Steve's Current Notes
Week of  December 17, 2000

The first order of business was to take the kids Christmas shopping yesterday morning.  We decided to get up early and beat the rush to the mall and thankfully so.  By the time we left that place it was getting packed and I don't think I could have endured another hour of shopping.

When we returned home, I helped Katie with the wrapping of our purchases and she quickly informed me I was too picky in my critique of her wrapping jobs.  I suppose she's correct.  What does it really matter as the paper is going to get torn off the packages in a matter of seconds on Christmas morning.

Suzy and I then headed out to a co-worker's home for a Christmas party.

Today, it was another co-worker's Christmas Open House in the afternoon and then off to the Church where the kids were singing and performing in a Moravian Christmas tradition -- the candlelight Christmas Lovefeast.  Katie and Andrew were part of the choir and Katie played her flute as part of the program.  Suzy and I beamed dutifully as proud parents.

 Moravian Christmas Lovefeast Symbols

The Lovefeast is the Moravian tradition of serving sweet coffee and a roll with an "M" stamped on it during a singing service.  Near the end of the service lighted beeswax candles with red paper frills around the bottom are given to participants.  New Philadelphia Moravian Church, one of the local Moravian churches explains their Christmas Lovefeast on its website.

If you build web pages with Microsoft's Front Page 2000 and have wanted to share the page with someone via a floppy disk you may have found this to be a more difficult task than it sounds like it should be on paper.  FrontPage stores the files differently than other html packages claim to, so you have to be sure to go out on your computer's hard drive and grab all of the files.

Microsoft claims it's coming the rescue with the Microsoft Office 2000 Web Archive add-in.  This add-in supposedly allows you to package a web page and its accompanying graphic files as a single web page, which would then make it simple to email to someone or even give it to them on a floppy disk.  You'd better hope the graphics are not too large if you're planning on the floppy disk route.

We haven't talked much about the SETI@Home project lately, so when an email arrived over the weekend updating us on the program's progress, I thought I would pass it along.

First, if you're not familiar with SETI@Home, it's a scientific experiment that uses Internet-connected computers in the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence (SETI) out there in space.   Folks on the net participate by running a program that downloads and analyzes radio telescope data.

From the SETI@Home dispatch:

Halfway through our second year of operation, SETI@home has processed over 7000 hours of digitally-recorded signals from the Arecibo radio telescope, using the power of millions of Internet-connected computers. As this processing continues, SETI@home's own computers are doing the next phase, in which we separate man-made radio signals from those originating outside our solar system. Our goal is to detect signals from other civilizations.

By using the Internet to form the world's most powerful computer, SETI@home has inspired other scientific computing projects, and is often credited (along with Napster) with defining a new generation of computer system design, called "peer-to-peer".

Because of the strong continued interest in SETI@home, the project will continue for at least a year beyond its original ending time. Plans are not finalized, but we hope to expand our search to the southern-hemisphere sky, and to search new frequency bands.

The Daynotes Gang group now has 73 member analyzing the data and we have spent better than 59 years worth of CPU time participating in the project.  Wakeolda is 17th on the Daynotes list having contributed more than 1.2 years of CPU time analysing almost 600 work units.

If you would like to participate in the project you can

• Download the software from the University of California at Berkley here.
  

• Bob Thompson at TTGNET.com set up the Daynotes group for the SETI@Home project and invites anyone who wants to participate in the group to join up.  Here are his instructions on joining our group.

I got one of those notes in today's email that makes you feel good.  Brenda De Sousa <bdeso26926@aol.com> ran across my pages on the trip to Mt. Evans, Colorado and after seeing these sites wants to make the trip up the mountain a priority on her visit next summer.

We're planning a trip to Colorado in August 2001.  A friend of mine mentioned Mt. Evans.  We've been up Pike's Peak and believe it or not, I hadn't even heard about the drive up Mt. Evans (yes, I feel stupid!!).  I did a search and your website came up.  Just wanted to thank you!!  I love your photos and your site has been very helpful.  We're definitely going to do the drive up Mt. Evans in August!  I love the mountain goats.  I hope we see them on the way up - my kids will love it!!!!! 

Thanks for your very kind words on the Mt. Evans page.  As you can tell from these pages we loved our trip up the mountain and wanted to share it with the world.  I know you'll enjoy the ride. I have taken the trip twice and both times saw plenty of wildlife (mountain goats), so I feel confident you'll have the same experience.  Our kids were thrilled when the animals walked right up to our car and wanted to stick their noses inside.  Have a great trip.

Quite frequently we have the conversation at the office as to how many of our consumers are internet savvy.  Some feel that not many of our customers have access to the internet.  Others of us fell that most of our customers can log on to the net.

The latest word for TechNet is that more than half of Americans can now log on to the internet.

The folks at Neilson report that some fifty-six percent of the U.S. citizens have internet access from home. As a comparison, some 43 percent of us had internet access last year at this time.

There may be another run on the supermarket milk and bread aisle around here tomorrow.  The weatherman is saying that it should rain here during the day on Tuesday and turn into wet snow by the end of the day and into the evening.

Can you surf at work?  There has been much made about the issues employers have with employees wasting time surf the internet from their desk.  Not so says a study at Computerworld.

It appears the election for the President of the United States is finally over as the nation's electoral College met today.  I say it was finally over last week when Al Gore made his concession speech and then went on to party the night away.

As of this afternoon, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney had toppled the magic 271 electoral college votes needed, and California, Hawaii and Vermont still had not reported.  Al Gore had 205 votes at that time.

There had been some talk about the possibility of electors defecting and casting votes promised for Bush in Gore's favor.  That turned out to be nothing but idle chatter.  About the most interesting that happened when the electors finally met today was a single elector from the District of Columbia leaving her ballot blank in an apparent protest for official representation in Congress

Here is the Electoral College map from the site PresidentElect 2000.

So finally it's over. Hooray.

The big news at the office yesterday was the announcement that R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, for as much as it is villionized as a member of the tobacco industry, has been named one of the 100 best places to work in the United States.

Software developer SAS Institute was the only other North Carolina based company to make the list.

Here's the Fortune Magazine Top 100 list.  RJR is listed as No. 94.  SAS is No. 2.

Here's the Winston-Salem Journal story on RJR's inclusion on the list.

If you're an internet purist and don't want anything but HTML coming through on the pages you read, more than likely you are running a utility that wipes away those pesky advertisements before they reach your screen.  You may be running another utility that blocks cookies or java script or or other annoying little tricks (blinking text as an example) that webmasters may have up their sleeve.

Enter Naviscope, a web acceleration utility that will do all of this with just one package.  From their website:

We're getting a light dusting of snow this morning which means the kids will be bouncing off the walls wanting to bring out the sleds and snow gear.  One problem.  They're just calling for a little snow mixed with rain and maybe some ice.  Won't be enough for any sledding.  Hey, what's the matter here.  The weather clowns are calling for a light snow, which means we'll probably have a snow up to our knees.  These are the same folks who predicted 8-10 a few weeks back and it turned out to be a beautiful sunny day.

The fact that we are getting some snow today backs up an old wife's tale.  We had thunder during the night last Saturday and the tale is that when you have thunder in the winter, you'll have snow within 10 days.  However, when I was discussing this with some of the local folk on Sunday, they said it wasn't officially winter yet, although it felt like it outside.  I accused them of being a Florida politician.

However, a quick look at the regional Doppler radar on the Weather Channel and it doesn't appear this storm will linger around very long.

Here's our forecast from NOAA:

NCZ021>023-038-039-192100-
 ALAMANCE-DAVIDSON-FORSYTH-GUILFORD-RANDOLPH- INCLUDING THE CITIES OF...BURLINGTON...WINSTON-SALEM... GREENSBORO...HIGH POINT... 

413 AM EST TUE DEC 19 2000 ...

WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY FOR SNOW IN EFFECT TODAY... .

TODAY...SNOW DEVELOPING THIS MORNING...POSSIBLY BEGINNING AS LIGHT FREEZING RAIN EARLY. SNOW ACCUMULATIONS OF 1 TO 3 INCHES POSSIBLE BY MID AFTERNOON. SNOW DIMINISHING LATE IN THE DAY. HIGH IN THE MID 30S. LIGHT SOUTH WIND BECOMING NORTHWEST 5 TO 10 MPH. CHANCE OF PRECIPITATION 80 PERCENT. .

TONIGHT...A SLIGHT CHANCE OF LIGHT SNOW EARLY THEN CLEARING. LOW IN THE LOWER 20S. NORTHWEST WIND AROUND 10 MPH. CHANCE OF SNOW 20 PERCENT. .

WEDNESDAY...MOSTLY SUNNY. COLD. HIGH IN THE MID 30S.

Andrew, on the other hand, was a different story.  An 8 year old boy who doesn't see much snow made the most of it and attempted a little snowboarding on one of the hills by the house.

I did venture out while it was still snowing and snapped a couple of photos with my Olympus D-490 digital camera.

And today.  All that was snow is now ice.  The only hope is for warmer temperatures and a melt-off today.  Unfortunately, it's only predicted to reach the mid 30's F.

I took the big plunge yesterday, well at least the next step in continuing the exercise regimen I started this spring.  I joined a gym.

There is a Gold's Gym just down the street from where we live and since the time has changed and brought along with it shorter days, not to mention cooler temperatures, I haven't been able to continue my walking/trotting.  I have been contemplating such a move for a while, mainly because I didn't want to get out of the habit of exercising over the winter and I don't like to go outside when it's cold and don't particularly like walking in the dark.  Therefore, a gym has entered into my life.  Yet another new step for me.  I wonder in I am in the midst of a mid-life crisis or finally starting to take a little bit better care of myself?

As we sit in front of our computer over the holidays I am sure the search engines will get a work out -- my favorites ones do on a regular basis -- and with this in mind, the folks at techweb put together a hit list.  A list of the top hits at some search engines. 

This could be good news for a heavy cell phone user like myself.  The Journal of the American Medical Association is now reporting it finds no increased risk of brain cancer for cell phone users.

I hope this is true.  We just changed cell phone carriers at the office to the AT&T digital service and were all issued new Nokia 8260 cell phone which has no external antenna.  I must admit I was a little more than concerned when I first saw the phone, but said, "what the hell."

2 Days To Go

I believe my mission today will be to take the kids out of the house so the main elf can concentrate on her duties.  In fact, she was almost getting set for the panic mode as she checked her list and thinks she may have forgotten a few things.

So this afternoon, the kids and I will get the opportunity to see a movie and then run a few errands.  It's Andrew's turn to select the movie and the exit polling is set to make the call for RugRats in Paris (I can hardly wait).  But all of the polls have not closed and since Suzy's brother from Florida has arrived there could be a recount.

I mentioned the nasty Christmas viruses headed around the internet yesterday and suggested that McAfee had a fix on their website.  However, Chris Ward Johnson, a member of the DayNotes gang and writer from across the pond was kind enough to send out a flash message you'll want to read if you're using Windows NT 4.0.

Thanks a million, Chris.  My personal setup here at Wakeolda is probably more like a gentleman's farm.  I currently have five machines running NT 4.0 and would be major league screwed by such a happening.

Chris has a couple of website you might want to check out.  Dr. Keyboard is where he gives folks answers to computer questions even the non-geek can understand.

And while you're at it, check out his daynotes site, the Chateau Keyboard, which he likes to call Computing at the Eating Edge.