Woozle/to do/archive/2006-2007

What Woozle Is Doing Right Now

Today

• 11:37, 16 Jun 2005 (CDT): Oh, and I should post 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 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 this person; in order to gain an understanding of how a piece of code works, 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 index.php and Article.php

What Woozle Was Doing Earlier

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 Analog has arrived. I read the editorial right away (saving the rest for later, as usual) and find that Stan Schmidt – whose editorials I've always really enjoyed, even more than Campbell's, in many ways – 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 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 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 – 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 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 A.C. Moore to pick out his color of yarn (for what, we're not sure) and then out to 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 Costco for gas ($2.039/gal.), and then to 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 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 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 worthwhile...

2005-06-10

• 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 groups 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 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 :-)

TEAC 4-track