Via anne, commenting in Moira's blog:

Klein bottle hat! with matching Möbius scarf!

Absolutely useless in Florida, but it's so cool. If by "cool" you mean "hopelessly geeky". Which, of course, is why I want one.

Last night, Sev scored some hockey tickets, so he, Lisa, Karen and I went to go see the Lightning play.

Not just any tickets, either; tickets to the XO Club. I saw no massage tables, but we did avail ourselves of the copious food.

Before the game, some fans proved themselves no better than some Canadian hockey fans by booing during O Canada, but they were soon drowned out by the more numerous cheers of civilized folk. During The Star-Spangled Banner, two face-painters below us doffed their blue-and-white Afro wigs, yet a pair of yahoos three rows behind them left on their baseball caps.

Alas, the seat next to Lisa became occupied by an odiferous drunkard; what he lacked in personal hygiene, he more than made up for in enthusiasm and lungpower. As Sev observed, drunks and babies never lose their voices. Karen — who didn't have to sit next to him — egged him on by yelling Woo! every time he shouted encouragement to the team.

The XO Club certainly provides more perqs than general seating; during the break between the first and second periods, as most fans headed back to the buffet, waitpersons moved up and down the aisles, picking up emptied beer cups and replacing them with full ones. Take that, Tooth Fairy!

The Lightning pulled into a 2-1 lead early in the second period (or "quarter", as announcer Dave Mishkin called it, to my mathematical incomprehension), and maintained it for the rest of the evening. All around, it was a satisfying and exciting game, feculent patrons notwithstanding.

Postscript: They no longer call the Zamboni a Zamboni. They refer to it as a Zamboni Ice Resurfacing Machine. Every single time.

Post-postscript: The only things that aren't corporate-sponsored yet are penalties. We've got the St. Pete Times Forum, the XO Club, the TECO Instant Replay, the Kraft Zamboni Ice Resurfacing Machine, the Verizon Power Play, the Kash 'n' Karry Goal...

Post-post-postscript: I may have asked this before, but speaking of power plays, why is it considered so fantastic to score a goal when the opposing team has a player in the penalty box? It just implies that you weren't good enough to score when they had all their players on the ice...

I was fairly disappointed in the Creators Syndicate Liberty Meadows site, as its archives only go back a month.

Or so it would appear.

After a little exploring, I discovered that they have strips going back to last December, and running through the 27th of this month. So I cobbled together a quick script to let me read them all without having to manually enter the URL of each comic (which not only specifies the date in the filename, as one would expect, but each week's worth of strips is in a different directory). If anyone else wants to read them, here's the script.

If you want to join the Mile-High club, you might want to consider letting someone else fly the plane while you're doing it.

You cannot have one part of the Axis worthy of a war without applying the same to the others. It would be disrespectful.

Thus writes Denis Horgan, a longtime columnist in the Hartford Courant whose column was recently axed, along with those of a number of other good writers.

When I moved to Florida, I was surprised by the entirely different tenor of the columnists in the papers here. Whereas Horgan and his compatriots at the Courant wrote intelligently and articulately, the local rag's top columnist writes in what I suspect is supposed to be a "folksy" manner — his sole idea of wit being to describe someone as, for example, "Senator Belfry, R-Inebriation, the John Belushi of Alcoholism", then follow it up with "Senator Belfry, R-Crapulence, the Descartes of Drunkenness", and continue ad nauseam throughout the column.

Thanks to the Internet, though, Horgan can continue to express himself, and his readers can continue to enjoy his writings.

(As long as they're not anal-retentive about the English language, that is; I was shocked — shocked! — this morning to see him put an apostrophe in the neuter possessive pronoun in the penultimate sentence of last night's entry. Tsk!)

Ah, Macromedia. Creators and/or distributors of such impressive products as Dreamweaver, Flash, Director, FreeHand, ColdFusion, and more. A large, on-the-ball company. Or so one would assume.

Many years ago, I purchased Altsys Fontographer, a fairly professional font program. I was quite happy with it. But when I learned that version 4.1 would create Windows and Macintosh fonts natively, I decided it was time to upgrade. So I contacted Macromedia (current owners of Fontographer), learned they had an excellent upgrade price, and I bought the upgrade.

And it was okay, except for a few problems. Like an inability to properly generate bold and bold-italic fonts. Not to worry, though — there's a free update available to registered users! Mac users can download their most recent version, but for some reason, Windows users have to email tech support with a snailmail address. Annoying, but still — at least I can get a free upgrade.

Except the online registration process doesn't accept Fontographer serial numbers, since they're in a different format from the rest of Macromedia's products, and the online form only accepts that other format. No problem! Just use the online problem report form to tell them that I can't register.

No problem? No reply!

Eventually, I call tech support. They register my serial number. I ask if I can get the update through them, but they say I have to send email to the tech support department.

No problem. Again, no reply.

So I call back after a suitably long time has passed. The support rep I speak to tells me to email my address directly to her, and she'll get it to the appropriate people. She sends an email back saying she'll update me on Monday.

Monday passes, and no email. Another Monday; no email. Another Monday; I send her an email asking what's up.

According to her, the person in charge of sending out the updates is "in transition" — but she'll see if she can get someone to send it out. (What, is only one person at Macromedia authorized to put postage and an address on a box and drop it in the mail?)

A couple of days later, she tells me that one of the engineers has found a disk image of the updater, and he'll put it on floppies for me and drop it in the mail. (Floppies — how quaint!)

Five days later, a cardboard envelope arrives. The return address — a piece of paper taped to the envelope — indicates that it came from Macronedia. Inside are three hand-labeled floppies. It has been two months since my initial request for the updater.

I install it. No problem! Well, one problem; while Fontographer ran fine on my Pentium 4 system with 1GB of memory, it claims there's not enough memory on my my Athlon-XP based system (also with 1GB memory). According to the technote on their site, too much memory confuses Fontographer — but it had no problems with the same amount of memory on a different processor.

I solve the problem by writing a small utility that lets me reboot Windows into different pagefile configurations. I run Fontographer. Aha! It works — but now it wants a serial number. According to the readme.txt file on the first diskette, this serial number is printed on the back of the diskette. No such number exists on any of the hand-labeled diskettes. My original serial number won't work; it expects the new Macromedia serial number format, the one that would actually work in their online registration form.

Another email to Macromedia. They're on the West coast, I believe, so I shouldn't hear back from them until at least... Thursday.

Rooster Spice is gone. Well, not gone yet, exactly, but no longer to be updated. I first "met" its owner via a computer-graphics mailing list, found that we both shared an opinion about one pompous and constantly condescending member of said list.

And DenisHorgan.com is also a casualty: Horgan, a former columnist at the Hartford Courant, was told by the paper's editor that he could not maintain a personal weblog due to a "conflict of interest" — despite the fact that they had axed his column a couple of months previously, so no actual conflict existed.

Sic transit gloria blogi.

Today, I took Karen's cellphone in to the Verizon store, as the antenna had broken off a couple of days ago.

Do they sell replacement antennas? No. Do they have a repair or replacement plan? Yes, but only if I had taken out phone insurance when I bought the phone (which I hadn't), and even then, it doesn't cover the antenna. Can they recommend a good place to get it repaired?

At this question, the salesman looked around, then leaned in close to me and said, "Well, I could give you the address of a repair shop, but you'd just be throwing your money away. Most cell phones made in the last few years have an internal antenna; the external one is just a dummy. It doesn't do anything. Try your phone without it, and if it still gets reception, you'd just be wasting $25 to have it fixed."

Rather major overhaul of the blog code, to get things cleaned up for a new blogger who'll be using my system. Now most of the files are kept in a central location, rather than keeping copies of the code in each user's directory, so that changes to the main code only need be done once. Also added a skinning feature, at Karen's request. Soon to come: URL and email address obfuscation, so that spammer spiders don't harvest any of the addresses left in comments.

Please email me if you discover anything broken in the meantime.

Last year, a pair of what I thought were pigeons, but which actually turned out to be doves, built a nest on top of the old, unused air conditioner in our carport and hatched two eggs. They came back this year, used the same nest, and had two more little chicks.

Mama bird sits in the nest, and the father usually sits hidden nearby. Both of them remain as still as statues. The little chicks are a bit more mobile, though they're silent.

They'll be gone soon, if they follow last year's pattern; but until then, they give me something to smile about when I leave for work in the mornings.

Via Moira...

According to Snafu's Marvelometer, I am Wolverine.

And according to the Dante's Inferno Test, I belong in the Sixth Level of Hell to be eternally punished amongst the heretics. Yeah, okay, it's a fair cop.