On Wednesday, while waiting at IAH between flights, I spoke with a representative from GeekAvailable.com about repair of my note-book computer. The rep said that turn-around time would typically be about 72 hours, allowing for order and receipt of parts.

I took my computer to them on Thursday morning. On Saturday after-noon, a technician (the same fellow with whom I had spoken on Wednesday) told me that he believed that a voltage inverter had failed, and that he had ordered a replacement on Thursday or on Friday. (My computer has a large screen with an odd aspect ratio — 1920×1200 — so it's no surprise that this part would require a special order.)

(It's not good policy for them to order such a part without my clearance to actually effect the repair, but in this case I would have given my okay.)

I'm hoping, then, to have my note-book computer back to-morrow or on Tuesday.

While I await the return of that computer, I am using Bessie, a desktop computer that I maintain as a Win9x legacy machine.

As such, Bessie has only 512MB of RAM — Win9x actually becomes more dysfunctional if there is more RAM than that installed, though Win9x can handle GBs of virtual memory. But, with that memory constraint and with Windows' otherwise poor memory management, applications frequently hang or crash or otherwise do intensely annoying things. I really need to clean-up Bessie's file system and free-up a drive so that I can alternately boot Linux on it.

And Bessie connects to the 'Net at noticeably lower speed, probably because of crummy telephone wiring to the computer room.

So I am not doing nearly as much on-line as I otherwise would.

(The Woman of Interest has been kind enough to manage my principal character in the Kingdom of Loathing since my return to San Diego.)

My visit to the Woman of Interest was timed to coïncide with my birthday. That timing was at her suggestion, as I long ago stopped taking much note of my birthdays.

Thursday, 8 May, and Wednesday, 14 May, were largely given-over to travel. Most our time together was spent doing every-day sorts of things, in part because there was a fair amount of rain during my visit. But I didn't view the trip as a sort of vacation, demanding entertainments; I viewed it as a time to be with her.

On my birthday itself, the 9th, she took me to FriSatSun, a restaurant in Philadelphia, noted for excellent food, good service, and questionable décor.

On Monday night, she took me to the police department at which she works, where I met her favorite sergeant and one of the other dispatchers. Unfortunately, she didn't reälize that one of the officers who had wanted to meet me was on duty that night, though away from the station, so there was a later protest lodged by telephone.

On Tuesday, we went to the Brandywine River Museum, in Chadds Ford, to see works by Pyle, N.C. Wyeth, Parrish, and various other artists. (Only two pieces by Parrish were on display.)

While we were there, we discovered that Wyeth's home and studio were open for tour, and we took advantage of that. In fact, the tour of the studio proved to be the best part of the visit for each of us (in spite of a few boors also taking the tour). The paintings and other work of the Brandywine School are available many places in high quality reproduction, but the studio was where Wyeth had done much of his work. His tools are still or again there.

I don't mean to slight the Museum, though. It was great to see so many paintings by Wyeth and by Pyle.

After we left the Brandywine River Valley, we went to the Frida Kahlo exhibition at Philadelphia Museum of Art, because the Woman of Interest is an admirer of Kahlo's work, and the paintings on exhibit aren't usually collected into one place.

Unfortunately, we discovered that the Museum was to close in less than 40 minutes. But the Woman of Interest feared that this would be her last chance to see the exhibit; the exhibition was to end to-day, and she is under constant threat of being called into work early if another dispatcher is unavailable.

So we made a sort of dash, skipping photographs of Kahlo from various times and places, to look only at the paintings themselves, and splitting-up individually to deal with sheeple and allocate viewing time. In the gift shop, the Woman of Interest bought an exhibit catalogue, largely so that she could view the photographs at her leisure.

The Infamous Beet Weasel did less biting per unit time than he had during my previous visits. He seems to be growing more sedate with age. He still likes to stand on the Woman of Interest when she is trying to sleep, and he has taken to doing the same to me (though not so much, as he loves her more).

Uh, er….

At the end of April, I reported

A few years ago, I got it into my head to collect working Mannheim slide-rule tie-clips. I believe that, as of to-day, I have secured at least one complete exemplar of every variety of such that was made for resale.

Yester-day, the clip whose acquisition I was celebrating arrived. It is of a somewhat different variety than any of my previous acquisitions, which is in-and-of-itself a good thing. But I had used the word complete advisedly. I have a slide-rule tie-clip that is missing the indicator (the clear, sliding thing used to check just how the graduated pieces line-up) with which it was originally sold. I was expecting a complete exemplar of the same variety. Instead, I have one that is altogether new to my collection.

So there is at least one sort of which I continue to lack a satisfactory example.

Last Friday or Saturday, my mother asked me qua economist whether we were in a recession.

I carefully explained to her that the standard formal definition of recession is two or more consecutive quarters of over-all economic contraction. So, as I explained, if I said that we were in a recession then I would be saying that it had contracted in the first quarter of 2008 and would contract in the second quarter, or that it would contract both in the second quarter and in the third quarter.

After that careful prefacing, I told her that I thought that we were in a recession, but that this had to be seen as a guess.

Well, the data have since been reported for the first quarter of 2007, and apparently the economy did not contract, though its annualized growth rate was a sad .6%. My guess is in danger of being falsified, if the growth rate manages to stay at-or-above zero in the present quarter, or if things pull back above zero in the next quarter. Unsurprisingly, I'd be pleased if the data proved me wrong.

In that first quarter, there were those who were mocked for refusing to concede that the economy was in recession. The data demonstrate that it was wrong to mock them. Not that any apologies will be made by those who did the mocking, or even that they will be held to task by other commentators in their circles.

Mind you that a small decline wouldn't have legitimized the mocking. What is wrong, first and foremost, is too much certitude. And then that wrong is compounded by attacking those who are duly cautious.

Decades ago, before the typical scientist or engineer had a hand-held, electronic calculator, they used slide rules. And, at some point, jewelers had the thought of making men's jewelry — tie-clips, cuff-links, and what-not — designed to look like slide rules. Well, actually, several designs didn't just look like slide rules; they were slide rules, not very precise, but able to make actual calculations.

A few years ago, I got it into my head to collect working Mannheim slide-rule tie-clips. I believe that, as of to-day, I have secured at least one complete exemplar of every variety of such that was made for resale. You can see some of these sorts included in the Jewelry Slide Rule Archive of Sphere Research's Slide Rule Universe The one sort of working Mannheim slide-rule tie-clip of which I do not have an exemplar was not made for resale, but was given to staff at K&E (an example is in the aforementioned archive). It is sufficiently rare that I have little expectation of getting one.

(BTW, some time ago, the Woman of Interest gave to me a jewelry box specifically so that I would have one suitable for storing and displaying my collection.)

[Addendum (2009:09/23): On 6 May 2008, I retracted this claim, as the slide-ruler tie-clip that I received was actually somewhat different from those that I had seen before (though I have since seen more like it). On 20 July 2009, I made the claim again, and have not felt a need to again withdraw it.]

Best practice in HTML is to put quotations into Q[uotation] elements, so that the mark-up looks like this:

Sam growled <q>I asked him, and he said <q>I swear on me mother's grave!</q></q>

rather than like this:

Sam growled “I asked him, and he said ‘I swear on me mother's grave!’”

Note that it is possible to have one Q[uotation] element inside of another — a good style-sheet will handle that.

Unfortunately, the WordPress editor seems to have been written by a programmer who believes that Q[uotation] elements must not nest, and the editor tries to fix things when it encounters nesting, by closing the outer element when it comes to the inner element. In the case of my previous entry, it then discarded the original closing </q> tag of the outer element, but (who knows why?) added an extra </div> at the end of the entry. The appearance of the whole page went to H_ll.

I fixed things by by-passing the WordPress software, and editing the 'blog's underlying dB with phpMyAdmin.

I've filed a bug report.

(I still need to arrive at a good specification of the list-bug that plagues my entry on installing Open Office.)

The BBC WWWebsite has a story with the headline Dutch bill to ban magic mushrooms. My first-pass parsing of that headline took magic as a noun and mushrooms as a third-person singular active indicative verb.

My LiveJournal account has effectively been purged. As of yester-day morning, I can no longer log-in with it. The diagnostic says

The database is temporarily in read-only mode, so creating new login sessions is temporarily down. Please try again later.

and the account is not yet explicitly declared as purged; but it has been removed from the Friends lists of accounts that had beFriended it, and I deleted the account on the morning of 16 February, which would be 61 days before I was unable to log-in. (Though one is warned that the account will be purged after 30 days, present practice is that it will be purged after 60 days.)

When last I looked, the user-name had not been listed as again available.

A big box o' books was left for me in the apartment complex office yester-day; I took possession of it this morning. It only contained 6 books, but some of the books themselves were large. And heavy.

The box was open and ruptured when I got it. I don't know just where that happened, though I suspect it was after it had left the local post office. The books themselves were all in fine shape (suggesting that the box had not long been compromised), and there had been an attempt to reseal the box with a few strips of ordinary cellophane adhesive tape. But the complex manager was on the phone when I got the package.

Anyway, the books themselves were concerned with comic strips, electrical circuit analysis, polymer clay, and photographing objets d'art, so the manager probably won't think less of me for her having caught a glimpse of my purchasing habits.

One of the books had been reported by the vendor (Edward R. Hamilton) as shop-worn, but was not. I take it that the shipment that he'd received contained shop-worn copies, but that I got a lucky draw.

While I was apparently distracted by shiny objects, Verizon Communications, Inc., spun-off its landline operations in Maine, New Hamsphire, and Vermont as Northern New England Spinco Inc., which was on the same day merged with FairPoint Communications, a firm previously noted for holding various small, rural local telephone operating companies.

I have received a tiny amount of stock, and a tiny check in lieu of a fractional share. They have suggested that I might sell them the shares. Previously, Verizon spun-off Idearc Media Corp., and likewise sent a small check and a tiny number of shares. They actively encouraged me to sell-back the shares, but I decided to be difficult. I don't plan to sell-back the FairPoint shares either.

It is interesting to see Verizon, which once aggressively absorbed other telephone companies, now spinning-off its landline operations in three states. When SBC Communications bought the remains of AT&T, and then took the name AT&T for itself, the media and others creäted the impression that the original AT&T, broken apart in the '80s, had been reässembled. (The Wikipedia article on the new AT&T uses a diagram designed as if to foster this misimpression.) In fact, some of the original RBOCs were not absorbed by SBC / AT&T, being instead held by Verizon and by Qwest Communications International, Inc. And now this consolidation into three parts has become a division into four parts.