Jefflog

There’s a stray kitten that’s been hanging around our house for a while. We discovered it a few weeks ago when it was meowing on our porch; we tried to go near it, but he just backed away and hissed. We cut up a Chinese fish ball and left it and a saucer of milk out for him. We watched him go for the fish ball from a distance, but on every attempt we made to approach him he backed away.

This morning, I heard him crying again, this time in the backyard. It was cold and rainy, so I can’t blame the fellow. He seemed to be even more wary this time, because he ran away as soon as I opened the door. We’re going to try to set up a little shelter for him, probably a cardboard box with some warm clothes and some food in the back.

If we can catch him, we’ll probably try to keep him, but he might be too wild by this point to make it worthwhile.

We’ve lived in our house for two years now, and so far, the dining room has gone virtually unused. We tried setting up some chairs and a lamp in there as a sort of “reading room”, but found we really didn’t read together enough to make it worthwhile, so we abandoned that.

As of this Saturday, though, we have found a use for it: we put a Ping Pong table in it. It’s a little awkward, as we’ve had to jack up the chandelier lighting, and one player has to keep a stance partially in the living room to make it work, but it’s okay. And, it’s one of the few games that Hong and I are on an equal footing with, making it that much more fun.

Apple Computer finally released a couple of days ago the machine that I’ve been waiting for: the G4 iBook. This is definitely going to my Christmas present this year. Coupled with Airport Extreme and X11 for OS X, I’ll be able to keep my x86 Linux machine as my primary development machine but access it anywhere in the house. That way, I can code in the family room while Hong watches TV. I’ve been loading up the Apple iBook page every day since the announcement, just drooling over the possibilities.

To sweeten the deal, according to this rumor at Mac Rumors, Apple will likely offer a 10% discount on machines during their “Night of the Panther” release party tonight. Under normal circumstances, I’d probably go and get it now, but to be honest I’m too busy to be distracted by a shiny-new toy right now. Besides, by the time I waited in line, I bet they’d be all sold out of the new iBooks…at under $1000 (with the discount), they’re bound to sell like wildfire.

This weekend, I participated in the Hilly 100, a 2-day 100-mile bike ride in hilly Southern Indiana. However, I only made it to the first day, as the ride totally kicked my butt. In the past year, I haven’t ridden more than 30 miles at a stretch, so needless to say the 55 miles over hilly terrain was not kind to me. I promise I’ll participate for both days next year.

I also forgot to bring my cycling pants, meaning that I did the entire ride in my jeans. Not terribly comfortable, you know?

When taking the train in China to travel, sometime during the trip, a porter will come to visit you wearing what appears to be a military uniform. Red star on the cap, chevrons on the sleeves, you get the idea. She — typically, it’s a she — comes around to each passenger and asks for their State identification card, or in my case, passport, and writes something down on her clipboard. It’s a little freaky, but I just threw it off with a “Hey, they’re Communists, what did you expect?”

Meanwhile, if the American government has it’s way, it’s going to get a lot worse for airplane-flying passengers. Check out this week’s I, Cringely column for the scoop. If CAPPS-II becomes the de rigeur standard, the U.S. government will be collecting 39 data points about each potential airplane passenger. Not just credit cards and Social Security numbers, but frequency of travel, hotel reservations, meal preferences, travelling companions, and other things I probably can’t even fathom. All of this in the name of protecting our skies.

Who’d have ever thought that people living in a Communist country would have more privacy than Americans?

My in-laws from China finally were able to obtain a visitor’s visa to come visit Hong and I here in the U.S. They’ve tried to obtain the visa on two other occasions and were denied both those times, but the third time’s the charm, I guess.

We don’t know exactly what let them get the visa this time around, but I claim that it’s because Hong is married to an American citizen. (The previous two times, we weren’t married yet.) If for nothing else, because the embassy knows that there’s no way an American would let their parents-in-law move in with them for good, which is what the embassy is trying to avoid when rejecting visitor visas.

We’ll still making the travel arrangements for them, although they’ll likely be here in early November, and stay for a month or two. Now I have no idea how they’ll keep themselves occupied in our suburban home for that long while Hong and I are at work, so we’re trying to think of things to keep them busy. We’re going to go shopping for a ping-pong table tonight. We’ll probably also bump our Netflix subscription up to the super-deluxe 8 movies out at once package, and add fifty or so Chinese-language movies to the top of our queue.

I guess I’d better start brushing up on my Chinese again…my in-laws don’t speak a word of English.

I haven’t been updating this blog like I really want to for two reasons.

1. Most of the time, I have nothing but geeky things to say, which has already caused at least one loyal reader (my wife) to not read it so often.
2. After hearing about Syncato, I’ve wanted to try to move this weblog from Movable Type to it instead.

Truth be told, I don’t really like Movable Type. First of all, the license for anything but personal usage is onerous. I’ve got a friend of mine who works for a non-profit organization that I’d like to set up a blog for, but apparently I’ll have to fork over $150 for the privilege.

Second of all, it’s written in OO-Perl. Perl has it’s strengths, but being object oriented isn’t one of them. It’s a pain to debug and even the most beautiful Perl is still messy looking. Then again, maybe Syncato isn’t any better, since it would be using lots of messy XSLT, I imagine.

Next, the system generates all its pages as static content. While this is nice from a hosting performance standpoint (pages get served up quickly), and is the only option for people who host their webpages on Geocities or whatever, it doesn’t lend itself to encouraging me to update the look of the site. Every tweak I make forces me to regenerate all 800+ pages, which is a pain in the behind. Something that generates the pages on-the-fly as people request them would be far better; if it can cache them after it generates them, even better.

I also don’t care much for the web backend, which is geared toward IE users. Something that’s more Mozilla-centric, and doesn’t rely on such tiny fonts, would be better.

See? I just proved point #1.