetts event. We received two feet of snow and wondered why the governor ordered us to stay off the roads for several days. A three-foot storm for us barely warrants mention on the Boston stations. Funny, isn't it, how 50 miles can make such a difference in both weather and attitude.

It's not likely that the newspapers will be delivered this morning. That's ok. We have plenty to do and plenty to read. This piece, for example, is a different take on the classic speech to graduating high school students.

Never underestimate the power of a bad day to get worse.

[I'm still seeing irregular email delivery of these notes. I'll use this snowy day to run some tests.]