I have written my first PalmOS application. It's nothing spectacular, just a PalmOS version of my Lute Fret Calculator. Truly simple: plug in the string length, hit the "Calculate" button, and it tells you where your frets go.

Only it wasn't so simple. For starters, PalmOS doesn't have a built-in way to print floating-point numbers -- a ridiculous deficiency for a PDA which might well be used to keep track of finances or expenses. "Simple," I thought, "I'll just roll my own. Such a routine is trivial."

But my float-printing routine always spit out zero. I tried it in a regular DOS executable on my machine. It worked fine. I tried it on the Palm OS Emulator; it returned zero. I tried it on my Prism; it returned zero. For three whole days, I bashed my head against the wall trying to get it to work under PalmOS. I rewrote my routine countless times, to no avail. I downloaded others' versions of the same kind of routine. Theirs didn't work either.

And then, doing probably the thirtieth GoogleGroups search to help me figure out what was going wrong, I discovered it. A bug in the compiler. Just download a patched version, said the message, and all will be well. And thus it was. Three days driving myself crazy over a compiler bug. Grrr. Arrrgh.

Still, it actually works. And despite the fact that the intersection of the set of lutenists and the set of PalmOS PDA users can probably be counted on one hand, I went ahead and registered a Creator ID for my silly little app. Just because I could.

Hey, something actually newsworthy happened in Tampa! 15-year-old Charles Bishop crashed a Cessna into the 28th floor of a building four blocks from my office. Fortunately, since he did it on a Saturday when the building was practically deserted, all he really accomplished was to remove himself from the gene pool.

I just returned from the office directly beneath where he crashed. The large plate-glass window was boarded over, and that corner of the lobby was cordoned off with police tape. Otherwise, the 27th floor seemed undamaged.

Last night, of course, the news anchors on the Fox channel were whipping themselves into a frenzy during what seemed like every commercial break before the 10:00 news. "Was there a connection to Osama bin Laden? We'll tell you at ten!" Of all the news teams in the Tampa Bay area, the Fox team does the most blatant, embarrassing pandering for ratings. (Actual quote during one sweeps week: "If you use feminine hygiene products, we'll tell you something that could save your life!")

During the news, they showed Tampa police chief Bennie Holder mumbling a prepared statement, his eyes glued to his notes the entire time. (I presume they choose police chiefs based on job merit rather than enunciation, but really, if a high-ranking public official can't speak coherently in front of the press, he ought to use a spokesperson.) They also claimed that Bishop's suicide note was found in his shirt pocket. The newspaper today claims it was in a canvas bag found in the rubble. Ah, there's nothing like accuracy in reporting.

Grief counselors have been dispatched to Bishop's high school. This seems rather ridiculous, as all the reports about Bishop emphasized the fact that he was a loner with no friends. I predict the grief counselors will be seeing a lot of malingerers who are taking advantage of the opportunity to get out of class for a while.

What can potential copycats learn from this weekend's events? First, a Cessna does not have anywhere near the same destructive potential as a jumbo jet. Second, if you crash into a mostly deserted building, the only person you'll end up killing is yourself, which is kind of pathetic if you're trying to emulate a terrorist attack (as Bishop was purported to have been doing). Third, for some bizarre reason, MacDill Air Force Base -- the very center of operations for Operation Enduring Freedom -- has no interceptors on hand, so Tampa seems to be a pretty safe place to do something stupid in an airplane.

Alas, my email address has finally made it onto the spammers' lists. Ah well, time to fire up the old bozo filter again.

Bennigan's Restaurant, in preparation for St. Patrick's Day, has resurrected last year's commercial in which the protagonist, of implied Irish heritage, finds $10 in his laundry; to celebrate his new-found wealth, he goes to Bennigan's and buys an enormous hamburger and a tall glass of Guinness stout — which together cost more than $10.

At least it's not quite as ridiculous as the ad where a woman decides to celebrate at Bennigan's because she found a good parking space; apparently, whoever wrote these commercials believes that the descendants of the doughty ancient Celts are morons.

And on a tangent, the entry page for Bennigan's declares that "Sláinte", the Irish toast meaning "to your health", represents the Irish hospitality which can only be found at Bennigan's. I didn't realize they had a monopoly on it.

The first season of Twin Peaks is out on DVD. It's a four-disc set, which one might expect for an entire season of a television series; a single DVD can hold eight hours of material, right?

Unfortunately, the first season of Twin Peaks — which doesn't include the pilot episode, by the way — was only seven episodes, as the show was picked up midseason. So we get a sparse two episodes per disc, and the pilot must be purchased separately. And it cost twice as much as the first season of Buffy The Vampire Slayer, which does include the pilot (and which should be arriving from Amazon any day now). The animated menus are cumbersome, and ambiguous at times; such effects were nifty when DVDs first came out, but now I find myself impatiently waiting for the next menu to finally pop up, rather than being dazzled by the technological bells and whistles.

On the bright side, the first two episodes that I've watched so far have had commentary from the director (episode 1) and the cinematographer (episode 2), who actually discuss the mechanics of filming a television series, which is something I find quite interesting.

Visually, the remastered episodes are stunning, with beautiful lighting and a cheerfully warm tone (thanks to the coral filters they shot all the interior scenes with). The storyline and characters aren't any less freakishly bizarre than I remembered, and now I'm noticing details I missed when it was on television (like Big Ed Hurley and Deputy Hawk subtly exchanging ritualistic gestures in the first episode). Special Agent Dale Cooper is so off-the-wall with his gnostic methods of obtaining information that he makes Fox Mulder look like an absolute skeptic.

Speaking of whom, seeing Twin Peaks again renews the question: Is the Sprint PCS spokesman supposed to be a parody of Mulder, or of Cooper?

My favorite part of the Simpsons episode "Homer Simpson vs. New York City" was the Khlav Kalash vendor in the World Trade Center Plaza. This site is not only dedicated to the ethnically ambiguous Khlav Kalash guy, it even has a recipe for the mysterious glop-onna-stick. (I wonder, though, where one can find wether meat? And how different is it from regular lamb?)

Did our taxes today. The instruction booklet is ambiguously worded in places, and the whole tax system is needlessly overcomplex. I would truly like to see the President and every single congressperson required to do his or her own taxes for the entire term of office, using only the tax booklet and the IRS information line for assistance -- no input from accountants allowed. I suspect the tax code would get an immediate massive overhaul. Of course, that'll never happen.

When I do my taxes, I perform each arithmetic operation three times on a calculator, and then a fourth time on paper. I'm not sure what that reveals about me, but I suspect "anal retentive" falls short of being the appropriate adjective.

Well, no big surprise, Fox has gone and canceled The Tick.

It was pretty much obvious from the start that they didn't think much of it; rather than debuting it on Sunday nights for a couple of weeks to gain an audience (like they do with all of their darling shows), they stuck it against NBC's Thursday night lineup, pre-empted it frequently, and shuffled it to other nights a couple of times without much notice.

So the last episode (Arthur, Interrupted) will air this Thursday. If the fan letter-writing campaign doesn't work, then eight meager episodes will be all that marked the third incarnation of the nigh-invulnerable blue superhero.

Superman had his Kryptonite. Achilles had his heel. But the Tick's nemesis is that slavering horde of network execs who prefer carbon-copies of successful shows to offbeat humor that doesn't follow a predictable formula and doesn't pander to the least common denominator.

Jason Mewes, who portrayed "Jay Phat Budz" in Kevin Smith's movies, is wanted by the police. Drug charges are involved; who saw that coming?

My wife's advice: don't reprise my Halloween costume again this year.

Yesterday, I had to flip off one of the circuit breakers for the repairman. Unfortunately, the breaker panel wasn't well labeled, so I had to figure out which one it was through trial and error. Which meant the computers lost power.

When they came back on again, Karen's machine had no video. As her monitor worked on my machine, and re-seating her video card had no effect, it was apparent that her video card was bad. So I bought my machine a new video card.

(That's the way it works in our household; new parts go into my machine, the parts they replace go into Karen's. Which works out well for both of us; my computer usage requires gobs of memory and raw number-crunching power, while Karen's doesn't. Not that her computer is a pathetic ancient heap; she currently has a 1.4 GHz Athlon with 512 MB of memory. And my old video card was only a couple of months old anyway.)

Anyway, I stuck the new video card and the memory into my machine, closed the case and screwed it together, and...

Nothing.

Lee's First Law of Computer Upgrade and Repair: Closing and screwing shut the case before testing to see if the machine will boot guarantees that you will have to open it back up again immediately.

The video card had apparently not been seated completely. So once that was rectified, my computer hummed along merrily. Except for the fact that the video drivers on the CD-ROM weren't signed, so Windows XP complained mightily that installing them would call forth rains of frogs, cause three-headed goats to be born, and afflict me with terminal halitosis. I would, obviously, have to download them from the Net; however, Karen's machine is set up as the Internet gateway.

So I put my old video card in Karen's machine, turned it on, and...

Nothing.

Arrrgh. So I started pulling things out of her machine, until just the video card remained. Still nothing. I double-checked to make sure the video card was seated completely. Still nothing. I pulled out the power supply and tried a different one. Still nothing. So I pulled out the motherboard, stuck it on non-conductive foam, hooked up the power supply and the video card, and turned it on. And it worked.

I put the motherboard back into the case. It worked. I hooked up the drives. It worked. I secured the power supply back into the case. It worked. I put all the other peripheral cards in. It worked. I screwed it all together. It worked. Just for grits and shiggles, I hooked together the bad video card, an older motherboard I had lying around, and the power supply I'd just taken out of her machine. It worked.

Lee's Second Law of Computer Upgrade and Repair: Computers are capricious, malevolent bastards that exist solely to play mind games with humans.

A few entries ago, I mentioned that I had learned from another blog that there was a Texas, Australia. Last night, the owner of that blog emailed me to say that "Texas" was only her codename for her workplace (probably a wise move, given some of her writings, like the entry about an elderly lady stinking up the bathroom). However, according to Weather Underground, there actually is a Texas, Australia, so all is still right with the world.

Well, actually it isn't, as this is one royally screwed-up world, but you know what I mean.