Talking to Myself Again

My Computer Hates Me

My computer hates me. Or is it the other way around? I was all ready to write a nice long post about recent events (short version: No working septic system for the last 7 weeks), but my computer instead decided to lock up in a rather major way. After about 30 minutes of struggling with it, I finally have it working again.

Alas, I know longer have any energy left for writing about recent events (did I mention our septic system hasn't worked for the last 7 weeks?), so I'm going to leave it for next time.

Good night! (Seriously, it died about October 15 or so.)

I said "good night!" (Oh, yeah. Good night!)

PC Problems Aplenty

mood: tired
music: crickets, frogs, and other night sounds

This will be a long post of woe and joy and more woe and more joy and... Well, you get the picture.

For quite awhile now, we've wanted a 2nd computer in the house. When Dawn and I were the only computer users, it wasn't too big of a deal to share the single PC. When Lando started using the computer (to play online Flash games), getting computer time became a bit too difficult. Pretty much anytime one of us would get on the PC, Lando would very quickly run over and declare that he needed to "do some work" (as he put it) on the PC.

So recently we ordered a laptop from Dell. Nothing too fancy, since all it would really need to do is access the Internet.

New Laptop

It arrived at 7:30 in the morning (!) on Saturday, March 28. Oh, joy!

I setup the new laptop and quickly configured it to work with our wireless network. All was good -- except it would frequently drop its network connection. Very frequently. Well, our Tivo is connected to our wireless network as well, and we had been noticing recently that it seemed to frequently lose its connection. Perhaps our wireless router was going bad? Oh, woe!

We decided to get a new wireless router from Best Buy. They're not all that expensive, and the newer routers support 802.11n, which is supposedly less prone to dropping connections.

Of course, if we just connected our Tivo via a wired network connection (rather than wireless), dropped connections wouldn't be an issue for it, plus it would presumably be faster. However, it turns out that the Tivo Series 2 doesn't have an ethernet connection, just the USB-based wireless. Of course, the newer Tivos do have ethernet connections. Hmm....

We'd been wanting a new Tivo for awhile now (well, ever since our old TV died and we replaced it with one that could handle HD). So we decided to give in and buy a Tivo HD XL while we were at Best Buy.

We already had a wired connection from our router in the family room to our new BluRay player (which we bought shortly after getting the new TV) in the living room. Rather than run another 30-40 feet of ethernet cable to connect the new Tivo, it would be easier to just buy a network switch. That would allow us to run one line from the router in the family room to the switch in the living room, then run short lines from the switch to the BluRay player, the new Tivo, and (someday) the Wii (which we also bought shortly after getting the new TV -- do you see a pattern here?).

So that afternoon we went to Best Buy and bought a router, a switch, and a Tivo HD XL. Oh, joy!

That night, our desktop PC died. Oh, woe!

Troubleshooting the Old PC

I wasn't too concerned at first. When I turned the PC on, the fan would come on, as would the internal LED lights in the case (woot!), but absolutely nothing would appear on the screen. I figured it was probably a bad video card.

The next day (Sunday, March 29) , I borrowed an old video card from Eric, as well as a power supply tester. I figured I would either verify that the video card was the problem, or I would test the power supply and find that it was the problem. I replaced the video card, then realized that it didn't have a DVI (digital LCD) connector -- analog only! Oh, woe! Luckily, I had an old CRT in the garage. Oh, joy! Unfortunately, it weighs about half a ton. Oh, woe! However, I lugged it into the house, plunked it down on the computer desk, hooked it up, and fired up the PC.

Still nothing on the screen. Oh, woe! Again!

Well, then that meant it was probably the power supply. I disconnected the power cable from the motherboard and plugged it into the tester. No lights. That means a dead power supply, right? Well, actually, that was the 20-pin connector. There was also a 24-pin connector going into the motherboard. I tested that one -- all lights green! So... What did that mean?

Well, I could order a replacement power supply from Dell ($153 plus shipping and taxes), wait for it to arrive, then swap it in for the old power supply (which isn't all that easy) and see whether that fixed the problem. If it didn't, then I would still be without a PC. *sigh*

Our "old" PC wasn't THAT old -- about 2 1/2 years. It was starting to feel sluggish when playing Sims 2, but it wasn't slow enough that I could justify buying a new PC. Except our old PC was dead. And the signs seemed to indicate that it was REALLY dead. It wouldn't even generate a diagnostic *beep* when I tried booting the system with the memory cards removed and all of the drives disconnected. Could it be a dead CPU?

Well, I couldn't justify buying a new PC if our old PC still worked, but it was looking like our old PC was never going to work again, so I figured we could justify buying a new PC in that case.

So on April 2 we ordered a new PC from Dell. Not the top of the line, and about half the cost of our old PC, but with more memory, more disk space, and a faster CPU. It even had a BluRay disc burner!

Second Thoughts

After ordering the new PC, I began to think more about what would be involved in transferring our files from the old PC. The hard drives were presumably fine, so all we would really need to do is remove them from the old PC and install them in the new PC. Except....

When I bought the old PC, large drives were quite expensive. However, Dell had an option where you could have two 320 gigabyte drives in a RAID 0 configuration. ("What did he just say?") By that I mean, the PC would treat them as if they were a single 640 gigabyte drive. That means not having to deal with splitting things up between a C: drive and a D: drive, but it also can result in somewhat faster performance in some situations, because the PC can write to both drives simultaneously.

Unfortunately, the new PC wouldn't t know how to to configure the two drives as a single RAID 0 drive. And by themselves, the individual drives aren't readable. At best, it would be like getting every other letter from Genesis 1:1 "I h bgnigGdcetdteHaesadteErh." (Actually, you wouldn't even get that. The OS would see the drive as being unformatted.)

So then I began to think more seriously about the possibility that we would not be able to recover the data from those two 320 gigabyte drives. Luckily, the thousands of digital photos I've taken were on the 500 gigabyte drive, which I knew I would still be able to read. What was on the two 320 gigabyte drives?

Quicken data, for one thing. That's important, but we periodically take a backup to CD. Our most recent backup was a couple of months old, but we could restore from it, then download the more recent transactions from our bank. Therefore, I wasn't too concerned about that.

TurboTax data. Oh. We'd already filed our federal tax return long ago, but we hadn't yet filed our state tax return, because we were going to owe a little bit. And we hadn't printed a copy of our federal tax return. So... Well, we'd just have to do our federal taxes again (*sigh*), comparing the result to make sure we came up with the same answer, then use that data to file our state tax return.

Genealogy data. Ouch! I have a large amount of family tree data, which I began collecting back around 1976, when the Bicentennial and Roots got me interested in the topic. Did I have a backup anywhere? Um... Maybe. Was it very recent? Definitely not. *sigh*

REALL membership list. Oh no! I'm the chairman our the local skeptics group, the Rational Examination Association of Lincoln Land (REALL). Among the numerous REALL-related files I had on my PC was our membership list. Did I have a backup anywhere? Uh... Not really. Maybe some old printouts somewhere. Um... This is not good.

I decided I really needed to be able to recover data from those drives!

Plan B

"How could I get the data off of those drives? Well, if I could get the old PC working again, that would do it! Perhaps it was the power supply. After all, none of the lights lit up when I checked the 20-pin connector. Maybe that was the problem after all. $150 wasn't all that much money to pay to get back all of my data! Okay, I'll do it! I'll order a replacement power supply from Dell!"

Of course, it would have been better to have had this discussion with myself before I had ordered the new PC, but better late than never. Hopefully.

So on Sunday, April 5 we ordered a replacement power supply from Dell.

But what if the replacement power supply doesn't work? There's got to be some way to read data from a couple of RAID 0 drives, right? It turns out, there is! A company called Runtime Software creates a suite of software that handles numerous data recovery scenarios, including reading data from a couple of RAID 0 drives. All you have to do is pay them money. *sigh* It's not too terribly bad, however. Their RAID Recover Bundle (which includes RAID Reconstructor, GetDataBack for NTFS, and Captain Nemo) costs $179. *ouch* but not *OUCH!*

Boxes, Boxes, Boxes!

Everything arrived on Tuesday, April 7. Of course, I happened to have a REALL meeting that evening, so everything stayed in boxes until I returned that night. I then setup the new PC, connected it to the network, etc. Everything worked fine. (It's a very nice machine from Dell, not top-of-the-line, but still quite speedy.) It was too late to tackle replacing the power supply that night, so I left that for the next day and went to bed.

I took off Wednesday, April 8, so that I could work on taking care of our PC problems. I unboxed the replacement power supply and plugged it into the tester. For the 24-pin connector, all of the lights were green. For the 20-pin connector, none of the lights lit up -- exactly the same behavior as the old power supply! So that either meant that the new power supply was broken in just the same way as the old power supply (unlikely), or that the 20-pin connector is on a switched circuit and only comes on when it is needed, in which case the old power supply was probably not the problem. *sigh*

At that point I declared the old PC officially very dead and turned my attention to recovering the data from the old disk drives.

Getting the photos back was easy. All I had to do was remove the 500 gigabyte drive from the old PC and connect it in the new PC. *poof!* All of my photos were back!

Getting the other data back was a bit more of a challenge. I moved the two RAID drives into the new PC, then purchased and downloaded the RAID Recovery Bundle from Runtime Software. When I ran RAID Reconstructor, it showed me... nothing. No drives. Crap. Then I remembered something in the instructions about disabling User Account Control if you're running Vista, which I am. I did that, and now the two RAID drives were visible. Great! The software then analyzed the drives and figured out the parameters needed to read data from them. I then ran Captain Nemo, which allowed me to browse the drives just like Windows Explorer and copy data from them. Huzzah!

Long story slightly less long -- I got all of my data back!

Except...

Here it is Friday, April 17, and I'm still not 100% done. Why?

Quicken. Where the heck is our installation disk for this? We've no idea. We've got the data file sitting on the disk waiting for us, just as soon as we install the software! *sigh*

Sims 2. I have the installation disks for all of the expansions, including the final two expansions that I had just installed when the old PC died. What I don't seem to have is the installation disk for the original game! I have the box. I have the manual. I just don't have the disk. *sigh*

Photoshop Elements. I have the installation disk for this (hurray!), but I've been having trouble getting it to load the old catalog of photos. The photos are all present, but the catalog contains all of the additional information, like captions, tags, etc. I'm hopeful I'll be able to get it working eventually, however.

iTunes. I've got about 20 gigabytes of music, all ripped from CDs. Try telling iTunes that! iTunes doesn't like it when things change. You might be able to get your songs back, but it will have lost things like playlists, ratings, etc. Actually, we had lost all of this information just a few months ago. At that time, we bought and downloaded CopyTrans, which is software that allows you to copy everything from your iPod to iTunes. (Normally, you can copy to your iPod, but you can't copy from it.) Since we still had that software, I just used it to recover everything from my iPod. Problem solved! Except then, while attempting to sync everything back from iTunes to the iPod again, Something Went Wrong. My iPod's disk is now corrupted. *sigh* It's not as bad as it sounds. My iPod still works fine, but whenever I try to sync it with my PC, Vista tells me that its disk is corrupted and offers to fix it for me. When I tell Vista to do so, it then complains that it can't because the disk is in use by iTunes. When I tell iTunes to stop messing with the disk, it is no longer mounted and therefore can no longer be fixed by Vista. *sigh* I'll get that straightened out eventually.

This saga began on March 28. Here it is April 17 and four of the most-used bits of software on my PC still don't work 100% correctly! However, it could have been much worse, so I can't complain too much! (Okay, maybe I'm complaining just a little bit!)

Postscript

Oh, did I mention that our old laser printer won't work with Vista? So on top of everything else, we went out and bought a new laser printer. At least the new one is network-ready, so it connects directly to the network, rather than to an individual PC. That means if Dawn wants to print something, she won't have problems doing so if I'm in the middle of playing Sims 2 -- which I'll be doing just as soon as I can find the stupid disk!

(Reposted from my old LiveJournal blog)

Our 3-year-old Computer Geek

mood: happy
music: silence

Lando has recently become much better at using the computer.

For quite awhile now, he has been able to click on things with the mouse, but more often than not he would right-click on things, bringing up the context menu, rather than left-clicking on them. He'd be at Noggin's web site, for example, trying to play some Flash-based game, and instead would keep getting the context menu. As a result, when he wanted to do something on the computer, that pretty much meant that Dawn or I would have to sit next to him and click on whatever he pointed at.

However, just in the last week or so he seems to have gotten the hang of it. He's now left-clicking with the best of them! And he loves it! We'll bring up the web page for Ready Set Learn!, Caillou, or Oobi, and Lando will spend 30 minutes quietly clicking his way through the activities. He doesn't know how to click and drag yet, so he can't really do things that require that (such as drawing), but many of the games just require clicking, so that isn't really a problem. I even turned him loose on YouTube so he could watch SCA combat videos! That might have been a bit dangerous, but so far as I know he didn't locate the "2 girls 1 cup" video.

Unfortunately, whenever he would play one of the Ready Set Learn games, he would quite often click the button to print the screen. That's fine, except that after he would do that, the Windows printer dialog box would pop up. Lando wouldn't know what to do, so every few minutes it was "Dad! Come here! I need you!"

After a couple of days of that, I made a mistake: I explained to him which button to click in the print dialog box to make it print. Why I didn't explain to him the "Cancel" button instead, I don't know. As a result, Lando has printed so much stuff over the last 3 days that he's now responsible for the disappearance of an additional 2 acres of the Amazon rain forest. Well... At least 1 acre. Anyway, he's printed a lot of stuff!

So, if you're in need of pages for your toddler to color or material to use as insulation for your house, just call. We've got plenty.

Flight Patterns

This is a VERY cool video created from FAA airline flight data. I have nothing to say about it other than, "Wow! Very cool!"

Virtual Gifts on Facebook

mood: confused
music: Gypsy Guerrilla Band - Rota

Here's something I just don't get it. Consider this bit about virtual gifts on Facebook:

"To date, users have exchanged more than 20 million virtual gifts, paying up to $1 for each, making them one of the site's most successful revenue streams."

My mind just boggles. People have apparently spent $20 million in real money to electronically send people little drawings of things. Why? What's the point? I don't get it. If you're a friend of mine, please don't waste money sending me drawings of balloons, brownies, or bunnies. Just send me an email with the words "Here are some brownies!" They'll taste just as good as the drawing would have and you'll save some money.

Six Months in One Post! How Efficient!

Hey, you! Wake up! Yes, shocking though it may be, I am actually writing a new entry. My last entry was way back on November 24, but I really haven't written very consistently since June of last year! Yeesh! A lot of that has to do with the fact that, in July, I launched The Skeptic News, which I update almost daily. Well, I finally decided to start posting again, so earlier this month I sat down and "cleaned house," as it were, moving old entries to the archive and getting things ready. I also began reading the journals of others again for the first time in quite a while. (What happened to Squirrel Bait's journal? It seems to be gone. Wah!) Today I read that The Mighty Kymm has begun working her way through the Open Pages webring in search of dead journals to remove. Looks like I've begun reviving this thing just in the nick of time!

So, what has happened since November?

December: Visited Dad and my brother Ross down in Texas over Christmas. When I did this two years ago, it was cold and rainy the entire time I was there. This time was better -- it wasn't rainy. Actually it did warm up a bit the last day that I was there, but nothing like the 85 degrees it had been before I arrived.

January: Nothing memorable.

February: In the November 17, I mentioned putting together a plan to completely change what I do at work. We held meetings, we modified the plan, etc., and finally submitted it to the Agency Information Management Steering (AIMS) committee. They examined it, held meetings, modified it, etc., and finally submitted it to the senior managers. They examined it, etc., and in February they approved it. Bravo! Success! Or so I thought. In actuality, they sent it back to the AIMS committee, saying, in effect, "sounds good, but give us more details." My section's manager, the chairman of the AIMS committee, then went on vacation, which takes us to....

March: The section manager returns and announces that he's taken a position elsewhere and will be gone in a week. All work in the AIMS committee grinds to a halt, due the the lack of a chairman. As for today, June 26, that's where things still are.

April: Nothing particularly memorable. I did attend the Illinois Geographic Information Systems Association (ILGISA) "GIS in Illinois" conference on April 20-22, but there's not much of interest to say about it. Oh, and Dain had a 5th birthday party on the 26th. I abandoned my traditional strategy of "buy a toy that's noisy" in favor of "buy a toy that will scare Mary out of her wits." Specifically, I got him a nature kit (for collecting bugs and stuff) and a bunch of plastic bugs.

May: REALL held its annual elections. I had been the secretary-treasurer for the last year, but the newsletter editor was getting too busy, so we swapped jobs this year. I had resigned as newsletter editor of the local SCA group earlier, luckily! Also, on May 15 I went to Springfield Highland Games and Celtic Festival. It was fun, but I left early because it began to rain. There was also a little movie called Star Wars: The Phantom Menace. I went to see it about a week after it opened, with the idea that I could avoid the massive crush of people and still see it before I learned the entire story. The movie was about what I expected -- not as good as the first two, but not a total bomb. The special effects were fabulous, of course, but there was virtually no character development and I had some problems with several plot points. I'd probably give it 3 stars.

Somewhere in there, Dad came up and visited for a couple of days. He finally bought a modern computer! He had an old Commodore Amiga 500 for years and years -- 1 meg of memory, no hard drive. One of the things he had to take into account when buying a new system is that he travels a lot, spending months at a time in a trailer Texas and Colorado. That means not a lot of room, and the system needs to be able to handle getting bumped around a bit. I recommended getting a laptop, and showed him some stuff from Gateway's web site. He finally got very nice one, which I think is probably about perfect for what he wants. Of course, there's a huge learning curve to get over! Plus, finding an Internet Service Provider that would have a local access number in Texas, Colorado, and a tiny town in southern Illinois was another challenge! After some false starts, however, it turned out that the solution was simple -- AOL! That has the added bonus of being about as "user friendly" as you can get. He's already been in contact with former neighbors, relatives, etc. As best as I can tell he likes it.

I also talked to Dawn this month, in our typical "once every 6 months" manner. We're still planning on taking a trip to Canada this summer, and I still haven't made any firm plans! Actually, we did settle on one thing -- the dates August 21-29. Now we just need to pick an itinerary and a mode of travel, preferably sometime before August 20.

Work Changes, New Computer, Moved -- and Mom Died

Yes, I'm back -- yet again! I suppose it's ironic that, pretty much by definition, when nothing is going on in my life, I have plenty of time to tell you about it, but when I have plenty going on in my life, I have little time to tell you about it. Judging by the long gap since my last update, you can infer that my life has been busy.

Four major events have occurred in the last couple of months. In increasing order of importance: I proposed completely changing my responsibilities at work; I bought a new computer; I moved; and my mother passed away.

The first one isn't particularly interesting to talk about. For the last couple of years, I've been responsible for the web site at the Illinois EPA. In recent months it has become increasingly apparent to me that our web development process just isn't working very well. Basically, if anyone wants something put on our web site, they send it to me. This means, first of all, that I'm an extremely busy fellow, particularly since the web site is only one of my job duties. Secondly, it means that our web site has a random hodge-podge of information, pretty much unconnected and disorganized. There might be the most extremely detailed information about one program area, but not even the most basic information about another program area. This makes it difficult to find information, to say the least.

I wrote up an 8-page memo discussing the problems with our current procedures and proposing, basically, that I turn over 90% of web development responsibilities to a team of a dozen people, drawn from the rest of the agency. That would free me up to do things like Java programming and writing database queries, rather than what has evolved into basically glorified word processing.

The second event was buying a new computer. What a story that makes! Way back on July 29, I ordered a new computer from Gateway -- a 400MHz Pentium II with 128MB RAM, Voodoo2 3D video card, DVD drive, ZIP, tape backup, theater sound system, etc. It was scheduled to ship on August 5. Well, on August 7 I received a postcard from Gateway, saying that "due to circumstances beyond our control," my order was delayed and would ship by August 21. Oh, bother. Time passed. On August 21, I received a postcard from Gateway saying that "due to circumstances beyond our control," my order was delayed and would ship by September 22. Ack! Should I cancel my order, or keep it? Decisions, decisions.

Then I learned that Intel would be releasing the 450MHz Pentium II on August 30. That would mean I could change my order to the faster chip. Sure, why not. So, after Gateway announces that they are selling 450MHz systems, I call them and change my order. There is plenty of confusion with getting the order changed, and eventually the sales critter just starts over from scratch and gives me a new order number. Time passes. September 22 comes and goes. Finally, on October 5, my new computer arrives -- twice!

Yes, sure enough, when I was given a new order number, the sales critter somehow managed to not cancel the previous order, so when the UPS truck rolled up, out hopped two computers. That wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the fact that Gateway also charged my credit card for two computers.

Well, eventually I got all of that straightened out, so I am now the proud owner of a brand spanking new screaming demon of a computer -- that can't receive e-mail! Yes, somehow or other I managed to totally hose the e-mail software on this machine. It came with Microsoft Home Essentials preinstalled. I owned Microsoft Office 97, which I loaded. I then downloaded the Office service release patch and installed it.

Unbeknownst to me, although Office 97 and Home Essentials both include Word 97, they install in separate directories. This means two copies of Word 97 are on the machine. My suspicion is that the service release patch saw the two copies, got confused, and patched the wrong one. Microsoft Outlook uses Word as its text editor, so when I went to start Outlook, it complained about a wrong DLL version when attempting to start Word. When I received the error message, I decided to uninstall Outlook and start over. Somewhere in that process I uninstalled something that I shouldn't have, and now my Internet e-mail is totally hosed. Since then I've been using my old computer to read e-mail, which isn't the most convenient thing in the world, but it works. I'm sure I'll eventually get e-mail working on this machine, but I've been too busy (naturally) to work on it!

Next, after getting my new computer in early October, I moved at the end of October! This meant that the middle of October was spent packing pretty much every waking moment when I was home. Actually, it began with me rather calmly going through everything, carefully sorting things, discarding junk, and generally being quite organized. As time passed, however, there was less sorting, less discarding, and more frantically tossing into boxes! I moved roughly 150 boxes of stuff, and I'll guess that probably a third of that is stuff that I'll just wind up throwing out -- or else just shoving into the back of closets like I did at the old place!

Anyway, I really like my new place -- I'm renting a house! Here are the specs: 3 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms, 2-car garage, great room, large kitchen, breakfast nook, fireplace, and deck! It's at the end of a very short cul de sac on the extreme west end of Springfield, so there is virtually no traffic. Although it's in the city limits, it's almost in the country. You can go three blocks to a cornfield and not much farther will bring you to horses!

My favorite room, however, is the great room. It's very large (naturally), with a cathedral ceiling, a fireplace, and sliding glass doors leading out onto a deck in the back yard. I love it! The back yard itself is filled with plenty of trees, particularly pine trees, and I love that, too. In short, I like my new place!

Unfortunately, two days after I moved, I received a phone call from Dad saying that Mom was in the hospital and that she had decided that she would refuse any further treatment. She had been diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma 12 years ago. She underwent chemo and fought it off, but a few years ago it returned. She had more treatments, but it was a downhill struggle.

For the last year or so she had been going into the hospital quite a bit. She was never bedridden for months at a time or anything like that, but she would have to go back to the hospital numerous times every month for yet another treatment or another test. Then she began having problems with an extremely low blood count. She kept going back to the hospital and getting blood transfusions, but they can't give you white blood cells, because they would simply fight against your body. As a result she was extremely susceptible to infection, and eventually got pneumonia. At that point she decided that she was tired of the fight, so she told the doctors that she didn't want any more antibiotics to fight off the infection.

I received Dad's call on Monday, November 2, which was the day my phone service was connected at the new place. Dad said that it would just be a matter of days. After I hung up the phone I cried my eyes out for several minutes. It wasn't just because I was losing my mother, which was bad enough. It was also simply stress. For weeks I had been going nonstop, getting ready for the move, and just went it seemed like things were about to get better, they very abruptly had gotten much worse. And, oddly enough, it was also because I would never been able to show her my new home. I wanted to show her the great room, the fireplace, the deck out back, the pine trees -- but now I never could. The day before I had used my camcorder to videotape a very brief tour of the place. I decided to bring the camcorder and tape with me to the hospital. If she seemed up to it, I could play back the tape in the camcorder and she could watch it in the viewfinder.

So on Monday I drove down to St. Louis to see Mom at the hospital. All of her sisters and her brother were there. She was still in pretty good shape at that point and was in good spirits. She actually looked significantly better than she had when I had seen her in the hospital a couple of weeks before that. It was hard to believe that she would be dead in a few days. I eventually showed her the videotape of the new house, which she seemed to enjoy. It didn't really show things very well, because I hadn't expected this to be my only opportunity, but it was all I had.

After a few hours I drove back to Springfield. My brother flew into St. Louis from Austin later that night. The next day (Tuesday) after visiting with her, he drive up to Springfield to stay overnight with me. On Wednesday we drove back down to St. Louis to see Mom again. When we arrived there was a sign on her door telling visitors to go to the nurse's station. She had passed away about an hour before we had arrived.

I took it well, but I was quite surprised that she had gone so quickly. On Monday she was doing quite well, so I had guess she would last until Friday. It just really hadn't occurred to me when I left her on Monday that it would be the last time I would see her.

I suspected that Dad would prefer to have some time alone, just to wander about the house and cry without worrying about who saw, so Ross and I spent Wednesday night back in Springfield, then drove down to Dad's place on Thursday. He later thanked us for that, so I guess my suspicion was correct.

The visitation was on Friday night (November 6). I was amazed, first of all, at the amount of food that neighbors brought over -- meat trays, loaves of bread, fried chicken, lasagna, even cartons of soda. Keep in mind that this is out in the country, so when I say "neighbors", I mean "people who might live 5 miles away."

Secondly, I was amazed at the number of people who showed up at the visitation. Mom had taught kindergarten in the area for 30 years, so she and Dad knew plenty of people. Plus there were people like two of my high school teachers, our neighbors from when I was in first grade, and the parents of a pseudo-girlfriend of mine from high school. I was also very impressed by the number of my brother's friends who showed up. (Six of them served as pall bearers, actually.)

Thirdly, I was amazed at how quickly all of that food was consumed by everyone who came by after the visitation and after the funeral on Saturday.

I guess Mom went about as well as she could. We all got to see her one last time when she was still in pretty good shape, and I think it's better to go that way than to spend years in bed, the way her grandparents spent the end of their lives. She had talked for quite some time about not wanting to drag things out, so I was about as prepared as one can expect to be for it.

As for me, I'm doing fine, although I still find myself periodically remembering, "Oh yeah -- Mom's dead." There's a part of me that keeps expecting this to be temporary. Ah well. Life goes on.

Dad seems to be doing fine. He came up to visit on Sunday. After showing him the new place, we took his pickup truck down to Oak Express and picked up some nice bookshelves for the great room. They're six feet tall, four feet wide -- and already completely filled with books, mainly hardbacks.

He'll eventually head down to south Texas, like every year. They've been there several times before, so he'll know plenty of people and will have plenty of things to keep him occupied, like playing shuffleboard, golfing, and generally enjoying warm weather in the middle of winter.

Writer's Block, Computer Books

Have you ever been patiently waiting for someone to stop talking so that you can say something -- and then find that you can't remember what it is you wanted to say? That describes my experience pretty much every time I sit down to do this.

Yesterday I received more of the stuff I had requested during our annual end-of-fiscal-year spending spree, much to my amazement and joy. My boss had a bunch of education money that she had been desperately trying to spend, but there really weren't any classes available during the few weeks left in the year that would do me any good. I eventually wrote up a list of probably 20-30 books that would be useful, on the chance that perhaps she could spend some of her education money on books. I didn't think it was likely that I would get more than a few, so I prioritized them and gave her the list. I've been totally shocked to discover that she apparently ordered all of them!

Anyway, on Monday several of them arrived, so I quickly snatched up Information Architecture and began reading. Yeah, okay, so it doesn't exactly sound like a page-turner, but I'm hoping it will help me figure out how to better organize the agency's web site. Currently it is (in my opinion) a disjointed, confusing jumble. It has improved over the last two years, but it still is only slightly less confusing than... uh, something that's really confusing. Anyway, I'll let you know how it turns out!

I just read in an e-mail message from my brother's girlfriend that they found a scorpion in their house. Texas! What a country!

My Life by the Numbers

Today: 230 pounds. What a surprise. I might as well just drop this bit and only post it when something changes! Walked 2 miles in 28:20. My time sucked, but this morning it was very warm, extremely humid, and very foggy! It was not unlike walking through a giant vat of chicken soup, only with more sodium and slightly fewer noodles.

Centralia Visit, Satellite TV, Software for Work, 4 Movies

Good heavens, how easily we fall out of habits -- when they're habits we didn't want to fall out of! I've missed a lot of days (as Mary has reminded me), so there is no way I'm going to be able to remember what happened over the last 11 days. Well, I'll just post what I remember and then try to get back on schedule.

Last Friday (June 6), right after I posted my previous entry, I hopped in the car to travel down south to visit my parents in Centralia, Illinois. They had called a few days earlier to ask about a computer problem they were having. It turned out that the monitor for they old Commodore Amiga 500 had died on them. Well, I've got 4 old Amigas scattered around my place, so I told them I'd grab a spare monitor and deliver it to them over the weekend.

While I was driving down Interstate 55, I saw a flatbed truck in front of me. On the back were some large containers labeled, in bold letters, "LIVE FISH." Three thoughts passed through my mind. The first thought was remembering that old joke. ("If you heard about a new movie coming out called 'Attack of the Killer Goldfish,' would you think it was about one great big goldfish or a whole bunch of little ones?" I love that joke.) The second thought was to wonder why they felt the need to label this thing. Did they think that people would drive more carefully if they knew that there were live fish traveling down the interstate? Did they think that emergency response personnel should be warned, in case of an accident? The third thought I had was to note that it is easy to obsess over trivia during a long car trip.

Saturday (June 7) they showed me their new camping trailer, a 37-foot 5th-wheel. Talk about massive! It just barely fits in the pole barn that Dad had built for his 32-foot trailer. There's probably about six inches to spare! In addition to being 37-feet long, it has three slide-outs, so it's nice and wide. It has the usual stuff, of course (kitchen, bathroom with shower, living room, bedroom, etc), but it also has some things I hadn't seen in a trailer before, such as a full-size couch that folds out into a bed, two full-size easy chairs, and even a computer desk!

While I was there, I also spent some time experimenting with Mom & Dad's new satellite TV setup. They went from something like 6 channels to 40 or so. We watched Monica Seles lose to Aranxa Sanchez Vacario (sp?) in the finals of the French Open, then just seconds after the match was over, we switched channels and watched the Triple Crown not get won.

Sunday afternoon I bid the folks goodbye and returned to Springfield.

Monday and Tuesday are a blur.

Remember a few weeks ago when I complained that I apparently wasn't going to get any of the stuff I asked for at work during our annual end-of-fiscal-year mad rush to buy things? Well, on Wednesday I actually received some stuff! Microsoft FrontPage 98 and Adobe PhotoShop arrived! I already had Frontpage at home, so that wasn't particularly exciting, but PhotoShop was something new for me. I quickly went out and bought a few books to learn how to use it. So far, I am extremely impressed! This is an incredibly powerful program and I have been amazed at how easily I am able to create some nifty looking graphics. Well, nifty looking for someone who has absolutely no artistic ability, that is. In addition, in reading through the license agreement, I was pleased to learn that I am allowed to install it on my computer at home as well! Considering that the program sells for something like $600, that's a very nice bonus! I spent most of the rest of the week and part of the weekend learning how to use it.

Wednesday night was gaming night, of course. We had pretty much a full house, so we had a massive, 8-player game going. If I remember correctly, my deck basically sucked the entire night. I really need to put together something new!

Friday, on the way home from work, I stopped off at Blockbuster to rent some videos. Ever since I got my DVD player, I've been buying DVDs instead of renting movies, so this was the first time I had rented any in quite awhile. Since virtually all DVDs are in wide-screen format, I even found myself being momentarily surprised to see that message about "this movie has been formatted to fit your television"!

On Saturday I watched "As Good as it Gets" and "Gattaca". "As Good as it Gets" was very good! Helen Hunt and Jack Nicholson -- how could they go wrong! I enjoyed it alot. "Gattaca" was reasonably good, too. It's about a future society where genetic selection means that the elite are born without imperfections. Sort of a Brave New World kind of thing. It was interesting, but not great.

Sunday I watched "Boogie Nights" and "Brassed Off". "Boogie Nights" was something of a disappointment, given all of the good things the critics had said about it. It was interesting, but it seemed to lack a climax (no pun intended) or an ending. It was sort of like they just ran out of ideas and stopped shooting. I think it sort of lacked focus. "Brassed Off" was pretty good. It was about a British town where the local coal mine is being closed and the people rally around the coal miners' brass band. It wasn't exactly "Hamlet", but I enjoyed it.

Well, I think we're going to have to call that good enough for this entry. Hopefully I can get back on schedule after this! (Monica? Next time, I think.)

My Life by the Numbers

Plenty of days to catch up on. Are you really interested? No? Then skip this bit.

Last Saturday: I was visiting my parents, so I wasn't able to weigh myself.

Last Sunday: Ditto.

Last Monday: 232.5 pounds. I gained only a half-pound while visiting my parents, which is a good thing! My mom always thinks she's feeding an army when she cooks. :-) Walked 2 miles in 27:37. That's my fastest time yet!

Tuesday: 232 pounds. Walked 2 miles in 28:09. I'm rather surprised at that time, since I had decided not to try walking fast. A couple of weeks ago I would have been amazed at that time. I guess this means I'm getting into (relative) shape.

Wednesday: 232 pounds.

Thursday: 233 pounds.

Friday: 232 pounds. My weight seems to be stuck! Walked 2 miles in 27:30. That's another personal best time!

Saturday: 230.5 pounds. Coolness!

Sunday: 230.5 pounds.

Monday: 230 pounds. That's my lowest weight since October of last year. I've lost 15 pounds in 11 weeks.

Today: 231 pounds. Didn't walk, but I mowed the grass, so I figure that counts. :-)

In April, I wrote 18 entries in this journal. In May, I only wrote 11. June will be better (I promise, Mary!).

I spent most of Saturday not working on the June issue of The Martyr's Rede, as well as not mowing the grass. That pretty much took up the whole day.

Actually, I did come up with something else to do. The Three Musketeers is finally out on video! No, not that one; the good one! Back in the mid-1970s, there was a version of The Three Musketeers made with Michael York, Richard Chamberlain, Charlton Heston, Faye Dunaway, Racquel Welch, etc. A few weeks after it was released, the "sequel", The Four Musketeers, was released. Actually, it wasn't a sequel at all; it was simply the second half of the story! It was originally going to be all one movie, but they just had too much footage, so they decided to split it into two. The movie(s) follow the original novel rather closely, and as it happens, in the book there is a fairly natural break in the story right at that point, so breaking the movie up wasn't very difficult. (My information about the original novel comes from my brother, as I've never read it.) In any case, it's an excellent movie, and I had been looking for it for quite some time, but it wasn't available. The other day, when I was in Suncoast (the bane of my existence; whenever I go in there I wind up much poorer), while paying for some DVDs, I saw The Three Musketeers and The Four Musketeers on display there at the register! I quickly snatched them up and watched them over the weekend. If you like period pieces, this is great stuff!

Sunday afternoon I finally sat down to work on The Martyr's Rede. Swordcliff has a new officer position, Archery Marshal, so one of the first things I wanted to do was update the officer listing in the template file. However, for whatever reason, Microsoft Publisher insisted on crashing every time I attempted to add an image of the badge of the Archery Marshal to the officer list. After fighting with it for over an hour, I hit upon a brilliant idea -- concede the point and produce the issue without the graphic. After that, things went significantly more quickly.

Of course, I still ended up making my traditional post-midnight trip to Kinko's to drop off the issue for copying.

My Life by the Numbers

Saturday: 235 pounds. Bother.

Sunday: 236 pounds. Hey!

Today: 236.5 pounds. Ack!