Okay, I'll admit, the new iMac is pretty darn spiffy. I wonder how long it'll take before I can get a PC in that form.

We've already lost power once this afternoon, for about half an hour. Whee.And it isn't even raining.

The wind's blowing a little, enough to make "tumbleweeds" out of pine needles and Spanish moss. But nothing that seems like it'd be enough to knock out the power.

I had to go hunting for a file converter for Karen, as one of her students refuses to use anything other than WordPerfect, and also refuses to export her papers to a file which other applications can read, such as Rich Text Format or even plain text. (Actually, I don't think the latter part is so much a refusal as ignorance of how to do it.)

Once I found a converter, I tried it out to see whether or not it worked, and in the process I got a look at the girl's paper. Holy crap! I can't believe that anyone could get to college with such a poor grasp of spelling, punctuation or grammar. I remember when I was a child, my father complained about such things when he was grading his students' papers, but this just made my skin crawl.

Go ahead, call me a grammar nazi — but for crying out loud, I'm a product of the public school system too, and I don't have any trouble remembering that "I'm" has an apostrophe and "want" doesn't.

What the hell are they teaching in school these days? Suddenly I have a little more understanding of the popularity of home schooling. I had always been skeptical about it, since parents usually don't have any training for teaching; but if this is an example of what's produced by trained teachers, I doubt parents could do much worse.

My Web host finally fulfilled my request to enable FreeType support in PHP, which means I can now dynamically generate images with antialiased, kerned text using TrueType fonts.

Now if I could only remember what the heck I wanted it for...

Friday morning, I was awakened by a very concerned Karen. There was a museum exhibit in Memphis we'd planned to see one of these days — Masters of Florence: Glory and Genius at the Court of the Medici — and she'd just discovered that it was ending on the third of October.

Now, we had plans on that weekend, as well as the weekend before that; neither of which we could change. So we decided to do it that day. I scrambled to take care of some things before she was done with her classes, and we set off for Memphis.

It took eleven hours to get there. We stopped along the way at a roadside stand, as we had on our honeymoon, to get peanuts. Karen, as is her wont, chose boiled peanuts, whereas I went with dry roasted. (Yes, even after twelve years in Florida, I'm still a Yankee. I don't like grits either.)

The hotel was amusing. The pictures on the walls were an example of their cost-cutting measures:

The "art" was generated on an inkjet printer, on letter-sized paper, and then drowned in a sea of matboard in order to fill up the enormous frame. The bed was as hard as a rock, and the pillows barely thicker than a Kleenex. But the room had a refrigerator, so I'll give them that.

The exhibit was excellent. Sadly, photography was prohibited, and Karen had to give up her camera before we were permitted in. I heard one of the other patrons tell his wife that the museum was much better than going to Florence, because it was all right there; you didn't have to walk all around an entire city in order to see everything. I think, if given the choice between going to a museum and going to Florence, I'd choose the latter, but that's just me.

The gown of Eleanora de Toledo drove home (once again) how screwed up the SCA's ArtSci judging standards are. In a Trimarian ArtSci, it would fare poorly; the trim isn't machine-even, there are wrinkles and puckers, you can see some stitches on the top. And yet the techniques were masterful; the trim was all couched work — not something woven by machine, bought by the spool and then just slapped on. Oh well.

One of my favorite pieces was an iron strongbox. This thing put modern "strongboxes" to shame; instead of a lock with a single catch, it had iron claws which extended all around the lid's circumference. Once that baby was locked, there was no way to pry the top off.

They also had a piece of the shirt Giuliano de Medici was murdered in, still crusted with his blood. Brunelleschi's model of the Duomo, his masterwork which resurrected the ancient techniques of building enormous dome roofs. Incredible stonework. And some later paintings in which every Medici had the same face (such as Sacconi's Death of the Virgin, mourned by the Medici family). Inbreeding? Or just lazy artists?

And then another drive home on Sunday. But I didn't mind all the driving so much; it gave me a chance to plan out parts of a novel I want to write.

Up in Tallahassee, we see a different selection of bumper stickers than we saw in Tampa.

One frequent sighting is Buckle Up For Dale, which doesn't really make sense to me, since if I remember correctly, Dale Earnhardt was wearing his seat belt, and it didn't do him much good.

But the one I saw Friday puzzled me through and through. Git'er Done For JESUS, it ordered, but failed to elicidate on what (or whom) the driver wished me to do.

"Our next president will be either the man whose chief virtue is that he is not George Bush or the man whose chief virtue is that he is not John Kerry."