Tuesday, September 17, 2002

Christmas is almost here: I can tell because those irksome reminders from gift subscription folks have started to arrive with a certain relentless fury. Apparently I don't have time left to renew my gift subscription, although experience tells me that magazines are delivered at least four months and sometimes a year after you've made the last payment. What is most annoying is that these reminders come from the people at Consumer Reports. 7:13:36 PM    comment []

E-mail from the dead, dept.: Just recently I got an e-mail that referred to me as a "former PointCast subscriber" and offered me what seemed to be a push version of CNN online. And, yes, I was at one time a PointCast person. For what? About a week? Nice to be remembered by the formerly alive, though. And, yes, I'm going to pass on that offer. I don't hold with news that taps you on the shoulder every couple of minutes. 7:06:41 PM    comment []

Saying goodbye: A friend of mine (and you know who you are, Andy) told me the other day that if I died he wouldn't be coming to my funeral because he hated them. "Anyway you won't know." I said I would and I would be hurt, but somehow that lacked conviction. Then it came to me. Why put my friends through that when, instead, I could merely arrange to send them parting gifts, perhaps a fruit basket, to be delivered by courier about three days after my death? Why indeed? Your fruit basket is on it's way, eventually, Andy. 7:00:05 PM    comment []

Thursday, September 12, 2002

No golf for you: All my golfing partners have deserted me. And, no, it's not because I'm so ill-tempered on the course, it's just that fate has intervened. One of them has run out of money (his wife is going back to university), another has given up his car for a time to take public transport and the other has been given the four to midnight shift, which means that we can't keep up our early morning games. I continue to go to the range and I just took the last of five lessons for the summer. However I am planning to go out with the pro to a nine-hole course to have him try to understand what it is that I'm doing out on the fairways that I don't do when swinging from the mats. Perhaps natural depressives just shouldn't play golf. 7:30:47 AM    comment []

Speak up, we can't quite hear you: You know when a biographer is having trouble getting information from primary sources. That's when she/he writes "no doubt he felt a ripple of joy spread through him on that wonderful occasion." This means the biographer hasn't a clue as to how the biographee felt. A step further along this road, something I noticed in a column that ran in my local weekly, is the quotation of the permanently dead. In this case the columnist said that he knew just how the late Mr. X would have reacted to what the columnist was writing and quoted him saying something he'd never said while he was alive, unless of course he had been gifted at that time with the ability to see four or five years into the future. And, you know, I'm absolutely sure that my favourite novelist Graham Greene would have something to say about this item. Wait a minute while I get out my tape-the-dead recorder. 7:22:52 AM    comment []

Pay your money, and stop writing?: How very odd. The minute I paid my money for the software to allow me to continue this blog, I lost all desire to keep it up. When I was in the free period I posted almost every day, but now I notice it's been a week and a day since I was here last. This has not happened with other software. I didn't stop using, for example, my newsreader Thoth because I paid for it. Ditto TextSpresso and all the other utlities that make my day pass a touch more smoothly. What's happening here? I suppose it might have something to do with the fact that my paying was coincidental with returning to work after a month of sitting around doing nothing. But I don't think so. 7:16:15 AM    comment []

We've got no mail: For the past two days my place of work has been without e-mail. The hard drive died during a backup and, bam, nothing. The IT guys are working madly to get it back, but everything they try fails. This is the third morning I've woken up to almost zero work mail in my inbox . And that's unusual. What's even more weird is that the spam filter is empty. Apparently I don't get any pleas to use Viagara or messages from nubile teenagers in my personal mail (probably because I don't put the address out on the Net). I have managed to keep in touch as much as I can through my other accounts, but I know that this is not good enough. Before e-mail how did I work? One side benefit for those who phone me, I now answer almost every call as it comes in. 7:09:54 AM    comment []

Wednesday, September 4, 2002

Family fun: I have recently been in touch with a second cousin, once removed (her maternal great-grandfather and my paternal grandfather were brothers) and have been digging up what family information I have for her. It turns out I have a silhouette of her great-grandfather done when he was aged eight. This adventure into my family's past brought to mind the fact that a cousin of mine once tried to become a member of the Daughters of the American Revolution by researching the family tree on my mother's side. My maternal grandfather's family did indeed live in revolutionary times in what was to become the United States. Unfortunately for my cousin, they turned out to have been supporters of the British, who later came to Canada in the huge influx of what are known as United Empire Loyalists. But not all was lost. As a result of her research, my cousin did manage to become a member of the Mayflower Society. 10:18:51 AM    comment []

Baaaaaaack!: Yes, I am returned after a long weekend of doing nothing much. And I'm back at work, which is my excuse for not keeping this blog up to date. It won't happen again, until next time. 10:05:14 AM    comment []

Wednesday, August 28, 2002

At home on the range: Yesterday I went to the local driving range, where they give you 90 balls per bucket -- far more than anyone else -- because they haven't changed them since about last February. And, be still my beating heart, the new balls had arrived. There was an audible buzz. The remarkably friendly crew who work there couldn't wait to tell me. They were thrilled. I was thrilled. Everyone was thrilled. Naturally, they reduced the number of balls per bucket to 75 (still more than you get from other, more upscale, establishments) but I wasn't about to object. And I couldn't stop. I hit four buckets. That's probably about 150 more golf balls (especially range rocks) than anyone should ever strike in a single session, but I couldn't stop. Twenty or thirty more yards on every drive is, of course an illusion, but when it comes to golf I'm heavily into self deception. And the word was out. This was a Tuesday afternoon in the middle of August, at a time when the range is usually relatively quiet and people kept driving up and emitting yelps of joy as they headed to the dreaded mats. It made the fact that I went out and joined Costco last night quite an anti-climax. 10:53:23 AM    comment []

Dentistry for cats: Okay, I admit it, I have three cats -- or they have me. Two black smokes and a silver tabby named Spike (whose original name was Sprite, but he seemed a little too muscular and tough, so I changed it.) Anyway, the silver tabbies in this neck of the woods seem to have dental problems, and other peculiarities of purebreds. And Spike, at age eight, has developed a cavity. Of course, they don't fill cats' teeth, they just yank them. And this, I am told, will cost me somewhere in the neighbourhood of $500, give or take, including teeth scaling in the hope that this will stem the tide of tooth decay. I, of course, can not let my guy suffer, so I'm going to fork out the amazingly large number of bucks. We have also been sent home with a tiny toothbrush and some fish-flavoured toothpaste. My wife will clean the teeth if I agree to take over clipping the cats' nails. Every time something like this happens I vow never to get another cat. And then I get one anyway. 10:38:52 AM    comment []

Tracking the Jaguar, nervously: I have now installed OS X 10.2 -- aka Jaguar -- in my test laptop. The installation went smoothly, although it did take about an hour and fifteen or twenty minutes. I didn't do a clean install, just put it in overtop 10.1.5. And everything works, with the exception of the help menus, but there are easy cures for that. However, I read on various Mac sites of all the potential problems. Printer drivers not working, software refusing to do what it should, even disappearing type on Web browsers. And I step back and say, maybe I shouldn't put it into what the IT guys at work call a "production machine." This happens every time a new version of an operating system comes out. And, like a wise person, I hope, every time I wait. 10:30:25 AM    comment []

Friday, August 23, 2002

Things that you think will be fun, but aren't: I don't know what brought this to mind, but several years ago our house was broken into (while we were asleep and, therefore, we now have an alarm system) and some 225 music CDs were stolen. Fortunately our insurance was for replacement value. This meant that the insurance company allowed me to replace all my CDs -- as long as I did it within, as I recall, three weeks. The idea is you go to the local CD megastore -- with which the insurance company has a deal -- and get your collection replaced. Well, not so fast, buster. The store gives you no help at all, just a shopping basket and a chance to walk up and down its aisles re-acquiring what you already had. Except that, it doesn't stock a lot of what you owned and isn't about to go out and re-order them either. So, basically, what you get is 225 CDs, not necessarily the ones you had before, but worth the same amount as you paid for them in the first place, on average. Okay, I thought, I'll do my best to find replacements and, after that, I'll just buy ones I didn't own before. I asked the insurance folk if this was all right and they said, as long as I picked out my 225 CDs within the specified time period, that would be just dandy with them. I replaced about 70 or so. Then it was on to the new ones. The first 60 were fun. After that, it was drudgery. So many bad CDs, so little time. Finally, I got a friend of mine, who was then a classical music critic, to help me with building the beginnings of a collection in that genre. Enthusiastic at first, even he grew weary. On the last day, when I needed to get at least 30 more CDs to get my money's worth, I was cursing the thieft not for stealing them in the first place, but for making me work so hard. A while ago I looked and there were still about 10 that have never been removed from their shrinkwrap. I wonder what insurance companies do now that so many people just download from the Net and burn on to CD blanks? 9:44:04 AM    comment []

To heck in a golf cart: All in all, I like to walk a golf course, pulling my little cart behind me. It's not that I want to feel one with nature on the links, I can do that in my house -- surrounded as it is by water and forests (and tourists) -- but because, otherwise, I get out of touch with the game itself. Friends, might (no, would) say that I have never been in touch with golf, but that's another story. Yesterday, however, I ventured on to a stretched out, mountainous course that takes four and a half hours to play in an electric cart and would likely run to six (plus varous bodily injuries) on foot. The experience became something like a game of polo, if you had to get off the horse to hit every shot. On board the vehicle there was a GPS thingy that told us how far we were from the hole every time we alighted to blast the ball remotely in the direction of the flag. This we turned off after the first three holes (for a $5 refund, each), but it continued to tell us how we were doing as regards time -- two minutes ahead of where we should be in the course, two minutes behind. All in all, an odd out-of-body experience. I don't know who was playing yesterday, but it didn't feel like me. That probably explains why most of the drives landed in the fairway. On the other hand, the people I was playing with were fun to be with and were kind about my remarkable lack of golfing talent. So it evened out. 8:00:25 AM    comment []

Fearful in the face of commitment: Every review I've read of the new version of OS X. aka Jaguar, has been favorable. It will do practically everything except put peanut butter on my toast in the morning, or so I'm told. Two things come to mind: One: I will put this on a test machine and not on the computer I use for my everyday life or work, because I've never met a new -- or even a revision of -- operating system that worked without flaws the first time out. There's always something that didn't come up in testing. Two: I always believe that a new piece of software is going to solve my life. It never does. What I get, instead, is a new piece of software, period. It may make things a tad easier, but it's no miracle cure for anything. Unless, of course they invent a program that will get me out of sand traps. 7:43:12 AM    comment []

Fearless in the face of commitment: I have taken the plunge and plunked down my money so that I can continue GfC. Was this wise? Was this a good investment? Probably not. 7:34:57 AM    comment []

Wednesday, August 21, 2002

Spamorama: First, let me say that my new anti-spam software is operating at about 98 per cent, blocking almost everything that I never want to see again. That's the good part. Unfortunately, the fact is that I still have to look at the spam it stops. I don't have to actually open it up and read it, but I do have to look at the headers and choose whether I want to nuke it or not. Then, if it's borderline, I have to look at the text to make sure I'm making the right decision. So, how, exactly is this better than just letting all the spam through and then making those same decisions inside my e-mail program instead of in the anti-spam program? I guess its a marginal improvement, in that everything that comes to me from work now comes through, so I know I'm not going to miss important messages. Sigh. 9:11:09 AM    comment []

Tuesday, August 20, 2002

Comment comments: To everyone who has commented on these tiny items, thanks. When you write for print publication you soon discover that those who like what you do almost never comment (and, consequently, it's wonderful when they do), but those who dislike your work rarely hesitate to blast you. Once -- back, around the third century BC, I believe, when I was a rock critic -- I was standing at a bus stop when a young woman walked by looked me up and down, took a few steps past me, then whirled and walked back. "You're Peter Wilson aren't you?" I smiled. I bowed my head slightly. I indicated that I was flattered to be recognized. This is something that happens to television people all the time, but rarely to print folks, whose pictures often only barely resemble them. I must have looked like a beaming total fool. "Well, you're not much," she said, and walked off briskly. 10:10:57 AM    comment []