The Red Sox equipment van left for Florida yesterday afternoon as scheduled. Although the idea of baseball's return is exciting, I've not started to think deeply about the team yet - the starting rotation, new players, returning players, and the competition. Spring training is as much for the fans as it is for the players. The season starts in 50 days.

I've spent a bit of time this morning trying a few tricks with Perl. We've had a problem with invalid hyperlinks in our PDF documents. There are plenty of link checkers for HTML files, but none that I've found for PDF. So, I've been thinking that it might be fun to cobble something together. Perl is a very powerful and even elegant language. The syntax, however, is quite fussy. It's just different enough from shell scripts, batch files, and other scripting languages that, well, that I get messages such as, and I'm not making this up, "Useless use of time...".

We have a full weekend ahead. We need to put the furniture back in our room-without-a-name. We'll see my father this afternoon and pick up whatever groceries he needs. The travelers return from PEI late this afternoon. We'll have the traditional Saturday night hot dogs and beans in their honor. Tomorrow is the birthday of Michael Francis (15). We'll have a party here. Threaded through all of this are the usual assignments - bringing in wood, grocery shopping, paying the bills, reading the newspapers, taking a nap.

Don has been gone for two years.

A couple of years before he died, Don came down with blood poisoning. He was hospitalized and in a coma for several days. We thought we were going to lose him then. During his coma, he had a steak and eggs breakfast with the Source. (The Source made him buy.) They had long talks about everything.

"Am I going to to die?" Don asked.

"Do you want to?" the Source asked. Don came back to be with us for a while and he brought us that story.

There have been many links to this article in other blogs this morning: You There, at the Computer: Pay Attention. (Free registration at the NYT site may be required.)

There is a charming irony that Microsoft, the company that brought you Clippy, is conducting research on disruption in the work process. More about Attentional User Interfaces (AUIs) and other projects at Microsoft is here.

There's also a charming irony that I read this article and some related stuff while preparing myself to settle in for a day's work.

It doesn't matter how much wet snow snow we did or didn't get, how pretty it looks stuck to the branches on trees and bushes. There's no surer sign of spring: Both the Boston Globe and MetroWest Daily News report that the Red Sox equipment truck leaves this afternoon for spring training For Myers.

I bought a Pepsi with my lunch yesterday. Pepsi is running a promotion with Apple iTunes, giving away free songs for iPods and other stuff. On my first try, I won a free song. I don't win a lot of contests, but then I don't enter a lot of contests, either. The last time Apple gave me a free song, I chose Chuck Berry's You Can't Catch Me. So, now, I can get a free song. It's a variant on the Desert Island Disc theme: If I can get any song, what would it be? Ideas?

Whatever it is, it won't be this song that's already in my head for free, even if the lyrics differ from version to version.

On last night's news, a TV reporter, describing a happy ending to a story, said, "Good news comes in three words - home, safe, and sound."

Happy Anniiversary, Mike and Lynn.

We like to make fun of the New England weather forecasters. They're scientists but we often accord them the same bemused respect as we give that weird uncle who means well, tries hard, and spills soup on his shirt and your new carpet. This was a very tough forecast, one that started out with 10-20 inches of snow and is now rain with a couple inches of snow at the end. "There is very little chance that this storm will miss the region," said Tuesday's NWS report. It's very tricky to get the timing right with a storm coming from the west and a cold front coming from the northwest. The storm got here before the cold, so we got rain. This is a pattern that we often see in late winter and spring, one that can give us a good soaking or two feet of snow in May.

Sandra and I brought our laptops home, expecting to be snowed in. Now it looks another commute to another day in the office.

The DNS servers at our ISP are having trouble this morning, so it's slow going as I try to communicate with the outside world. DNS (Domain Name System) is an essential feature of networks, converting familiar network addresses such as queenlake.com to and from its numeric equivalent, 65.108.234.145.

Woody has been calling from the island every morning. Usually he calls around 7AM (8AM AST). Phone calls at that time of the day usually bring bad news, news of death or serious illness. It's good that the calls are bringing good news, but we all jump when the phone rings. (When a call comes in, all of the phones in the house ring. We have distinctive rings, basically an old-fashioned party line. One ring for the Hakkarainens, two for the MacGregors. When my mother lived here, she had three rings.)

This morning's entry for the Almost a Good Idea Dept. is here. Even the conservatives are squeamish.

The time has come to replace the 25-year-old carpet in the room that we don't have a good name for. When the MacGregors owned the house, they used the room as a living room. For 20 years we used it as our bedroom. Now we use it for Sandra's sewing projects and for large family dinners. We have a couple of long tables and can seat 20 if everyone is friendly. The new carpet comes on Friday and we'll have a birthday party here on Sunday.

We have a couple pendulum clocks from my grandfather, by way of my father. One is a grandmother's clock in the room that's getting the new carpet. The clock keeps good time. Because our old floors are uneven and sometimes unsteady, we had to screw the clock to a vertical beam in the room to insulate it from the vibrations of people walking by. The clock is about five feet tall, a couple of inches taller than my grandmother, Mummu, my father's mother. The other clock is a grandfather's clock, about the height of my grandfather.

My grandfather, Vaari, was a cabinet maker. Particularly after my grandmother died, my grandfather built furniture, including a clock, to help fill the time. The old gent, as my father called him, was going to the hospital for some routine tests. A long-time Pall Mall smoker, his lungs needed to be checked periodically. My father went next door to drive my grandfather to the hospital. My grandfather showed my father the work he'd done on the clock. "I guess you're going to have to finish this," my grandfather said. A few days later, my grandfather died in the hospital. My father finished the clock and gave it to us 10 or so years ago.

We now call my father Vaari. I don't have a good phonetic spelling of vaari. The closest that I can get is vah-di or vah-ti, the last consonant being quite soft.

Today is Ash Wednesday, Chinese New Year, and Tet. For many Americans, Tet will forever be associated with the Tet Offensive of 1968. For others, it's a video game.

Hakkarainen's Maxim for Modern Communications, #17: Nothing good is likely to come from using Reply/All.

Last week I sent material out for review. The reviewers sent their comments in email, using Reply/All with lots of detail that compelled others to join in. It's like a pack of dogs on a water bed. It takes a long time for the noise and motion to settle down, even after the original problem has been addressed.

While most of us are heading off to an ordinary day of work in mid-winter, people all over the Christian world are preparing for Lent with revels in New Orleans and, of course, Brazil. It's a bit rich for my taste and for the tastes of Brazilians in our family.

A Massachusetts legislator, representing a largely Hispanic district in a neighboring city, is quoted in the local newspaper as saying, “I have nothing against Spanish people — I love ’em. I just don’t understand a word they’re saying.”

The weather forecasters issued messages about a potentially significant winter storm tomorrow night into Thursday, bringing us plenty of these. I'll bring my laptop home tomorrow evening with the likelihood of working from home on Thursday.

For a while there, it looked like neither team, coaches or players, wanted to win this one. There were plays badly called and badly executed. There were fumbles and dropped passes and missed tackles and costly penaltiees. And that's how the Patriots have done it, winning no matter how they play. Anyone can win when playing well. Great teams can win when playing badly. The Patriots brought a great team to Super Bowl XXXIX.

We can all be grateful that Charlie Daniels didn't have a wardrobe malfuction during his pre-game performance.

My vote for the best ad goes to P. Diddy and the Diet Pepsi truck.

In the meantime, the Red Sox championship trophy will be on display at my old high school. This is part of a victory tour around New England. When the trophy visits the Cape, brother-in-law Scott's company will be a co-sponsor.

A selectman in the town where I grew up observed that, with the influx of new people to the town, causing the population to swell to 7500, residents are now expecting that the roads be plowed, sanded, and salted on a regular basis.

The household is quiet again. It was good to have company, to get to know Russell a bit. He sat on Marian's lap and banged on the piano, playing better than I can.

In addition to the mishegas that is Monday, I get to have another conversation with the Massachusetts Department of Revenue. The Commonwealth claims that my mother's estate owes some taxes. There were plenty of times when this could have been addressed three or four years ago, but, we (I) didn't. As executor, I'm responsible. We're not very practiced in these things and rely on professionals for guidance. In the end, though, what the state wants in tax money, the state gets.

Sandra will go with her mother to a doctor's appointment this morning. It could be routine or it could be more.

Baby Russell is crying in the upstairs bedroom. Marley, not used to the sound, is keening himself, pacing the downstairs floor.

Krista and Tess joined Cassandra in a mid-morning visit yesterday. For a while, this was a completely different household, the smell of a new baby blending with the smell of crayons deployed on the coloring books.

Krista was wearing a yellow Live Strong bracelet on her wrist. Elastic bracelets in various styles and for various causes have become popular of late. The blue elastic that I'm wearing might have political significance, but it might also be that the Post Office held our bundle of mail with a blue elastic a few weeks ago. (Although I was, and remain, a Boston Celtics fan, I started wearing an elastic on my wrist in 1959 when Wilt Chamberlain came into the NBA. Wilt wore rubber bands on his wrist out of superstition. He stopped wearing them during his retirement.)

We're having a fine stretch of weather. Yesterday afternoon I was outside shoveling, wearing a t-shirt and light sweatpants. We might see some precipitation mid-week, but that might be rain.

The travelers spent the night in Moncton NB and should arrive at the island house by late morning.

Today's installment of "Lord, I'll eat it up if you keep it down." comes from Iceland. (See the section on traditional food.)

In case we're not surprised enough by that strange face looking back at us in the mirror, we can now see the strangeness that awaits us.

For the last 20 years or so, the National Football League has shown that, on any given Sunday, any team can beat any other team. That said, the prospects for the New England Patriots look good today.