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Current entry Archive February 2001 |
Long days. Tired.
For the last several nights, we've been staying up past 1AM, mostly because Mike is working on an app, and we end up having complex conversations late in the evening about how to optimize a routine or how to approach a problem. Stimulating, but the net effect is not much sleep.
Today we got something fun: the phone bill. Phone bills are a quarterly thing here. This one is so big, it came in a different envelope than usual. It's 14 pages. Some of that is summaries, of course, but most of it is call detail, and most of it is mine, for work. Thanks to the two weeks I had to wait before we got the cable modem, and the tunnel troubles I've had over the last few weeks, there are a lot of international phone calls.
And now for something completely different: I registered my own domain name today. This is something I've meant to do for a while but haven't got around to. The domain name I'd most like to have, lisanelson.com, has unfortunately already been grabbed by someone who will sell it to me for $625. Sorry, I don't care that much. The name lnelson.com is also taken. I considered whether to register lisajnelson.com or ljnelson.com, but it seemed likely that it would be easy to forget the j in lisajnelson.com. So, ljnelson.com it is. With any luck, it'll exist by Monday, whereupon this site will move shortly thereafter.
Verna shipped us four pounds of chocolate chip cookies about ten days ago. The package finally arrived yesterday, rather seriously banged up, complete with an apology for the damage from the Royal Mail. Of course it would be the package of perishables that would end up taking nine days to get here. This was, no doubt, partly due to the postal strike backlog. So, they arrived rather dry. But a few seconds in the microwave re-softens them and they're fine, so a happy ending after all.
Hmm. I don't seem to be getting to bed early tonight either.
Created at 01:16
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My goodness, that was fast, wasn't it! The site space was available yesterday afternoon, but it took until this morning sometime for DNS to update. (DNS is what tells your browser where to find www.ljnelson.com.) So, I have moved the site already, as you probably already know if you're reading this. Congratulations for making it here, by the way. I should also mention that this means I have a new personal email address: lisa@ljnelson.com. All the other ones (and I've accumulated quite a few of them by now, which I won't bother listing because why confuse you) still work, but this is now the official one.
We had a frenzy of self-indulgence this afternoon: We finally used those Amazon gift certificates from christmas. ("Hey, Mike, you know what we need? ...More books!") Mostly we chose items we both want, including some splurges that are expensive enough to make it unlikely we'd get around to buying them on our own (e.g. another Andy Goldsworthy book), but we also each chose a few individual items. I won't update the various buying queues until everything actually arrives, though. Thanks to those of you who made this buying spree possible!
This afternoon we got into something of a getting-things-done mood (well, Mike did, and it proved contagious), resulting in, among much else, the Final Unboxing. All that was left still in boxes were the framed prints. I've now unboxed them, but we haven't yet decided where they'll go. Plus we need more picture rail hooks before we can put any of them up. Have I mentioned picture rails yet? This house (and probably most others, judging from other people's comments) has a picture rail running around most of the rooms, at just about top-of-the-doorframe height. You buy special hooks, which just, well, hook over the picture rail, suspend wire from them, and use that to hang just about anything. It's practically effortless. It's definitely much easier (not to mention more flexible) than pounding rawl plugs (molly anchors) into the wall. If you don't like where the picture ends up, you can just slide it left or right, or change the length of the wire.
I have just now finished flattening all the packing paper. I was quite right in my earlier estimate that the kitchen packing paper constituted more than half of the total volume. What I failed to consider was that the kitchen stuff tended to be more thickly wrapped than anything else, often as much as a dozen sheets that could be uncrunched and flattened as a single unit, whereas everywhere else, it was used mostly one or two sheets at a time. It therefore took much more time to flatten the remaining paper, and I never want to do it again. (Mike came wandering in towards the end of this final batch. "I have decided," he announced, "that from now on I shall call you Russell.") Anyway, now it all fits into a single 3.1 cubic foot box, where before it filled about a dozen times that. Of course, I haven't tried lifting that box just yet...
This afternoon Mike ripped another half-dozen CDs he's had all along but hadn't bothered ripping before, plus two more that he bought during the course of the week. The MP3 main playlist is now up to 4567 tracks, and 18 GB. This doesn't include 4 GB of classical, new age, soundtracks, and various other CDs that aren't in the main playlist. Much more of this and we'll have to add another hard drive to the server...
Yesterday was a 99.44% pure coding day. Mike worked on his new MP3 player front end, and I did some more twiddling with MixPix. The net result in MixPix was two new features: For any graphic, the user can choose whether to centre, tile, or stretch; and also (if it's a jpg) whether to rescale it, and these settings are saved and used whenever that graphic is selected. I added the scaling mostly to allow easy use of very large jpgs (or the use of normal size jpgs on a low-resolution screen), but the combination of these two features unexpectedly results in the ability to make an ordinary jpg very small indeed, and then tile it. This looks quite silly. I tested it with some of our Hubble images; I had hundreds of tiny Marses and Jupiters plastered all over the screen.
I'm toying with the notion of adding an option to shuffle the wallpaper whenever the screen saver kicks in. I had no idea whether this could even be done, but some research turned up the relevant Win32 functions that would make it possible. However, it's far more esoteric stuff than anything I've ever tackled, and the only examples I found were in C, so I can't even plagiarize. So I've put it aside for the moment, but it feels like one of those ideas that will nag at me until I do it...
However, I'm definitely not going to do any coding tonight. No, I'm not going to work on MixPix. Not at all.
Well, maybe just for a few seconds...just clean up one or two little things...
(Much, much later...)
Whoops.
Created at 00:34
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No diary entry yesterday, because I spent most of the evening with a vicious headache, the worst I can remember in a long time. My normal headache treatment--ignoring it until I go to sleep, whereupon it fixes itself--nearly didn't work, because it was severe enough that it interfered with falling asleep. Eye fatigue, I suspect; I've spent way too much time staring at this giant radiation-emitter. Then again, it could be due to lack of caffeine. I'd better have some more tea now, just in case.
Ahhh, that's better...
Fortunately, the headache hasn't returned today, although for most of the day I've felt like I almost have a headache, which I don't expect to make any sense to anyone because it doesn't really even make sense to me.
Meanwhile, an almost springlike day today! We reached about 10°C (50°F) today, and it was sunny all morning. The afternoon turned blustery, but then that's normal for spring too. It occurs to me that Groundhog Day was a few days ago in the US; if they have groundhogs here, they didn't bother hibernating. The grass is green, some of the flower bushes are still merrily trying to flower, and the back garden wilderness is thriving nicely. I see on weather.com that there has been snow in the forecast every day for a week in Maine...heh heh...
Today I used Mike's new MP3 player front end to play random tracks all day while I worked. It's getting really cool. This is because it doesn't have feature-creep so much as feature-sprint. It's amazing how many convenient features can be thought of for a simple MP3 player.
I made a few small modifications to some of the About pages on the site today, but otherwise it's mostly been work and programming, I'm afraid. Maybe now I'll go curl up with a little light reading--I've just started Foucault's Pendulum.
Created at 00:14
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We're just back from the supermarket, so this will be a short entry as it's already getting late. Not that that should make any difference, considering our recent track record. Actually, compared to the hours we've been keeping, it's positively early...
We brought that massive boxful of packing paper to the supermarket with us, because they have recycling bins in the car park. It's all gone now! Hooray!
It turns out that the new web space is case-sensitive. I had known from the very beginning that some web servers are, and others aren't, so I was very careful in making sure all my links match the case of whatever they're looking for (and in fact I've mostly used all lower case, precisely in order to avoid this problem). Even so, after all that, I had two case mismatches in the new site's error log yesterday morning. Embarrassingly enough, they were in attempts to fetch LisaNelson1pgCV.pdf and LisaNelson2pgCV.pdf. The files were named like I've just typed, but the links were mysteriously looking for the .PDF in upper case. Well, it's fixed now.
Conveniently, the new site allows me to create my own "missing" page, which is what you get if you try to go to a nonexistent page, or fetch a nonexistent file. This would happen if I had a wrong link, or if you typed a URL in from memory and got it wrong. Normally you'd get a generic "not found" page. So I also created my "missing" page today.
This leads to a philosophical conundrum. So far, I've carefully kept the work and personal sites separate, even though they're in the same web space. The personal site contains links to the work site, but not vice versa. This is because when I start serious job-hunting, I may not want a prospective employer to be able to pass judgment on my personality based on a cursory glance at my rather flippant personal site (e.g. they might be put off by the page about heavy metal). So although it's not impossible to find the personal site without being told where it is, I haven't tried to make it easy. But--here's the new problem--I only get one "missing" page for the entire web space. Whether the user is looking for something nonexistent in the work site or the personal site, they'll get the same "missing" page. It would be friendly to put links to, say, the site map on the "missing" page. But I have two site maps, which I'd like to keep separate. With only one "missing" page, which site map should I link to? Just work? Both? That means a visitor to the work site, who ended up at the "missing" page, would have a link to the personal site right in front of them. So my conundrum is: Should I have a less friendly "missing" page, or allow this possible path to the personal site? It's not really the end of the world if someone finds their way to the personal site, after all. The jury is still out, but at the moment I do have links to both site maps. Here, take a look and see what you think: This is a link to a nonexistent page.
Gotta go; time for some hot apple-and-blackberry pie, with cream...And then there's the vast bulk of Foucault's Pendulum calling; I've already been thoroughly sucked in...
Created at 23:52
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Oooh, oooh! Today my site was visited by a search engine!
OK, so it's not that exciting. It is to me, though. I'm still starry-eyed about the entire domain-ownership thing, and even having a web site at all.
It's not an engine I've heard of before; it's called Fast-Webcrawler. There used to be a search engine called Webcrawler way back in the mid-90s, which AOL used when a user clicked their Search button, but I have no idea if this is a great-grandchild of the same thing or something totally unrelated. Not that it matters. I promptly went to their site and searched for something that would find me--which it did, but amusingly enough, it found the work site where I briefly had it stored at blueyonder. Obviously it must have paid me a visit there as well; I just didn't know it, because blueyonder doesn't provide access logs.
Once I found this hit on the old location, I realized that of course the site probably doesn't incorporate the results from its 'bots immediately; it probably updates its data at regular intervals. I'll peek back in a day or two and see if it finds me in the new location.
I've never searched for myself on a search engine before (well, until I was looking for domain names). Does this strike anyone else as a strange, modern form of narcissism?
Created at 23:45
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Yesterday while washing dishes, I was absent-mindedly staring out the window into the back garden--it's either that or pay attention to the dishes--when I noticed that one of the...um...mystery flower bushes appears to have developed something that looks suspiciously like buds. Today I thought I'd investigate, but it turns out that the door to the back garden is solidly stuck shut (try saying that out loud), no doubt due to the wood expanding. So I used binoculars instead. They are indeed small pink flower buds of some sort. I think spring is trying to spring. The last few days especially have been very spring-like, and beautifully sunny.
(If I mention that yesterday Mike noticed daffodils coming up, Linda will probably kill me, so I won't...)
Last week I began the Boston office migration from NetWare to NT. Well, sort of. The new server hasn't arrived yet, so I can only do the preparatory stuff, although some of that is quite complicated. Our environment is littered with legacies from how we originally set up the network. We've continued on with them because it has never been worth the bother of changing them--much effort for no real gain. But now, since we're going to be an NT office like all the others, it seems worthwhile to make us actually like the other offices, instead of perpetuating all these idiosyncrasies. Most of the necessary changes are behind the scenes, completely invisible to the end-user, but fundamental to our way of operating and therefore requiring caution. Each change has to be carefully planned and rolled out, and then I have to wait for fallout. Thus the migration will progress in small jumps; I'll make a change, wait a few days, fix any problems that crop up, and move on to the next change.
All this means that rather than the migration consuming all my time, as you might expect of such a large project, I work on it in fits and starts. Prepare, change, wait. In between, I've spent the last couple of days preparing a new version of Lisa's Macros. Well, actually, I've worked on the next version off and on since the day after the current version went out, and could carry on doing so indefinitely. But some of the recent content-related changes the company has asked for are things they want rolled out as quickly as possible, so I will tie this version off, polish it, and roll it out. I still have a list of more features I'd like to add, improvements I'd like to implement, shortcomings I'd like to fix...but they'll have to wait for the next version.
It's always like this. I love writing apps, but as the prospect of declaring an app finished and rolling something out looms, I balk. But I'm not done! See all these features I want to add! The fact is, no app is ever done; you just stop at some point. Much like writing a book; I don't remember who said that no book is ever finished, only abandoned; it's true of apps as well.
I do have some really cool new features in this version, but I always forget that; I already wrote them, so to me they're old news, not interesting any more. All I can see is the list of things I haven't done yet.
I had a look around diarist.net today and re-learned humility. Some people just have a knack. When I write, I have to wrestle with the words, and they usually win; they never manage to convey what is so clear in my head. Sadly, the truth is that I write like a technical writer, and although I can recognize good writing, I can't produce it. This is especially ironic considering the sheer quantity of pages I've read in my life. You'd think by now I'd have absorbed the art by osmosis, but it's not so. Ah well.
Right. Back to Foucault's Pendulum, a book which manages to be suspenseful, ironic, mocking, complex, engrossing, and hilarious all at once--an especially impressive feat when you consider that it was written in Italian and still manages all this in translation.
Created at 00:33
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A plot, if there is to be one, must be a secret. A secret that, if we only knew it, would dispel our frustration, lead us to salvation; or else the knowing of it in itself would be salvation. Does such a luminous secret exist?
Yes, provided it is never known. Known, it will only disappoint us.
...But everything is not a bigger secret. There are no "bigger secrets", because the moment a secret is revealed, it seems little. There is only an empty secret. A secret that keeps slipping through your fingers.
--Umberto Eco, Foucault's Pendulum
My brain has been squished to goo.
I spent basically the entire day reading Foucault's Pendulum. Last night I left off on page 347; tonight I finished it, which means nearly 300 pages of mindbending at a single sitting.
All I can say is: What a book. It is a masterful examination of the search for meaning, most particularly of the search for secrets that will give meaning to existence and power to the initiate, and how such a search can create its own deadly momentum, its own meaning and its own imagined truths, which are, in the end, empty.
I'd better go write some code to bring my brain back down to earth.
(Muuuuch later...)
Oh yes, I forgot to mention that Amazon shipped the results of our little spree a few days ago. It may take as much as three weeks to get here, though, so we will just have to be...er...what's that word? Oh yes, patient. That's it, patient.
Created at 02:22
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I remember an occasion when, as a child of perhaps eight years old, I had to sweep the kitchen floor. Not a big deal, not even for an eight-year-old; I finished up and presented the job to my mother for inspection. (She always inspected everything we did.) Looked good, she said, except for that one dust pile; sweep that up and I'd be done.
"What dust pile?" I asked, taken aback because I didn't see one.
"Don't pretend you don't see it," she said, or words to that effect.
Bewildered, I looked around, found something that might have been dirt and tried to sweep it up, but it was just part of the linoleum pattern. Still, it was worth a try.
"Was that it?"Down we slid into the surreal.
I'd sweep a random patch of floor. "Was that it?"Repeat interminably.
I remember desperation: I genuinely couldn't see what she was talking about, and she clearly thought I was malingering. I must have swept the entire floor three times over, trying to find the mysterious dust pile that I couldn't see. In the end, I never did find it; I don't know why I was finally let off.
This incident, with variations, was replayed many times over during the course of my childhood; I never did get to the point where I did any housework well enough to pass her muster. I've always thought this was just a side effect of my being unobservant and absent-minded; it's easy for things to get by me. After all, half the time I'm not even looking at what I'm doing.
Fast forward to the present. I'm doing dishes by hand again, after having a dishwasher for years. (Although it must be said that I ended up doing a lot of them by hand anyway--those that couldn't be put in the dishwasher, or were too big, or whatever. But anyway, they're all done by hand now.)
You might think I'd have food-poisoned a guest or two by now with my laissez-faire dish-washing style, but it's not so. Instead, a strange thing has happened. Over the holidays, I had a chance to see lots of other people doing dishes--Mike's mother, Helen and Kevin, James and Jo, and, of course, Mike--and would you believe that, compared to everyone else, I'm either irretrievably neurotic, or at the very least, incredibly fussy? It takes me about three times as long to do dishes as it does any of them, and that's not just due to being out of practice. The strangest part is that, in watching myself, I now see that I carry on washing long after the point is passed where I consider it done. I do this without thinking about it at all; I take it completely for granted. Clearly this is a learned defensive response to knowing that what I considered clean was a million miles from my mother's definition--and that I couldn't see whatever the flaw was that made her consider them not clean. I just keep washing 'em, to be on the safe side.
It's not as if I enjoy doing this. Housework isn't exactly in my Top Ten List of Fun Things to Do. So, you might reasonably ask, having now become aware of this extra work-creation that I'm doing, which may not be necessary after all, have I gleefully cut it out and reinvested the time saved into reading?
Sadly, the answer isn't an unqualified yes. It turns out that I have a deeply-ingrained expectation that I'll be in trouble. I therefore have to relax my standards--these alien standards that aren't really mine--slowly, so I can get used to the idea that maybe it's OK after all. So I'm not gleefully flinging grease-encrusted dishes into the drying rack. Well, not yet. People contemplating visiting, though, might want to consider doing so sooner rather than later...
Lesson learned: Even if you hate something, with enough repetition you can learn to do it completely automatically. You can make it part of you, even when it's not. You can become what you hate, and never know it. You will be assimilated.
It wasn't until the day my stuff was delivered that I figured out what was going on. We were fidgety, waiting for them to arrive, so we were doing that random knee-jerk keep-yourself-occupied-without-starting-anything housework thing that we both do. Maybe you do it too. I was washing dishes while Mike dried them, and we talked about my dish-washing speed, or lack thereof. I remember declaring that not one of the dishes I'd handed him so far would have passed muster with my mother.
"Why not?" he asked, and ran his finger across a plate, which squeaked obligingly.
It was at this point that I realized that I didn't know why not. I was still sure it wouldn't have been good enough for her, but I had no idea what she would have found wrong with it. Why, I finally wondered, am I still trying to live up to standards that I never even understood?
Discoveries like this were one advantage I was expecting from having a relationship with another INTP. INTPs, being pretty much by definition the exact opposite of societal expectations, are always being "fixed" by well-meaning people. (I'm not complaining; I can understand it. We're clearly the ones who are different, so it's not unreasonable. Plus it's not as if I haven't embarked upon my own counter-improvement projects.) We were curious whether, being together, we'd find out more about how to be ourselves, without pressure to be more like other people. And indeed, I'm already uncovering behaviours that have been programmed in, that aren't me at all.
Today is something of an anniversary for us: it was last February 12th that we met (or e-met, or virtually met) when Mike replied to my de-lurking posting on the INTP list. There is, of course, the usual mix of "it doesn't feel that long" and "it feels like a lot longer". Either way, if you'd told me a year ago...
Created at 23:12
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For Valentine's Day we surprised each other with Thornton's. Hmm. Maybe not all that surprising. Still, Mike also got me a book called "Leonardo: The First Scientist" which looks very interesting...
Lots of work the last few days on Lisa's Macros. I put them into beta on Monday, and today got back some comments from the people who have been using them. (I wouldn't want you to think this is the normal course of events. Usually I put something in beta and never hear back from any of the testers.) So, I caught some bugs early, and also added a new feature suggested by a user that will be appreciated by a lot of other users.
In the meantime, of course, I've also added five or six new features of my own accord...I can't help it. Some of them are really cool, too, if I do say so myself.
Yesterday afternoon, with a headful of code, I decided I needed tea, and managed to hang on to the thought long enough to make it to the kitchen, where I rinsed the tea mugs and dropped tea bags into both of them. It was somewhat later that I realized I probably shouldn't make tea for Mike when he wasn't here. My goodness, autopilot is an amazing thing.
Created at 00:16
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A combination of a warmish, sunny day and an attack of acquisitiveness sent me into town this afternoon. I didn't really have time to linger anywhere, but it was a nice outing anyway. The results were a DVD (Men in Black), a CD (Halford--Resurrection), and a couple of books. I also went into George Henry Lee, a delightful department store, and actually came out with what I went in for. (Specifically, I was looking for more suction-cup-attached shower organisers. One of the kinds I previously bought has the suction cups in the wrong positions to stick properly to the tiles, so it falls off.) But I also had a nice time looking at things.
I didn't feel guilty about doing some shopping during work hours, because Steve had scheduled a staff meeting for noon their time, i.e. 5:00 mine, so I knew I'd be working late officially (as opposed to the usual I-can't-stop working late that I do anyway).
The staff meeting itself was the usual circus. Working on my own like this has shielded me from the day-to-day irritations that plague any department, and of course, not having to deal with it, I'd come to take its absence for granted. Oh, plus HR sent down a friendly reminder from On High that jeans are not acceptable attire. Where do you suppose a bathrobe falls in the hierarchy of business casual? I'm so spoiled here. I work hours straight without interruption on projects that are interesting and sometimes even difficult. I rarely have to deal with politics at any level. My commute is the stairs. I wear jeans if you're lucky. And, most wonderfully, I can work and stop in accordance with the ebb and flow of my creativity, such as it is. Yet, despite all these advantages, this staff meeting served to prod me to get going.
Not that I mean to imply that H&A, or the IT department, is a terrible place to work; far from it. I've just been there too long. Every argument has been had a hundred times already; every personality conflict is well-mapped territory; every problem is old news. Nothing is really a new challenge; everything is just a replay of some earlier squall, with a few different parameters passed to create a semblance of variety. It is stagnation, and only the fact that I'm five time zones away obscures this fact.
Time to go.
So...where to start?
Created at 00:46
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On the way out the door this morning, Mike noticed that the rose bush in the front yard has new leaves opening. It's amazing. I find that I don't really believe spring is here; it must all be a cruel ploy to take in the gullible. Any minute now I'm expecting a foot or two of snow to crush the pretensions of these foolish upstart flora. Any minute.
Watching this balmy climate do its mellow thing, I can only imagine how horrified and cheated the English colonists in New England must have felt, as they discovered the myriad delights their adoptive climate offered. Let's see, we have: A winter that starts thinking about going away sometime around April, and comes howling back by November; mysteriously, a very hot summer (by British standards) in between the snowstorms; a whole catalogue of bugs that bite and even a few poisonous spiders and snakes; hurricanes, nor'easters...And then consider the people who settled in Canada. My dad has a video from a family reunion that includes readings from letters written home by new settlers, one of whom describes the two feet of snow still on the ground when they arrived...in May. (Although those particular settlers were from Yorkshire, so maybe it wasn't quite as terrible a shock for them.)
I posted my CV on Monster today. Hooray for this modern age of passive job-hunting. I don't actually expect any response from it, but it was a good exercise to have done, because it gets me focussed in that direction again. I'm not sure what I'll do next. There's always the possibility of posting CVs on other, similar sites. Or, if I want to be less passive about it, I could contact some recruiters, which has been my intended plan from the beginning. Or, in the spirit of What Color Is Your Parachute, I could research local companies to whom I might have a plausible link or particular suitability.
...Gosh, the passive approach sounds more appealing all the time!
(Hmm, it occurs to me that I ought to register with Monster as an employer, so that I could do CV searches and see how I stack up against my competition. It's worth thinking about.)
Yesterday, during my excursion into town, I thought about how easy it is to slip into a semi-hermit-like lifestyle. (I have to think about something while I walk along, so that I have a plausible excuse when I walk into a lamp-post.) Now that I work 100% at home, there's really not much that requires me to leave the house, aside from trips to Tesco's and the occasional social visit. Mike's mother has, on several occasions, expressed concern that this may be bad for me. I've also seen plenty of trade magazine articles (not to mention Dilbert cartoons) about the effect working at home has on some people. I was therefore interested to see whether venturing out would feel strange in any way, or whether I would be reluctant to go and relieved to get home. There was also the opposite possibility: that I would feel elated to be outside.
Well, not surprisingly, nothing so dramatic happened. (I did experience the usual seductive "oh, I could put this off till tomorrow" trains of thought shortly before leaving, but I've always done that. I can put off errands for weeks on end.) In the end, it felt exactly like a trip to, say, the North Shore Mall would have. I wanted to put it off, went anyway, looked at stuff, found it difficult to make decisions, bought some things and didn't buy others pretty much at random (in retrospect), got a bit dazed from staring at lots of products on shelves, and came home.
So, my conclusions? The outing wasn't especially therapeutic, and I probably wasn't in need of therapy in any case. I appear to be me, still, pretty much intact. I'm apparently not in any immediate danger of becoming any weirder than I already am.
All of which thinking about yesterday brings to mind an amusing incident. Busy street, throngs of people walking in all directions. Nice lady picks me out of all the available targets...and asks directions. Oh dear. It seems like every time I'm by myself, someone asks me directions. It never happens when I'm with people who might actually know the answer.
Created at 00:47
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<head explodes>
I got interested in MixPix again today, and spent most of the day coding. Well, really it was mostly researching, trying to figure out how something works so I could use it, only to discover in the end that I can't.
Thanks to someone who shall remain nameless, whose RiscPC shuffles the wallpaper every time his screen saver kicks in, I have Feature Envy. I've therefore been toying with the idea of adding this as a feature to MixPix. I've never seen a wallpaper shuffler with this option, so it would be a cool thing to do anyway. In order to accomplish this, MixPix obviously has to notice when the screen saver kicks in (or when it kicks out, doesn't matter which), and do a shuffle then. VB doesn't have built-in functions that can tell me when this happens. I have to go to a lower level; Windows itself has to notify my app when the screen saver starts, which means delving into the Windows API. In my researches today I found out that the process, if I could manage it, would go like this:
Sounds pretty good in theory. The trouble is, the only examples I could find of using this Win32API call were in C, which I speak about as well as I speak Russian, which is to say, hardly at all. I couldn't work out from the C examples--which went far over my head--just how to handle the call parameters in VB.
But then I found a freeware DLL for VB that simplifies hooking Windows messages! Just what I needed! Unfortunately none of their documentation or examples were about exactly what I was doing, but it wasn't hard to extrapolate. Well, except for one problem: It didn't work. Just flat-out didn't work. The screen saver would kick in, and nothing would happen. My app gave no error messages, but it didn't notice the screen saver kick-in either.
Some heavy-duty reading between the lines yielded the answer. When you install a hook, it's either local (pays attention only to messages generated by your own app) or system-wide (pays attention to all Windows messages). This freeware DLL only installs local hooks. My hook will only respond to events generated within my VB app.
The problem is a Windows limitation. It's picky about how system-wide hooks are handled. Apparently, system-wide HookProcs must reside within a Windows DLL, and VB can't create Windows DLLs. So, I can't use VB to write the code I need into my own DLL, and I can't make use of the HookProc in this freeware DLL (it's their app, they didn't exactly write my code into their HookProc).
Now what? Give up? Learn enough C to write a DLL? Keep hunting for a third-party solution? (In fact, I've found one, but it'd cost $200 to find out whether it would really do the job.) I don't know yet. Right now I'm cheating; I've sent the problem to one of the Real Programmers at H&A to see if he can write me a quick-and-dirty DLL to do the job.
So, thwarted in my primary aim, I settled for doing an overall code cleanup, reorganization, and optimisation. It's amazing how, as code evolves, you can end up with orphans that you don't notice are no longer needed. And, of course, along the way I thought of a few other features that definitely must be added...
Meanwhile, Mike has been coding and documenting all day as well. Neither of us could be bothered to notice the world, so we snacked on tea and chocolate and teacakes when peckish, and didn't get around to having real dinner until 10:00.
Created at 00:49
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And I thought my head exploded yesterday.
Programming is a wonderful thing. Within seconds you can be tossed from realizing that you are the stupidest person ever to walk the earth, to discovering that you are godlike and only chocolate is better than you are. Sometimes even the ascendancy of chocolate is questionable. Those are the really good moments.
So, did you guess that I've spent the day programming? In fact I have. No more work on the screen saver shuffle problem; instead I went back to the other major problem that's been lingering in the background. Windows will only use bitmap (.BMP) files as wallpaper. For some time I've been trying to add support for other graphic file types. In fact I've been supporting JPG files for some time now, but in a rather clunky way. (Although writing it did involve reverse-engineering some C code, which I was happy to have done successfully.) Today I finally found a built-in VB object with which I can read graphics of several file types, determine their size, rescale them, and convert them to BMPs--exactly what I need. Unfortunately this descended into the usual head-beating, trying to understand why the control didn't behave as expected in various situations. I've just now conquered both bizarre behaviours it was exhibiting, so at this time I have an app that will create wallpaper from source files in several graphic formats, and automatically rescale them so they fit sensibly on your current resolution.
At the moment the code is an absolute mess. Earlier today I had specialized, rather clunky code handling converting and scaling just JPGs, or, in the case of a BMP, displaying without rescaling. Now I have unified code for displaying and rescaling, no matter what the source filetype, but I still have all the code for the earlier method everywhere, some commented out, some just not being called (and therefore orphaned). I have a lot of cleaning up to do.
Enough of that. This afternoon we went to Tesco's, that having been one of the things we meant to do yesterday but didn't because we spent the day with our heads stuck in our computers. I always like going, because I'm not used to the standard British supermarket items yet. Every trip reveals some new astonishing item. For example, today Mike spotted "Heinz Baked Bean Pizza". Honest! And I myself noticed "Coal Tar Scented Soap" and toffee-flavoured Frosted Flakes (Frosties). Then there's "Oxtail Soup", which, if you're like me, you assume doesn't really mean actual tails from actual oxen, but, horrifyingly, inspection of the ingredients list reveals "oxtails". The mind boggles. And I won't even mention "Spotted Dick", because all comparisons of Britain with the US mention that one, but I have independently noticed "Pork Faggots". Hmm.
Created at 00:40
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See, this is the problem with programming all day, and then going straight to bed only at the last possible moment. I'm trying to go to sleep right at the peak of my day's mental activity. My brain is going a thousand miles an hour, coming up with solutions to problems, remembering things I haven't fixed yet, and even figuring out ways to implement (easily!) a feature I'd given up as being too complex. It's so hard to stay in bed, especially because my thinking is so clear right then, and I know that in the morning my brain will have mysteriously turned into a block of wood.
Still, mustn't grumble...
Having now received all the forms required to file my US tax returns, I ran out of excuses for putting the whole topic off, so this morning I emailed it all to my US accountant, who happens to be on the west coast. Even so, by 1:00 (which, I'll point out, is 5:00 AM his time), he had replied back to me, with five completely filled out draft tax forms (Federal 1040, 2350, 2555-EZ, and Massachusetts 1-NR/PY and Schedule D). Wow. Even more wow was that his draft forms showed me getting a federal refund upwards of $3000!
<boggle>
You can easily imagine my near heart failure. First reaction: What the heck have I been doing wrong every other time I filed my taxes?! At first I thought it was all a tease, and that he'd forgotten that he'd counselled me to file as MFS (Married Filing Separately). He filled out all these forms MFJ (Married Filing Jointly), which means he was calculating a tax return for two but based only on my income. Re-figuring at the MFS rates would take a good knock out of that number, which I fully expected.
In fact I'd been expecting all along to owe taxes, because I withheld all year at the Single rate, but now I have to file as married, and (I thought) MFS, where the rates are much higher than single. Plus, I actually have to file as though I lived in the US all year, and then file an amended return next December (which means that for the time being, I'll have to pay taxes for December 2000, which were never withheld). This is because I don't qualify for the foreign-income exclusion until I have lived outside the US for a year, but at that time I qualify retroactively.
But after asking him about all this, he said that he'd done more research into the MFJ/MFS question, and had concluded that because Mike's not a US citizen, and had no US sources of income, he has no tax liability to the US in any case. Unless we want to declare his income, we don't have to, but I can still file MFJ and claim him as a deduction/exemption.
(If you're British, and all this tax complexity is making your eyes water, I assure you: It gets a lot worse than this.)
Work-wise, I did something rather melancholy today. Way back in 1993, when David and I first designed the Boston office network, we chose particular drive letters for particular data storage purposes. In following years, the other offices did their own thing while installing networks, including several different systems for drive letters. Once IT centralized and took over the other offices, we imposed a drive-letter convention on them, but left Boston as it was (too much hassle to change). Today, as part of my preparation for migrating the Boston office to NT, I changed the first of several drive letters from what we originally chose to the (now) company standard.
It's always a strange feeling to undo or dismantle something you originally set up. In a way, it feels like erasing yourself.
Created at 22:47
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Young Person's Advice and Information Shop
--Name I saw on a shop on Tuesday, while out and about
The fact that Mike asks "Yes? Why is that funny?" just makes me howl that much harder...
Yesterday morning our Amazon loot arrived. That should keep us busy for a few minutes. I've already ripped all 4 CDs we ordered. Fun, fun, fun!
One of the books I got for myself is the new Patrick O'Leary short story collection; it includes stories about:
Sounds fairly promising, in the mindbending department. Of course I expect that from Patrick O'Leary. He's just not well. When I met him at Readercon in 1999, I asked whether it's an effort to write such surreal stories, or if he thinks like that all the time. He just buried his head in his hands and laughed and said "You have no idea."
For the last two days I've been feeling slightly under the weather. I don't know whether it's going to blossom into a full-blown illness or just keep teasing. It's a strange one. Usually I feel awful in the morning and better as the day goes on, but with this I feel OK in the mornings and worse the later it gets.
Created at 00:05
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Oooh, I've been lazy lazy lazy lately, at least with regard to diary entries.
I confess it: my writing energies are focussed elsewhere. I've finally started writing one or two of the pieces I mean to put in the Musings section, which is currently nothing but a signpost. As usual, once I start, I get caught up in expository completeness, so I've been writing heavily for several days now, with a long way yet to go.
If you're curious, I'm not writing about the Meaning of Life or any such philosophical topic. I'm writing about the process of moving from the US to the UK. Much of what I had to do during the process, I learned about by reading information other people had posted on the web, so I'm trying to return the favour.
Today was fun; an attempt to do a routine work email check didn't work. Investigations revealed that a major meltdown was in progress at work. Fortunately it was something I'd seen before, so I knew exactly how to handle it without having to do any research.
Here's the anatomy:
And that's exactly what happened. 5GB of disk space was eaten up in no time, stopping only when the volume became full. Full volumes are not good for a server. Plus, the post office kept trying to save the message, making connection after connection to the server until all the licenses were used up. Now I had a full volume and a server that wouldn't allow any more connections. Other servers that depend on connecting to this server (which is all of them) started to fail. It's a cascading problem that quickly gets out of control.
Because I knew exactly what was going on, I was easily able to fix just about all of it from here. All I had to do was get the backup software to let go of the file (by cancelling the backup), shut down the post office, add some space to the full volume, and then reboot everything (not strictly necessary, but good to have a clean start after a problem). This was fine except that two servers didn't come up after the reboot. In the end, Jill had to send someone in to the office to see what the problem was. It turned out to be nothing. Some of the servers are a bit strange about rebooting on a keyswitch. Mike thinks the keyswitch confuses the power-on-self-test; the computer can't decide whether it has a keyboard or not, and just stops at that point. As soon as you switch the monitor to the affected server, the boot process resumes.
Anyway.
It turns out they don't have the word "poopy" here to describe the feeling of restless lethargy...
Created at 22:27
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A diary entry! Will wonders never cease!
We've just finished Mike's birth-picosecond. I gave him, among other things, Quake III. Possible tactical error here. Mike is installing Quake into Windows 2000 right now (530 MB!). Consequently I am typing this entry directly from the Risc PC. I have a strange feeling--call it intuition--that it may be some time before I regain control of that particular keyboard...
This is probably just as well. I need a break from writing my US-to-UK Musing. It's getting rather, erm, long, and I've been quite single-minded. Typical binge behaviour. I get into a topic for a while, and think about little else. Then, suddenly, I've overdosed on it, and I want nothing to do with it. I haven't reached the overdose point with the US-to-UK Musing yet, but the harder I binge, the more likely it is to happen. A break is not a bad thing.
We have both taken tomorrow and Friday off from work, which will be nice. On Saturday, a crowd arrives: James and Jo, Justin, and Cath. I think everyone but Cath is staying overnight. Hmm. This is the same group of people who visited for Mike's last birthday, with one small addition: Me!
Mike's mother also came to visit this evening, to do the birthday thing. She gave him a Scrabble set. This is good, because Helen and Mike squashed me like a bug when we played back in May. With our own game in the house, I can get some practice, at the price of the occasional humiliation until I improve.
Work-wise, today I finished the drive letter changes I mentioned a few entries ago. There has been remarkably little fallout. So far I have one app that depended on F: that I didn't know about, and two users who didn't get their new home drive letter mapped properly. That's not bad, out of 200+ users and probably 300 apps.
Also, today I started looking at the public beta of GroupWise 6. I think I might violate my own principles and roll it out without waiting for a few patch versions to get behind it, because it finally adds some features we've been desperate for, most particularly the ability to limit message sizes and to put quotas on user mailbox sizes.
Coincidentally, over the last few days, I did an audit of user mailbox sizes, and found about 10 users with mailboxes over 600MB. This is what happens when you can't put a quota on a mailbox. Unfortunately, the users have had seven years to get used to this all-you-can-eat email system. They're not going to take kindly to having limits placed on them. I think they probably assume that it's their right to store as much as they please. A rude awakening may be in store.
The ability to limit message sizes will be even more welcome. Right now, people casually send the most enormous emails without even looking at how big they are. I've got users sending 96MB emails to each other, even between offices over our extremely narrow bandwidth WAN. Some of these messages must be taking days to deliver. We notice when enormous messages are being sent, if they cause other messages to back up, but right now there's not much we can do about it. With built-in message size limits, I can make it so a user can't even send a message if it's larger than, say, 8MB. Ooooh, won't that be nice.
My goodness, the graphics in the new Quake are impressive...
Created at 00:15
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