November 30, 2001

November 29, 2001

Saw the Harry Potter movie. Well, what can I say? You can get shot these days (or turned into a toad or something) for not liking Harry Potter. The poor kid tried his best, but the movie, for my money, was a loser. I hate to spill too many details for those who haven't seen it and still may want to, but in broad terms, the film was: 1) incoherent; 2) boring; and 3) emotionally cold.

Not everything I saw made sense, and numerous details essential to understanding the narrative line were missing from the film, although they were present (I am told) in the book. I didn't understand the ending at all and had to have Carol (who read the book) explain it to me. The filmmakers flubbed it badly there. Now, I'll forgive a film for being a little incoherent (a flaw present in The Matrix, The Mummy, and a lot of other recent SF/fanatasy films) if it is clever enough to retain my attention. Not so with poor Harry. It's a concept stitched together from some of the hoariest cliches in all fantasy. The single most original idea in the film (a brutal sort of airborne hockey game played on broomsticks, which I found as loathsome as I find groundside hockey) was completely extraneous to the story line and just extended the length of the already overlong film by another fifteen minutes, while showing us nothing about the characters that we did not already know.

What killed it for me, though, was the emotional coldness of it all. Harry is brutalized by a neanderthal aunt and uncle whose loathing for the poor kid is completely cartoonish and beyond understanding at any level. Even once he reaches Hogwarts School, the frost doesn't melt. The teachers there are all flint-hearted stone-faced ciphers, and the only adult character with any trace of humanity in him is Hagrid, the school's affable giant of a groundskeeper who's constantly realizing he's said more than he should. (All the more puzzling that he seems to be the school's secret agent and undercover diplomatic courier.) The script gives us no chance to really understand or come to like our three child heroes, as much as I think the actors could do justice to their roles if given the opportunity.

I'll venture a couple of guesses as to why this happened. The film smells like a book that was turned to film a little too literally. Film is not text, and stories told on film must told according to film's idiosyncratic grammar. I also suspect that Ms. Rowling (who is now the second richest woman in England, after the Queen herself) had a few too many fingers in the pie. Authors should sit back and let professionals do the filmmaking. There's no guarantee that they'll do a good job of it, but when authors try to be filmmakers, there is a near-certainty that things will go badly.

November 28, 2001

I got nailed by a virus the other day, and while nothing horrible happened, it's an interesting lesson in bad luck and some pathological glitches in Microsoft software. I ordinarily keep Norton running in memory at all times, but a week or so ago I unloaded it while I was probing a weird runtime error in my Aardmarks application. Predictably, I forgot to load it again, and so the machine was running for a week without virus protection. (Windows 2000 is robust enough so that I neither power down nor reboot for what may sometimes be a month or two at a time.) That would, of course, have to be the first time I got a virus mailed to me in a couple of months.

The bad guy is the BadTrans.B virus, which uses an infamous exploit in Windows Explorer 5.x. It's the Incorrect MIME Header vulnerability, which allows an .EXE email attachment to run without being opened. Yup, you heard me: Download it and it runs. This isn't a preview pane script virus; disabling the Windows scripting host as many do won't prevent it. It's a native code executable called KERNEL32.EXE with an accompanying DLL called KDLL.DLL. It doesn't damage your files, but it does attempt to mail itself to others using your address book.

I saw it happen—there was the merest flash of a dialog, which tipped me off—and I'm savvy enough so that I killed Outlook Express instantly, and caught the little bastard before it could get more than one email out the back door. (It queued up a couple more, but for some reason that remains obscure the other two were never sent.) The fix is to upgrade to IE6, which I did. But a better fix would be to fine MS a cool billion dollars for allowing an idiot's bug like that to go untrumpeted. I pay attention to such things, and hadn't heard of it.

November 27, 2001

November 26, 2001

One of the things that I find so absurd about liberal "identity politics" (at least as it applies to ethnicity) is that it has no place for mongrels. What does one check on the US Census form if all eight of one's great-grandparents are a distinct ethnicity? Such people exist, and I myself come close, with German, Polish, Irish, French and Austrian blood in my veins. Ok, ok, I'm a "European-American"…but what if you swapped out my Austrian grandfather for an Aboriginal American? ("Native" means "born here." Look it up. I was.) Or swap out my French great-grandmother for one born in Mexico? In my view, ethnicity makes a lousy foundation for things like pride or self-esteem, in part because these are things you are born with and had no part in selecting or creating, but also because many people (like myself) are literally born without "deep roots" in any single ethnicity and are therefore excluded from the ethnic identity game.

November 25, 2001

I took my "hell box" down off the shelf in the garage yesterday and started to go through it. A hell box is something mad scientist types like myself tend to have: It's a box full of stuff picked up off the floor or workbench when you're trying to tidy up but don't have enough time to sort it all into the proper bins and shelves. My particular hell box was quite heavy, because mostly what it held were small items dumped on the floor during the Loma Prieta Earthquake of 1989. I lived about six miles from the epicenter of that one, in Scotts Valley, California, and while the house escaped without serious damage (the water heater rocked against its pipes and broke one) much of my workshop was dumped on the garage floor. I picked up what I could, but we left California soon after that, and what was left I scooped up off the floor in handfuls and dumped it into a box.

A lot of it was nuts and bolts, but there were plenty of resistors and capacitors and semiconductors mixed in as well. So I dumped it all into a large photo developer tray (these are wonderful to have, even if you never intend to do any darkroom work yourself) and laid out five or six butter dishes around it.

There's a way to go about sorting a hell box. You begin by pulling out the small number of relatively large objects that prevent you from seeing the smaller objects. Put them in a separate box to sort later. (That box may well become your new hell box. Some workshop items are truly mathoms and never really get out of your hell box. Some items in the hell box I have long forgotten—or never really knew—what they in fact were.) Then make a series of scans, and budget yourself no more than fifteen minutes for each. The idea is to work your way down in size, leaving the smallest items for last. First pull out all the capacitors. These tend to be larger than resistors. Then pull out all the resistors, which in turn are larger than semiconductors. Then pull out all the semiconductors. By this time you're for the most part down to nuts, bolts, and other small hardware. I'm pretty good at eyeballing thread sizes, and if you are too, start with the largest sizes and work your way down, dumping like thread sizes together in the butter dishes.

Once you've finished (or have had a bellyfull) dump the butter dishes of nuts and bolts in their appropriate bin. If there's anything left in the tray, dump it back in the hell box for another day. I got mine down from over ten pounds to about two pounds, most of that weird stuff that my executor will someday have to dispose of, since I have a terrible time dumping hardware.

November 24, 2001

November 23, 2001:

Evidently this traditionally frantic shopping day has lost much of its steam, and much angst is being generated thereby. People who in better times were castigating us for crass materialism and "affluenza" are now moaning that companies are laying off countless workers. Well, duhh—as I've pointed out here before (almost precisely a year ago, if I recall) all the junk that people buy whether they need it or not was assembled, marketed, shipped, and sold by workers who drew paychecks from the process. If people suddenly stop buying junk (as they did with a vengeance on September 12) people will lose their jobs, and the cause-effect relationship is clear and direct.

What to do? I don't know. I'm suspicious of government intervention, which as often as not treats the wrong problem, or treats it after it's already begun to improve. People need to look inward a little—that's how healing begins, and there are other side-benefits to introspection as well. My guess is that time will heal these wounds as well as any before, and that healing will result in many good things. We may buy less pointless stuff —Billy the Big-Mouthed Bass being a perfect example (see my entries for November 26 & 29, 2000)—and more of other things that will allow us to make the most of who we are: Books, training materials, courses, tools, and things that pull a family together rather than cause them to drift off into self-involvement and isolation....

November 22, 2001:

Thanksgiving. I'll be brief, as Carol and I are heading over to the home of Bill and Esther Shindler shortly for a low-key Thanksgiving dinner. Bill makes his own very excellent honey mead, and I am looking forward to a snifter of it when the turkey and yams have been internalized and we are all speaking of interesting things.

November 21, 2001:

November 20, 2001:

Necessity requires culling my book collection, and it is with considerable regret that I am giving away most of what's left of my DOS books and my Pascal books—and even a few Delphi books from versions 1 through 3. Most of the Pascal books are either textbook tutorials (and I have my own books for that, heh) or books on Turbo Vision, which I certainly don't expect to touch again.

In reviewing books to eliminate (and we give them to the annual Visiting Nurse book sale) I am struck by how simple computing used to be. I recall thinking that real-mode DOS interrupt service routines (ISRs) were a challenge, and free union variant records once gave me conceptual fits. Now I look at Delphi (the inheritor of Pascal's legacy) and boggle at the complexity that it represents. And Windows internals, yikes! I do my best not to try to understand a lot of that stuff, just to save room in my brain for things that might turn out to be useful. Certainly I am writing software with a degree of complexity that would have astonished me twenty-odd years ago, when I first began programming—in FORTH, of all things! It's true that RAD and software components have highly leveraged the programming process upon the efforts of others, but still, there is an amazing amount to be learned and remembered about programming these days. I'm trying to figure out how to do threaded database access from Delphi, so I can have a thread running in the background, checking bookmark records to make sure they're "live" and current. We never had to deal with threads, and sockets, and database sessions, and record locking back then. On the other hand, our machines are nothing short of magical in terms of what they can do.

November 19, 2001:

We went to see Monsters, Inc. I'm reminded of David Brin's first novel, The Practice Effect, in which we journey to a parallel Earth where the rules are just a little different... So it is here: The film takes place in a parallel Earth where everything is pretty much the same as it is here, except that the people who live there are...monsters. Yes, big ugly monsters who live in New York-style tenements, hang out after work in stylish sushi bars, and wear hard hats on the job. The job is a little different, too: In a huge plant, the monsters open hyperspace doors into the closets of Earth kids in our world, and then scare them. Not hurt them, of course—these are actually pretty soft-hearted monsters—but another point of difference is how Monster-Earth powers its technology: from batteries that are charged by children's screams. So at Monsters, Inc. ("We scare because we care") your raise and bonus are all about how many energy points you generate by making children scream.

Yes, it's peculiar, but the film has a pleasing if cockeyed inner logic that any kid can understand. Our main characters are monster roomies Jim "Sully" Sullivan (voiced by John Goodman) and Mike Wazowsky (voiced by Billy Crystal.). Sully is a tall, hairy, toothy blue specimen who reminds one of a bipedal musk ox. And Mike is basically a big green eyeball with legs. Sully is the "scarer", who jumps out of the closet and makes faces at terrified children, while Mike works the equipment. All is well in this mundane monster world, until one day Sully gets careless and a girl toddler (who seems completely un-scared by monsters, and calls Sully "Kitty") wanders back through the hyperspace door into Monster-Earth. This is cause for panic, because everymonster knows that human children and their stuff (toys, socks, whatever) are highly toxic to monsters. It's not true, of course, though it's never explained why the monsters believe it.

November 18, 2001:

The Leonids rocked! Last night Carol and I set the alarm for 2:45AM, bundled up in our winter jackets, and went up on the roof deck atop our second floor, where we keep a couple of resin pool loungers for just this sort of thing. Covered in blankets against the withering 58 degree temps (no comments, gang—sitting still in the wind can get cold, especially those of us not used to being cold under any circumstances) we turned the loungers east and sat back to watch the show, with Leo vaulting high over Lone Mountain.

The sky wasn't ideal. We had a high haze and scattered clouds that gradually coalesced into a generally complete cloud cover by 4:45. But there were broad swatchs of starry (if hazy) night, and from the start there were meteors every few seconds. We noticed a peak about 3:30 or so, when we would often see two or three or even four at once, in widely separated parts of the sky. Given the sky conditions, and the unavoidable inability of two human eyes to take in the entire dome of the sky at once, I suspect we missed 75% of the meteors, especially the fainter ones, which were almost continuously present in the darker parts of the sky.

November 17, 2001:

Reader Jon Barrett has experienced coffee milk (see my entry for November 9) and says that it reminds him of good coffee ice cream after it melts. That's good enough for me; apart from the short-lived Coffee Toffee Crunch Special Edition ice cream from Haagen Daaz, straight coffee ice cream is my favorite flavor. (I am also partial to good Mint Chocolate Chip.) Jon offers another source: Home Town Favorites, where you can not only buy Eclipse Coffee Syrup, you can buy it in two flavors, one bottle at a time. And if Eclipse doesn't do it for you, right down the "aisle" can be found Autocrat Coffee Syrup and Coffeetime Coffee Syrup.

Browsing the online store there was wild. You want coffee-flavored jello? It's there, if not the Jello-O brand (Plymouth Rock, actually, but everybody genericizes it to "jello" these days.) Teaberry Gum. Black Crows. Bit-O-Honey. Charleston Chew. Charms Sour Balls in a can. Licorice Pipes. Pop Rocks. Reed's Root Beer Rolls. Sen-Sen. Wilbur Buds. Squirrel Nut Zippers. (Not the band!) Quisp Cereal. Vernor's Ginger Ale. Mrs. Grass' Chicken Noodle Soup. (With the Golden Nugget!)

This stuff isn't "new old stock" (that is, goods made in 1968 and sitting in a warehouse all this time) but rather regional delicacies that got driven off national store shelves (if they were ever there to begin with) by monster corporate superdupermarkets like Safeway. You can buy all of these things somewhere—but you can buy all of them anywhere by dialing in on the Web. Gotta love this technology stuff.

And hey: You can get Choward's Violet Squares (lemon too) one pack at a time!

November 16, 2001:

November 15, 2001:

My friend Ben Sawyer of Digitalmill sent me a pointer to The Internet Archive. I was boggled: They have been taking "snapshots" of countless Web sites since 1996 at least, and have a search feature called The Wayback Machine that showed my slackjawed face what my first hamhanded personal Web page looked like. The amount of storage space this must require has to stretch into the hundreds of terabytes—but then again, with 80 GB hard drives going for $200 or so, this is a smaller stretch than it might seem at first.

It was fascinating—and slightly eerie—to look up the Coriolis Web site and watch it evolve over the years. Go take a look, and see if your personal page is there. Mine is, both when it was under the coriolis.com domain and later under my duntemann.com domain. This concept raises a lot of interesting questions, but it reinforces a warning some sage (I don't recall who) posted back at the dawn of the Internet Era: Nothing you post to the Internet ever actually goes away. Your humiliating failures as well as your vaulting triumphs. Your youthful indiscretions (recall Corri, the young college student who posted some tasteful nudes of herself on her Web page and brought down the Northern Arizona University servers in 1996) and intemperate flames are probably all there somewhere, able to rise again when you least expect (or want) them to.

November 14, 2001:

I forgot to mention something yesterday that you may not have noticed if you don't haunt Amazon as frequently as I do: They're now posting sample chapters, tables of contents, and other extremely useful come-ons for online book purchasers. The goal is clear: They're attempting to obtain some of the advantages of bricks'n'mortar bookstores, which allow you to thumb a book and get some sense of it before laying your money down. If you followed yesterday's link to The Science of Happiness you'll see what I mean. This feature hasn't been implemented for all books by any means, but an encouraging number of books I've investigated recently have had sample pages and even the whole index (what a great idea!) posted and freely available.

November 13, 2001:

I'm reading a fine little book called The Science of Happiness by Stephen Braun. It's in some respects both an update to and a repudiation of Listening to Prozac, and my main reservation is that the author could have gone on for another five hundred pages and chose not to.

Having experienced a touch of depression earlier this year (as those who have been reading this diary since February or so will recall) I am passionately interested in what mood is and how it happens. Braun's book (published only last year) presents an update of what we know about antidepressant drugs (Prozac, Paxil, Zoloft, etc.) and told me something I suspected but didn't know: That low levels of seratonin and norepinephrine are an effect of depression and not its cause. We're less sure about what the precise cause is, but we've noticed that there is a correlation between elevation of mood and new growth of dendritical connections between neurons in certain areas of the brain—growth that is fostered by a whole class of drugs, including but not limited to those in the Prozac family. We need a lot of further research here, but I suspect that we will close in on depression's machinery in the next five to ten years, after which we will be able to banish depression completely and permanently.

November 12, 2001:

November 11, 2001:

I was reviewing some bookmarks I saved a while ago, and went to—or tried to—bring up a Web site that I vaguely recall being some new search technology developed a couple of years ago. Instead, I got an immense list of porn sites, which was bad enough—but then the damned thing started doing the JavaScript “whack-a-mole” schtick on me, popping up obnoxious porn site come-on windows as quickly as I could delete them. At the center of the screen was a note indicating that “this domain is for sale.” Yup. A dead giveaway.

For what? Domain extortion: You buy an expired domain name, load it up with porn site links and pop-ups, and then try to sell the domain back to the original owner so the domain’s former readers won’t have to deal with an explosion of porn pop-ups. This is an excellent reason to be careful lest your domain expire and be snapped up by such creatures.

November 10, 2001:

Yesterday's entry has prompted me to ponder that e-commerce is alive and well in circumstances where e-commerce is not its own sole virtue; i.e., not e-commerce for e-commerce's sake or (God help us) because e-commerce is "cool." This morning I ordered a four-pack of Mrs. Renfro's Mild Picante Salsa through the Renfro Foods Web site, as I have done before. I can't get it at my local supermarket, but I have bought it in other places, and I like it enough to pay the premium, which at $7 per four-pack is pretty stiff. I buy books online all the time, generally books you can't find in stores. I'm picky about my books, just as I'm picky about my salsa, and I am picky about certain other things as well. That pickiness has always been what drives "mail-order" sales, a category that now includes Internet e-commerce.

The difference with Renfro Foods and the Vermont Country Store is that they're not solely e-commerce operations. It's the difference between being in the railroad business and being in the transportation business, if you've heard that (hoary but completely accurate) comparison before. Renfro sells mostly through grocery stores, but they'll pick up incremental revenue through their Web site. Vermont Country Store sells lots of odd things that picky and eccentric people like, some of which are available in stores that cater to eccentrics, but most of which exist almost exclusively in the pages of the Vermont Country Store catalog, which exists in both printed and online form. Both companies are focused on their products, not on their technology, and in the wake of the dot-com collapse, both of them appear to be thriving. Oh, and did I mention Plumbing Supply Online? It's about pipe fittings and toilet parts, not about cool technology. And y'know, they're still out there, still selling toilet parts. If there's another place that will sell me 3/8" pipe floor flanges in brass, I have yet to find it.

November 9, 2001:

November 8, 2001:

In an otherwise unremarkable article posted on the BBC Web site, Nicholas Negroponte drops the opinion that there is a sort of "magic" population figure for a successful and vigorous modern nation-state: 3.5 million people. He cites Ireland, Norway, Singapore, and Costa Rica as falling into this range, but doesn't venture to guess as too why 3.5M is the magic number, other than to hint that it's big enough to be a bubbling pot of economic activity while still being small enough to govern effectively. Freedom is a major ingredient, to be sure—no regime that forbids significant freedom will ever be truly successful. (This is why we needn't fear that Islamic fundamentalist states will become modern world powers.)

Another strong element that nobody likes to talk about is ethnic/cultural homogeneity. The nation-states cited by Negroponte are pretty monolithic in a cultural and ethnic sense, compared to the US or UK. These days you can't even question the value of “diversity” without being called a racist or some other flavor of bigot, but I have never really understood why cultural or ethnic diversity is of itself a good thing. It destroyed the USSR, and a great deal of energy in other ethnically divided nation-states (like Canada and the US) goes into arguments about who's being slighted by who, and what the self-declared victims are entitled to. And we won't even speak of regions like the Balkans, which are “diverse” in the extreme, and where blood regularly flows in the streets in celebration of said diversity.

November 7, 2001:

The Wall Street Journal yesterday (11/6/2001) published an op-ed piece (not available on the free Web) putting forth an intriguing and probably correct explanation for why we're having trouble restarting the economy: We're trying to do it by reducing interest rates, at the same time Federal banking regulators have done everything they can to keep businesses (especially small businesses) from actually getting loans, any loans, at any rate at all.

You need to understand that Federal agencies (all government agencies, actually) have their characteristic obsessions. The Federal Reserve's obsession is inflation. When they sniff inflation in the economy, they crank up interest rates, with a single-minded consistency that makes me think a computer program could do their job just as well and we could simply fire the lot of them. By contrast, Federal banking regulators (who are not all in one single agency) obsess on bank solvency. What they do—just about all they do—is protect bank capital from defaults. The dot-bomb collapse of spring 2000 resulted in a huge number of bankruptcies, which caused a fair number of bank failures. Regulators stepped in and raised the bar for loan applicants; raised it in many cases almost absurdly high, to the extent that the only people who can get loans (basically, those with cash reserves more than sufficient to cover the entirety of the loans) are those who don't need them. Many businesses would expand their operations and create jobs if they could get the capital, but under revised and more stringent bank regulations they just don't qualify.

November 6, 2001:

November 5, 2001:

It is a testament to the oddness of the occasion that I actually made a conscious decision last night to sit down and watch a sports event. Yup, for the first time in my personal history, my team has won the World Series. (Of course, I spent the first 26 years of my life in Cubs land. 'Nuff said.) And although that was a tense and interesting game because of the stakes involved, the ponderous slowness of play made me wonder why people still watch when no such stakes are involved. My sister (who got the sports gene in our family) remarked last night after the game that if you could program a VCR to record only the pitches, hits, and base running and leave out everything else, a four-hour baseball game would cook down to about half an hour.

November 4, 2001:

While gathering photos to display at our 25th wedding anniversary party, Carol and I unearthed a couple of ancient pictures that I particularly love. The first one, shown below, is a great shot of me on my 18th birthday in June 1970, when Carol and a couple of my friends completely conned me into believing I was going to a 25th wedding anniversary party of the parents of one of my friends, when in fact the party was for me. I came around the corner, and everybody jumped out from the dark yelling, "Surprise!" That was the precise moment my friend Art Krumrey got the shot. I never suspected, not for a moment. My hair back then was always falling in my face. I thought it was a nuisance. I should have just enjoyed it, as it was a problem I didn't have for long thereafter..

I find it remarkable how very little Carol has changed in appearance over 30 years. Me, I've taken some hits—particularly in the hair follicles, though mercifully my taste in ties and eyeglasses has changed for the better. But my spouse remains completely and totally stunning, as she has been since she turned 16, and two weeks later ran smack dab into her future husband.

The other photo was also taken by Art, and dates from May 1972, while Carol and I and Art were waiting for Art's date Eileen to be ready to go down to Loyola University's formal President's Ball. Again, my hair is an issue, and Carol was keeping it out of my face while I played something on Eileen's piano. Same glasses, and the mustache that everybody thought looked awful except for me. (I have since changed my mind. It was a Seventies Thing. Yes, it was awful, though it took years for me to realize it, and I didn't ditch it until I took up snorkeling and found that it made for a bad seal on my upper lip.) It's worth noting that just this past June, when Carol and I were at her mom's house near Chicago, Carol found the very dress she wore in this photo in the far reaches of the basement closet—and it still fit.

November 3, 2001:

November 2, 2001:

November 1, 2001:

All Saints Day. I had nothing much to say yesterday about Halloween being All Souls Day, since that distinction bothers me somehow. In traditional Catholicism, the saints are those in Heaven, while those who are still roasting in Purgatory are the Poor Souls. This notion of Purgatory has been largely discredited, while I think still "official." Modern theology suggests that Purgatory is a sort of graduate school leading toward a degree in sainthood, and the Poor Souls are living in grad school housing and eating grad school food while studying how to be saints. This implies that once you're a Saint, you're done somehow. Perfect? And still human? I have a hard time crediting perfection to anyone but God—truth be told, I have a hard time even understanding what perfection is.

I'd prefer to think that the transfiguration implied by sainthood is an ongoing process, through which we spiral ever-closer to the Still Point at the Center of All, in Whose image and likeness we were created. I don't want to be done. The journey is the reward. The journey, in fact, is what being human really means: Striving through this world (and all the ineffable worlds to come) to draw closer to the One who created us.