I think it’s an encouraging sign about the quality of Star Trek: Enterprise‘s fourth season that I’ve gotten interested enough in the show to start reading rec.arts.startrek.current again. It’s been at least five years, maybe more, since I last read that newsgroup.

Interesting side-note: I discovered just now that I’m still subscribed to rec.arts.startrek.info. I probably left myself subscribed to it when I stopped reading the others, since it was low-traffic and moderated. You can gauge how even lower the traffic has become by the fact that until I checked, I had no idea I was still subscribed to it. It turns out the last post was on January 1st, 2002.

I just watched the Ebert & Roeper review of Christmas with the Kranks, the movie based on John Grisham’s Skipping Christmas. I haven’t seen the movie, but Ebert and Roeper both hated it (“big big big thumbs down down down”). What I found interesting is that many of their complaints against the movie were exactly the reasons Laura and I didn’t like the book when we read it two years ago.

I’ve still got the book on my shelf, because I keep meaning to re-read it. Last time it came up, Suzanne (who didn’t like it either) suggested that maybe it was supposed to be a farce, and I kept meaning to read it again to see it was better that way. From what I’ve seen of Christmas with the Kranks, it’s definitely a comedy, but of the slapstick variety, rather than attempting any broader social commentary. Either that, or the movie did such a poor job of conveying it that neither Ebert or Roeper got it.

I got a strange phone call earlier that I just now think I understand. I answered the phone, and the fellow on the other end claimed to be my mailman. He said he had lost the key to the front door, and needed to be let in so he could deliver the mail. This confused the heck out of me, since our mailboxes are outdoors. I thought maybe he meant the door on the back that he opens to put in all the mail, but I wouldn’t have the key to that! I told him I didn’t understand what he wanted, and he repeated several times that he was my mailman and needed to be let in the front door. I checked outside, just in case, but there was no one there. I considered whether this could possibly be some sort of confidence scam or burglary tactic, but that didn’t make any sense either, so I said he must have the wrong number, and hung up.

I think I get it now: Our phone number is the same one that Laura had in her old apartment, and I think she’s never been taken off the security system there. That building does keep the mailboxes inside the (locked) lobby, so I think we must have gotten called by that building’s mailman, who probably picked a random apartment to call, and got me instead, three blocks away.

Ever since I disabled comments due to unmanageable spam a few weeks ago, I’ve been looking for a solution. The latest versions of MT-Blacklist support comment moderation, but require Movable Type 3, and I’ve written before about how I don’t want to upgrade.

So instead I’ve migrated to WordPress. Its MT importer worked fairly well, although I did have to mess with a few entries due to differences in the auto-formatters. I had been using a whole slew of MT plugins, but it turns out that most of them either were built in to WordPress, had easily-found replacements on the WordPress Wiki, or turned out not to be something I cared all that about in the end. Ironically, the latter category included plugins I spent a long time writing, like threaded comments. The only real code I had to write was a WordPress version of MTResolveURLs. Overall, I’m fairly impressed with WordPress as a piece of software, although the documentation is almost nonexistent, especially compared with Movable Type’s excellent documentation.

Admittedly, I haven’t spent as much time customizing the look and feel of WordPress. Mostly, I took a stylesheet I found online and changed it some, and then hacked bits of the WordPress PHP files to move some things around. I’m fairly pleased with the look so far, but I’ll probably tweak things a bit over the next few weeks.

At any rate, things seem to be mostly working. I’ve skimmed through most of the old entries and they look okay. Since comments are now active, go ahead and leave one if something isn’t quite right…

I’ve been playing the Ford Racing 2 demo the past few days. It’s been very frustrating; I’ve been very frustrated at the steering control on this game, and all the other car driving games I’ve tried recently. It’s been making me long for 1998, when I spent many long and happy hours playing Interstate ’76 on a 133 Mhz Pentium.

It occurred to me just now that maybe the problem wasn’t the games or the platform, but the fact that I’ve been trying to play these games using a PowerBook keyboard, and back then it was an original Microsoft SideWinder Force Feedback Pro joystick—that was a great joystick, but had serious heat and power issues; it had a separate AC adapter, and the joystick had a fan louder than any hardware I’ve owned since. It eventually broke, after the onboard electronics literally melted.

So on the theory that maybe an analog control would help my steering control, I went over to the drawer and pulled out a SideWinder Game Pad Pro and plugged it into the USB port on the PowerBook. Beat both of the demo levels on the first try.

I’m tempted to take the SideWinder Force Feedback 2 or SideWinder Force Feedback Wheel out of the closet and give them a whirl, but full-size game controllers don’t work well when you’re lying on the couch—the racing wheel needs to be clamped to a table—which is why they’re in the closet in the first place. It is a little disappointing to find out that I’m probably not going to find a good racing game without using a decent controller. I like to play games on the bus, and there really isn’t room to whip out a gamepad.

As a postscript, I can’t find any indication on Microsoft‘s Web site that they still make game hardware. If that’s true, I think it’s a real shame; I haven’t shopped for them in a few years, but the SideWinder line have been by far the best Microsoft products I’ve owned.

The other day, I happened upon Yahoo! Local, which lets you “find businesses and services near you.” I’m not quite sure how or why it’s a different site than Yahoo! Yellow Pages, which has much the same purpose, but I digress: I was looking for nearby restaurants. According to the service, there are 2530 businesses categorized as “Restaurants” within 10 miles of where I live. I had them sorted by distance, and had read through the listings. After the 150th—the Gelato Classico on Castro Street, 1.23 miles away—I had stopped.

Tonight, on my way to La Costena to pick up some burritos¹, I realized I hadn’t seen it on the list. Sure enough, it’s at number 170, just over 1.3 miles away. This is a place I think of as very close by, and it’s not even in the closest² 150 restaurants. I can only conclude that there are a whole heck of a lot of places to eat nearby.

Prior to George H. W. Bush in 1988, the previous Vice President of the United States to be elected to the Presidency while serving as the Vice President was Martin Van Buren in 1836. Before that, Thomas Jefferson was elected in 1800 and John Adams in 1796.

Five other Vice Presidents have been elected President, but four of them (Roosevelt, Coolidge, Truman and Johnson) succeeded to the Presidency first, and Richard Nixon was not elected until eight years after serving as Vice President.

It does beg the question of why the parties continue to nominate the Vice President. In the past fifty years, Bush is the only one to have won: Nixon lost in 1960, Humphrey lost in 1968, Mondale lost in 1980 and Gore lost in 2000. The Vice President plays a much larger role in politics than he used to, but the story is quite different prior to World War II.

The fate of the Vice Presidents of earlier Presidents who retired at the end of their last term (as opposed to dying, or losing re-nomination or re-election):

• Truman (1952): Alben Barkley lost the nomination to Adlai Stevenson.
• Coolidge (1928): Charles Dawes did not seek the Presidency.
• Wilson (1920): Thomas Marshall (who looks an awful lot like William H. Macy in this picture) did not seek the Presidency.
• Roosevelt (1908): Charles Fairbanks unsuccessfully sought the nomination in 1916, but not in 1908.
• Cleveland (1896): Adlai Stevenson (no, not that one, his grandfather) did not seek the Presidency, but did run for Vice President again in 1900.
• Hayes (1880): William Wheeler retired along with Hayes in 1881.
• Grant (1876): Henry Wilson died in 1875; there was no Vice President when Grant’s second term ended in 1877.
• Buchanan (1856): Aha! John Breckinridge ran for President, but lost to Abraham Lincoln.
• Polk (1848): George Dallas did not seek the Presidency.
• Johnson (1836): Martin Van Buren was nominated and won. Last time until 1988.
• Monroe (1824): Daniel Tompkins did not seek the Presidency.
• Madison (1816): Elbridge Gerry died in 1814; there was no Vice President at the end of Madison’s term.
• Jefferson (1808): George Clinton did not run for President in 1808, although he did serve as Vice President again in 1809 under James Madison, until his death in 1812.

Prior to that, we have Adams and Jefferson, who did run and win. However, between the 12th Amendment (1804) and the 22nd (1951), only two of the eleven eligible (not counting the two deceased) Vice Presidents were nominated; only one won. Since then, every single incumbent Vice President has been nominated, but only one has won.