April 2002 Archives

Blogger does not support spell checking on the Mac (I don't understand why, since the service they use does support IE on the Macintosh). So, I've been looking into writing a web spell checker on my own and integrating it into Movable Type. That way I'd have all the power that MT provides (and BloggerPro is supposedly working on, but who knows when and if) and I'd be more in control.

I don't think it would be all that hard to do. I know I can use aspell from within a CGI or PHP to do the hard part. The rest is a great excuse to learn JavaScript programming.

The paper occasionally drops some less popular comics and adds some new ones. If usually takes me a while to get into the new ones (and I don't bother with some). I do like the Pearls Before Swine comic that they recently added. Especially today's installment.

What is your favorite comic strip?

Well, we finally found the owners of the lost dog. The city never called back (their message said they check their voicemail 365 days a year, I guess they just don't respond). We took Laurence on his walk this evening and let him lead us to where we though he lived. We checked with one of his neighbors and she pointed out his house. His owner did not appear surprised or distraught about his absence, which is a shame - the dog deserves better. Oh and it turned out that his name is Logan so we got if fairly close.

Having another dog for a day was fun - especially one as affectionate as Laurence. It made us appreciate how well behaved Homer is on his leash (Laurence is a puller) and how lucky we are that Homer doesn't have long fur.

We found a loose dog in the park today. He's some type of collie and I don't think we've seen him before. We took him home and called the lost and found number on his tag, but so far they have not called us back.

They played well in the park and they don't seem to be killing each other in the back yard right now, although Homer was chewing on him a little bit and he didn't seem to care for it. I decided to call him Laurence, because he's cute in a girlish sort of way (and, as it turned out, is very much interested in giving Homer some lovin').

I hope we'll find the owners tomorrow, I'm sure they're missing him. Until then, Homer has a pal. Maybe Laurence will teach him how to fetch like a real dog.

Well after lots of futzing around, I figured out how to redirect old URLs to our wedding site to the new location. Here are the .htaccess lines that accomplished the magic:

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>

RewriteEngine On

RewriteBase /

RewriteRule ^wedding(.*)$ http://wedding.riha.us$1 [R]

</IfModule;>

KUT is having their semiannual membership drive and the stupid phone number jingle is running through my head non-stop. During each pledge drive, I always wonder if they would cut the drive short if someone gave them a huge sum of money. Well, no-one ever does, so it's a hypothetical question. Maybe if I ever become a gazillionaire, I'll call them on the first day of a drive and tell them I'd give them the entire amount they're trying to raise if only they'd stop interrupting my programs.

Until then, if you are a listener go ahead and call 471-6291 or go to their site and give them your contribution if you haven't don so yet.

Recently the the .US top level domain has been released into general usage (as opposed to being only available to US governmental entities such as ci.austin.tx.us). I pre-registered for my name and now I am the proud owner of the RIHA.US domain. I'm not sure yet what I'll be using it for, but it may become our "official" family web site when we get around to building one. And yes, in the past, I have looked into getting a domain using my first or last name, but they all were taken (there even exists a Stepan Company with over 1300 employees world wide - it's kinda eery seeing my name on their site).

So if you want to snag a cool .US domain name, head over to GoDaddy or some other registrar and register it ASAP.

According to this article on TruePath.com "new Macs are based on Darwinism", because MacOS X is (code) named Darwin. Not only that, "Darwin OS is released under an "Open Source" license, which is just another name for Communism."

It gets worse! MacOS X is based on an

obsolete OS called "BSD Unix". The child-indoctrinatingly-cute cartoon mascot of this OS is a devil holding a pitchfork (pictured above). This OS -- and its Darwin offspring -- extensively use what are called "daemons" (which is how Pagans write "demon" -- they are notoriously poor spellers: magick, vampyre, etc.) which is a program that hides in the background, doing things without the user's notice. If you are using a new Macintosh running OS X then you probably have these "daemons" on your computer, hardly something a good Christian would want! This clearly illustrates that not only is Macintosh based on Darwinism, but Darwinism is based on Satanism."

The new MacOS X contains another Satanic holdover from the "BSD Unix" OS mentioned above; to open up certain locked files one has to run a program much like the DOS prompt in Microsoft Windows and type in a secret code: "chmod 666".

So we want to the big Dog Walk this morning and Homer and I both enjoyed it. It wasn't too hot and they had plenty of water stations. I don't know the total number of participants, but I did see race numbers in the 3400 range, so they probably easily broke the previous record.

It's bizzare to be surrounded by thousands of dogs. It was actually amazingly quiet since there was hardly any barking at all. This is typical Austin, too, since so many dogs socialize in parks and at outdoor concerts and other festivals. Homer didn't seem bothered by the strangers and let them feed him treats and pet him.

It was a three mile walk and I saw some dogs being carried or pulled on cart. But most dogs were big enough and in good enough shape to make the walk. There was everything there, from miniature dachshunds to Great Danes and Mastiffs. Of course plenty of labs and retrievers and the ubiquites mutts. As part of our packet we received a couple of Mutt Mits and most people were good about picking up after their dog. Although towards the end, you had to look where you were walking.

By Auditorium Shores they had a rest area where different Dog Frisbee clubs were showing off their stuff. Some of these dogs were amazing. Sure you can see dogs catching frizbees in any park, but some of these dogs were doing 360 turns in the air and some were doing complete head over feet flips.

I took the opportunity of Jennifer's absence to do some web maintanance and added comments to Rita's journal and to our Wedding Journal. I modified the dotcomments script to add preview and to make it easier to configure and I really should use it in this blog, but I'm too lazy right now. Eventually I'll post my commenting scripts on my site to make them publicly available..

I found out at the park today that tomorrow is the Mighty Texas Dog Walk benefiting the Texas Hearing and Service Dogs. Last year, despite bad weather, the walk drew 2800 people (or was it dogs?) and they expect to do better this year.

So Homer and I are going to do our part for the cause. Beside helping, he'll end up with a medal and I'll score a T-Shirt. Too bad Jennifer will miss it.

Yesterday we had another meeting with Fr. Cletus as part of our wedding preparation. These stints usually last between one and a half and two hours and we are definitely a captive audience (in the literal sense of the word). Still, so far I have appreciated these encounters and the things they are focussing on. In particular, we're supposed to really give thought to what marriage means, what it means to be starting a family (not just with kids, but also as husband and wife) and that you have to continuously work on it. Some of it was "grace of God" propaganda - he really doesn't care much for "psychologists" and "secular humanists" and I felt a bit like a Linux developer at a Microsoft conference - but most of is was very sound stuff. I think some form of pre-marital counseling should be required before they (government) issue you a marriage license. I wonder how this was done in my parent's generation. At our next meeting we'll start with what looks like a 200 question quiz - Scantron and all.

Anyway, we were filling out the marriage application form (I think) where you check of your intention to marry the other person, that you're not being forced into it (shotgun wedding style), that you're not related, etc. and that you intend this to be a life long commitment. It felt great to be able to answer all these things with conviction and without hesitation. Looking back at past relationships and the types of doubts I was plagued with, this has always been one of my worries. What if a get engaged, we plan this huge event, everyone shows up and I'm there in front of the judge/minister looking at my wife and thinking "what the hell am I getting myself into?!?" I am not hesitant at all, probably a lot because of getting older and (I hate using this word) more mature, but mostly because of who I'll be getting married to.

So while I have signed important documents before - I've bought a couple of cars and I have bought a house (I doubt that you sign and initial as many documents as when you're buying a house) - this is so far the most important one but also the only one I signed with the least hesitation (or buyer's remorse :-).

Yea, I have gotten one of those we-need-you-to-help-us-get-our-$16'500'000-transferred-from-Nigeria-and-you-get-to-keep-20% emails. I feel so all grown up. I thought they mostly targeted retirees, but no - I am trustworthy enough!

So, if you happen to receive email from Dr Patrick Oni, Federal Ministry of Works & Housing in Lagos, Nigeria, don't bother to reply. 'Cause that $3.3 million as as good as mine baby! Yeah!

Oh, if you happen to see an email offering to sell the Brooklyn Bridge, please forward it to me, since I might be interested and will finally have the funds for it.

Currently all the news are focused on what's going on in the Middle East so the recent short lived coup in Venezuela has quickly disappeared from the news. In particular, the news have not really picked up on how and when the US government reacted to what was going on there. To recap, recently there have been strikes against the government in Venezuela and its president Chavez (who is not loved by the US government due to his leftist leanings and friendly overtures towards Cuba, Iraq and other bad boys). Venezuela is the third largest oil supplier to the US and the strikes stopped oil production and drove up oil prices (it didn't help the Sadam Hussein is threatening to stop oil production in protest to the Israel/Palestine conflict just around the same time). On Friday, 4/12/02 there was a military coup against president Chavez, the flash point being the bloody reaction of Chavez's supporters against a massive but peaceful protest. The military announced that Chavez had resigned and introduced and interim government.

As far as the U.S. Department of State was concerned "events in Venezuela resulted in a transitional government until new elections [could] be held". All Latin American countries and most of the rest of the world quickly denounced the coup in Venezuela. Both the State Department and the White House said that "the Chavez government provoked this crisis" and this was just a "change in government".

I guess one person's coup is another person's "change of government" kind of like one person's terrorist is another person's "freedom fighter".

When the Venezuelan military decided that they didn't like the new government any better than the old one and reinstated Chavez, who, as it turned out, had not resigned after all (despite of what Ari Fleischer said) - the spokesman back paddled, saying that "United States officials explicitly made clear repeatedly to opposition leaders that the United States would not support a coup".

The press briefings actually make a fascinating read. It's almost better than West Wing (in a scarry sort of way).

It is very telling that one of the first things that you get when you start doing your taxes in TurboTax is the option to prepare the automatic extension form. It's called "knowing your customer" and it's one of the reasons why Intuit is going to rule the earth. Speaking of which, Addie is convinced that there is this vast horde, comprised of people from H&R Block, Intuit and other companies that make money off of tax preparation, furiously lobbying congress to never allow a flat tax but to keep taxes arcane and complicated.

Anyway, it took me less than 5 minutes to prepare and print my extension form. I dropped it off at the post office drive through mailbox on the way to work. Interestingly there already was a line of cars and the mailbox was chock full of mail. I actually had to cram in my envelope pass the others that were almost spilling out.

As is becoming a yearly tradition, Jennifer took me out to hear Selected Shorts On Tour live at LBJ. It's always a treat to see as well as hear the performers live. Especially now that KUT moved the program to Saunday morning (and yes, Isaiah Sheffer complained indirectly about this).

I think this was also the first time where we heard the entire performance without one of us (i.e. Jfer) nodding off. This is problably due to the fact the we both had a delicous nap this afternoon. Jennifer deserved her nap, since she rode 25 miles in the morning as part of the Ride for the Roses. My nap, although longer, was purely sympathetic.

It's getting hotter by the day and all signs of spring are here. I played tennis with Michael on Saturday (lost again) and it was getting pretty damn hot by the time we finished at 11AM. On the way back home, I found clouds of little black birds frantically glueing nests built out of mud underneath overpasses. The trees in the park are getting full with leaves and the birds just won't shut up. And Homer and his friends are frisky and playful. I even saw a big assed turtle trying to cross the highway on its way to who knows where.

I like this time of year. It usually only last a week or two before it gets unbearably hot, so it's good to enjoy it while it lasts.

Well, it's almost 11pm on tax-day-eve and I have yet to finish doing my taxes. The likelyhood of finishing them by tomorrow is close to zero. Never mind, though, since I am intimately familiar with IRS Form 4686. I just have to remember to actually file it.

Huzzah, Kat and Steve are engaged! Being the suspicious person that I am, when I read the leak on Jennifer H's site a was afraid it might have been an April Fools joke (although I don't think she'd have that in her).

So it's true! Way cool! I am very happy for both of them. We'll have to have them over and commiserate, I mean joyfully celebrate, wedding plans.

I noticed that it took Kat only a couple of weeks to get a date and church for her wedding (correct me if I'm wrong, but I bet it wasn't Steve's doing :-). I wish I were organized like that.

We watched Swing Kids on tape over the weekend. The movie is almost ten years old and its release coincided with the resurgence of popularity of Swing/Lindy Hop in the US. Beside some fairly cool dancing most of the movie was tripe. It's about Swing dancing youth in Germany in 1939. Those poor guys are hassled by the Hitler Jugend because they don't conform. The "rebel" by dancing some more. Courageously wearing longish hair standing up for their right to listen to Benny Goodman's records! Big whoopee.

As Robert Ebert says on his site

There are moments here where the movie seems to believe Hitler was bad, not because he mapped genocidal madness, but because he wouldn't let the Swing Kids dance all night.

Sure, it's more difficult to get up in the morning and the first couple of days tend to be a bit confusing until all the clocks have been adjusted. But right now, it is after six and I'll be heading out of the office, and there is glorious day light for at least another hour or so. Which means we get to walk Homer in daylight. Which means he's more likely to run into other dogs. Which means he'll get chased and will be worn out. A tired dog is a happy dog.

As far as I'm concerned, daylight savings time should be all year long. Of course, I guess one could just show up an hour earlier at work and leave an hour earlier, too, but somehow it wouldn't feel the same.

I just got back from seeing David Sedaris and Sarah Vowell at the Paramount Theater. They were both reading several of their short stories and I was laughing so hard it almost hurt.

I've heard part of Sedaris' Santa Land Diaries on radion before and we read his book Naked in Bookgroup, so I had an idea of what to expect. Well he's even better ina live performance.

I've heard Vowell on This American Life on NPR before, without knowing who she was. She, just as Sedaris, has a very distinct voice and her pieces vere very enjoyable as well. I'm glad that Jennifer got us these tickets as part of her season pass - the show was very sold out.

Apparently some people have way too much time on their hands. There is this text-based animation over telnet from some site in the Netherlands (you can also see it as a Java app at asciimation.co.nz). I didn't watch the whole thing, but it looks like a pretty close copy of the original film.

It makes me fondly reminisce on the long gone days of ASCII art. I remember a line printer ASCII Enterprise on the wall in the room at Welsh where I used to take my CS 304P quizzes in '87. With high bandwidth and graphical operating systems, a lot of that is now gone. Lots of people now send HTML formatted email and some don't hesitate to include images in their signatures (thanks for wasting my bandwidth).

However, if you look around, there is many a gallery dedicated to old-timey ASCII art. As you would expect, a lot of it focuses on stuff with geek appeal, i.e. Star Trek, Star Wars and, of course, p0rn.

And then there is The Collection, over in Germany, which contains categorized pictures from Aardvark to Zulu. They even have 3D-ASCII art in the style of the Magic Eye.

It's a good news - bad news thing. After Jfer "being late" for a couple of weeks we finally took the test! And the report is in and we're on our way to fulfill Jennifer's wish of a large family! We are excited, since we're both looking forward to having kids (Homer's a good start, but really, he is just a dog) So that's the good news. The bad news is that Jfer's wedding gown is going to use a bit more fabric than anticipated...

The frustrating thing is that we've tried calling family and can't reach anyone right now! Argh! So, this is the first official announcement.

Update: This has been an APRIL FOOLS post!

We are, however, grateful for the congratulatory comments that we did receive. I hope that I'll make a post like this for real at some point (preferable after October). Until then, thank you all for your thoughts and the votes of confidence:

Congratulations, I had no idea that you were waiting on such huge news. You two will make such great parents, can't wait to see you "grow".