Difference between revisions of "Woozle/to do/archive/2006-2007"

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|Time doesn't just fly; it tends to go first class and charge the tickets to my account.
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=What Woozle Is Doing Right Now=
=What Woozle Is Doing Right Now=
Entries are most recent first; to read in order, start at the end.
{| align=right
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| __TOC__
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==Overview==
==Overview==
*Recovering from Windows hard drive failure
*[[Staddon vs. Griever]]
==Today==
*[[Childsitters Wanted|Childsitting]]
*08:25, 25 Jun 2005 (CDT): Hmm, all the VillageIRC servers seem to be having trouble. Ping returns just fine, but IRC connections kind of stall after checking ident, and web pages (e.g. sluggysquad.com) won't load. I'm going to go take a shower and see if anything has changed by the time that's done.
*[[HyperMail]] so I can manage my emails
*07:00, 25 Jun 2005 (CDT): Fixing breakfast sandwiches for B&Z and reheated chicken for Josh. Then working on setting up a Windows machine, on two fronts: both the actual machine, and also a simulation using [[Qemu]], which could be very useful for the Mayhall project as well (because I can test installations and instantly restore the system to the state it was in before the install by saving backups of the simulated hard drive).
*Images for existing VBZ items
*[[DriveFerret]] (currently at experimental stage) to recover work from 60 GB drive
*[[HyperFile]] (has many uses, but most urgently to help with managing vbz images)
=Journal Entries=
* '''2007-01-11''': Actually making some progress on [[FileFerret]], finally. Who knew that all it would take is a bit of single-minded hyperfocussing to the exclusion of all else (except for a bit of vbz shipping now and then)?
: It's not really surprising, though, that this has taken so long to get to, as I am finding that there are many things which will be using it and correspondingly many complications in converting them (and their data) so that they ''can'' use it... (and I'm probably jinxing it by saying that I'm making progress, too.)
* '''2007-01-08''':
** [[2007-01-05 Rebekah's response]]
** [[2007-01-08 Woozle's response]]
* [[2007-01-04 open letter to Rebekah Wade]]
* [[2006-12-23 The tirCysP Affair]]


=What Woozle Was Doing Earlier=
'''09:04, 10 December 2006 (EST)''' Harena's to-do for today:
==2005-06-24==
* <s>Help W finish Josh application thingy</s>: mostly done; need to see if we can get answers from Tom
*06:24, 24 Jun 2005 (CDT): First, I'm going to try some Linux drive-recovery utilities I found last night. Failing that, I'll set the drive aside for later and throw in a spare 20 GB (which I also wanted to check in case it had some files I haven't been able to find since the move over to Linux). First [http://sourceforge.net/projects/biatchux/ this], which seems to be a collection of security and recovery tools in a bootable Linux distro with convenient menus but also doesn't seem to have been updated since 2004.
* Get all the teacher stuff thingies
==2005-06-23==
** go to AC Moore
*20:45, 23 Jun 2005 (CDT): Reeling from sudden death of 60 GB Windows hard drive, just after moving about 5 GB of audio data over there (because the 20 GB was getting full). The main store data is backed up repeatedly on a Linux drive (same computer as the one I browse and email from), but the audio data represents many tens of hours of work and I would very much like to get it back if at all possible. So I'm looking for disk recovery software. I have [http://grc.com SpinRite], but it's beyond that -- FDisk shows the partition, but dir returns "invalid media". Scandisk and chkdisk say the same thing. So something more advanced is needed, if anything can be recovered at all.
** candy canes, put them all together
*08:21, 23 Jun 2005 (CDT): Uploading rebuilt vbz pages, burning off more stuff, corresponding with Livia about home surveillance systems, bugging my lawyer to bug the defense lawyer about what date would be acceptable. And now I need to find an ancient home recording and digitize it.
* <s>xmas cards (low priority)</s>
*Overview up to the point where the drive died: Migrating old vbz.net help/about pages to the new [http://wiki.vbz.net vbzwiki]. Text of all pages has now been moved, and extra navigation links added to the wiki. I'm regenerating the main vbz.net pages with the new wiki links and redirecting the old pages to their new counterparts. In the meantime, I'm trying to do something about the wiki URLs, i.e. get rid of that /index.php/ thing. This can be done (it's documented) with an Apache directive, mod_rewrite, but that solution seems inelegant. I'm convinced that it can be done using the "page not found" page; this solves two problems at once.
* pay bills
* <s>stickers for soap</s> enough for this year
* lip balm


==2005-06-23==
* [[2006-11-24 The Cockroach Mafia]]
*14:32, 22 Jun 2005 (CDT): Got nice URLs working reasonably well this morning. There's still a minor glitch in that URLs with spaces in them cause an error, but this can be avoided. So I've redirected all the vbz /about and /help pages, and am (again) rebuilding the main catalog pages so they will have wiki links in them.
:Also burning off more stuff onto DVD. Yes, I've managed to fill up a 250 GB hard drive in under six months.
==2005-06-22==
*09:13, 21 Jun 2005 (CDT): ...and then we did a bit of yardwork, because it's nice and cool this morning, and now we're going for a walk, because it's nice and cool this morning.
*06:51, 21 Jun 2005 (CDT): Didn't get to do much, yesterday, of what I said I was going to be doing, between the usual kid pickups plus the usual Monday morning shopping and then on top of that a tech support visit to Harena's mom (which, on the plus side, found a home for the desktop photocopier (offloaded by my parental unit a couple of months ago) which would have been absolutely heavenly to have back in the 1980s and maybe even 1990s but which is just not necessary enough in order to be worth the (always scarce) surface area it would take up, even if it might occasionally save time when we need a quick paper copy and don't want to keep a digital copy as well; generally I try to avoid paper where possible and keep everything on the hard drive these days, so if I need to refer to something I don't have to find the original) which turned out a little longer than usual.
:I'm also heavily pondering setting up a wiki for gender issues. It would be pretty easy to set up, but (much like the neglected [http://issuepedia.org/ issuepedia]) I'd really need to spend some time creating some content in order not to have wasted the time (and the $12 for the domain, if I wanted it to have one) getting it set up. And that extra time-needed makes it officially a side-track, if I were to do it. So I think I should wait at least until I've got this vbzwiki thing all nicely hooked into vbz.net.
:So in theory, I get back to working on the "/index.php/" elimination now... although it will be time to take kids into camp in about 45 minutes.
==2005-06-20==
*06:57, 20 Jun 2005 (CDT): [[:Category:Benjy and Zander|Z & B]] start at CFS Summer Camp today, and Josh is off at overnight camp until Friday, so for the first time in several weeks we'll be kid-free during the week. Woot. I'm torn between spending more time on the wiki redirection and just using it as-is, i.e. at least the links will ''work'', and I can fix the implementation later -- except that fixing them may involve experimenting on the wiki software, which might make it stop working for short intervals. They may be short, but I hate to be doing that when it's live, and especially when first impressions are possibly being formed (because it would be linked from vbz.net for the first time). So I'll probably investigate a little more and see if it looks like a brick wall or not.
==2005-06-19==
*20:08, 19 Jun 2005 (CDT): The 404 redirect thing should work. Right now I have it working to the point where you can type in http://wiki.vbz.net/arbitrary/web/page and the wiki software will create a page called "Arbitrary/web/page" and load it -- but it does it after redirecting you to the regular ugly-looking wiki-style URL, i.e. http://wiki.vbz.net/index.php/Arbitrary/web/page. So I need to figure out how to kill the redirect (attempt #1 resulted in a page with no title), since as it is now this is only slightly better than what I could do with [[.htaccess]] redirects.
:Also, we took Josh off to Camp Royal today, courtesy of the [http://www.autismsociety-nc.org/ ASNC]. It's about an hour's drive each way, just past [[Pittsboro, NC|Pittsboro]].
*07:00, 19 Jun 2005 (CDT): Unfortunately, kdiff3 doesn't seem to have an option to move files instead of copying them -- so after I finish this merge, I have to go back and delete the copy I won't be using. This is not a big problem, but it does introduce the possibility of accidentally deleting the wrong thing (which is part of what should be the program's job), and it also means that any files copied will be taking up more room temporarily.
:Meanwhile, yesterday evening I got the rest of the vbz policy pages copied over (and protected, and indexed), so today I should be able to start setting up redirects. ...except I keep coming back to the idea that the "missing" (404 error) page could somehow be used to tidy up mediawiki URLs without having to resort to mod_rewrite. So I may end up working on that first.


==2005-06-18==
'''19:57, 11 November 2006 (EST)''' This came to me as I was waking up; it was only supposed to take an hour, maybe two, to write down; what with one thing and another, I basically spent all day writing it: [[Issuepedia:A spiritual argument against religion|A spiritual argument against religion]]
*21:02, 18 Jun 2005 (CDT): Today has been one of those mish-mash kinds of days, wherein I find myself doing about a half-dozen things and could only tell you maybe one or two of them without sitting down and concentrating. Gaah, I need to do that file consolidation, now that the backup is finished burning, and it's past bedtime.
*06:50, 18 Jun 2005 (CDT): so far, just kind of puttering around and getting my bearings, the way I have to do most mornings. Checking email. Etc.
==2005-06-17==
*10:49, 17 Jun 2005 (CDT): KDiff3 seems to do a nice job of comparing directory trees. It can also do a merge -- haven't tried that yet, but it could save me a lot of trouble. But anyway... I did a comparison to the first backup DVD I made, and KDiff3 said it was hunky-dory. So that becomes my "B" copy. Then I ran a compare on the "A" copy, and it says there are 5 files different. Problem is I haven't been able to figure out how to get it to tell me which 5 files.
:But now I have to go out, so it'll have to wait.
*06:41, 17 Jun 2005 (CDT): Trying to figure out how to compare all files in one set of directories with those in another (supposedly a complete backup). I've burned the same set to DVD twice, and each time it says there's a file it can't find (presumably in the copy, but it's not clear), and it was the same file both times, and it stopped comparing at 93% both times. What I need to know is (mainly) whether the other 7% of the files are ok, and (secondarily) what the file is -- k3b shows the name, but not the path. (And why, oh why, would a backup verify just ''stop'' after finding one mismatched file? It should continue the comparison and then show me a list of all mismatches.)
:Also, got the "backlinks" navbox working on wiki.vbz.net last night, so today it's time to change the official "about" and "help" links on vbz.net -- though I may see if I can get the wiki links to be neater...
==2005-06-16==
*[[User:Woozle|Woozle]] 14:43, 16 Jun 2005 (CDT): *snrk* [[Anna Nikola|mine offspring]] hath sent me a happy father's day letter-ish-kind-of-thing, which I am still struggling to comprehend. It arrived with 23 cents postage due. It includes at least one secret code message.
*13:30, 16 Jun 2005 (CDT): Shipped a couple of in-stock items. Back to looking at wiki sourcecode.
*11:37, 16 Jun 2005 (CDT): Oh, and I should post [[User:Woozle/2005-06-16 Chat with Cutie4|this chat log]] of a converation with cutie4 (11 y.o. banned from villageirc for excessive bounciness, back when she was 10; she contacts us via AIM every now and then). The question is, do I brave the ph33rsome [http://neopets.com NeoPets]? Or will they all wonder what I'm doing there if I have no actual interest in having an actual NeoPet? And do I really have time for more socializing, virtual though it would be?
*11:24, 16 Jun 2005 (CDT): Clearly my mental mis-wiring is a bit different from that of [http://www.computerworld.com/news/1997/story/0,11280,1427,00.html this person]; in order to gain an understanding of how a piece of code works, [[MediaWikiDoc:Article.php|this]] is the kind of detailed mapping-out I have to do. Which is what I've been doing since the last entry, except for the part about mowing the weeds in the side yard and the shower after that and composing an email to the kids' grandparents to see if they can give me some dates when they could watch the kids so we can get down to Athens to do the paperwork review.
*06:39, 16 Jun 2005 (CDT): Documenting what happens in various MediaWiki files, starting with [[MediaWikiDoc:index.php|index.php]] and [[MediaWikiDoc:Article.php|Article.php]]
==2005-06-15==
*21:00, 15 Jun 2005 (CDT): Made some notes on the MediaWiki code, pursuant to figuring out how to insert more navbar stuff, but now it's bedtime.
*18:57, 15 Jun 2005 (CDT): Just checked the mail (while the kids were out swimming with Grandma Dorothy and hence there's no Benjamin to demand a letter to open, put inside the return envelope, and then demand that I mail for him) and the September issue of [[WikiPedia:Analog magazine|Analog]] has arrived. I read the editorial right away (saving the rest for later, as usual) and find that Stan Schmidt &ndash; whose editorials I've always really enjoyed, even more than [[WikiPedia:John W. Campbell|Campbell]]'s, in many ways &ndash; is agreeing with me about the current over-security situation we have here. He then goes on, however, to extend the point into a criticism of excessive exposure of one's personal life (and the personal lives of one's offspring, even) via the internet.
:Now, I don't go to the extremes that he describes, but it did make me think a bit. I take more of a ''[[WikiPedia:The_Transparent_Society|Transparent Society]]'' approach to self-exposure on the internet (although the book is not mentioned or alluded to, it seems most unlikely that Dr. Schmidt hasn't read it; he may be ignoring it in order to keep the argument simple, space being limited). Posting personal information online is my way of having a community, when the people I'd like to be in a community with don't live anywhere nearby. It's my way of getting my thoughts straight, because I can much better answer a question like "So, what are you doing these days?" by writing about it (and posting it on the great global bulletin board) than I can in person. My mind just doesn't work that way; I can't cough up a list.
:I've even reached the point where too much privacy has begun to feel like more of a threat than too little. Which is worse, for example: if everyone knows a rumor about you, or if everyone has access to the entire story? There are certain subjects which I've tried to bring up in on the web and essentially been forced to take "off the air" because of the embarrassment expressed by certain family members. But nobody forced those family members to read about those subjects (the pages somehow came to the attention of someone who took it upon themselves to helpfully make sure said relatives were aware of them, thank you oh so much to that person), and not being able to discuss them freely has not made life easier. I would also feel happier if I could publish all the information at my disposal regarding the [[Staddon vs. Griever|court case]] in which I'm currently involved, so that people who know I'm involved but who don't know the details could decide for themselves if I'm being a jerk -- but my lawyer has advised me to stick to the public documents at least until after the case is resolved, so that's what I'm doing.
:It may be true that tomorrow's kids will be "softened up" to the point that they don't care if they're being monitored, but I suspect that the ever-increasing presence of monitoring will make them much more likely to be savvy about it &ndash; Junior should be taught that he has the right to monitor anyone who may be monitoring him, and to have access to whatever information they may be gathering about him, rather than to simply fear all monitoring. Therein lies the way to keep the watchers honest, and prevent individuals being harmed by misinformation (including misused true information).
*16:59, 15 Jun 2005 (CDT): I've been bad; I've spent more or less the whole day uploading and organizing Anna photos. So there's now a [[Anna Nikola|starter page]] for Anna stuff, and later I can reconstruct what was on the old hypertwins.org site. I've been saying for years that I was going to get that site updated... so that makes it not ''totally'' bad that I spent all day doing this, right...?
*06:59, 15 Jun 2005 (CDT): Ok, what *am* I doing right now? I guess I'm working up to trying again to insert more navlinks on the control bar at vbzwiki.
==2005-06-14==
*18:46, 14 Jun 2005 (CDT): Categorizing lots of stuff. Whoo. And cooking dinner (hamburgers). Whoo.
*12:44, 14 Jun 2005 (CDT): H got up, and we promptly took B out for a promised trip to [http://acmoore.com A.C. Moore] to pick out ''his'' color of yarn (for what, we're not sure) and then out to [http://goldencorral.com Golden Corral] to take advantage of the 99-cent kid special (where the kids kept going for more and more, and then dessert), and then to [http://www.costco.com/Warehouse/LocationTemplate.aspx?Warehouse=249 Costco] for gas ($2.039/gal.), and then to [http://kroger.com Kroger] for other stuff and then finally back here. Resuming the picture processing now.
*09:12, 14 Jun 2005 (CDT): Processing pictures
*08:59, 14 Jun 2005 (CDT): back. Attempting to offload [[:Category:2005-06-14|pictures]].
*07:37, 14 Jun 2005 (CDT): Taking B & Z for a walk so H can get some sleep.
*06:59, 14 Jun 2005 (CDT): Made some changes to [[HyperMail]] which should help the import to go faster. Note to self: indexing the main search field ''does'' make a difference. Currently, I guess I'm still trying to figure out how to add some nav links in the vbzwiki to point back to vbz.net.
==2005-06-13==
*evening: Copied all the existing vbz pages off the hypertwiki over to vbzwiki.
*10:12, 13 Jun 2005 (CDT): Most of the morning spent documenting various MediaWiki things while trying to figure out how to do the customizations I want. No visible progress yet, but at least I know how to edit the controlbar links that are already there. (Making new ones, or a separate box, is more of an issue.) Also shipped a few things. Now taking some time to watch a DS9 episode, and then lunch and grocery shopping.
==2005-06-12==
*11:48, 12 Jun 2005 (CDT): Moving pages over to [http://wiki.vbz.net/ vbzwiki] while also doing customizations and such to make the wiki more vbz-ish.
==2005-06-11==
*evening: Gave up on trying to get wiki.vbz.net to work as a subwiki, and installed [[MediaWiki]] from scratch. Found that it had the same problem. Finally checked notes and figured out what the problem is... but decided to proceed with it as a separate wiki for now. Heavily documented the MediaWiki installation procedure.
*09:05, 11 Jun 2005 (CDT): Still working on the Apache tweakings, but beginning to wonder if it's [[MediaWiki/Subwikis|worthwhile]]...


==2005-06-10==
'''19:36, 4 November 2006 (EST)''' Woops, a month went by.
*07:11, 10 Jun 2005 (CDT): Shipping order which arrived yesterday (then back to the Apache tweakings). (And yes, I worked on the Apache tweakings pretty much all day, aside from shopping and kinderdeliverance.)
==2005-06-09==
*evening, 9 Jun 2005 (CDT): Putting the finishing touches on a few select pieces of Linux documentation. I had to look up how to do a few things, and ended up creating pages about the [[groups]] abd [[groupadd]] commands and Linux user [[Linux:group|group]]s in general -- so I could include my own clarifications, questions, and examples as needed.
*06:58, 9 Jun 2005 (CDT): Messing with Apache some more. My original attempt was partly successful -- http://img.vbz.net loads the correct file, but http://wiki.vbz.net loads the server's default page. So something's still not right.
==2005-06-08==
*18:31, 8 Jun 2005 (CDT): seriously messing with the [[Apache]] config on this server, due to the fact that neither of the handy-dandy utilities (one web-based, one [[CLI]]) for managing domains seem to be able to deal with subdomains using different IP addresses. So I'm having to modify httpd.conf, which is difficult because of the security restrictions (FTP cannot connect as root).
*11:54, 8 Jun 2005 (CDT): back from therapy. I've decided that various vbz improvements -- starting with the wiki -- need to be top priority at the moment. I want to be off that shared server before the next $70 charge comes in, about 2 months from now.
*09:48, 8 Jun 2005 (CDT): Fixing minor error on vbz home page, processing yet another in-stock order which just arrived (do my customers have a sixth sense for when I need orders? Should I feel like George Bailey?), and going off to H's cognitive therapy, depositing borrowed $$ to fill the $$ gap, and mailing the other package -- yes, ''all at the same time''.
*07:21, 8 Jun 2005 (CDT): Shipping large in-stock order which arrived last night. It's not enough to cover the huge hole (-$180 or so) which is now in my bank account, and it probably won't arrive until early next week, but it will cover ''most'' of the gap. (And dammit, that should have been surplus.)
==2005-06-07==
*19:59, 7 Jun 2005 (CDT): Just discovered another #&*^$ overdraft in my bank account. I thought I had plenty of margin, but there it is. From the fact that the overdraft charge ($68) just about equals the amount of negativity (68.36), it's probably a case of a credit card refund being debited before midnight (when they assess overdraft fees) and the sales in the same batch coming through after... (I so very hate my credit-card processing service, but each time I start to look into getting another one it always involves more steps which don't seem to get done.) And there will probably be more overdraft charges tonight, but I don't have enough in my other account to even try to cover this. It's times like this I really just feel like quitting business, but I seriously can't see myself earning an income any other way at this point. Everything else makes me crazy. (This just makes me depressed, and only ''sometimes''.)
*12:22, 7 Jun 2005 (CDT): back from conference with Benjy's teacher, and some shopping. Resuming audio editing stuff even though I really should be working on Mayhall project.
*08:45, 7 Jun 2005 (CDT): spent about 2 hours trying to figure out what my priorities were for this morning. Briefly flirted with trying to tag and file the piles of loose inventory in the office, but this required more tags, which required finding the tag images, which I wasn't able to find. Found some folders which might have contained them, but they were all empty.
:Ended up working on picking out useful bits of audio from TDK-001 to see if a moosical idea could be done.
==2005-06-06==
*20:33, 6 Jun 2005 (CDT): bed
*15:38, 6 Jun 2005 (CDT): back from all that. Actually was home for about 30 minutes somewhere in the middle, but not enough time to actually do anything. Read some of Vernor Vinge's Singularity article out loud to Harena, but had to go off to fetch Z before getting more than about 1/3 of the way through. Then we had to go to Costco for gas (still $1.959/gal) and stuff, during which I had this odd flash of Karen S. singing Peter Gabriel's "Steam". It's not really her kind of song, I don't think, but I think it'd be right in her vocal range... I can imagine it so vividly, but I don't know if there's any way to get the idea across.
:Currently trying to get [[Bochs]] working again, as I think it might be helpful in working on the Mayhall install issue -- I want to have a clean install of Windows, dump the whole registry, then install [[FormTool]], dump the registry again, and find out what changes. This should tell me what reg keys need to be set up in order for FT to work right.
:Still pretty whacked from all the weed-whacking, though. And it is suddenly summer today, too (probably started a day or two ago but I wasn't outside any & didn't notice).
:...and I've had "Cut the telephone line, the story's the same" running through my head all afternoon, after finally finding the song lyrics yesterday and having not heard the song for at least a decade and a half.
*10:47, 6 Jun 2005 (CDT): going shopping and stuff and things.
*10:40, 6 Jun 2005 (CDT): recovering from weed-whacking, which was necessary in order to be able to get far enough back in the woods to release a [[WikiPedia:American_copperhead|copperhead]] snake Harena found lurking under a tarpaulin. While doing the clearing, I came across a hole in the ground containing two tiny raccoons, both looking quite terrified.
*06:55, 6 Jun 2005 (CDT): added index to [[HyperMail]] program for hopefully-increased speed. Now some ordering and shipping. (Does anyone know how to make this thing display time as EDT instead of CDT??)
==2005-06-05==
*20:55, 5 Jun 2005 (CDT): bed
*19:44, 5 Jun 2005 (CDT): processing The Birthday Tape (1969-05-11)
*19:01, 5 Jun 2005 (CDT): reading bedtime stories to kids
*17:56, 5 Jun 2005 (CDT): saving files and eating dinner
*12:40, 5 Jun 2005 (CDT): Transcribing audio from ancient 4-track reel-to-reel tapes. Currently transcribing "TDK-001", possibly the first 7" rtr tape I recorded on. It's old enough that itdoesn't contain any serious attempts to record actual songs, although there are some pieces which I have plans for. It also contains a lot of bits which ended up in "Pineapple" and "Daydream of the Psychoanalyst", so may be helpful in recreating those with higher fidelity. Lots of noodling around on the piano, most of it too much like existing songs to be useful.


I was a little worried at first because one of the channels didn't seem to be there anymore except very faintly, and I was afraid maybe the tape had been left up against something magnetic and partly erased, maybe... but it turned out just to be a slightly-corroded switch in need of cleaning :-)
I'm now trying to decide whether to pester my lawyer about a discovery I've just made (that's [[wikipedia:Discovery (observation)|Discovery]], not [[wikipedia:Discovery (law)|Discovery]], although it does involve the latter).


[[Image:2005-06-05 teac A-2340 SX.550px wide.jpg|thumb|TEAC 4-track]]
In the trial process, there is a phase referred to as the [[wikipedia:Interrogatories|interrogatories]], which is where I get to ask them questions, and they have to answer within 30 days. (They also get to ask me questions, and I have to answer within 30 days.)
[[Image:2005-06-05 tapes 1.jpg|150px|Some 7-inch reel tapes I need to transcribe]]
 
[[Image:2005-06-05 tapes 2.jpg|150px|More reel tapes to transcribe]]
We did one round of interrogatories already ([[SvsG:Plaintiffs' First Requests to RDA|RDA]], [[SvsG:Plaintiffs' First Fact Requests to Bubba|Bubba]], [[SvsG:Plaintiffs' First Fact Requests to Lynne|Lynne]] &ndash; 5 questions per defendant), and the questions were rather general, and their answers were uninformative.
 
I came up with a much more [[SvsG:Plaintiffs' Position Statement/archive|specific set of questions]] after that, but then the lawyer said I couldn't ask them, because there wasn't going to be another round of interrogatories. From this, I gathered that I'm only allowed one set.
 
However, I just now found the relevant statute ({{gacode|9|11|33}}) in Georgia law, and it doesn't say anything about the number of rounds; it only says you have to limit the total number of questions to 50, and we've asked, like, 5 or 10. I think. It seems to me that we could seriously clarify some things before the trial by asking my list of questions, even if I have to pare it down quite a bit.
 
On the other hand, my lawyer is likely to insist on doing all the typing and formatting, and one way or another will end up charging me for more hours to handle the additional paperwork &ndash; which runs the risk of pushing me over into yet a ''third'' multi-thousand-dollar retainer. Is it worth the risk? Should I ask her for a statement of our current account status? Or should I just let all this stuff get dealt with at trial?
 
Feh.
 
'''13:31, 24 September 2006 (EDT)''' Some trivia: I pulled a bunch of old service receipts out of the Benz, trying to clean up after the CD player thief (who rifled thoroughly both the Nissan and the Benz, took the CD player out of the Nissan but struck out with the Benz because it doesn't even have a radio) spilled all the glove box contents everywhere. Oddly enough, the receipts are not for ''this'' Benz but for a different one, a 300TD, license plate CME-837, belonging to some people named Harry and Pam Abel in Atlanta.
 
From the receipts, it looks like they moved there sometime around or before August 1985, and sold the car sometime in 1994. I found their address on one of the receipts, which leads to [http://66.64.236.226/identity/mstockton/listings_details.asp?OrderBy=beds&User_ID=mstockton&Offset=10&Listing_ID=5951 this site] showing their former house (with lots of photos) sold for $1,195,000. Googling both office and home phone numbers comes up with nothing for area code 404, which I'm pretty sure included Atlanta at the time (prior to 1992 or so, it was most of northeast Georgia).
 
On one receipt &ndash; October 13, 1988 &ndash; they spent a total of $8076.41 on the car, apparently including a new engine (#617 912-12-727772). So now I don't feel quite so bad about all the thousands I've spent on ''my'' Benz...
 
I'm guessing that this was the Benz which the Grievers later somehow obtained and which became Cimmeria's car (maybe she bought it with the settlement money from her court case? I don't remember what that was about except that there was a lot of money and it was gone pretty quickly.) I'm going to assume this is correct, and stuff it in with the other stuff to give back to the Grievers next time I encounter them (presumably in court).
 
* [[2006-09-05]]
* [[2006-09-04 beach trip]]
* [[2006-09-03]]
 
==2006-08-10==
'''21:36, 10 August 2006 (EDT)''' I feel like however I handle this, it'll be the wrong thing to do. [[2006-08-10 truth and secrets]]
 
==long hiatus==
It's been a really, really busy summer. What can I say.
==2006-03-19==
'''08:05, 19 March 2006 (EST)''' Actually got something done yesterday, in spite of having to drive Zander to a [http://maps.yahoo.com/dd_result?newaddr=122+pinecrest+rd.&taddr=9000+Habitat+Cir&csz=27705&country=us&tcsz=Chapel+Hill%2C+NC+27516-5262&tcountry=us birthday party] (1/2 hour each way x 4 trips = 2 hours felled in the name of improved childhood socialization or whatever): the main catalog portion of vbz.net (all URLs starting with /cat/) is now running from a single script, rather than being hundreds of static pages built on a PC. It's a small but significant step towards making the site completely data-driven and no longer dependent on Windows.
 
A lot of other stuff happened which I haven't had time to post about; see [[:Category:Wallpaper]] and [[:Category:2006-03-10]]. Also [http://wall.hypertwins.org Wallville] is back ^_^
==2006-03-03==
'''07:41, 3 March 2006 (EST)''' Began the seed of an area about making music as a profession: [[Art vs. Career]]. Also, a couple of days ago, wrote up our unhappy experiences with the {{yp|Kenmore 44052}} washing machine. Didn't have time to process the Day In The Life pictures; three days generally isn't enough, unless it includes a weekend and my to-do list isn't more overloaded than usual.
==2006-02-26==
'''15:38, 26 February 2006 (EST)''' [http://secondhandwhore.livejournal.com/ Sraedi] invited me to take part in [http://community.livejournal.com/ditl/profile this], so I've been taking pictures. I also figured out that the camera has a mode which squeezes about 5 times as many shots on a memory card, and (incidentally) doesn't take forever to process them. Who knew.
 
Also creating new icons for vbz.net. The transparency doesn't work in MSIE v6, but who cares, right? ;-) (I wonder if v7 will have proper support for PNG alpha transparency...)
==2006-02-25==
[[Image:P2250007 2006-02-25 Zander in playstructure at Wheels.jpg|250px|left]]
'''21:04, 25 February 2006 (EST)''' Finally put some of my kindergarten-era electronics knowledge to work -- see [[User:Woozle/notes for electronic learning kit|Woozle/notes for electronic learning kit]]
 
Also took Zander to [[htyp:Wheels (Durham, NC)|Wheels]] for the birthday party of Henry (the immediate motivation for creating the aforementioned electronic kit) and picked him up again after (leaving about 45 minutes in between for shipping operations). This was made considerably easier, however, by the presence of Rachel-the-sitter, who made it unnecessary for me to also pack up Josh and Benjamin in the car each time.
 
==2006-02-22==
'''10:28, 22 February 2006 (EST)''': Just now applied for [http://seeker.dice.com/jobsearch/servlet/JobSearch?op=101&dockey=xml/4/8/485466afd1b98d598f899e71c08d14bc@activejobs0&c=1&source=1 this], after updating [[Résumé - Nick Staddon|this]].
 
Catching up: The overload has continued since the last entry. The plumber replacement section of pipe and removed a large quantity of muck from the existing pipe, but apparently didn't test the fix because the sink was still stopped up after he left (he may have tested it but not realized that you have to leave the water running for a good 5 minutes to be really sure, because it takes that long for the pipes to fill up from the blockage to the sink drain). So Saturday (with a bad headache) I got out the powered plumber's snake and reamed out the drain from the laundry room (after the unsurprising false start where the snake went up the vent instead of down under the floor). So that's fixed.
 
But then the washing machine was still making unhappy noises, and when the drain was still blocked it was leaking, so he need to come back and fix that, and I still can't get the drain under the laundry room sink to stop leaking completely (though I've got it to the point where it's a drip every 5-10 seconds instead of 5-10 drips per second; maybe it just needs a new gasket somewhere).
 
Then on Sunday I had an even worse headache and a slight fever and kind of did not much of any use all day. Monday I was a bit better, but still had no appetite until dinnertime. Tuesday mostly recovered; today still mostly recovered.
 
Also, I finally broke down (sometime during all that) and installed the windows drivers for the scanner. It worked fine for a bit, and then I foolishly tried to install a USB snooper utility to help out with the Linux driver development, and various things stopped working (including the network and the scanner). I was able to fix the network, and I got the scanner working again for a bit, but then it mysteriously stopped working again. So I'm still in the middle of that.
==2006-02-16==
The kitchen sink has been doing its quasi-annual stoppage since about Tuesday. This time, we're having a plumber look at it. (For one thing, there's a section of pipe which appears to have been patched with ''duct tape''. For another, this shouldn't keep happening; if the pipe is too small to accomodate the load, then we need bigger pipe.)
 
Meanwhile, we had fun bailing out the laundry room last night (the laundry room sink, dishwasher, and washing machine are all on the same drainage "circuit") in order to prevent the floor from being flooded (again) when laundry had to be done.
==2006-02-14==
'''07:41, 14 February 2006 (EST)''' More things I did between 1/11 and 2/13:
* Upgraded [[vbzwiki:Main Page|vbzwiki]] to the latest {{yp|MediaWiki}} version, in hopes of getting the spam filter to start working; I was able to get it working, though I think this was mainly because I re-read the instructions more carefully and found I had left out a line of code in the configuration file. Also, this will allow me to offer customers the ability to subscribe to topics of interest.
* Set up a test {{yp|Drupal}} page &ndash; it's at http://stuff.hypertwins.org, but I'm still working out the kinks before it's ready for actual use. (At first I couldn't get the email confirmation to work, but then that mysteriously started working several days later. Now it won't create forums, even though it says it is doing so.)
 
And time's up again...
==2006-02-13==
'''21:20, 13 February 2006 (EST)''' Yeah, [http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2006-02/b-oam013006.php this] describes what I've noticed. And I thought it was just my current kid-infested lifestyle. Or maybe it's mainly that, and later on I'll be able to look forward to the joyous prospect of ''always'' feeling like I'm in a room full of screaming kids. Hmm.
 
'''14:47, 13 February 2006 (EST)''' I guess it must have been a busy month since January 11. I've done a substantial number of mentionable things, but can't immediately remember any of them. Oh, wait, yes... there was...
* The new water heater, which took much back-and-forthing between here, Sears, and a few other places (I have the "before" shots and will put them up eventually along with an "after" shot).
* Shaving about 8 inches off the end of the old falling-apart sink base cabinet in the laundry room (forgot to take "before" shots, but got a nice "after" shot).
* Getting one ("Von! Ah-ah-ah-haa!" &ndash;[[Wikipedia:Count von Count|Count von Count]]) [[Childsitters Wanted|childsitter]] lined up. She's too young to do overnights or driving, but it's a start.
* Spent a lot of time working on [[FileFerret]] and oops, that's all I have time for now because it's time to pick up the kids. (I was going to tell about buying a new scanner and looking at phono needles, but it'll have to wait.)
 
==2006-01-11==
'''07:41, 11 January 2006 (EST)''' Just finished the final (I hope) revision to [[SvsG:Messages for Defendants|this]]. Yesterday, we discovered that the reason why vbz seemed to be making so much money over Xmas, relatively speaking (the bank balance climbed to nearly $700 at one point, (yee. haw.), and is still well above $400) was that one of the suppliers had mistakenly been charging one of Sandy's credit cards which I gave them to use ''once'', two years ago. The total came to $730.80... so I'm still working back to "break-even" point. So much for "Black Friday". (She was relieved to find that she hadn't been as much of a spenthrift as she thought; I'm vastly annoyed and dismayed that I can't even seem to make a profit at Xmas. The sales numbers say I did make about $600, but that's not unusual for most times of the year.)
 
Yesterday also, I foolishly started into doing a huge overhaul of vbz's Topic system, and of course unexpected issues have arisen (as I expected).
 
Currently printing out the famous SvsG "Sales Accounting".
==2006-01-05==
'''13:32, 5 January 2006 (EST)''': There's a fine balance between (on the one hand) taking on so many tasks that one starts to get panicky over how much isn't getting done and (on the other hand) taking on too few and ''actually'' not getting much done. I'm feeling like I haven't been getting much done over the past week, but I'm trying not to take this as a signal that I need to take on a whole lot more because I can feel that edge of panic ready to spring up. Just find one or two things that need doing, and work on them. Lather, rinse, and repeat.
 
Reading material: http://www.judithberman.net/sffuture.html

Latest revision as of 00:55, 5 March 2021

Time doesn't just fly; it tends to go first class and charge the tickets to my account.

What Woozle Is Doing Right Now

Entries are most recent first; to read in order, start at the end.

Overview

Journal Entries

  • 2007-01-11: Actually making some progress on FileFerret, finally. Who knew that all it would take is a bit of single-minded hyperfocussing to the exclusion of all else (except for a bit of vbz shipping now and then)?
It's not really surprising, though, that this has taken so long to get to, as I am finding that there are many things which will be using it and correspondingly many complications in converting them (and their data) so that they can use it... (and I'm probably jinxing it by saying that I'm making progress, too.)

09:04, 10 December 2006 (EST) Harena's to-do for today:

  • Help W finish Josh application thingy: mostly done; need to see if we can get answers from Tom
  • Get all the teacher stuff thingies
    • go to AC Moore
    • candy canes, put them all together
  • xmas cards (low priority)
  • pay bills
  • stickers for soap enough for this year
  • lip balm

19:57, 11 November 2006 (EST) This came to me as I was waking up; it was only supposed to take an hour, maybe two, to write down; what with one thing and another, I basically spent all day writing it: A spiritual argument against religion

19:36, 4 November 2006 (EST) Woops, a month went by.

I'm now trying to decide whether to pester my lawyer about a discovery I've just made (that's Discovery, not Discovery, although it does involve the latter).

In the trial process, there is a phase referred to as the interrogatories, which is where I get to ask them questions, and they have to answer within 30 days. (They also get to ask me questions, and I have to answer within 30 days.)

We did one round of interrogatories already (RDA, Bubba, Lynne – 5 questions per defendant), and the questions were rather general, and their answers were uninformative.

I came up with a much more specific set of questions after that, but then the lawyer said I couldn't ask them, because there wasn't going to be another round of interrogatories. From this, I gathered that I'm only allowed one set.

However, I just now found the relevant statute (9-11-33) in Georgia law, and it doesn't say anything about the number of rounds; it only says you have to limit the total number of questions to 50, and we've asked, like, 5 or 10. I think. It seems to me that we could seriously clarify some things before the trial by asking my list of questions, even if I have to pare it down quite a bit.

On the other hand, my lawyer is likely to insist on doing all the typing and formatting, and one way or another will end up charging me for more hours to handle the additional paperwork – which runs the risk of pushing me over into yet a third multi-thousand-dollar retainer. Is it worth the risk? Should I ask her for a statement of our current account status? Or should I just let all this stuff get dealt with at trial?

Feh.

13:31, 24 September 2006 (EDT) Some trivia: I pulled a bunch of old service receipts out of the Benz, trying to clean up after the CD player thief (who rifled thoroughly both the Nissan and the Benz, took the CD player out of the Nissan but struck out with the Benz because it doesn't even have a radio) spilled all the glove box contents everywhere. Oddly enough, the receipts are not for this Benz but for a different one, a 300TD, license plate CME-837, belonging to some people named Harry and Pam Abel in Atlanta.

From the receipts, it looks like they moved there sometime around or before August 1985, and sold the car sometime in 1994. I found their address on one of the receipts, which leads to this site showing their former house (with lots of photos) sold for $1,195,000. Googling both office and home phone numbers comes up with nothing for area code 404, which I'm pretty sure included Atlanta at the time (prior to 1992 or so, it was most of northeast Georgia).

On one receipt – October 13, 1988 – they spent a total of $8076.41 on the car, apparently including a new engine (#617 912-12-727772). So now I don't feel quite so bad about all the thousands I've spent on my Benz...

I'm guessing that this was the Benz which the Grievers later somehow obtained and which became Cimmeria's car (maybe she bought it with the settlement money from her court case? I don't remember what that was about except that there was a lot of money and it was gone pretty quickly.) I'm going to assume this is correct, and stuff it in with the other stuff to give back to the Grievers next time I encounter them (presumably in court).

2006-08-10

21:36, 10 August 2006 (EDT) I feel like however I handle this, it'll be the wrong thing to do. 2006-08-10 truth and secrets

long hiatus

It's been a really, really busy summer. What can I say.

2006-03-19

08:05, 19 March 2006 (EST) Actually got something done yesterday, in spite of having to drive Zander to a birthday party (1/2 hour each way x 4 trips = 2 hours felled in the name of improved childhood socialization or whatever): the main catalog portion of vbz.net (all URLs starting with /cat/) is now running from a single script, rather than being hundreds of static pages built on a PC. It's a small but significant step towards making the site completely data-driven and no longer dependent on Windows.

A lot of other stuff happened which I haven't had time to post about; see Category:Wallpaper and Category:2006-03-10. Also Wallville is back ^_^

2006-03-03

07:41, 3 March 2006 (EST) Began the seed of an area about making music as a profession: Art vs. Career. Also, a couple of days ago, wrote up our unhappy experiences with the Kenmore 44052 washing machine. Didn't have time to process the Day In The Life pictures; three days generally isn't enough, unless it includes a weekend and my to-do list isn't more overloaded than usual.

2006-02-26

15:38, 26 February 2006 (EST) Sraedi invited me to take part in this, so I've been taking pictures. I also figured out that the camera has a mode which squeezes about 5 times as many shots on a memory card, and (incidentally) doesn't take forever to process them. Who knew.

Also creating new icons for vbz.net. The transparency doesn't work in MSIE v6, but who cares, right? ;-) (I wonder if v7 will have proper support for PNG alpha transparency...)

2006-02-25

P2250007 2006-02-25 Zander in playstructure at Wheels.jpg

21:04, 25 February 2006 (EST) Finally put some of my kindergarten-era electronics knowledge to work -- see Woozle/notes for electronic learning kit

Also took Zander to Wheels for the birthday party of Henry (the immediate motivation for creating the aforementioned electronic kit) and picked him up again after (leaving about 45 minutes in between for shipping operations). This was made considerably easier, however, by the presence of Rachel-the-sitter, who made it unnecessary for me to also pack up Josh and Benjamin in the car each time.

2006-02-22

10:28, 22 February 2006 (EST): Just now applied for this, after updating this.

Catching up: The overload has continued since the last entry. The plumber replacement section of pipe and removed a large quantity of muck from the existing pipe, but apparently didn't test the fix because the sink was still stopped up after he left (he may have tested it but not realized that you have to leave the water running for a good 5 minutes to be really sure, because it takes that long for the pipes to fill up from the blockage to the sink drain). So Saturday (with a bad headache) I got out the powered plumber's snake and reamed out the drain from the laundry room (after the unsurprising false start where the snake went up the vent instead of down under the floor). So that's fixed.

But then the washing machine was still making unhappy noises, and when the drain was still blocked it was leaking, so he need to come back and fix that, and I still can't get the drain under the laundry room sink to stop leaking completely (though I've got it to the point where it's a drip every 5-10 seconds instead of 5-10 drips per second; maybe it just needs a new gasket somewhere).

Then on Sunday I had an even worse headache and a slight fever and kind of did not much of any use all day. Monday I was a bit better, but still had no appetite until dinnertime. Tuesday mostly recovered; today still mostly recovered.

Also, I finally broke down (sometime during all that) and installed the windows drivers for the scanner. It worked fine for a bit, and then I foolishly tried to install a USB snooper utility to help out with the Linux driver development, and various things stopped working (including the network and the scanner). I was able to fix the network, and I got the scanner working again for a bit, but then it mysteriously stopped working again. So I'm still in the middle of that.

2006-02-16

The kitchen sink has been doing its quasi-annual stoppage since about Tuesday. This time, we're having a plumber look at it. (For one thing, there's a section of pipe which appears to have been patched with duct tape. For another, this shouldn't keep happening; if the pipe is too small to accomodate the load, then we need bigger pipe.)

Meanwhile, we had fun bailing out the laundry room last night (the laundry room sink, dishwasher, and washing machine are all on the same drainage "circuit") in order to prevent the floor from being flooded (again) when laundry had to be done.

2006-02-14

07:41, 14 February 2006 (EST) More things I did between 1/11 and 2/13:

  • Upgraded vbzwiki to the latest MediaWiki version, in hopes of getting the spam filter to start working; I was able to get it working, though I think this was mainly because I re-read the instructions more carefully and found I had left out a line of code in the configuration file. Also, this will allow me to offer customers the ability to subscribe to topics of interest.
  • Set up a test Drupal page – it's at http://stuff.hypertwins.org, but I'm still working out the kinks before it's ready for actual use. (At first I couldn't get the email confirmation to work, but then that mysteriously started working several days later. Now it won't create forums, even though it says it is doing so.)

And time's up again...

2006-02-13

21:20, 13 February 2006 (EST) Yeah, this describes what I've noticed. And I thought it was just my current kid-infested lifestyle. Or maybe it's mainly that, and later on I'll be able to look forward to the joyous prospect of always feeling like I'm in a room full of screaming kids. Hmm.

14:47, 13 February 2006 (EST) I guess it must have been a busy month since January 11. I've done a substantial number of mentionable things, but can't immediately remember any of them. Oh, wait, yes... there was...

  • The new water heater, which took much back-and-forthing between here, Sears, and a few other places (I have the "before" shots and will put them up eventually along with an "after" shot).
  • Shaving about 8 inches off the end of the old falling-apart sink base cabinet in the laundry room (forgot to take "before" shots, but got a nice "after" shot).
  • Getting one ("Von! Ah-ah-ah-haa!" –Count von Count) childsitter lined up. She's too young to do overnights or driving, but it's a start.
  • Spent a lot of time working on FileFerret and oops, that's all I have time for now because it's time to pick up the kids. (I was going to tell about buying a new scanner and looking at phono needles, but it'll have to wait.)

2006-01-11

07:41, 11 January 2006 (EST) Just finished the final (I hope) revision to this. Yesterday, we discovered that the reason why vbz seemed to be making so much money over Xmas, relatively speaking (the bank balance climbed to nearly $700 at one point, (yee. haw.), and is still well above $400) was that one of the suppliers had mistakenly been charging one of Sandy's credit cards which I gave them to use once, two years ago. The total came to $730.80... so I'm still working back to "break-even" point. So much for "Black Friday". (She was relieved to find that she hadn't been as much of a spenthrift as she thought; I'm vastly annoyed and dismayed that I can't even seem to make a profit at Xmas. The sales numbers say I did make about $600, but that's not unusual for most times of the year.)

Yesterday also, I foolishly started into doing a huge overhaul of vbz's Topic system, and of course unexpected issues have arisen (as I expected).

Currently printing out the famous SvsG "Sales Accounting".

2006-01-05

13:32, 5 January 2006 (EST): There's a fine balance between (on the one hand) taking on so many tasks that one starts to get panicky over how much isn't getting done and (on the other hand) taking on too few and actually not getting much done. I'm feeling like I haven't been getting much done over the past week, but I'm trying not to take this as a signal that I need to take on a whole lot more because I can feel that edge of panic ready to spring up. Just find one or two things that need doing, and work on them. Lather, rinse, and repeat.

Reading material: http://www.judithberman.net/sffuture.html

wiki file: https://hypertwins.org/mw/index.php?title=Woozle/to_do/archive/2006-2007&oldid=21374