WordPress version 2.7 has been released.

About eight months ago, when 2.51 was new, I reported a bug that had been giving me grief, a mishandling of the HTML <q> element. WordPress.org automatically set the target of fixing this bug by version 2.7 — which, frankly, to me seemed rather unambitious. It's one thing not to expect to fix a bug in the very next bug-fix release, quite another to put it off for two minor versions.

In any case, I've been looking forward to version 2.7. Now it's out… …and the bug is not fixed. In fact, I've learned that about two months ago, the target was changed to fixing the bug by version 2.9, another two minor versions away. And there seems no assurance that, about half-a-year from now, that target won't be reset to version 3.1.

I didn't get a chance to ride the bicycle that my father gave me. The vehicular gate to the parking area of the apartment complex in which I live was mysteriously disabled; and a few days later, on 25 November, exactly one thing was stolen — that bicycle. Whoever stole it came prepared with something that could cut through a heavy-duty security cable.

I learned of the theft on the morning of 26 November, as I was packing my car for a trip to visit my parents. The complex manager promised to review the video recorded by the security cameræ. Since the bicycle wasn't visible from the street and the thief or thieves were prepared with cable cutters, I'm pretty sure that the theft was by a party including someone who had been on the property earlier, and that said person or persons had disabled the gate. He, she, or they were probably attendant to the position of the security cameræ.

As unhappy as I was, I considered not travelling, but I knew that I would make my parents very sad if I didn't come. So I went ahead.

On top of ordinary reasons for visiting them, I had been asked to help them get their computers up-graded from Windows XP SPs 1 or 2 to SP3. Although SP3 installed without difficulty on my Windows partition, the installation aborted on each of their machines. Well, we have SP3 on their machines now, but the processes have been trips through mine-fields, with many explosions.

We ultimately resorted to formatting the principal hard drive of my father's desk-top computer, and installing everything from scratch except in-so-far as we have over-written much of the new contents of the Application Data folder with the old contents. It seems to be in reasonably good shape now.

Things went smoother with respect to my mother's lap-top computer, but (at this stage) the OS knows that the built-in sound card is some sort of audio device, but does not recognize it as a Playback or Recording device. In fact, the OS likewise cannot tell what sort of audio device a SoundBlaster PCMCIA card is. I've tried many things, and visited many sites looking for a fix, but have so far failed.

As I've fought with the computers, my mother has repeatedly acted as if my father has been pushing me too hard to solve the problems, while actually my father has at various stages pushed me to quit working the problems hours before I would normally want to stop. I greatly wish that neither would act this way.

Also making me unhappy is the reduced opportunity to talk with the Woman of Interest. My parents are Morning People, and operating on something like their schedule greatly reduces my window of opportunity to speak to her. Then, because I use a head-set, people don't have a good visual cue that I'm using the phone. People have a propensity to start talking to me without first listening to whether I'm in conversation. And, finally, a fair amount of my normal telephone interaction with the Woman of Interest involves one or both of us being relatively quiet for extended periods. (We have unlimited connection time within the Sprint PCS network,[1] and so leave the connection in place and interact as if separated by a room partition.)

My brother and his long-time girl-friend also came for Thanksgiving, but left on the week-end. Yester-day, they got a quick civil marriage. Later, they will have a bigger ceremony to which they can invite friends and family. What precipitated the marriage seems to have been that my brother was offered a job in Tucson shortly after being laid-off from his job in Austin. I think that his girl-friend reälized that she should seal-the-deal. (Yes, she seems to have been the one most reluctant to commit.) My parents and I really like her.

With my brother moving to Tucson, my father is now speaking wishfully of my moving here as well. But he does understand that I would much rather live in or near the forests of the Pacific Northwest than in the Arizona desert.

Yester-day, my cousin Lyn (a really nice guy, who suffered some sort of in utero cerebral damage) came to visit my mother. I tagged along as they ran errands yester-day, and to-day as they went to Sweetwater Wetlands and to Tohono Chul Park.

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[1] Actually, we're limited to 44640 minutes per month (or sometimes as few as 40320 minutes). Perhaps not enough if one loves eight days a week.

I wonder just how long it's going to take the typical Obama supporter to move on from Denial to Anger…

…or if, indeed, they ever will. Much of politics has a sort of tribalism to it, under which people care far less about policies than they do about whether the coälition with whom they have identified themselves is in power. My friend Ronald once noted that, in some political factions, a willingness to turn on a dime when it comes to doctrine is often seen as the true test of merit.

Yester-day, I installed version 8.11 of the ATI Catalyst™ Linux Graphics Driver on my RHEL 5.2 system. When I later booted to Linux after restarting the computer, the GUI was grossly dysfunctional. What it displayed was little more than a few simple rectangles — no text, no icons, an a largish square for the mouse-cursor.

It took me some time to get at a solution, but I present it here for the sake of anyone in a similar fix.

The problem seems to have been with /etc/X11/xorg.conf, configured for my system when it was running an earlier version of the software, and simply renaming this file is apparently sufficient to resolve the problem (though initially I reinstalled version 8.10 of the driver, and version 8.11 seemed not to have a problem with the version of /etc/X11/xorg.conf created anew by version 8.10).

Because the GUI wasn't really usable, I booted an RHEL installation CD, entering

linux rescue text

at the boot: prompt; this gave me a Linux CLI session that could access the Linux partition on the HD. I had the Linux partition mounted as /mnt/sysimage; that put xorg.conf at /mnt/sysimage/etc/X11/xorg.conf, whence it could be mv'd.

Yester-day, I finished reading The Pig Did It, by Joseph Caldwell. Although it has some genuinely amusing movements and clever notions, it was on the whole a disappointment.

The book rests upon the author's recognition of how an obsessive desire to be loved by some particular person is often mistaken for romantic love of that person, but really is no such thing. However, the author, in turn, appears to have confused that recognition for a positive understanding of love, whereäs he displays no such thing, in a book which is about love.

In an interview, Caldwell said

Stories really reveal… people. I mean, even if you're telling a tale, uh, what you do is that it tells about people, and people can identify with other people. Y'know, they can say Oh yes, I have feelings like that, Oh yes, I'm capable of that, Oh yes, I've done that, or Oh yes, I wish I'd done that, and that's what, uh, keeps somebody reading, because they're… when we read, we're really reading about ourselves. …to a great degree. …if it's any good at all. Because we recognize, in the characters, aspects of ourselves that are set down, possibly, or one hopes, with a, uh, perhaps a clarity or with an interest that hadn't occurred to the reader about himself, before that.

I think that he's at the least largely correct here. Well, the central character is, by-and-large, an ineffectual ninny. It's a bit of a stretch to imagine the reader saying Oh yes, I wish I'd done that!, and those who are saying Oh yes, I'm capable of that! or Oh yes, I've done that! either imagine themselves to be ineffectual ninnies or lack even the efficacy to recognize a ninny.

Returning to the matter of love, another character ultimately falls in love with this protagonist, but there's no explanation as to why. He does a poor job of most of the tasks to which he has been appointed, literally stinks most or all of the time that he is in her presence, and treats her system of values as bizarre (which, indeed, it seems to be).

For his part, he has been falling for her, even as he wrestles with concern that she might have committed a homicide, which homicide might have been some act of jealous rage. A moral of the story seems to be that when one gives one's heart to another — to any other — one accepts a risk that this other person might in fact be a murderer. Well, true; but ordinarily that giving of one's heart is based on so firm a presumption that the other person is not some wanton killer that the presumption, like that of the ground not swallowing one up, isn't even conscious; and without that presumption one wouldn't fall in love.

Love indeed isn't the same thing as a desire to be loved; but it also isn't some intrinsically mysterious attraction. It's nearly tautological that love is about personal attributes that one values, though one may not recognize oneself holding those values and imputing those attributes to an object of one's affections, and though one may be terribly mistaken in that imputation.

Sometime this morning, I awoke very thirsty. I opened-up a bottle of tea that I had by my bed, and gulped some down. My lower esophageal sphincter — the valve between the esophagus and the stomach — suddenly started spasming, and hurt as if I had swallowed something relatively large and inelastic. I don't recall previously having that experience from drinking liquid (and tepid liquid at that).

At this point, several hours later, I'm still aware of a low-level discomfort there. (And it truly hurts when I laugh.) I think of food warily.

I'm planning to visit my parents in Tucson, for Thanksgiving, and that argues against getting a mouse until I have returned, since it would be best if the mouse and I had a well-established relationship before I take it on trips of any length. None-the-less, I went to La Jolla yester-day evening, to take a look at a mouse. He wasn't, in any case, what I really want, in part because he looks fully adult, and I'd like to get a juvenile.

The trip wasn't a loss, as I stopped at the World Market site in La Jolla Village Square, and found red stacking coffee cups and stacking large mugs that match the stacking espresso cups of the Woman of Interest. (Some of the sets of large mugs were still in their shipping boxes, and a young woman at the store was kind enough to find for me a set of the coffee cups likewise still packed.)

I also found various seasonal rubber ducks, the best of which had a kippah and Chanukah vestments. I got one for a neighbor who has an extensive collection of rubber ducks.

Much of my time of late has been going into my paper on operationalizing a model of preference in which strict preference and indifference don't provide a total ordering.

Quite a while ago, I reälized very precisely what sort of system the assumptions would have to imply; I mistakenly presumed that I would relatively quickly identify sufficient assumptions (beyond those already recognized). But, at this point, I have a sufficient assemblage, each member of which is, taken by itself, at least passably acceptable. Jointly, however, there's an issue of factoring.

The paper derives its results from three sets of propositions. The first and second sets seem perfectly fine to me, and I don't expect them to provoke much dispute. The third set are more ad hoc. For the purposes of the paper they function as axiomata, but some or all of them would more ideally be derived from deeper principles (the pursuit of which, however, would be mostly a distraction from my goals).

It's amongst this last set of propositions that the factoring problem exists. One of them used to play an important rôle; right now it's doing nothing but occupying space. I'd remove it, except that I suspect that, in conjunction with the very principle that seemed to make it superfluous, it renders redundant another principle which feels even more ad hoc.

At the same time, I am now wrestling with what sort of discussion to provide after presenting the theoremata. I just don't seem to be in much of a frame-of-mind to ruminate.

A 4.1 'quake hit at 33.498°N 116.865°W, at 12:35:42 UTC. I felt it here in Hillcrest, and started checking the USGS SoCal 'quake map, fearing that a population center had been hit by something big. Fortunately, the 'quake wasn't all that strong, and the population density at the surface above the epicenter was very low (even before the 'quake).

[Up-Date (2008:11/21): I was asleep when a 5.0 'quake hit Baja Calfornia yester-day, and don't recall feeling it.]