Computer fixup day.

My Windows machine (yes, I do have one, shame shame) was getting cranky so I decided to get a new hard drive, a mere 80 GB to replace the 20 GB that was there (that drive and a new power supply are going to bring a second machine back from the dead, and that will be LInux).

And I for some reason decided to make the 3cat home page, which has very little on it, fully w3c compliant, and to update this site to Movable Type 2.51.

Read on if you are really bored:

So, first the computer:

I needed to move the boot drive from the old to new drive. To do this I got
Norton Ghost. I'm not in the business of plugging programs here but this one worked as advertised -- it can make a "virtual" boot partition, boot off that into DOS and do its stuff, meaning you don't even need a boot disk.

Trouble is, Ghost said it couldn't do its stuff because the C drive was too fragmented. So I went to defrag it with the Win2k tools, but it didn't have enough free space, so I had to move a lot of files.

Then defrag - on a 20 GB NTFS drive this takes forever, which probably ended up being about 2 hours or so, on a Pentium II 400mhz system. Maybe some other defraggers are faster.

After that, Ghost was pretty simple. After checked to see that the machine was OK, I moved the hard drive cable over to the new drive, making it the primary, and powered on. Hot damn, it works.

While waiting for the file moves and defrag stuff, I started playing with this site. This was spurred by seeing one of those "validated" tags.

So I played with tags on the simple page a while, and actually got it to have a clean bill of health. Probably won't be visible in Netscape 4.0 any more, but it actually looks pretty much the same in IE, Mozilla and Opera using CSS. Maybe there is hope for standards after all.

The MT upgrade was pretty simple, once I read the instructions -- basically just uploading some new files and running one cgi script.

But it doesn't look like the MT page is going to validate for a while. I played with that a little - fixing some missing tags - but something about the basic XML structure of the page pissed off the validator.

Something for another cold winter day.

So my day was spent playing with computers, with one nice interlude sitting by the fire with my human and cat roomies. Never left the house. Not a bad deal at all.

Ya lookin for a blog?
j-mo's got a hot one
but if you want borin'
that one is really not one

It's always been amusin'
but now it's lookin betta
cuz jenny did a re-do
on each an ev'ry letta

She's got an MT template
that's got an attitude
so get your ass on over,
c'mon now, don't be rude:

j-mo

Two hikers killed by an avalanche on Mt. Washington -- one of them from my town.

We humans may think we rule this planet, but we sure don't rule that mountain.

Excuse me, Barnes and Noble, but you need to rent a clue. I just made up my "wish list" there -- my wife hates Amazon because they screwed up an order and I know if I made a list up there I'd get coal in my stocking.

BN has a "wish list" -- but to quote them:

Can other people see my Wish List?
Your Wish List is personal and is not intended to be a gift registry.

Well now, if we had a gift registry we might actually sell more stuff and we wouldn't want that now would we?!

So she has to sign on as me to get me stuff, which means she has to sign off as herself.

Also, the site kept giving me error pages instead of what I wanted.

Maybe if e-commerce businesses would think a little more about customer-friendly sites we'd have fewer dot-bombs.

Glad I do not have to work today -- between cats wrestling in the middle of the night and a bad dream, I do not feel rested at all.

The dream: I go to my cubicle at work and find that all of my stuff has been moved somewhere, without any warning. Somehow I know it is on floor AAA or something wierd like that. I go looking for it and start protesting on why I have been moved, and somebody (one of the bosses at a job I left five years ago, and really got along with fairly well) chews me out and tells me to shut up.

So I go wandering around through this sort of construction site of new office, trying to find my stuff, but the layout is incredibly confusing and I am more and more lost. Oddly, I seem to be wandering around my college campus.

I don't think this is too hard to interpret, but I'm wondering if other people have this dream too?

A wonderful Thanksgiving dinner here at our house. Just the two of us and a Chinese couple. My wife is a conversation partner for the woman, a grad student, who is trying to improve her English.

They have only been in the U.S. since August, so the Thanksgiving tradition and food were new to them.

I think this made me appreciate the meal as a tradition even more, sort of seeing it through new eyes.

The other day I said I wasn't going to do a "I'm thankful" post but I have to say that I should give thanks for such a nice meal, a nice house with a fire going -- and most of all the good company.

I think I feel at home in the truest sense a lot more this year than any year since I left my parents home.

I know some of you are having a good day today, some of you are battling relatives -:), and some are not having such a good day.

To those who are not so happy today, I wish for you that next year will bring better things. Life brings many unexpected things -- but some of them are good.

Happy Thanksgiving, everyone.

Today the sun came out just in time to set and illuminate the snow still clinging to the trees.

It is almost impossible to capture the true magnificence of this in photos. But I had to try.

Click on the thumbnails to see them bigger.

Now also, being from upstate New York, I always like snow for Thanksgiving. Especially this year, when I don't have to travel.

So far today, I'm just looking at it out the window:

Later, I will have to shovel, however -:(

I can't do one of those sappy "all the things I am thankful for" entries here. That's just a little too pat for my tastes, a little too easy to be "thankful" one week a year and cynical the rest.

But I have to say the prospect of having a son by next thankgiving is making it difficult to be cynical right now.

If this happens in a way it will be like starting a new life for me.

I sure didn't save the world from anything, and probably won't. But there's no guarantee that my son won't. Maybe someday us humans will actually get it right!

OK, now go and chow down!

There are many, many good things about my life and I hope soon to post 32 reasons why today is wonderful.

However, right now I'm pretty grumpy, so instead:

32 reasons today sucks:

1) It is Monday
2) We are waiting for an important call about the adoption, and we are not getting that call
3) We are upset and cranky about 2
4) My stomach hurts
5) It is already getting dark
6) There's a bug somewhere in some code I designed
7) This bug might be in my code from 1997
8) Or it might be new, but we don't know when
9) The bug happened several times recently
10) But not with enough information
11) And it won't happen now, when we are ready to gather information
12) This house is way too quiet
13) While I am waiting to get the bug to happen I am getting not a whole lot done
14) George W. Bush is president
15) The Giants lost to the Houston Texans yesterday
16) This computer is a laptop, meaning it should be portable, but when I try to move it it locks up
17) There still may be a war in Iraq
18) Terrorists are somewhere probably planning to blow up somebody I care about
19) Africans are dying of AIDS and I am doing absolutely nothing to help
20) People are blowing each other up in the Middle East and I haven't a clue how to stop them
21) Someone who I thought was a friend of mine has disappeared from my life
22) Almost none of the email I get has any value
23) I spend more time bitching about stupid problems at work than even thinking about things like 19 or 20
24) I have not gone to the gym in a very long time
25) It shows
26) I have not read a book in several months
27) I don't do a very good job of listening to other people's problems
28) I'm not sure sometimes if anyone really cares about my problems
29) Very few people seem to care at all about real problems like 19, 20 etc
30) I really am not into working today
31) I can't really think of anything clever to write here
32) Or what the 32nd reason is

Yesterday we bought a toy. The first toy we've bought for a boy who we hope will end up being our son.

It will go in a gallon-size Zip Lock bag with a few other items to Guatemala, to a place we've never been, a foster mother we've not met yet.

We actually bought three of the same toy -- a little turn-the-knob-and-get-a-sound thing. The other two, we hope, are so if he likes it he'll have it when it arrives home/here/a new scary place.

I know I would not want to be him when all of this happens, but I hope he changes his mind after a while.

The end of a very, very long week -- yeah!

After the joy of learning of our adoption referral, we've been brought back to reality by a new mountain of paperwork to fill out. (I should not be the one to complain -- my wife has shouldered far more of this burden than I).

Someday, I hope all this turns into a real child, here with us.

Was checking out the Blogdex at the MIT Media Lab after I saw it looked at this site, and did a search for "bigcat" in URLs.

I did not find "myself" but I did find this giant cat urban legend.

In yet another attempt by the Central Cat Council to conceal the cat's true purpose as an evil creature designed to wreck our house and disturb our sleep, this has been posted:

Random Kitten Generator.

Please do not visit this link, it will contaminate your mind!

(Thanks to dear wifey for this link!)

I am not even sure if I want to say this, but can't keep it to myself.

This entry is going to be long but I am not going to put part of it after a "MORE" - I think I want it to take up the whole page.

Today, we were matched with a child.

Our adoption agency had said this referral was likely to happen once INS approved us, but still - now that it actually happened, I feel even more excited, and even more scared, than I expected.

It would not be right to say anything more than this now - the process has really just started. We will soon, God willing, be starting a long legal process in Guatemala. (The "God willing" isn't normal speak for me, but it just seems like it has to go in there).

There's a picture on the refrigerator now. We have actually had this picture for a little while, but until now it was a child, and the picture was in a folder, so we would not look at it too much. Now, it is not "our" child now, but the picture now speaks a lot more than a thousand words.

For so many years I've seen other people's refrigerators with pictures of other people's kids on them (for some reason my mother, who had pictures of me all over the house, never puts pictures on the fridge!).

This picture - of someone we know only a few paragraphs about, really - is somehow so much more real than all of those other pictures, even though I've met a lot of those kids, seen some of them grow up and have their own.

I have always measured myself by work, sometimes to a ridiculous degree. From time to time the real world put things in perspective - my father's death, illnesses of those close to me, and 9/11 - but I always manage to fall back into the old ruts and complaints.

Those complaints are still there, but from time to time I see that picture or think about what might happen to us and am jolted out of my old world.

This is not always pleasant (how can I do anything but bow down to the powers that be at work when I need to keep this job so badly now?). I am up, down, and sideways emotionally and my wife is too.

I need to end this entry but can't figure out how to ... but maybe that's because it is just a beginning.

This is supposed to be one of the goals of my company. It probably is one of the goals of your company too.

But does anybody out there really feel empowered?

To me, it seems that empowerment should include the ability to raise complaints. But I find that:

1) If I complain to my manager, nothing happens
2) If I complain to the department that is screwing up, they ignore it
3) If I complain publically, I am reprimanded in some way, or it is just plain ignored, too.

Rather than feeling empowered, I think I feel emasculated (at work, that is).

Ever have a time when a lot of exciting things are happening in life and you just cannot really focus on work?

Well I'm having one of those times now.

More on this later, I hope. I gotta do some work!

Today's Dilbert is so good, you may not be able to get away with posting it at work, so as a public service I'm posting it here.

Of course, this strip is of purely academic interest to me because the managers where I work are nothing like that. You knew that, right?

GooglePeople can answer all sorts of "Who is" questions. It does pretty well much of the time with things like "Who is the president of MIT?" It's lots of fun, and probably useful.

Of course, we know who invented the Internet, but if you want to make sure you can try GooglePeople, or just cheat and see the response.

Now you know I'm no stranger to tech toys and such, but we just got a new cordless phone. (It seems like we have to buy a new one about every year because either the old one dies or it just sucks so bad you can't hear anyone.)

And I was amazed at how many models were on display (this was at Target). You've got 900 Mhz and 2.4 GHz and 5.8? Ghz and analog vs. digital and with and without answering machines and with one or two handsets and with/without intercoms, etc. etc. (Not to mention cellphones and IP phones and, yes, phones with cords!)

I am old enough to remember when, when you wanted a phone, you got one from The Phone Company, aka Ma Bell, aka AT&T (but we're not talkin' about your current puny AT&T, we're talking your big monopoly bend over and enjoy it 'cuz we own you type company).

It was a big deal when you could get phones in different colors.

On the wall in the basement we actually have one of those phones - I bought it around 1982 when the phone company had to sell them off.

And get this, kiddies, it has a DIAL on it. Does anyone born in the last 20 years even know how to work that thing?

There's lots of nice features on some of these toys, but I confess that in terms of the progress of civilization, this is not one of the areas that you should write home about. Those old Western Electric clunkers always worked, and lasted forever (see above reference to antique dial phone, which still works).

Cellphones are another story - they are easy to hate when annoying people use them where they shouldn't, but easy to love when you hit a deer in the middle of you don't have a clue where and really don't feel like walking miles in the rain to find a house and hoping it's not like one of those in stupid horror movies, etc.

My wife really hated the breakup of AT&T. Myself, I don't love monopolies, but confess to some nostalgia for Ma Bell and the days when phones were just there... how's that for an old fart comment!

Some happiness happening here now -- we just got a notification of preliminary INS approval for our adoption ! (More technically, form I-797C which apparently has replaced form I-171H :-)

So in adoption lingo we are now "paper ready" and are waiting for a referral from Guatemala.

It's a long road still ahead and things can always go wrong, but after a mountain of paperwork this feels good.

I can't get too specific about things until something really happens (you do need to protect the privacy of your new child, and their birthmother -- there are details of their life that the child should be able to tell only if and when they want to).

But wish us luck!

I've seen some of these before, but didn't realize how many they have:

demotivators

In an attempt to show my total lack of motivation, I stole this link from Living Reflections from a Dream. Thankee!

I was just reading a post about being social or anti-social, and for some reason it prompted me to think about how does one go about meeting people.

Which made me recall what happened to me 18 years ago.

I took a new job at a small newspaper in New Jersey. Already working there was a woman I soon grew to strongly dislike, and she quickly grew to strongly dislike me. But we had to work together, and it was not pleasant. Over time, jobs changed, and we changed.

To make a long story short, we were married about 5 years later, and still are more than13 years later.

My point is that the people you love often come to you in strange ways.

You might be wondering why I haven't said very much about my life here yet.

(The above makes several dangerous assumptions:

1) There is actually someone reading this.
2) They might actually be wondering anything about me)

Anyway, I like blogs that tell something about someone's life. And frankly, sometimes I like reading about other people's problems, partly to put my own in perspective.

Well oddly for me, I actually am probably closer to being happy right now in my life than at most other times. But this doesn't mean I have had a smooth ride to this point in my life.

At various times, I have been:

-- horribly lonely

-- horribly heartbroken

-- horribly sad

These times in the past, and some of the people who inhabit those times, are still a part of me. And there are several people I miss very badly.

Regrets, I've had quite a few

But as of now, I am happily married. I don't have any kids -- yet (maybe more to say on that sometime soon). I have a job that is probably pretty good as jobs with large companies go -- and I get to do some fairly fun things at my computer keyboard.

We have two cats. If you are really bored right now (and you must be, if you've gotten this far), you might be wondering why my domain is "3cat.com". Well, there were three cats at one time. Two of the original ones are chasing mice in the hereafter (you can see pictures of Barney, sadly, I never made a tribute to the one I started out with, Tiger), and there's a new one, Ginger, to go along with Fred (maybe I'll post some pages for them sometime soon).

Maybe someday I'll have one of those "about me" pages, but for now this will have to do.

For those of you who could not sleep worrying about the layout of this page -- and I know you are legion -- I think I've got the blogrolling stuff working better and looking better -- so I moved all the manual links over to it now.

I'm trying out blogrolling. There are two sections -- one will be a set of personal links, the second (the one you may see now) is a list of members of the Ryze blogger tribe.

All of this may act or look funny for a while till I get the kinks worked out. I think programmers tend to have screwed-up Web sites because they are always tinkering....

Carlos Santana kicks butt.

This just needs to be said. I loved Supernatural and now there's Shaman. Both are two of the best CD plays I have.

There are good songs here, but Carlos' guitar just adds something extra to everything.

And, since I'm fast approaching geezerdom myself, I get an extra kick out of geezers or near geezers that can still kick butt.

I've been hesitant to post about the Iraq situation, because it seems like it has gotten blogged to death, but I think the Security Council resolution is a big step forward, for these reasons:

1) It might actually work. I don't want to see Saddam heavily armed, and if this can be avoided without war, all to the better

2) I believe in the UN -- it is far, far from perfect but it is the only world organization we've got right now

3) Bush has stepped down, at least a little, from the cowboy stance he started out with

4) I never quite understood why "regime change" in and of itself was a legit goal of the US

5) Bush appears to be listening to Colin Powell. As Martha used to say, "It's a Good Thing". You might not agree with Powell on everything but at least he packs a lot of brainpower, and courage of conviction.

Do I trust Saddam? Do I trust Bush? Does anyone here really want peace?

Well, we don't need to solve all of this at once. Managing to put off a war for a while (without giving free rein to dictators -- we cannot completely forget the appeasement of Hitler (and I'm not comparing any one in this situation to him)) is enough for right now.

A lot of parentheticals there. But parentheses are better than bombs -- from either direction.

The last few days have been kindof a downer, for no particular reason. Maybe it is the shortening of the days, or the fact that we seem to have gone from summer to winter without much of a fall (although this weekend is supposed to be nice).

It would be easy to blame politics -- I'm not a fan of the Republicans (in their incarnation of the last 40 years, at least) and I'm unhappy that voters seem to endorse ideas I don't like -- but I don't think that's really it.

I think I need some new inspiration -- if anyone is really reading this, what inspires you?

Getting a room ready for a new member of the family, I moved our cable modem and cable router to the basement and the Aironet base station to my wife's office, which basically meant reshuffling our whole home network.

It all works now (yeah!). At first, I couldn't get the Aironet to work. Hmm -- did it loose its settings? I can't get to its web page either, or telnet to it. Is it dead?

Well, maybe it would help if I actually connected the Ethernet cable from it to the switch.

Another geek win: I kept having printing problems from Linux, especially my work notebook (now running RedHat 8.0). So I decided to switch to the CUPS printing system. RedHat has a 'wizard' to make the switch for you, but it doesn't tell you what to do once you have.

It is RTFM time. I actually read the docs. This may be a first. And now it works -- I can print!

Sometimes you have to be greatful for small things.

Is this phrase unique to the Boston area: A sign on the Alewife Brook Parkway says:

"Pleasure vehicles only"

Well, I know I'm not in a truck, but is my car a "pleasure vehicle"?

Not when I'm stuck in a giant traffic jam because they are fixing a bridge, I don't think!