Serendipity strikes again!

I again turned to the net to search for the translation of Rostand's Cyrano that was used in the Ferrer movie, and found, by complete happenstance, a pointer at a page titled Kay Nolte Smith FanSpace. The name rang a bell, as she had been a contributor to Ayn Rand's The Objectivist way, way back when.

Clicking on the page revealed that Smith died in 1993, listed the books she had written, and provided a further link to an essay on Smith's work by one Greg Swann. Who Swann is, I don't know, but his essay is well written, and his home page promises some interesting reading in the future, when I have more leisure time.

Hmm. It seems I completely lost track of the goal - the Rostand translation - and allowed myself to be sidetracked by a the Internet equivalent of a pretty pebble on the beach. This is an old sickness of mine, which began back in elementary school, when I it would take me ever so long to look up a word in the dictionary, because I kept getting sidetracked by words that I'd find on my way to the word I was supposed to be looking for. I wonder, do others suffer from this malady?

So far this, um, morning, I've reinstalled C++Builder3, so I ought to be able to tweak the GlossaryBrowser some time this weekend. Then I installed the HomeSite 4.5.1 update, which I am told will liquidate a couple of annoying bugs, one of which caused me to lose data recently. And most recently, I readjusted the system clock on my Windows box to run at 66 MHz (the jumpers had been in the 95 MHz configuration, but the Spacewalker web site suggests that my Cyrix M-II is built for 66 MHz). I'm willing to take any related performance hit because speed is not that critical for me at this point, and more important, the random spontaneous rebooting that's been plaguing me since I homebrewed this machine is really beggining to annoy me! The 333-MHz Cyrix CPU is already running at well below its rated speed (200 MHz), and I really want to exhaust all avenues before I am forced to conclude that the CPU was damaged early in its life when I inadvertently overclocked it.

Cheers...

Lazy Saturday...kinda...

Well, I finally hit the sack around 2:30 am last night, and true to form, it took me a while to finally fall asleep. Galina woke me early with her activity and we ended up heading for the flea market up near the intersection of 35 and beltway 8.

You've undoubtedly been to one of these places, chock full of dealers selling everything from furniture to second-hand junk. Ostensibly, we went to look for a suitcase large enough for all the stuff Galina wants to take with her, and cheap enough so she doesn't have to bring it back.

Instead, she ended up picking up some clothes, and I bought some fresh chorizo.

We stopped at the house on the way back, and I turned on the water and went around to check where it might be flowing. It turns out the kitchen faucet was on and the toilet tank needed refilling, and as soon as those two items were taken care of, the telltale in the water meter stopped turning. Good.

I (or we) will undoubtedly have to start spending time over there, as the property is starting to look a little overgrown.

Anyway...time to go get some stuff done around this house. Sasha chewed the heck out of some plastic and someone probably ought to go pick up the pieces. Then there's the task of filling in the hole under the gate in the back yard, compliments (I am told) of the armadillo.

Cheers...

Disappearing source...blech!

For a programmer, there is perhaps no agony more exquisite than to go looking for the most recent version of an application one is working on, only to find no trace of that version anywhere on one's system, one's backup system, one's backup tapes, one's backup CDs, in short: anywhere. I would begin to believe that perhaps I only imagined making the most recent mods, except that I have, on a separate diskette, the version of the application that proves the pudding and mocks my best configuration management efforts.

It's almost enough to make you cry. I suppose the next step will be to sit down and reaquaint myself with the behavior of the new features in the program, but not now...I'm too annoyed.

On the other hand, at least the hunt for the missing source - and the associated general cleanup that has filled two HUGE trash bags - has kept me indoors, while my fellow citizens have faced temperatures that feel as if it's 114F out there. Yikes.

One other positive note, though cautious: the Windows box hasn't rebooted on its own after running for almost 19 hours. (Somehow, that shouldn't sound like much of an accomplishment, but as I mentioned yesterday, this machine has been a royal pain as far as that, um, `glitch' is concerned. As much as one might presume the problem lies with Windows, in this case, Microsoft is innocent; the machine used to reboot spontaneously with Linux installed, too.)

Tried the chorizo a little while back. Nice. Not as hot as one would expect, and little pieces of pepper tend to stick to the roof of the mouth, but nice.

Time to go relax.

Cheers...