The Time Sink

Short shrift may continue here for another day or two, but the short week for the boys may mediate things a bit. Between colds, homework and an overly full schedule, I've taken the liberty of declaring web work to be the 'discretionary' part of discretionary time. ...and sleep and relaxing to be the higher use of what spare time there has been.

So yeah, there's a friend's site that hasn't been worked on (two actually. Sheesh) and a project that got pretty much derailed. ...but after the 'uphill, against the wind, in the snow, both ways' sense I had about blading Saturday morning, I pretty much had decided blading was out even before it rained yesterday afternoon. Yeah, too much packing of things into the limited hours in the days...

Interesting... I thought Klein Bottles were purely theoretical, but it appears we have the functional equivalent sitting in the living room...

Things started out simply enough: we were missing a phone. Why we cannot keep track of phones when we've upgraded the count to three I just cannot fathom. When we had two separate cordless handset phones, they always seemed to end up back in their cradles. ...but when we moved to an integrated three handset/charger system we suddenly began to lose phones. ...and I don't mean one handset; I mean all three would be MIA for huge blocks of time (well, "huge" to those who use them as their primary means of communication; I just emailed Shelley if I wanted to talk with her).

...and last night's adventure really began Sunday evening with The Great Nightly Phone Search batting .666 (an interesting number considering the "other-worldly" issues we got into last night); the second phone was gone, likely off on yet another adventure (we believe we've actually acquired a matching set of experimental phones that somehow escaped from the Uniden labs, phones with teleportation capability or at least the ability to move through n-space to transfer themselves great distances, those distances being greater than the sound-carrying ability of their ringers since we cannot hear them at those times when they've transported out and therefore...). Oh. Okay...

So. No phone. Again... Dexter's clone (Brad, but somehow un-Dexter-like with his blond hair and lack of glasses. ..and well, no lab coat and he doesn't wear boots) was put on the case. He's the official "phone empath", he who can use his special talents to reprogram the ring tones on a phone three rooms away without accessing it directly, but rather by communicating in the sub-ether using another of the duo-trio (note how that multiplies out to "666" again) units as a his pawn in his ongoing plan to drive his mother quite insane and then move further with his quest for World Domin... Oh. Yeah. The phone...

Okay. SO. We called in The Expert and put him to work locating the missing phone. By some feat of sequentially enabling and then disabling the ringers he was able to track the missing member of the Telco Triumvirate to the 'chair and a half' recliner. Only it wasn't there. Well it was. ...but it wasn't. We could hear it ring, but we couldn't locate it either to the sides or behind the seat cushion. ...but we could hear it. Great forces were called in (Dad lifted the chair so Dex/Brad could look underneath), but 'twas to no avail. ...and soon, the intrepid tracker was sent to bed to save him contemplation of the impossibility that was beginning to look like the only answer: somehow this particular unit had missed its targeted materialization zone and had reappeared within the chair rather than in the chair!

The Pragmatist wandered in about that time. To him, all is black and white; there are no shades of grey. Things either "are" or "are not" (with the proviso that his "are's" are the correct ones.) His declaration of being able to locate and extract the wayward module in mere minutes by use of his Spock-like logical interpretation of events ("Dad, it fell behind the cushion!") came to naught more quickly than a Raider's (his team) winning streak. ...and it soon came down to "How can it be there, yet not be there?" ...and the answer came to me in a flash: the chair wasn't just a chair; it was a three dimensional representation of a Klein bottle! Yes, of course! The phone was there, inside the chair, but of course it was also outside the chair! No wonder we couldn't reach it: I'd only been trying to rotate the chair through three dimensions (although Time was beginning to play a role in my ability to sustain the rotations I was employing whilst The Pragmatist viewed the various torturous bends and folds in time and space and the chair...

...but of course, with that realization came the solution: We proceeded to work up an extra long Möbius strip from some spare IDE cable and went 'phishing' within (without?) the confines of this peculiarly structured chair. ...and we were successful! Our final count: the missing telephone, the DVD/TV remote (missing for two weeks), a TV remote from antiquity (I sure don't recall it!), the spare shed keys (missing for two years), two pairs of socks (folded), two loose socks (unmatched), one (and only one) cracker (presumed stale and hence not tested), three pens, two mechanical pencils, two batteries (that didn't match up with either of the recovered remotes) and several paper scraps configured as 'cat toys'.

Things quieted after that, and we proceeded to finish the homework assignments. ...but at one point, as I looked back across the living room toward the object of the evening's adventure, I was suddenly seized with the desire to hang an Escher print or two over that chair!

Run. Don't walk, run! Update your Firefox installation. 1.0 is out and it just rocks. Both my Linux version and my Win2k version handled it nicely under auto-update (Tools|Options|Advanced|Software Update). Oh, man...

Dave's place has a list of mirrors if you'd like to do it that way. ...and if you're running IE, you owe it to yourself to drop by Mozilla.org and download. ...and yes, it will allow you to import all your IE bookmarks.

Just a couple of updates as we move into the weekend (and the kids enjoy an extra day off from school). First, the weather, which has been confounding local forecasters to no end. They completely missed calling one storm earlier in the week and have been hedging their bets on the one that's been dropping rain for the last few days. I'm with the one forecaster a few years back: In a similar situation he said, "Hey, just look outside, and that's the weather!".

I have to agree; I managed to blade yesterday morning despite dire predictions. ...and our 'clear afternoon' had local showers in our area while the 'big city' fifteen miles away stayed dry. ...and a gentle rain is falling as I type this ("clearing Thursday evening"). ...but good news for the skiers: The local ski place at about 9000 feet opened yesterday!

...and in not so good news for the unwary, you may want to check with your domain name registrar if you handle your own domains (or whoever supports you if you have it done for you). The rules change today and your place isn't as protected as it was. The old rule: if someone wanted to transfer a domain and put in a request, your registrar could not without getting confirmation from you. The new rule: if your registrar gets a domain transfer request they cannot deny it if they don't hear from you. ...and if your spam filter catches their email to you, or if you're on vacation? Yeah, you're hosed...

What can you do? You can "transfer lock" your domain so it cannot be transferred without being unlocked at the registrar. I use pairNIC for most of my domains, and they've decided to lock all accounts across the board (and let you unlock them whenever). I use GoDaddy for a few domains, and while they've decided not to blanket transfer lock all of their accounts, they are encouraging customers to log into their accounts and transfer lock their domains themselves. Good advice...

The last thing I remember after sleeping in very late in the aftermath of eating a bit too much while watching the local team down Hawai'i 70-14 (No they weren't piling it on; and no, it wasn't that close) and making one killer peppermint white mocha latte (close enough for a bit of " 'Tis the season") before I went blading was coming back home and ... well...

What I can say is that it's 1700, there looks to be a new tree in the front yard, every muscle and joint I have is complaining about abuse and I haven't had breakfast yet...

"Lather, rinse, repeat..." I kept thinking about one of Dave's favorite sayings as the afternoon waned and I still hadn't had breakfast. Again...

Yeah, when I finally hoisted my body out of bed this morning I realized that maybe one way to get the stiffness and soreness out would be to go blading. ...and clear skies and temps above 60F sure looked good. So after coffee I took off on the usual route and managed to get a pretty good run in. ...and things loosened up and I was feeling pretty good by the time I got back. That was a bad thing...

...a bad thing in that I looked a the work Daniel and I had completed yesterday (a fifteen gallon tree in a thirty gallon hole with a new curve to that part of a front garden) and knew I might as well finish the rest of the cleanup (trimming up some bushes and laying a new layer of bark, re-setting the drip lines and generally prepping for planting bulbs later) while I was already sweating.

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"Any sufficiently advanced technology is
indistinguishable from magic."
Arthur C. Clarke, "Technology and the Future"

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