From the monthly archives:

January 2003

Put It In A Letter

31 January 2003

If you want to get involved in grassroot politics, you have to start small. You can join the local branch of a political party, organize petition drives, talk to your neighbors, express your views to your congressman or MP, and write letters to the editor. And maybe, just maybe, you can make a small difference. [...]

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Ding Dong

30 January 2003

Meanwhile at work, our CEO announced that she is leaving at the end of the month, i.e. tomorrow. I don’t want to say that she was unpopular in our department, but someone hung a ‘Ding Dong’ sign on our door, citing the song from the Wizard of Oz.

Meanwhile, the CTO is taking over for her [...]

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Return of Winter

30 January 2003

Yech. The ice and snow had been gone for 3 weeks, until today. The snow returned, with wind and temperatures near freezing, just in time for evening rush hour. My 60 minute commute from work to day care and home took nearly 3 hours.

Christopher’s grandparents will be disappointed to hear that the OshKosh overalls they [...]

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American Idols

30 January 2003

After continuously reading the past months in warblogs how Europe no longer matters, I am amused to now see various blogs taking country counts of European countries ‘for’ (10) and ‘against’ (5) us. Diplomatic efforts are now furiously underway in Lichtenstein, San Marino, the Vatican, Andorra, and the Grand Duchy of Fenwick to further [...]

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Gimp Update

29 January 2003

Ten days after her injury, Mama is now able to hobble across the room without crutches. She’s able to handle Christopher in the morning, so I’ve gone back to my normal work schedule. She’s back at work, staying in the office. We imagine that next week she’ll be able to drive again.

All in all she’s [...]

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On This Day: Challenger

28 January 2003

BBC On This Day: 1986: Seven dead in space shuttle disaster. I still know exactly where I was (a bitter-cold parking lot at the U of M in St. Paul) when I heard the news, and I never regained my taste for space travel or science fiction. Thanks to hebig.org for the reminder.

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An Axe for the Toolbox

28 January 2003

I’m unlucky enough to have to maintain internal web servers on a few outdated Linux boxes, with various versions of Red Hat, Suse, and Mandrake. Trying to keep Apache and PHP current on them is a nightmare, since current RPM packages are not available for old distributions. (MSSQL admins learned over the weekend how important [...]

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Old European Stereotypes

26 January 2003

In their reporting on the 40th anniversary of the Elysée treaty (and before the Rumsfeld remarks on ‘Old Europe’), our local news radio station interviewed people in Paris about their stereotype of Germans. The best answer they saved until the end.

“The typical German is just like the typical Frenchman. They always know better and never [...]

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Axis of Small Mammals

24 January 2003

Sometimes I go through phases where I write more as comments to other blogs than I post for myself. This week this has culminated my being cited by InstaPundit without a link, since lately I don’t have anything to link to. Time to fix that. By the way, even though I don’t share [...]

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Hobble Hobble

22 January 2003

Mama got an air cast today (not a gel cast like we thought). It’s fastened with Velcro, so she can take it off when it gets uncomfortable. She didn’t even have to visit the doctor. She just picked it up from the medical supply store. Meanwhile she’s able to put just a slight amount of [...]

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Diagnosis T14.3

20 January 2003

Mama went to the doctor today. The ligament in her ankle is not completely torn, so surgery will not be necessary, but the ankle was still too swollen to apply the gel cast today. She’ll get that on Wednesday. Meanwhile she is taking Arthotec for the pain and swelling as well as a set of [...]

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Injured Reserve

18 January 2003

While hauling leaves out to the woods, Mama stepped into a tractor-tire rut, fell, and tore a ligament in her right ankle. Luckily Christopher was outside, and she sent him to the house to get me. With our neighbors’ help, we took her to the local emergency room. There in very uncaring fashion they took [...]

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Back In Touch

18 January 2003

After 36 hours, the Telekom fixed a bad cable in Jesteburg and we’re back in touch with the world. Did anyone miss us? Other than my mother, whose birthday was yesterday when we were unable to call or post. Happy Birthday, a day late!

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Sounds of Silence

17 January 2003

Our ISDN line at home has been down since late last evening. That means no telephone and no internet, and thus no weblog entries. If it doesn’t come back up, we may well have a very quiet weekend. Maybe we’ll play Scrabble or something.

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I Got The Bug

15 January 2003

Wouldn’t you know. As soon as the weather gets warm (above freezing) and Mama’s off on her first trip of the year, I get the flu. Nothing serious, the usual headache and sore throat that ibuprofin and pinot grigio can handle in the short run, but enough to come home early. My co-workers don’t like [...]

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To Book or Not To Book

13 January 2003

I thought the Internet was supposed to make it easy to book a flight.

We’re set to meet Christopher’s grandparents in Florida the first two weeks of April. We wanted to go in March, but Mama’s schedule won’t allow it. We’d have liked to spend about €1500 for the three of us to fly, but [...]

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Buggy Browsers Deux

13 January 2003

Update: Mark has now found a bug to hide CSS from only Safari. He’s not quite correct, of course, since the bug also hides CSS from Konqueror, which also uses KHTML. But then he tested on only devilish operating systems, and not on systems that are good and pure.

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Buggy Browsers

10 January 2003

Mark Pilgrim pleads for buggy browsers. Let him eat Netscape 4. Buggy browsers are never good, and we have enough of them already.

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Women and IT

9 January 2003

BurningBird has been relating the frustrations of being a female Unix expert. Way back in August 2001 there was a discussion of Women in IT, for which I wrote a response that never got imported into my new blog. Maybe some parts are now relevant, so I’ll repeat the some of it here.

Scripting News [...]

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Samhain – File Integrity and Intrusion Detection

8 January 2003

At work I’ve been looking at Samhain, a file integrity system similar to AIDE or Tripwire, but with many additional features, like signing of logs and config files, detection of rogue kernel modules, stealth operation, logging to SQL databases, and encrypted client/server communications. It can probably brew coffee, too, but I haven’t found it in [...]

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Colder Than It Needs To Be

8 January 2003

We’re in a cold wave. -18°C the past two nights, and it will continue until the weekend. That’s around 0 for you Fahrenheit fans. Being from Minnesota, I’d call that just ‘a bit brisk’ (there’s no black ice on the pavement yet), but it’s still colder than I’d rather deal with. Maybe Hamburg will [...]

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Relative Success

8 January 2003

I hate editing CSS. I use default stylesheets so I don’t have to think about it.

But after receiving a complaint from one of the world’s top 5% computer users that PapaScott was unreadable under Mozilla on his Mac, I sprang immediately into action. He’s surfing at a font size of 12, which is quite small, [...]

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Snowstreet

5 January 2003

Our steet, cobblestones covered with snow.

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Let It Snow

5 January 2003

Christopher insists that the fun of having a sled is pulling it, not riding it.

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Joining The Gigahertz Generation

5 January 2003

After two years of working at 900 MHz, I finally went out and bought a new computer. Actually, I didn’t, I haven’t bought a whole new computer in over 10 years. I only bought a new CPU and motherboard, and the requisite DDR RAM. The RAM cost as much as the CPU and motherboard combined, [...]

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Cool and Works Nicely

3 January 2003

nntp//rss is a Java app that serves RSS feeds as NNTP news articles. That makes at least as much sense as sending yourself RSS entries via email. My first impression is to repeat Martin’s reaction. It is cool, and it does work nicely. So can I hack it without having to lean Java?

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Five Dollar Bookmarklet

2 January 2003

About the time my New Year’s hangover was starting, Phil Ringnalda had come up with a Five dollar bookmarklet in response to my authoring app post. While hacking the MT bookmarklet is a cool idea, and it’s handy to know where to do it, it’s not really what I had in mind. Of course, I [...]

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Grounded By Stupidity

2 January 2003

I was all set to drive in for my first work day of the new year when I noticed that my left front tire was flat. This would have been a nuisance in any case, but was in fact a huge bother because my spare tire was also flat. I had intended to buy new [...]

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Quiet Day

1 January 2003

We spent New Year’s at home with Christopher. We prepared a simple raclett (gouda cheese, not the real stuff) and fascinated Christopher with a Feuerzangenbowle (punch laced with flaming rum-soaked sugar). For the first time ever we bought fireworks that were going to show him, but he pooped out about 10 pm, so we had [...]

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