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"Forget Google; what we need is a service that tells me of stuff I didn't know, but would think was really cool to find out." -- austin_dern, 2005-09-15

If any of my friends who is going to the Maryland Renaissance Festival on Sunday has a camcorder and is willing to do me a big favour, please email me.

I'll playing with The Homespun Ceilidh Band this weekend at what I've been told is a sort of RenFaire-ish event (the web site says both "medieval" and "renaissance" on it ...) the Harvest Faire in Newport News, Virginia. We've got a long set tomorrow night and may or may not be playing Sunday morning (we've been asked to be ready in case another band, which has had health problems, can't make it). Are any of my readers going to be there?

It's been a mixed bag of a week, but at least I'm feeling well enough to feel like I've had a week.

Things I've learned this week:

• Mac OS X does not have a 'csplit' command (say what?!)
• Fink does have a package that includes 'csplit' ... so I also learned about Fink (took a big detour in the middle of a wee project for anniemal to install Fink on her machine; I am so very glad I wasn't doing that over dialup).
• Lynx, the web browser, is my friend -- no, wait, I can't count that because I knew that already.
• Screen-scraping is not as fugly as I'd feared (but it's still technically-ooky enough that I'd rather use other tools when I can -- I did look very carefully for buttons labelled "XML", "RSS", or "Atom" before resorting to my first screen-scraping script).
• I have no USB keyboards in my house (okay, that's more "noticed because it suddenly became relevant", rather than "learned", but I felt like sticking it in the list).
• I may have to start using Microsoft Outlook after all ... not to send or read mail, nor to manage my calendar, to-do list, and contacts, but simply as a data way-station because it's the one tool/format that all the different gizmos that I'd like to keep synchronized to each other (which I will use for info-management and communication) all know how to connect to. Sheesh.
• The Ericsson hands-free adapter from two-phones-ago won't work on my current phone after all, even if I do remember where I left it.
• I still generate more comments than code when I'm programming, at least when I'm going to let anyone else get a peek at it or might ever want to edit it in the future. I guess one good habit I deliberately acquired actually stuck.
• "Model number" on the bottom of a Sun peripheral refers to the type of case the peripheral is housed in, not the interesting thing inside (fortunately there's also "Part number", which I really hope does translate to something like "this is such-and-such type of CD drive").

• How to make the camera-phone communicate to my computers -- it doesn't want to talk to the Windows software I downloaded (maybe that computer has a broken COM port?), and (at least as far as I can tell using Google and the "search" box on the Ericsson web site) there doesn't seem to be Linux software for it ... nor Mac, but I don't have access to an OS X machine that has an RS-232 port anyhow, so Mac software would have to be for OS 9 or earlier to be relevant anyhow.
• How to make an iPod talk to a Linux machine (Google found me instructions but the phone stuff has distracted me from going through them).

It was nice to feel like a useful geek this week, a nice change from my usual "the world doesn't want a geek who can't work full-time" feeling. Okay, one project was a favour and the other was barter, so I'm not "working", but feeling like my admittedly rusty skills are useful is nice.

(Hmm. I wonder whether there's a version of iTunes for OS 9 -- that might be easier than setting up the iPod under Linux, once I get ahold of a USB keyboard.)

The weather seems to have finally made up its mind to be autumnal, after flip-flopping on the issue for a while. Wednesday night my house was too warm; last night and today it's been cool enough for me to want clothing (at least a bathrobe). Which reminds me that it's time to start putting plastic over the windows again, and past time to have been thinking about obtaining heating oil (I'm still probably weeks away from turning on the furnace, but I should've been sorting this out already).

Before Pennsic, I thought, "There ought to be a dip in fuel costs between the end of the summer travel season and the start of the winter heating season, right? I'll see what's feasible to obtain then." But after Pennsic, prices didn't exactly get friendly, and then Katrina gave oil companies an excuse to squeeze a little more. Whooooops! I blew that one. The one hopeful sign is that prices this week are about thirty cents lower than what I was seeing shortly after Katrina. Still, a couple hundred galloms of heating oil ... %wince%. (It looks like this house needs about 700 gallons a winter to stay a little chilly but not cold enough for guests to have to keep their coats on; half that if I just aim for not letting the pipes freeze and only turn it up when I'm ill or have guests; two hundred gallons if I keep it chilly and we have a really mild winter. But all of these estimates require that I repair/replace the electric space heaters that have died over the past couple of years, so that I can keep a bedroom, the office, and most importantly the bathroom at something warmer than "fingers feel like they're falling off" temperatures.

My brother has suggested biodiesel for my furnace. I haven't checked yet to see whether anyone's selling that locally, and whether it's much cheaper (and I want to double-check that it won't require modifications to my furnace, but I think that's true). Of course, he was talking about do-it-yourself biodiesel, meaning that I should go ask the local fast food restaurants to give me their used fryer oil and do whatever chemistry is needed to clean it up for use as fuel. I haven't looked up the steps, but I'm not feeling very hopeful about the job of processing a couple hundred gallons (the size of my tank) turning out to be something I'm up to unless I have a Really Good Week all in a row, fibromyalgia-wise. But I need to look that up.

Transportation of the used cooking oil would also be an issue to sort out, and I haven't checked to see whether restaurants are still throwing old oil away or have started selling it to commercial biodiesel producers already. Whee, another research project. If it does turn out to be both practical and nearly free, that could make my house more comfortable than it's been any previous winter.

But that's for next week. Today, I get ready for tomorrow.