This weekend, my friend Severin and I took a trip to St. Augustine. We belong to a group of guys who volunteer for the National Park Service's interpretive history program; several times a year, we put on the clothing of 18th-century British sailors, and shoot cannons at the Castillo de San Marcos and Fort Matanzas.

We left Friday after work, and crashed at the house of one of our fellow crew members. Got up way too early the next morning and drove into St. Augustine. It was a bright day, very warm in the morning, though not too warm to make my wool and linen clothing unbearable.

The gun deck of the Castillo still being under repair, we brought a Minnion (a small cannon which fires a three-pound iron shot) outside to the banks of the river, whereupon we fired three shots for the entertainment of the visitors to the Castillo. For the first shot, I handled searching and loading the cannon; for the second, I fired it off; and for the third, I primed the charge. (Side note: pelicans are ungainly creatures, but they can take off in a hurry when startled.)

We then went to lunch at the Spanish bakery, where I bought two sausage rolls and some water. Someone Severin knew from the SCA decided to invite himself to our table, and insisted on talking loudly about 21st-century topics, rather than permitting us to re-enact a group of sailors eating (for the entertainment of the bakery's other patrons).

After lunch, we went out to fire the cannon again; as only a couple of men stepped up to join the gun crew, another man and I from the first crew went to fill the positions, whereupon I handled the sponge and rammer for the first shot; thereafter I helped keep the spectators out of the danger zone as others manned the ordnance for two more shots.

After that, we retired to the guardroom within the Castillo and sang shanties for an hour, then back outside to fire four more shots before putting the cannon back inside; then off to dinner.

After dinner, we prepared for the British Illumination Torchlight Parade, an annual event that kicks off the Christmas season in St. Augustine. As I was the newest member of the HMS Falcon, it fell to me to carry one of the two torches which lead the parade (the other was carried by my friend John, who is always willing to participate in anything involving fire).

It was the stupidest parade route in history. But first, some background:

In St. Augustine, there are a number of street performers who inhabited the main pedestrian thoroughfare, St. George Street. Jugglers, a "one-man band", a guy who paints himself silver and pretends to be an android, a guy who paints himself like a wooden dime-store Indian, and so forth. Shopkeepers detested these performers, because they gathered crowds which blocked access to the stores. At their urging, the St. Augustine city council passed a law prohibiting performances on St. George St.

However, when interpretive history volunteers would march down the street playing fife and drums, or singing shanties, the outlawed performers sued the city, so now no performances, even ones for which no money is charged, are forbidden. And for some reason, even though the Torchlight Parade is put on by St. Augustine, they decided to change the route to avoid a "performance" on St. George St. (rather than, say, issuing a permit for the parade).

So where did we go? At least 90% of the parade was through narrow side streets which were completely deserted, because nobody told the spectators that the route had been changed. After everything was over, we encountered many people sitting on St. George waiting for the parade to start. Their reactions (upon learning that it had already occurred) ranged from anger to misery; some people had driven from as far as Ft. Lauderdale to see the parade.

So now I will be writing to the St. Augustine city council, expressing my displeasure with the new parade route (and the fact that the anti-performance law makes no distinction between performances for money and interpretive history demonstrations).

But despite the stupid route, the weekend was a lot of fun.

Karen and I were sitting around watching TV, and she pointed out something about the holiday commercials: this year, they're telling us that "the special woman in your life deserves jewelry", but "the special man in your life deserves a Norelco razor".

Yeah, that's an even trade.

I've never read much of The Boondocks (probably because the characters are a little too black and lot too radical for the Tampa Tribune to carry), but I discovered their home on the Web last night, and read the entire archive in one sitting. I really enjoy and respect cartoonists who can make valid social commentary while still managing to be funny. And Huey is definitely one of the coolest-looking cartoon characters I've seen in a long time.

Christmas is looming large, so I guess I should actually start my shopping.

Karen wants a PDA. I know she actually wants one, because apart from mentioning it when I asked what she wanted for Christmas, she's kept me posted on low prices that she's seen in the newspaper.

But I'm afraid I'm going to have to disappoint her.

She wants me to buy the least expensive model for her, and I really can't do that. Back in 1994, I bought a "Zoomer", an ironically named first-generation PDA. It was cutting-edge for its time, but it was painful to use. The CPU was woefully slow, it had only a megabyte of RAM, and it chewed through batteries like they were candy. So I eventually quit using it, and it now gathers dust on the shelf; I don't want Karen to have a similarly bad experience. Besides, she's my wife; she deserves better than low-end!

Recently, then, I've been comparing features and trying out the various brands of PDAs. I really like the PalmOS-based machines; they're fast, they're lightweight, and (what I find most exciting) there's a free software development kit available. (Palm even provides an emulator which can be used to test PalmOS software on various PDA models, even if you don't actually have a PDA.)

So I've arrived at two conclusions: firstly, Karen's just going to have to settle for a better machine than the one she's asking for; and secondly, I'm eventually gonna have to get myself one too. PDAs have come a long way since the Zoomer.

I fired up the old Zoomer PDA last night, to see if it was really as bad as I remembered it. It was actually worse than I remembered.

The batteries had died, of course, including the backup battery that was supposed to preserve the memory when the main cells ran out of power. So all of my documents and third-party programs were gone, including the Graffiti handwriting recognition system that I'd added, meaning I had to use the default recognition system.

Now, Graffiti was excellent, because rather than trying to interpret many different variations on the way a character could be written, it required the user to use its alphabet, which was specially designed so that each letter and number was distinct from the others. This made for really fast and accurate recognition, and Graffiti is in fact the kernel around which the PalmOS was designed.

The default Zoomer recognition system, on the other hand, was pathetic. It took about three seconds to recognize a single letter; a whole sentence took up to fifteen seconds to convert into text (and it usually only got about half of the letters right). Switching applications seemed to take forever; even calling up an application's help screen took about five seconds.

On the other hand, it did have a nice big screen -- 3 times the number of pixels the Palm models offer. Still, given a choice between speed and screen real estate, speed will win in my book every time.

I think perhaps this might be why Osama bin Laden is so pissed off all the time. Err, no pun intended.

I decided last night to install Windows XP. I viewed this task with no little trepidation, as my previous experiences with installing Windows (3.1, 95, 98 and ME) had been fraught with complications. However, I was looking forward to XP's most significant new feature, demonstrated repeatedly in the commercials: providing the user with the ability to fly without any mechanical aids.

I zipped up my entire Windows ME directory tree prior to beginning, because I planned to do a "clean install", which wipes out the prior version of Windows. This helps prevent version conflicts, but it requires reinstalling all software that puts its settings in the Registry. Back in the old days of .INI files, a reinstall of the operating system rarely required reinstallation of the applications. (This is apparently Microsoft's idea of "progress": Make Everything Harder For The User).

When installing previous versions of Windows, I'd always copied the Setup files onto the local hard drive, which (1) made the install process faster, and (2) obviated the need to reinsert the CD when installing new hardware. For some reason, though, Setup didn't like this under XP (which, as it turns out, was unnecessary; Setup now contains the ability to do exactly the same thing, but on its own terms).

My first panic came when Setup rebooted for the first time, and a message appeared, informing me that the "My Documents" folder might be deleted. Mind you, the boot process was now set to enter Setup automatically, meaning I couldn't get to a command prompt to save those documents. This warning was not in the pre-install instructions! As it turned out, "My Documents" was not deleted, but Windows XP looks in a different place for each user -- meaning that the documents appear to have been deleted, even though they're still present. (Thanks for the heart attack, Microsoft.)

Next, I noticed a message proclaiming, "Windows XP not only starts faster than any previous version of Windows..." This is, unfortunately, a lie. Oh, admittedly, it's significantly faster than Windows ME, which was itself faster than Windows 98. But after I'd installed, I clocked the startup time at 15 seconds on my 1.7 GHz Pentium 4. Sorry, Microsoft, but Windows 3.1 started in under 10 seconds on my 25 MHz '386 way back when. It is a big improvement over ME, though; I'll grant them that.

Next, I was amused by the boast that Windows XP lets its users share modems. That was a standard feature of OS/2 Warp 3, back before Win95 had even been released. Actually, OS/2 let its users share the COM ports themselves, not just modems.

Finally, the self-promotion was over and it started asking me for input. It asked me to set up my network card. Which I did. It then asked me to set up my second network card. I only have one network card -- it had diagnosed my FireWire card as an Ethernet card, and displayed that one first (and I couldn't use the same values in the *actual* network card's setup).

Because of that, it informed me that the Internet was not available (hardly surprising, considering it was trying to talk to my videocamera). Then it asked me if I wanted to activate Windows XP over the Internet. Duh.

Well, finally it was installed (and, remarkable as it is, far less painfully than I had anticipated). The new interface is garish and cartoonlike, and spends lots of needless time displaying unnecessary froth and frippery (like sliding menus out rather than simply popping them up, or putting alpha-channel drop-shadows under the cursors and menus). Fortunately, however, most of these things can be overridden. Nevertheless, I heartily approve of the NT-style Task Manager and the ability to apply ClearType smoothing to all screen fonts. And apart from the FireWire card, Setup correctly identified all of the hardware in my system and installed the proper drivers without any intervention from me.

And then I spent the next six hours reinstalling applications.