Geez, who would have thought that missing a single day of work at a job where I get very little if any email on most days would result in me having about 20 messages to catch up on when I do actually take a day off? Anyway, I spent the past weekend in St. Louis. I saw Austin Powers on Friday night (funny, but not great); had lunch with my grandmother, a cousin, and her husband at TGI Friday's on Saturday; spent hours-upon-hours moving ACM furniture and computers around (and creating fire hazards with some questionable wiring) on Saturday afternoon/evening; more ACM stuff Sunday afternoon; watched the Cardinals game on TV Sunday night. Then the fun started.

When I woke up early on Saturday morning it was quite hot in the apartment. Hotter than 85°F. Apparently the AC wasn't working. Chris tried to call the maintenance number, but we were told to call back at 8. He did so, and informed them of the problem, bu I didn't wait around to see if it got fixed. I packed up and got out of there. I made a quick trip to South County to help my grandmother pick up her new car, and then I got on the road to head back to Evansville. I needed to be back at work in time for a 2:30 meeting, but everything seemed to be working against me. There was a lot of construction going on and a huge down-pour that required me to reduce my speed to below 60mph in order to see the road. But I did make it back by 2:15. If only I hadn't.

I spent the 90 minutes I was at work in a meeting on the second floor in an un-air-conditioned conference room having this really cool web application I made for these guys picked apart line-by-line. Just to give you an example of the general tenor of the meeting, we spent probably 20 minutes discussing one five-item pull-down field. After a lot of discussion it was decided that the word "install" on the drop-down needed to be changed to "installation" because "install" might be interpreted to mean "in a testing stall," even though this system has nothing to do with testing stalls. Also, "repair" has to be changed to "product update." Did I mention that it was really hot in the conference room? I would give a lot of money to get those 90 minutes back.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 30 July 2002 at 8:40 AM

It's Hall of Fame time and as usual Pete Rose is up to his usual shenanigans. I don't really know what his game is all about. The whole world knows that he bet on baseball games, probably games he was managing. MLB has a ton of evidence to support its case. And Pete Rose declined to have a hearing regarding the evidence in 1989, probably because there is just so much of it. Phone records, betting slips, handwriting samples. Check out dowdreport.com for more information.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 29 July 2002 at 12:33 AM

Competition among ivy league schools is supposed to be intense. But who would have thought that admissions officers from Princeton would "hack" Yale's web site?

All this fighting among the ivys makes a certain highly regarded school in the midwest look better and better, don't you think?

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 26 July 2002 at 10:48 AM

Blogging seems to be becoming more and more commercial. Yesterday, online magazine salon.com announced that they were going to begin hosting blogs. They're using the Radio UserLand software, and are charging $40/year for software updates and hosting.

Advantages of salon blogs: possibility of a high hit count, especially for early adopters. Disadvantages: the Radio UserLand software requires you to use client software running on your computer to update your site rather than using a web-based system to do so. This means you can only update from your home computer, which isn't very flexible.

We'll see how this pans out.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 24 July 2002 at 9:51 AM

-273's stats package needs a bit of an overhaul I'm afraid. But before I can implement it I need to find a quick and easy way to do session tracking. I'll probably resort to just checking to see if the user's ip address has been recorded in the db recently, since cookies often aren't accepted by browsers and php's session management, unless its changed recently, took too long to load.

What else? Oh, a couple of weeks ago I released code for our colorize feature. It's available as a zip in the Code section. Let me know if you have any questions.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 23 July 2002 at 2:42 PM

In case you're wondering, fiddling with your $500 work chair's nineteen different options (forward tilt, tilt lock, tilt tension, sliding seat, seat height, back height, arm height, etc.) in order to find a slightly more comfortable seating position is pretty much guaranteed to end with you being less comfortable than you were before.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 22 July 2002 at 10:36 AM

Work ends in about 31.5 minutes. This is good, since I have done little or nothing since lunch. Well, maybe a bit more than that, but not much. It' not my fault though. People keep coming by my desk and distracting me. I did work through the normal two o'clock break, so that's good. But then I took an extra long break from 2:30 to now, and that's kinda bad.

I've been fiddling around with the digital camera I bought myself for my birthday. I've been putting together a site to display the photos I've taken on, but it isn't anywhere near done yet, so you'll have to wait before I release it. (I need to figure out why the automatic thumbnail generator fails on excessively large files.)

I'm probably going to Holiday World this weekend, but I may go into Saint Louis with my parents instead. I'm playing it by ear and don't really know what my plans are yet.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 19 July 2002 at 3:37 PM

I woke up around 3 am last night, and when I couldn't fall back to sleep I used the time for writing emails. This was probably a mistake. I ended up losing about 90 minutes of sleep during a time period where that most amount of sleep I could get was about 7 or 7.5 hours. Definitely a mistake.

I had a meeting at one this afternoon that ran until almost 2:30, and it doesn't seem like I've gotten much done since then. Well, I did write my weekly summary (or "hilites" as they're called here) and type up my notes from the meeting, but that's not really very significant work. Which means I should probably stay late and get something accomplished.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 16 July 2002 at 3:38 PM

It's time now for your comments.

First, Jeremy Raphael had this to say regarding my followup to Chris's post about Rusty Staub Day in Montreal and baseball in general.

they LOVE Rusty Staub in Montreal. They call him "le grande orange" because of his
hair.

in my (unsolicited) opinion, one thing more baffling than minor league bobblehead dolls is how Omar Visquel wrote an autobiography, or perhaps that a published was interested in printing an autobiography of Omar Visquel.

And Charlie Vaske had this to say to me regarding my recent webmail posting.

I'm not experiencing the problem you mention in your rant. As far as I can tell, the "Toggle All" is implemented client side. The JavaScript is there in the source and everything.

Sadly, the JavaScript for the Select All link is not present in SquirrelMail 1.2.2 (the version in use by the CEC), or at least I haven't found it. Here's the code that I found:

<a href="/squirrelmail/src/right_main.php?mailbox=INBOX&startMessage=1&sort=1&checkall=1">Select All</A>

And that link looks a lot like a server-side scripting call.

Wait. After thinking about the issue I investigated SquirreMail's options and changed the "Use JavaScript" setting from "AutoDetect" to "Always Use." And now the JavaScript is present and working. I wonder why SquirrelMail failed to detect that I have JavaScript enabled? Anyway, Thanks for the tip, Charlie.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 16 July 2002 at 9:06 AM

Note: the following will prove to be very boring for the majority of our readers, but I need to get this off my chest.

Frequent readers might recall that I served on the committee from hell (aka the CEC Mail Advisory Board) last Fall. Our goal was to select a web-based mail client for WashU's engineering school. Like most committees, we failed to accomplish much of anything. After three months of work we came up with the three programs listed on this page. The committee members were split into two rival factions, the open-source lovers, who favored SquirrelMail, and those of use who wanted the best mail client possible, and preferred EmuMail. I don't want to go into it in any depth, but there were a number of reasons to prefer EmuMail.

Anyway, here we are 6 months later, and SquirrelMail is the only client still running, so I'm guessing it's the winner. And because I'm behind a firewall here at work, I've been using it everyday to check my email. And let me tell, SquirrelMail sucks.

Have you heard the adage "it's the little things that count?" Well, someone needs to mention it to the SquirrelMail people. They wrote their client entirely in php, a server-side language, when a combination of client- and server-side scripting would be much better. For example, there is an option to select all of the messages in the inbox so that you can delete them all or mark them all as read without having to select each and every checkbox for every message. This isn't a unique feature; sites like hotmail have had this for ages. What is unique is the bone-headed way the SquirrelMail people implemented this feature. The logical way would be to use some Javascript or other client-side scripting to select the checkbox for each message. That would be very fast for the end user, and super easy for the programmer to implement. The SquirrelMail way is to post back to the server, let the server regenerate the page on the fly, except this time it will check all of the checkboxes for you. Oh, and as a byproduct, it gets any new mail that may have arrived and checks the box next to it as well. So in addition to being unnecessarily taxing on the server, if you aren't paying close attention you can easily delete mail you hadn't read by immediately selecting delete after choosing select all. And this instance is just the tip of the iceberg; SquirrelMail is filled with UI nightmares like this. I wish I knew why the CEC chose this stupid program as its only webmail client.

Okay, I'm sorry about the boring rant. I'll stop now.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 15 July 2002 at 2:30 PM

Why are professional athletes, at least based on anecdotal evidence, among the stupidest people on earth? The big news in the sports world today, aside from the rumor (negotiation-fodder) that two MLB teams might file for bankruptcy before the end of the season, is that Allen Iverson of the Philadelphia Eagles is facing felony trespass and gun charges. He apparently kicked his naked wife out of his house after an argument and then, with his uncle, went looking for her at the home of his cousin, Shaun Bowman. Not finding Bowman or his wife, Tawanna Iverson, at the apartment, he proceeded to threaten the two occupants of the apartment, Charles Jones and Hakim Carey, with a gun while inquiring about his wife's and Bowman's whereabouts.

While this story is humorous enough on its face, the kicker is that Iverson has faced gun charges in the past when an unlicensed gun was found in one of his vehicles. He plead no contest and I think (although I'm not sure) he did some time for it. Either way, he should know better than to have an unlicensed gun.

The New York Times has a bunch of other amusing details in its story. My favorite is that the NBA's "collective bargaining agreement states that if a player is convicted of a violent felony, he will be suspended for a minimum of 10 games without pay." Ten games? For a violent felony? And people wonder why I don't like professional sport's unions.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 12 July 2002 at 12:53 PM

The Washington Post is reporting that Janet Reno, in an attempt to raise money for her gubernatorial campaign, will be hosting a "dance party" similar to the one she was depicted in on a long-running SNL sketch. It's being held in a trendy Miami nightclub, and the campaign is charging $25 a head. Will Ferrell has yet to RSVP.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 11 July 2002 at 12:44 PM

Everyone out there complaining about the All-Star game needs chill out. I've never cared much for the All-Star game, which might be why I can say this, but Selig made the right decision when he called the game after the 11th inning. The fans who were upset by this seem to have forgotten that the All-Star game is played by different rules than every other baseball game. It's certainly not about winning and losing, especially in extra innings. The managers have a mandate from the fans to get as many of th players on their roster out onto the field. As Joe Torre said, "You can't have it both ways." And the one thing I haven't heard from fans is a call for the All-Star game to be managed like other MLB games.

Oh, and in response to Mr. David Cuscuna, quoted in this espn.com article, the All-Star game is a meaningless game, which is probably why they treated it as such.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 10 July 2002 at 8:11 AM

The Google Weblog is pretty cool. Lots of information about google. For example, did you know about Google Micorsoft? Anyway, I thought the Google Weblog was pretty cool.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 9 July 2002 at 1:37 PM

Man, I'm on a roll here tonight. Anyway, I just found this at amazon. It's called The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog. Is this a good sign for blogging or a bad sign? I'm tempted to side with the latter.

I'm also upset that I didn't think of writing a book like this first.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 8 July 2002 at 10:38 PM

Man, I'm on a roll here tonight. Anyway, I just found this at amazon. It's called The Weblog Handbook: Practical Advice on Creating and Maintaining Your Blog. Is this a good sign for blogging or a bad sign? I'm tempted to side with the latter.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 8 July 2002 at 10:38 PM

[Ted] Williams' son, John Henry, has spurned requests for a funeral and burial, preferring to preserve his father's body at the Alcor Life Extension Foundation in Arizona. According to stories in the Boston newspapers, the body is already frozen. The Globe's Dan Shaughnessy writes, "If this is what Ted wanted, he never told anyone, at least not anybody who's talking these days. … There are only two ways to think of this: Best case—The son is in denial and thinks he can bring his father back to life. Worst case—John Henry hopes to profit from prospective cloning or DNA distribution."

From slate.com.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 8 July 2002 at 10:21 PM

Okay, let's assume for a second that you have a weblog. Now, you don't normally use your weblog to promote your politic viewpoint, but you recently decided that you would write a nice, pithy post, sadly devoid of any facts, about certain political issues. Let us further assume that your little post manges to successfully convey the fact that you get all of your news only by reading the headlines on news stories, and that you lack any depth of knowledge to back up the stated political message you are attempting to convey in your nice little post. If all of the above assumptions about you are correct, you should never again post a politically-themed message to a forum I might read.

Let's face it, the first amendment should not apply to idiots.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 8 July 2002 at 10:14 PM

Okay, let's assume for a second that you have a weblog. Now, you don't normally use your weblog to promote your politic viewpoint, but you recently decided that you would write a nice, pithy post, sadly devoid of any facts, about certain political issues. Let us further assume that your little post manges to successfully convey the fact that you get all of your news only by reading the headlines on news stories, and that you lack any depth of knowledge to back up the stated political message you are attempting to convey in your nice little post. If all of the above assumptions about you are correct, you should never again post a politically-themed message to a forum I might read.

Let's face it, the first amendment should not apply to idiots.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 8 July 2002 at 10:13 PM

I was in a good mood, but now I'm in a horrid mood. Such is the price I pay for spending ten minutes around my parents. Oh well. C'est la vie, I guess.

Anyway, about two or three months ago Micorsoft started sending me email messages intended for Windows XP resellers. I usually deleted them, and planned on unsubscribing from the list at some point, but never got around to it. Then, on a slow day at school, I read one of the email messages. It directed me to a site where resellers could sign up for a free XP promotional kit. Today my "Micorsoft Windows XP Professional 'Go Pro' Collector's Kit" arrived, complete with aWindows XP Bobblehead, Windows XP baseball, Windows XP baseball cards, Windows XP Big League Chew, and a free copy of Windows XP Professional. I only ordered it for the copy of XP Pro, but the Bobblehead is pretty funny. And the whole deal was free, which is pretty cool as a full copy of XP Pro is quite expensive.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 8 July 2002 at 5:48 PM

Death penalty opponents seem to view the recent Supreme Court decisions outlawing the execution of the mentally retarded and overturning judge-imposed death sentences as a big win for their groups. I'm not so sure. I suspect that these changes have only strengthened the death penalty, mainly by removing opponents' potential arguments against it.

In fact, I would suspect that the one measure that would most strengthen the death penalty would be a law guaranteeing death row inmates access to DNA evidence. You see, because of the flaws in death penalty system here in the US, death penalty opponents have been able to frame the argument in terms of logic. Something along the lines of "If we aren't sure we're executing the right person, should be executing anyone?" But what happens when doubts about the accuracy of our criminal system and the appropriateness of executing certain individuals disappears? Then the death penalty debate becomes a debate about morals. And it is much more difficult to persuade someone to abandon their moral beliefs then to persuade them of the logic of your arguments.

My advice to death penalty opponents would be to stop nibbling around the edges. I suspect that death penalty advocates have decided to cede the controversial side-issues such as the ones the Supreme Court recently ruled on, in favor of strengthening the core issue. But recent polls indicate that support for the death penalty is at a 20-year low. Which means that now is the time to go for the jugular. Given all the current controversy about the death penalty, the moratorium in Illinois, and these poll numbers I really don't think there's going to be a better time to push for the repeal of the death penalty. It's now or never, folks.

Just for the record, if pressed I'd probably admit to being opposed to the death penalty. But don't quote me on it.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 8 July 2002 at 10:43 AM

Today is the seventh of July, a good 72 hours since the big July 4th fireworks celebration. Yet as I type this post, I can hear the pops and fizzes of fireworks being set off somewhere in my neighborhood. They are quite annoying if you are trying to get to sleep. I guess this is the price I have to pay for telling all my friends that the 4th of July holiday was a stupid reason for setting off fireworks, when they're just as much fun to set off on every other day as well. I guess what I forgot was that society allows you to create this big racket once a year, but prefers you not to set off fireworks on the 364 other days of the year.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 7 July 2002 at 10:47 PM

if the first 3 hours off being 22 are any indication of how the rest of the year is going to go, things are not looking good. although this doesnt usually happen to me, I have ended up with a very bad headache tonight. theres no real explanation for why it happened; it just did. but oh well. I took some ibuprofen and Im sure that if Im patient the pain will go back to where ever it came from and just leave me alone. so thats my plan for the rest of the night.

tomorrow Im going to springfield with my family to visit my grandma for her birthday and then drop my brother off at a summer program he is enrolled in. then we will turn around and drive back, and then I will get in my car and drive back to st louis. there will be a great deal of driving tomorrow. this is to be followed by many hours in the media and machines lab hastily preparing for mondays dry run. hopefully we will get things finished in time for me to sleep some, too. but that remains to be seen.

speaking of sleep, I have to wake up at 9:00 tomorrow, so I should probably go.

(happy birthday, dave.)

Comments: 0 Posted by michael on 7 July 2002 at 3:09 AM

I've been 22 for a little more than an hour now. Its not much different from being 21. In the best case, I've now blown 25% of my life. More likely 30-35%. But who's keeping track of these things?

Went out for some drinks tonight with Jared and his cousin Ryan. We saw "Never Been Caught" at Marina Point. They were a fairly decent cover band, but right before we left I wandered up to the front and discovered that they were the trashiest of white trash; the lead singer had a mullet and the rest of the band looked pretty bad. They did some decent covers though. But that's not tough.

Tomorrow I'm going to the Bayou Grill for brunch with my parents, and then I think I'm either playing volleyball or going out to Marina Point again. I'll just have to play it by ear and see what happens.

(Happy birthday, michael.)

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 7 July 2002 at 1:32 AM

ahhhhhhhhhhh!

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 5 July 2002 at 9:39 PM

A lot has been said about the prevalence and in-your-face nature of the ads in Minority Report, and everyone has noticed the Lexus and other futuristic cars in the movie. But here's something I haven't heard anyone discussing. What do the people do when they're riding in their cars? They didn't have to drive; the cars drove themselves. And I find it hard to believe that a society that accepts billboards that talk to you and jump out at you three-dimensionally is happy listening to the radio while they sit in their cars. Why didn't we see them watching TV? My mom, who originally pointed this out to me, feels quite certain that they would have TVs in their cars, and I can't disagree.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 4 July 2002 at 12:10 AM

Note to self: When I get a digital camera, I must at all costs resist the urge to take self-portraits of myself and post them on the Internet. Horribly cheesy posed shots of self are equally as bad. Horribly cheesy posed shots of friends and roommates, however, are to be encouraged.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 1 July 2002 at 10:08 PM

I have the worst luck with regarding other weblogs. When I add a link to a weblog onto my homepage (my version of bookmarking) I think some kind of mysterious signal is generated that tells the author of that particular site to never post again. And of course the real trump card is when I add a link from -273 to their site. I might as well hack into their site, delete all their files, and use their account to send spam to people. The end result would be the same: no more updates on that site.

I'm generalizing of course. The -273 is filled with links to lots of great sites, and I don't want their authors upset at me. But we also link to sites like this one.

All of this is building up to a point, I promise. Here's my idea. What if I replace the links to all of the good sites with links to bad sites? That way, all the sites I like will keep posting, and the sites I despise will disappear, never to be seen again. The main problem, at least as my sleep-deprived mind currently sees things, is that there are so many sites that I dislike that composing a list would be rather tedious. And taking down the links to the sites I like, while meant as a compliment, could be viewed as somewhat insulting.

Before the Internet, life was simpler, and no one had problems like these.

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 1 July 2002 at 10:03 PM

Well, -273 has hit the big time. Our daily page views have more than doubled over the past few days. Sadly, it's not they kind of attention we really wanted. Over the weekend a link to our sticker request form was added to a number of "freebie" type websites, resulting in more than 40 sticker requests since Saturday evening. Since none of these sticker requesters stayed on the site after requesting a sticker (and a good number of them requested stickers under multiple names) I had to temporarily disable the sticker request form. I'm not opposed to sending out all these stickers, but at 37¢ to mail a letter, plus the cost of the envelopes and stickers, this was getting a bit outrageous. But here's what I can't figure out: why would you want a -273 sticker if you've never been to the site before?

Comments: 0 Posted by david on 1 July 2002 at 2:07 PM