Last week, I accidentally mistook the digital camera’s USB cable for my Palm’s travel charger, and so now I have no way to charge my PDA. Both the cradle and the travel charger are packed in boxes, either still on the truck or in a storage warehouse somewhere. Either way, I won’t see them for weeks. This is unfortunate, as my Palm was low on battery before we left, and now refuses to turn on entirely.

It seemed like it should be simple enough to purchase a replacement charger, but it seems that stores no longer carry parts for the Palm V. I’ve visited a myriad of computer and electronics stores, but all I can find are power adapters for the “Palm Universal Connector” on the newer Palm models. A salesperson at Fry’s claimed that the Palm V-specific products were discontinued two months ago. I’m not sure if a Fry’s salesperson is a particularly reliable source, but they certainly didn’t have any in the aisles, and the Palm Store doesn’t list them either.

I’m guessing there are still some third-party chargers available from online stores, and I could probably get a real Palm V cradle on eBay, but at this point I’m not sure if it’s worth it. My Palm’s memory is almost certainly gone by this point, so I wouldn’t have any access to my contacts, schedules, games, etc… until the movers show up with my iMac (which has the HotSynced backup). So maybe I should just go handheld-less for the next few weeks. Or take this as an omen that it’s time for a brand-new Tungsten.

I just got back from a trip to the local Office Depot to buy some CD-Rs so I can back up data for the upcoming move. The total came to $8.60. I handed the cashier a $20 bill. What followed was one of the more entertaining checkout scenes I have ever witnessed. I was being attended by a trainee, although an experienced employee was supervising her. The trainee accidentally hit the “enter” button on the register instead of the “$20” button, and so the register assumed I had paid the exact amount, and did not compute the change. The supervisor knew exactly what to do: “Just give him the change. It’s $14.40.”

Those of you playing along at home will realize, as did the trainee, that her math was a little suspect. “No, I think it’s $13.40,” she said. The supervisor got a calculator. Not believing its answer, she got out a piece of paper and pencil. Finally, after the calculator had given the same answer about three times, they decided to accept its wisdom, and the trainee counted out $11.60. At this point, they had to call over the manager to re-open the cash drawer so they could exchange one of the quarters for a nickel.

I shudder to think what would have happened were there long division involved.

From The Big Sleep, by Raymond Chandler:

Then it was really hot. The air was thick, wet, steamy and larded with the cloying smell of tropical orchids in bloom. The glass walls and roof were heavily misted and big drops of moisture splashed down on the plants….I stood up and peeled off my coat and got a handkerchief out and mopped my face and neck and the backs of my wrists. St. Louis in August had nothing on that place.

I first read that a little over a year ago, a few months before I was about to move to St. Louis. The fact that I would soon be in the place (and month) that Chandler had chosen to compare on its heat and humidity scared me. A lot.

I’ve grown accustomed to St. Louis weather now at least a dozen times. I never stay acclimated for long. As Laura’s father put it the other day, “if you don’t like the weather in St. Louis, just wait a little while.” The unfortunate corollary is that if you do like the weather in St. Louis, it won’t last long. I grew up on the San Francisco coast, where it is permanently 65&#176 and cloudy. It’s not so much the extreme temperatures I can’t stand so much as that my body reacts very poorly to change of climate.

Today’s example: We went out for dinner. All day, up to and including when we went into the restaurant, it had been warm and sunny. The sky was blue^† and it was a relatively nice day. I was wearing a thin T-shirt. Half an hour later, when we emerged from the restaurant, the sky was gray, and the air was filled with raindrops the size of small poodles. To this moment, I have no idea where the rain came from. Laura claims this is normal, but it’s completely against my idea of how rain works. Where I come from, if it’s going to rain, the sky clouds over, it gets dark, it gets misty, begins to drizzle, and eventually raindrops appear. You’ve got at least three or four hours notice.

Laura says the rain was inevitable given the humidity today. I guess the theory is that the air fills up with water, and eventually the water forms drops and then falls on you and makes you wet? I guess I can understand that, but it still doesn’t seem right. Although I’m sad to be leaving St. Louis, I am a little bit glad not to have to spend a whole summer here.

According to iTunes, I’ve played this song 72 times since I bought it on Friday. It lists only three songs I’ve listened to more often, and I’ve had those since iTunes 3 introduced the listen count feature last July. Not only that, but I can still hear the lyrics. That’s pretty unusual for me: After a half-dozen listens in a row, my brain usually begins to filter out a song, so that even if I concentrate, I can no longer hold on to the words for more than a few phrases. I’ve only had Poodle Hat for a few weeks, for example, and I already can no longer hear the words to most of the tracks. This is especially annoying for artists like Weird Al, whose main attraction is the lyrics.

This is the second song I’ve bought from the iTunes Music Store. What’s worth telling about this story (the first song was one I’d heard part of on the radio, and bought so I could hear the whole thing; it turns out I don’t actually like it that much) is that I’d never heard of this song, or even the album, before I found it on the Music Store. I like Gordon Lightfoot, of course, and I was looking at his albums because of that. I found this song, however, entirely by looking through the album listings and listening to the 30-second previews. I liked what I heard on this song well enough to pay 99¢ for it, and it seems to have worked out pretty well. I’m pleased.

Since we’re leaving at the end of the month, Laura and I have been spending the past few weeks doing all the things that we’ve been meaning to do in St. Louis since we got here. Last night, we went to Sonic Drive-In. This is, admittedly, not an attraction particular to St. Louis, but they don’t have them in the Bay Area, and I’ve been wanting to try it ever since I first saw one while driving through Texas last summer. I suspected that the experience and the food would not live up to the expectation, and I was right. I was especially amused by the limeade: “Made with real limes” apparently means “artificially-flavored citrus soda to which we toss in a few hunks of real lime to satisfy truth-in-advertising laws without actually adding any real lime juice.”

Today, we were going to the zoo or perhaps go biking again, or visit Six Flags or the Transportation Museum. All of which require only that it not rain. Of course, it is raining. Bah.

Well, it’s official. I just checked my online bank balance, and my credit card balance is $43.75 more than I have in my checking and savings accounts combined. It’s a good thing I’m starting a new job soon.

(To be fair, most of what I owe on my credit card is expenses I incurred when interviewing at Apple, which hopefully they will soon reimburse me for.)

Sun today introduced new rack-mounted servers. Nothing new here, except that they use Intel Pentium chips and run Linux (you can also get them with Solaris x86).

A Slashdot reader made this comment, which I think sums up one possible interpretation very well:

I hope Sun notices the smoldering carcass of Silicon Graphics on the side of the road they are now traveling down.

Personally, I’m willing to give Sun the benefit of the doubt. SGI had managed to lose the high-end graphics/server market, had let the performance of their MIPS chips lag, and they were not only switching to x86 but trying break into a new market. Also, they got into bed with Microsoft, which in retrospect was a very bad idea. If Sun starts shipping Windows 2003 Server with these new Sun Fires instead of Linux, we’ll know it’s time to start selling Sun stock.

I suspect Sun’s motivation here is to keep their existing customers from buying cheaper Linux/x86 servers from Dell or IBM. By letting them purchase those same cheap x86 servers from Sun, they keep those customers from looking elsewhere when they need to buy the big, expensive, big iron servers that Sun’s real profit margin comes from. If that’s what Sun’s aiming at, I think it makes sense. On the other hand, if Sun sees Dell, et al, making piles of money selling cheap rack-mounted x86 hardware and wants a piece of it, they’re doomed.

I’ve been remembering lately something Brian said about five years ago: that within five years, all of the commercial Unix vendors would be shipping Linux instead of their proprietary operating systems, with the possible exception of Sun and Solaris. At the time, I thought he was nuts. I mean, sure, Linux was making some inroads with beige-box PC hardware, but I couldn’t imagine any of the big workstation and server companies giving up their proprietary OSes. But have you seen many new systems running HP-UX recently? IRIX? AIX? Tru64? UnixWare? BSD/OS? I didn’t think so.

Three hours, four record stores, two busses and one traffic ticket later, I’ve got it.

In installing some extensions to Mozilla Firebird, I’ve been given a perfect example of why buttons in dialog boxes should always be verbs:

Link Toolbar: “Do you wish to install Link Toolbar to you (sic) profile? This will mean it does not need reinstalling when you update your browser. (Click cancel if you want Link Toolbar installing to the main browser directory)”

Popup ALT Attribute: “Do you want this package to be installed for all users? (Administrator permissions required)”

Both dialogs displayed “OK” and “Cancel” buttons, and both were asking the exact same question (did I want the extension installed to my user profile or the application directory). The answers, however, were different. Suffice it to say, I installed at least one of them to the wrong place.

Mozilla Firebird 0.6 was released today. One of the new features is an official Mac OS X version (there have been unofficial builds of Phoenix floating around for a while). The release notes promise that “it’s still quite rough around the edges,” and this is definitely true. So I will avoid commenting on problems or glitches in the Mac OS X version for another few releases (and I will continue to use Safari and/or Camino).

One thing amuses me, though: The context menu for the Firebird toolbar icons give you an option to customize the toolbars, with a dialog very similar to Mac OS X’s native toolbar support (e.g., Cocoa’s NSToolbar). In fact, Firebird even goes to some trouble to simulate a sheet. Except on Mac OS X, where the toolbar customization window appears just like any other document window, complete with title bar. Mac OS X, of course, is the only OS that has native sheet support, and what no doubt inspired the dialog’s appearance on other platforms. I find this a little ironic.

Well, my signed offer letter is now sitting in a FedEx drop box, so I guess my mind is pretty much made up: on June 23, I will begin employment at Apple Computer, Inc. I’ll be working for the same “sooper-s3kr1t” group as Eric. I guess this makes him two for three.

I’m looking forward to moving back to the Bay Area, although I’ll miss St. Louis, and I still regret that in nine months I was never able to find full-time employment here as a software developer. It’s more than a little depressing.

According to Rodents of the World, by David Alderton, “young capybaras are miniatures of their parents, able to follow their mother and graze grass almost as soon as they are born.” (p. 74) So I’m thinking it’d be fun to give someone an infant capybara and tell them “Here, I got you this guinea pig as a pet.”

Although the capybara weighs only three pounds at birth, they are the largest living species of rodent, and an adult weighs over 150 pounds. Imagine your victim’s surprise when their “guinea pig” grows and grows and grows, to over four feet in length!

My laptop is broken again. Yes, I dropped it. I guess technically, since I was ten feet away at the time, it fell. But I was the one who left it sitting so precariously, so I take full responsibility.

It landed on its “back”, and the AC adapter’s plug bore the brunt of the impact, which it kindly transferred to the laptop’s power socket, which is now only barely connected to the motherboard (that 12″ PowerBook, with the power socket on the side, is looking better every day). The laptop is mostly intact and works fine, except that it only intermittently charges. From experience, I know that trying to power it in this condition leads to Bad Things. Unfortunately, not powering it at all will make it rather difficult to use the computer for many more hours.

I’ll get out my screwdriver and open ‘er up to ascertain the damage, but I expect that the system board needs to be replaced. From experience, I know this will cost me $968, plus tax. At this point, I doubt it’s worth it. One option is to get an external battery charger and just forget about the built-in one, although that’s not cheap either. Also a little annoying, since you can no longer run the laptop off of AC power.

Eric’s PowerBook screen cracked recently, and someone offered to sell him cheaply an intact screen from a dead PowerBook of the same model. I don’t suppose anyone out there has an otherwise-dead Dell Inspiron 4000 with an undamaged system board they’d be willing to sell me?

Since I released NCIDpop 0.9 in January, I’ve received a number of emails from people who’ve had difficulty patching ncidd to work with NCIDpop. This turned out to be especially complicated due to the fact that my patch didn’t compile on Linux (oops). Thanks to everyone who wrote to me, and especially those who sent me Linux-compatible versions of the patch; I apologize for never putting them online.

Anyway, I finally got around to rewriting NCIDpop’s network layer to not need a patched server. You can now use NCIDpop with a stock ncidd, as available directly from the NCID Web page.

Download NCIDpop 0.9.5

Update (May 17): The NCID Web page is back up, now hosted at SourceForge.

Laura and I went to the St. Louis Zoo this afternoon, and we sketched some of the animals. For no good reason better than that I finally have an excuse to use the scanner that Laura’s had sitting in a box for four years, here are the drawings that I made:

• Capybara
• Asian Elephant
• California Sea Lion
• Amur Leopard
• Grevy’s Zebra
• Reticulated Giraffe

See also Laura’s drawings, which are mostly the same animals, except that she has a puma instead of a leopard, and an anteater instead of a giant hamster.