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Someone rang the door bell just as I was about to sit down for supper soliciting donations for some charity. I’m crabby on an empty stomach, though, being an adult I was reasonably polite and said “I’m not interested.” When she persisted I said the same thing rather what I thought, “F**k off.” Telemarketers and door-to-door solicitation people: when I say I haven’t had my supper just go. I don’t care about you or your cause when my stomach’s growling.

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Buddy sent me Mapquest directions from Barnesville, OH to Home, PA. Some questions:

1. Who is Buddy?
2. If he lives in Home, PA, where is that?
3. If I know him, where are the directions from Mississauga, ON, CA?
4. Does Buddy know how to copy 'n' paste an email address?

If you know Buddy’s friend (customer, client?) in Barnesville, OH send him these directions.

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It turned out to be a sunny early spring day with a temperature of about 8°C and a coolish SE wind. As the forecast calls for rain tomorrow, I spread fertilizer on the lawns. I removed the last of the black plastic edging I put around the gardens several years ago. Until the frost heaved parts of the edging and the lawn mower clipped it, the edging served its purpose. Methinks I will try paver edging some time or just go back to using the flat spade, chopping a ditch and weeding every so often.

While I was working outside, a driveway paving salesmen stopped by. So I asked him for a quote on removing the asphalt from the double driveway and spreading a layer of crushed stone suitable for laying pavers. His verbal quote was $650. Of course I’ll have to check into this further.

Later I ran my “river” route 10km run. Yesterday I ran a street route to the west of my place for about another 10km. I think this is the first weekend I have (ever?) done two back-to-back 10km runs. Yeah, of course I’m tired.

Why “gardening without guilt?” I’ve finished my 3 tax returns: there’s no reason I should be working my brain inside for the moment.

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Our music director was away for this Saturday’s rehearsal. Three of the choir members did a fine job taking rehearsal. After break we broke into section groupings and discussed “whither the choir?” The discussion is required because a) we’re in debt and b) there was a fall concert that, though it went well in the end, had a rough and rocky rehearsal road. Do you want to sell tickets if it is likely the choir might embarass themselves?

I believe there were some good suggestions—we will see what the other sections thought next Saturday. The men agreed that men, being men, we weren’t as senstive to “issues” as the women are. We come to sing under the direction of a fine conductor. Period!

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It took me a while to find the midi percussion key map with pitches. I ended up copying it from a web page, transforming it into a csv file, importing into Excel, fixing up a couple of errors and then importing that into a Word 2000 table. I then saved it as html and include the result here. Now I can add persussion parts to my Noteworthy Composer songs.

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According to the local weather station the temperature has gone from a low of -10°C on the 22nd to a high of 16°C today.

I had a non-routine day. I drove in this morning and started work early. I left for a vendor’s meeting shortly before one and then drove home as the vendor is less than 10 min. away. Then I completed my day’s work at the home computer through the VPN. So, I could knock off earlier than usual and I was home already.

Shorts and T-shirt were enough clothng for the mild spring weather. My “new” usual route time was only a minute faster than the run on Saturday which surprised me as there were less mud and puddles along the way.

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There’s another *ssh*l* out there. Maybe it is a former smoker, you know, the kind who dump their buts in a public parking lot. Today it was a pile of half a dozen water bottles. What a jerk.

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I had been holding out upgrading from emacs 20 to 21 because my favourite fixed width font, 7×14b (or 7×14bold) wouldn’t display with the specifier I used in emacs 20. However emacs 21.3 was to good to pass up so I investigated and added the following fix to my startup elisp files.

  (if (>= emacs-major-version 21)
      (progn
        (setq default-windows-font
              (create-fontset-from-ascii-font “-*-7×14b-*-*”))
        (set-fontset-font default-windows-font 'latin-iso8859-1
                          “-*-7×14b-*-*”)
        (set-default-font default-windows-font)))

Why 7×14? On a 1280×1024 screen I can have two side by side 80 column x 62 row windows for writing source code or comparing files using ediff. You have to be a coder to appreciate. There’s too much “fluff” in today’s so-called IDE.

I probably have been using emacs for at least the past 10 years. There may be still one or two bug fixes in the elisp files with my name on them. My thanks to RMS for this “not just an editor but it’s a religion.”

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Today’s treadmill stats: #3 / 360 ↑ / 112 ↑ / 2.0% / 5.02 ↑ (10.04 km/h) / 12.1 ↑ / 78 / 49.

Though today’s outside weather was fine for running I had washed my running stuff this morning. I set the max. speed to 12.1 km/h (7.5 mph) which was pretty fast though I found if I lengthened my stride I could (just) keep up. Truth be told, I pressed pause a couple of times. While looking for something else I found the heart rate monitor for the treadmill (after I was done natch) so I’ll try a heart rate controlled routine next time.

Last night’s spreadsheet discovery was how to show formulas in MS Excel. This simple VBA function does the trick:

Function GetFormula(Cell)
   GetFormula = Cell.Formula
End Function

Some of my expense calculations for the tax return combined some values (I use named ranges) and I wanted to show the formulas I used beside the calculated values.

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I pulled out the topographic map I bought and checked some distances. Near as I can figure my regular route wasn’t quite 10km as the crow flies. I remedied that today and added some extra distance. It took me an hour to run the route which isn’t all that great for a 10K run; however, my excuse is spring. I would guess that at least 60% of the route is on grass or park paths which are quite squishy and puddly at the moment. There is the as the crow flies aspect, too: the map shows my route varies over a vertical distance of 62m or 203ft 5in. Most of this is spread out over the route except for a couple spots getting in and out of the Credit River valley.

As I am home alone I have had a chance to log some 324 receipts to account for my wife’s music teaching business. This means that I’m almost finishing the completion of our 2003 tax returns. Yee haw! Let the weather get warm and the following weekends' weather be excellent!

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I misplaced my favourite “waiter” corkscrew. It’s been to Italy (perhaps even in my hand luggage in those naïve pre 9-11 days) for our choir tour. It then went on to see more of Italy with two women in the choir. Apparently the corkscrew just went along for the ride because neither woman could figure out how to use it. Anyway, I had to open my last bottle of wine with the old corkscrew. Its “worm” is too long: usually a piece of cork ends up in the wine. This evening I hunted all over for it and then I remembered my wine bottle carry bag had a lever corkscrew, too. I opened tonight’s bottle, poured my glass and then got the pewter stopper… Oh, there was my corkscrew next to the stopper on that little shelf under the kitchen cupboards. Now I have two useful corkscrews at hand.

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I was asked to conduct(?) the vocal warm-ups for the choir on Tuesday evening. What with the March Break school holiday week and a late winter snowstorm, we had just over 50% attendance. I’m not sure what sort of impression I made on the choristers. I’m usually a one or two finger “piano-poker,” so I can’t accompany the vocal exercises like the woman did last week. Personally, I don’t really like warm-ups: you know scales and the me-meh-mah-moh-moos. Just like modern car-starting advice—you turn on the engine, let it idle for about 30 seconds and then drive off slowly. That’s all you need to warm-up vocally I believe. Sing one or two songs, not too loudly, that are in a comfortable range for your voice. Then I would get down to the serious works of the evening.

One problem I discovered. I sit at the computer and stay pretty silent. I may chat with a colleague now and then. But at this warm-up session I had to talk loud enough to be heard in the small lecture hall that we practice in. I guess I should have warmed up my lecturing voice first as my singing wasn’t up to snuff for the rest of the evening.

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The xcopy command has been around since the ol' DOS days. Since Windows 95™ I’ve been using explorer to copy or move directories' of files. Today’s problem on a Windows 2000™ server was to copy some directories from one drive to another but preserve the permissions. However, just copying directories will inherit the permissions of the parent directory. I didn’t want to remove the old directories until I could confirm the web site and application worked solely from the new drive.

The solution I found was to use xcopy /O /T C:\dir X:\. This makes a tree of directories rooted at \dir on the X: drive with the same permissions as on C:. Next I could copy the subdirectories of C:\dir to X:\dir where they would inherit the xcopy'd permissions. If I had just copied C:\dir directly to X: using explorer then X:\dir would have inherited X:\'s permissions.

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I’ve been asked if we can support other browsers on the company website: specifically MSIE 5.2.3 on the Mac OS. I don’t own such a beast nor do any of my immediate colleagues so it would be difficult to test methinks. The logs report that 0.1% of the visitors use this OS/browser combination. So, for every 1,000 visitors with “standard” browsers I need to support that 1 person who has downloaded IE and installed it on his Mac? Yes, it is doable; however, I understand the CSS support is very quirky for that version of IE. However, this site seems to suggest that this browser should support most CSS specifications. I wonder where the problem is? I wonder if I can find a browser CSS test suite? Or will I have to make one based on our company’s web site?

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I’m using Quicktax, more because I’m lazy: it imports last year’s information. As I haven’t moved or been reborn that data stays the same. I started with my T4, RSP, charity donation slips, etc and it looked like I’d get a $4k refund. Then I added my wife’s T4 information—the refund was halved. I know Ontario tax credits (or lack thereof) are based on family income. Still, there’s my wife’s small business to account for and there’s lots of receipts to log. I keep saying I should log the receipts in the spreadsheet as we receive them but I always seem to leave it until March or early April of the following year. Maybe I’ll give it a push to try and get it done by the end of March.

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My son and daughter-in-law have gone off to a party out of town so we are looking after Cricket, their golden retriever. She has just turned one year old. This time we got a manual: The Bible of Cricket telling dog sitters how to care for her. I wish I had this sort of manual for people’s kids when I used to babysit them when I was a teenager.

Cricket just came up to visit me. She says hello!

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What do you write about when you can’t think of anything significant to write about? Perhaps it’s been a long week and I need some sleep. Or maybe today was like that Monty Python sketch when … absolutely nothing happened!

“Notes to self” today include the following:

• The registries and IIS configurations of nodes in a Windows cluster are different. This means your careful settings in the “master” node are “lost” when the cluster fails over to the other node. Naturally there are complicated Microsoft programs, scripts and incantations to try and overcome this. On the Unix side of things I would have just used rsync to synchronize various etc files.
• My wife and I were both born on a Saturday.
• I found OPCW, a simple one page calendar written for Windows 3.1. Nothing fancy, just a black and white calendar that fills the page and has some space to write in some stuff.
• I should look into the Text::Template Perl module for composing emails to the individual project leaders at work. I’m proud of my greater than 80% response rate. When I followed my predecessor’s example and sent an “Everyone” email with a GBSA the response was about 3%.

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On Tuesday mornings, “garbage day,” I collect the odd wine bottle or two from the neighbours' recycling bins. Last Tuesday I collected seven of the especially coveted bordeaux-type bottles—the long narrow ones with the dimple on the bottom. 16 of these fit in a plastic “milk” case without jamming: especially important once you’ve filled and labelled the bottles. I’m collecting these discards so I can make the next batch of wine before I have consumed 30 bottles or so of the present vintages, nor do I want to raid my wine cellar as yet.

My complaint is against three wine companies who use some non-water-soluble gummy substance to affix their labels. Not nice. I have to use mineral spirits to remove the gum once the paper has been scraped off. What are they protecting? You don’t store red wine at temperatures where condensation would be a problem and the label might come off. The other bottles had labels that slid right off with less than an hour’s soak in water.

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Parts of this seem to be from a reading at Audrey Hepburn’s funeral and other bits are found on lots of places on the Internet. This struck a sentimental chord in me when I got in an email. Naturally, I dedicate this to the most beautiful woman of all to me, my wife.

A little boy asked his mother, “Why are you crying?”

“Because I’m a woman,” she told him.

“I don’t understand,” he said.

His Mom just hugged him and said, “And you never will.”

Later the little boy asked his father, “Why does mother seem to cry for no reason?”

“All women cry for no reason,” was all his dad could say. The little boy grew up and became a man, still wondering why women cry.

Finally he put in a call to God. When God got on the phone, he asked, “God, why do women cry so easily?”

God said, “When I made the woman she had to be special. I made her shoulders strong enough to carry the weight of the world, yet gentle enough to give comfort. I gave her an inner strength to endure childbirth and the rejection that many times comes from her children.

“I gave her a hardness that allows her to keep going when everyone else gives up, and take care of her family through sickness and fatigue without complaining.

“I gave her the sensitivity to love her children under any and all circumstances, even when her child has hurt her very badly.

“I gave her strength to carry her husband through his faults and fashioned her from his rib to protect his heart.

“I gave her wisdom to know that a good husband never hurts his wife, but sometimes tests her strengths and her resolve to stand beside him unfalteringly.

“And finally, I gave her a tear to shed. This is hers exclusively to use whenever it is needed.”

“You see my son,” said God, “the beauty of a woman is not in the clothes she wears, the figure that she carries, or the way she combs her hair.

“The beauty of a woman must be seen in her eyes, because that is the doorway to her heart — the place where love resides.”

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I installed a web application on behalf of a colleague. It didn’t work. There was an old DLL loaded by IIS which needed to be unloaded before the new DLL could be used. Here are roughly the steps required:

1. Google around for possible solutions.
2. Solution found was to press the Unload button in the IIS properties for that web application.
3. Usual MS message about being sure you want to do this.
4. Oops. Now none of the instances of IIS work including the company Intranet website running on the same server. There’s a message on the web about some Server Error.
5. Try restarting IIS.
6. Now IIS fails over to other server. But at least the company Intranet website is up again. However my web app. doesn’t work because the drive where the home directory pointed to by the virtual directory was has failed over too.
7. Do something else for a while.
8. More googling. Have a look at Component Services. The “IIS Pool” is running.
9. Ask IT support person to show me how to fail back IIS to original server since this web application I was working on only runs on the one server.
10. Heave a sigh of relief because he didn’t check the Intranet site which still doesn’t work.
11. Find out that the DLL loading thing is supposed to start automatically. It doesn’t.
12. Found lots of errors about DCOM not starting in event log.
13. Hmmm. Why was the account IWAM_MACHINE disabled. Enabled the account so that IIS could start is “Pool” and do the DLL loading.
14. All the websites are now working, including the new one…finally.

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Since I was downtown at a seminar today, I had asked by son who works for Landscape Ontario, one of the co-sponsors, if he could get me a ticket. With guest pass in hand, I walked into a blooming spring at the Toronto Convention Centre. The gardens were pretty but I would have to agree with one comment I heard. The conference centre lighting, industrial Hg lights, don’t a sunny day make. Many of the flowers would have looked better au soleil. With the temperature reaching 18°C at one point it certainly felt like spring outside.

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I had installed a web app of asp scripts and a dll on behalf of a colleague. The opening login didn’t seem to work as no list of databases were displayed. I poked around the scripts and concluded that the ini file wasn’t being read. After a phone call and a couple of emails it was clear the “technical” guy (I hope he wasn’t the developer, too!) didn’t have a clue what the real problem was. He talked about ntfs permissions, missing entries in the ini file, etc. In a fit of inspiration I decided to try filemon on the web server and load the web page again. There it was in black and white: the dll was using the ini file from the directory of the old version of the program. This pointed to the fact that the program hadn’t been tested with two versions on the same box. I sent another email pointing out the ini file problem — we’ll see what the tech guy says about that.

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She passed me just as I had started my run from the GO station to chez moi. I was jogging slowly as I had been on the verge of headache most of the day. However, I couldn’t let her “get away” with it so I picked up the pace and trailed her by about 10 m. for about the next 1.5 km until she turned the corner. She was probably surprised that this old guy with knapsack could keep up. A couple of times I was catching up then she sped up again, never quite “getting away.” All that pounding and exercise did bring on the headache but a couple of Moitrin got rid of it at supper time. Geez am I tired though.

To that guy in the SUV whose back window I slapped: “Is it too much to ask a driver to stop before the pedestrian crossing when the light is red in your direction before you make a right turn? Oh, and could you look both ways, too.”

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He had counted on borrowing the van. Hah! The factors “why not” are too numerous to list here but include potential inclement weather on the drive back, his usual lack of sleep combined with one of the most boring highway drives in North America, no free parking, parking outside a university dorm next to an unsavoury part of town, zero maintenance and upkeep contribution, etc. Thus, we drove him and his girlfriend there Sunday evening and then my wife and I stayed at a hotel on the way back. After a good night’s rest, we drove the rest of way to Mississauga this morning. Added bonus: gas had dipped below 70¢.

I sat at the computer this afternoon and did some work while my wife went off on some errands. One particularly sad one was to attend the funeral visitation of the son-in-law of my in-laws' neighbour. He died of complications from a heart attack. Dead at 42 — about the same age as my “baby” brother!