August, 2004

August 31, 2004 — Alfred, Ohio. Happy Birthday Jeanie!

August 30, 2004 — Alfred, Ohio. Twenty six years ago today I met Jeanie. We have always thought the way we met a pretty amusing story. I had just bought the land we now live on. A mutual friend called and wanted to see where it was before I moved. I was cooking myself something to eat and noticed that I had dirty dishes in the sink that had been sitting there for a couple of days. It seemed reasonable to try to clean them up a little and so it turned out that I was washing them as Pat walked right into the house and marched into the kitchen. Jeanie and her sister Kate were right behind her. Jeanie made a smart remark as soon as she walked through the door, something like “A man doing dishes? He would be a real asset.” I reacted by flipping soapy dishwater in her face. We had never met before this moment and had not known each other for more than a second or two before this exchange took place.

August 29, 2004 — Cantwell Cliffs, Ohio. Today Jeanie and I got up and headed for the Hocking Hills state parks. There are several within just a couple of miles of each other. Ash Cave is the closest to us, Cedar Falls, Old Man’s Cave, Conkles Hollow, Rock House, and Cantwell Cliffs follow. Today we drove past the first ones and started at the Rock House. I had not seen it in several years so it was nice. We drove up to Cantwell Cliffs and had a picnic in the area. We walked around the beautiful gorge and then back up what seemed a thousand steps to the car. The weather was nice though a little warm at times.

We then headed up to the Lancaster Mall and just walked around for a bit and picked up a few items. It was nice to just walk around without being in a hurry to be anyplace. Steve and Mary Ellen called within minutes of our arrival back home. Joe and Angie called inside another ten minutes and stopped by for a little visit.

In all it has been a very pleasant couple of days leading up to today. I’ve received several cards and gifts and visits. Thank you everyone for remembering my birthday. I will be elegible for the Bob Evans senior discount in only 365 more days. I can’t wait.

August 28, 2004 — Alfred, Ohio. Nick and Jeanie went shopping for a few items that he needed for school and then he headed back to Morehead. It is an odd feeling watching your son drive off. It feels good knowing that he is able to take care of things on his own but it also feels a little sad. You can't help but miss a person that you have spent nearly every day of the last eighteen years with. I have felt very similar feelings with Joe and Steve. Proud and happy for them and yet hard not to miss them.

August 27, 2004 — Alfred, Ohio. Nick showed up this evening. Angie, Jeanie, and I all have birthdays this week so he stopped in to help us celebrate. He had a lot of stories to tell about school and it was fun to have him around again, even if only for a short time.

Would anyone like a GMail account? Just ask. dave.weeks at frogtails.com

The State of Ohio and I came to terms today. “GRY” is the official term now printed on my new drivers license just beneath the heading “Hair”.

While waiting on the license, I sat in the chair where they took my photo. This gives you a distant view of the computer screen that the registar works with. A fellow came in that was a little loud and requested that he get another id card. The lady asked what happened to his old one. He lost his wallet apparently. He provided two pieces of paper. From a distance, it appeared to be a birth certificate and a social security card. Both were paper, neither had a photo. The lady looked at the social security card and typed something into the machine. I assume it was a social security number. She got back something in red towards the bottom of the screen. She cleared it and continued on with something else. About then, they gave my license to me and I was on my way. I would guess that the guy eventually walked out of there with an official ID card today. He probably is exactly who he says he is. The point that I found interesting was, it could have been anyone standing there. Not likely in the small backwoods part of Ohio that I live in, but possible. That prospect gives me a little cause for concern.

August 26, 2004 — Alfred, Ohio. Happy Birthday Angie!

August 25, 2004 — Alfred, Ohio. This evening I decided to have a cup of coffee. I ground some fresh beans and brewed a pot after supper. The aroma was delightful and then I found that the milk had gone bad. Gag! Fortunately I had some non dairy powder sitting back in the fridge saved just for such occasions. It doesn’t taste so good but it will do in a pinch. As I’m sipping away, I realize that it really doesn’t taste so well and I got to thinking about how long it might have been in the refrigerator. Probably leftover from my in laws 50th anniversary last October. How can they make anything last that long? Food just doesn’t last anywhere near that long… even in the fridge.

Private note to Diane: make some space in your email inbox and let me know so I can re-send you a GMail invite. A GMail account would solve your space problems for the foreseeable future.

August 24, 2004 — Alfred, Ohio. Happy Birthday Dad!

August 23, 2004 — Alfred, Ohio. Today I noticed that my Kona coffee had sprouted a couple of new leaves each. Recall that the original sprouts were way back in March. Each plant had only the two original leaves until today. Woo hoo! My private coffee plantation is still on track.

August 22, 2004 — Cincinnati, Ohio. Jeanie and I went to visit my Dad this weekend. It is always pleasant to hear how he is doing and help out with any little chores that he will permit me to do. This time I learned to use an edger (sp?). Jeanie pulled the grass away from the sidewalks and driveway and swept it together in piles. Dad loaded it in a wheel barrow and removed it. I got to run the gadget. We don't have such things out in the country so it was kind of interesting. I probably did a lousy job but dad humored me and said it looked nice. The weather was beautiful again and we had a nice ride home. Nick is still writing in his blog titled School Time Fun. I encourage you to give it a read.

My Radio news aggregator has apparently expired. The last I have of anything is dated the 18th. It is probably related to either the Windows or Norton firewall that I’ve got on the new machine. Just what I want, a lot of research to figure out how to make something I purchased and have used for over six months start working again. Grrr!

GMail gave me a couple of accounts to give out. I invited a couple of people that I thought would appreciate them and wow, did they ever. I received really nice thank you notes in return. I’m thinking that I could ask them for really big favors right now. The question is, should I cash in now while the iron is still hot and go for something big or should I save them for a rainy day when I’m really in need? If you are one of my family or friends that did NOT get the invite from me and would really like one, please let me know. Should Google ever give me more accounts to pass out, I’ll be in touch. This time, I gave them to people who had expressed an interest in one.

August 21, 2004 — Alfred, Ohio. Happy birthday Steve!

August 20, 2004 — Alfred, Ohio. Would you be interested in providing criticism and feedback for a story that I am writing? Here is the deal. If you are interested, I’ll give you a rough draft of a chapter to look over. I would like to know what works and what doesn’t. You must agree to a couple of things. They are:

• Confidentiality—you must not copy or share this story with anyone as I may want to publish it.
• Criticism—you must provide written criticism. I am not looking for someone to say “sounds good to me”. Nope, I’m looking for someone who has a sharp red pen and is not afraid to use it.
• Speed—you must be willing to provide the feedback to me in a timely manner. My goal is to write five pages a week. Once a chapter is completed, I’ll mail it to you with the expectation that you will provide the feedback I request within a month.
• Salary—none. You must be willing to do this out of the goodness of your heart as a favor to me.
• Benefits—you might find your name mentioned as one who helped make my story possible, if indeed, your criticism is helpful to me. Your comments may even provide some direction for the story that I would not imagine on my own. I expect that the story can be told in under 300 pages so a year from now it will be done if I meet my goals. Even if it turns out to be rubbish, a year from now, I intend to have written a story.

August 19, 2004 — Alfred, Ohio. I noticed that it was very quiet tonight. It was unusual for me to turn off all of the lights in the house before going to bed.

August 18, 2004 — Morehead,Kentucky. Today was Freshman move in day at Morehead State University (MSU). We moved Nick into a dorm room today. It went well. The weather was nice, the books were in stock and not terribly expensive, everyone seemed pleasant enough. The drive down and back was uneventful. Nick had an email waiting on us when we go home with an urgent request that we send money. All is right in the world. :)

Nick has promised to keep us current with his own website while at MSU. NOTE: unfortunately, it is probably no longer a good practice to include a valid email address on a web page. Programs scan through web pages and harvest these email addresses for the #%&!@% spammers. A better method is to use something English like that people can understand but programs would find difficult. For example, programs go for the easy ones. Something like anyone@gmail.com is an obvious email address and the programs will find and pluck those from a web page. Humans can easily locate me with this: dave.weeks at frogtails.com, and the programs are likely to overlook it.

August 14, 2004 — Alfred, Ohio. It gets worse… Service Pack 2 for XP has a firewall feature. This means that you can be notified any time that you have network activity. There has been some activity that I would have never guessed. For instance. This new Dell machine has dual DVD’s with one of them being a burner. I have Veritas software that came with the machine to manage these drives. XP SP2 notified me when I connected to the Internet that Veritas was wanting to use the connection. Whatever for I wonder? It is probably an innocent request like checking the mother ship to see if there are any updates but why not let me make the decision to check or at least give me the option or make me aware of what is going on. The old machine has a similar “feature” in something called backweb. Nick thought it was the Kodak software I had loaded some time back for a digital camera. Searching this morning on the Internet, it appears that it may be from Logitech. It apparently “Automatically checks for software upgrades and new products, services, and special offerings…”. I understand the idea but do not think that I should not have to agree to this sort of abuse in order to buy and use a pointer for my machine.

August 13, 2004 — Alfred, Ohio. I spoke to soon. It so happened that I am moving my email files from one machine to the other and am looking each of the folders to make certain that everything went the way I expected. I found this (see below) in my deleted folders at 6:56 p.m. EST. I did not do this and have no earthly idea of where it originated. The mailer is particularly interesting as the machine is brand new and this is the the first day I have placed it online. The version of Outlook Express on this machine is: 6.00.2900.2180 (xpsp_sp2_rtm.040803-2158). About the same time that this message appeared, I imported my mail from Outlook Express 6.0 into Thunderbird version 0.7.3 (20040803). I'm not all that familiar with Thunderbird and only downloaded it from Mozilla this morning. Senator Voinovich is my senator and the it had my address and email filled in correctly (I replaced those with dashes). In the deleted folders of Outlook Express it had todays date and 6:49 p.m. EST which is about the time I was doing an import. In Thunderbird, it has a date/time of 2/6/2101 6:28 a.m. Here is the long and the short of it. I didn't do it. Given that the machine is brand new and only connected to the Internet today AFTER I installed XP SP2 and updated everything that Norton Anti-Virus wanted to do that we have a very small group who could be responsible. They are:

• Microsoft—XP SP2 (266mb downloaded and installed today) or Outlook Express. It worked and seems highly unlikely to me.
• Norton—the anti virus program (over 8000kb) downloaded and installed today (NOTE: I was surprised that there would be so much to download since the machine is new, I would have expected Dell to have placed a more current version of the program on it, there were fourteen things that needed downloaded). Again, seems unlikely.
• Mozilla—Thunderbird (6048kb) or Firefox (4964kb) both downloaded and installed today. These I am least familiar with and recognize that they do come from the open source community. Unfortunately, I have to think one of these are the most probable.
• Apache—http web server (6357kb) downloaded and installed today. Again, I’ve used this for many years. It is open source but seems very unlikely to me.
• PHP—php 5.0.1 (7536kb) downloaded and installed today. This is a programming language. Version 5 is relatively new. It is possible, but seems unlikely.
• Dell—they built the machine. This seems real unlikely at first glance I don't know where else my email address and postal address could have come from.
• me—again, it wasn’t me

Each of these vendors and products seem to me to be reliable. I personally downloaded each of these products from each respective company’s web site…earlier today. Below is the message that I found. I really doubt that on any other day I would have even noticed and so the implication is that there may be someone out there that is sending messages to senators and the like under our names without our knowledge.

From: "Dave Weeks" <------@-------.net>
To: 
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
Subject: Form posted from Microsoft Internet Explorer.
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset="iso-8859-1"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 5.50.4133.2400
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2900.2180

Title=
FirstName:=Dave
LastName=Weeks
Address1=-------------------
Address2=--------------
Address=
City=---------
Zip=-----
FormsComboBox4=Taxes
Other:=
Comments:=I am in favor of tax relief. Last year I paid $15,927 in 
Federal Income Tax and am looking at paying much more this year. If 
you ever think that the government needs this money more than I do 
or would spend it more wisely, please come and visit me.

FormHandler1=Send it in

Today I downloaded XP Service Pack 2 (all 266mb of it) and installed it on both the old machine that is going with Nick to college this Wednesday and the new one that I just bought. The date seemed appropriate for such a venture. Once the service pack was installed (without a hint of a problem mind you), I placed the new machine online for the first time and immediately updated the virus definitions. I’m still trying to figure out how to get everything I need off the old one and working on the new one. It is amazing how much junk can be stored on a computer. It is kind of fun to look at old pictures and little projects that I worked on that never went anywhere. They seemed so important at one time.

August 07, 2004 — Alfred, Ohio. Nick and I are headed for Columbus today. The weather already looks like a repeat of yesterday. Beautiful!

Pay attention to the Taipei International Electronics Show (Taitronics) on 8 October. A Taiwan company is expected to reveal a 2TB memory card. That is two terrabytes or two thousand gigabytes. On a card the same size as a standard MMC unit. Mass production is expected to commence the following year. That is a lot of storage and will probably make hard disks go the way of the buggy whip. It would be a difficult position to be the owner of a buggy whip manufacturing firm when Henry Ford started his assembly lines. You would have a product that everyone needs today and yet it would be obvious that no one would need tomorrow. What would you do? The smart ones would realign their capital and people behind newer product and keep a minimal crew to maintain the current customer base. Research and development could safely be kept to a minimum as well as any new plant and equipment.

Benoît Mandelbrot, father of the fractal proposes that we study for patterns in financial markets. It is a short read but not for everyone.

The United States has killed three hundred people in Iraq in the last two days. Everyone has read or heard about it by now and it really isn't making much news. Put this into a different perspective. Three hundred American soldiers died in May of 1968, the bloodiest month of the Vietnam war. The names and faces of each of these soldiers made the centerfold of Time magazine. Three hundred people from a small country like Iraq in two days is pretty significant to them, even if it means nothing to us.

Chester, Ohio. Joe wrote and said

“I also recommend the Da Vinci Code. It's not exactly your taste, but it's a fun read.”

August 06, 2004 — Alfred, Ohio. Steve wrote and said that I HAVE to read the Da Vinci Code. He wasn’t sure I would like it, just that I had to read it. Diane read it a few months back and had a strong response to it as well. I’ll probably add it to my list.

The weather was spectacular today. Odd for August. This evening we had a very large blue heron walking around our pond. Nick, Jeanie, and I all saw it. They mentioned to me that earlier, they had seen a deer family in our back yard. The older ones kept an eye on them but the fawns were being playful and did not notice them. Living in the country has its moments.

August 05, 2004 — Alfred, Ohio. Amazon sold me a few more books recently. I really like buying from them. I also like browsing in bookstores. Amazon gets the bulk of my business anymore. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez, a Nobel Prize Winner, is what currently holds my attention.

August 04, 2004 — Alfred, Ohio. Do you remember honey bees? I do. I’ve always seeded clover with my grass. Honey bees love the little white flowers. Every yard that I can recall ever cutting was full of these friendly little bees. However, that was back when. Nearly all of them were killed off a few years ago by a mite. Scientists claim that it could take up to fifty years before the population returns to normal. Fifty years seems like a long time. It is likely that I will have grandchildren someday and they will grow up thinking that honey bees are a rare sight. Years from now, when the population of bees begins to return to normal levels, my grandchildren may look in horror at all the bees that will plague their grandchildren. It doesn’t take much to imagine hearing them say “I don't ever recall seeing all of those bees when I was growing up” and take it upon themselves to do something drastic to reduce the honey bee population to levels they think are normal.

Do you think it possible that we act in a similar fashion? I was pretty old before the U.S. had a trade deficit. It turns out that we had not had one since 1914, long before the memory of my parents or grandparents. In other words, we were taking on something that no one alive could recall. Today, we are beginning to think of trade deficits as the norm and it looks like an entire generation may come think that it has always been this way. It seems possible to me, that just as my grandchildren may mistakenly opt to keep the bee population low, we may be doing long term economic damage to ourselves beyond our comprehension for similar reasons. Part of the problem is that people just don’t live for very long and tend to think of older times as quaint and irrelevant. The old adage “Those who don’t (or won’t) learn the lessons from history are doomed to repeat them” takes on a serious meaning in the world we live in today. It may be possible that our children will grow up believing that the constant threat of terror is normal or that corporate greed is routine. It takes a little effort to look at things on a longer scale than we generally live in but I think it is to our advantage to do so. The alternative is to suffer consequences that we know (or should know) all too well. I would prefer to spend my remaining days raising new questions and working towards progress rather than repeating a pattern that history has proven will fail.

August 01, 2004 — Dallas, Texas. Dennis sent this photo of the West End of Dallas for everyone to enjoy. It is a block or so from the book depository and has turned into a family tourist attraction. There is a comedy club, a candy factory, and other attractions that make it a pleasant place to visit. He also mentioned that he would feel quite comfortable walking the streets of Dallas at any hour day or night. We had a real nice chat on ICQ while this photo was being transferred in the background. I’ve been wearing him down and believe that he will soon be writing and providing photos for your enjoyment.

Cincinnati, Ohio. Dad, Aunt Pat, and I had a pleasant day working around the yard. The weather was a little warm but that didn’t stop us from trimming a hedge. With all three of us chipping away at the hedge, it didn’t take long at all. Once we finished our work, we just enjoyed each others company until it was time for me to head for home by drinking ice water and making small talk. Not a bad way to spend a Sunday afternoon. The ride home was uneventful.