My own set of questions...

Back ten years ago, at about the time I joined LiveJournal, I was an "early adopter" at a site called InfoRocket.com, whose gimmick was to act as online intermediary between people who had questions and those who were willing to answer them for a price (minus a cut, if memory serves, to the site). In March 2000, the site was the fifth fastest-growing site on the Internet (according to an outfit called PC Data Online).

A lot of the questions were silly ("What is the name of the CD in my computer right now?"), and even more questions had more than the whiff of spam about them ("Who wants to make a lot of money online?"), but in 2000, the site held a contest for people to write something appropriate to Father's Day. I wrote something - I don't recall what, offhand - and as a result won a book titled Questions for My Father, by Vincent Staniforth.

I raise the point because I just unearthed the book from the archaeological dig that is my library, and as was the case with its author, both my dad and stepdad are no longer around to answer any of my questions. (Strangely enough, I know more background about my biological father, of whom I have but a few memories and some handful of letters addressed to my mom, than I do about my stepdad, whose entire life prior to marrying my mom fit into a box that would fit in your pocket, and whose contents - photos, mostly - cannot speak to me.)

And now that I am inclined to open the book at random, to perhaps answer one of the questions therein as if I were the father being asked, I find the book has... disappeared. I do not recall moving it, so where did it go?

Cheers...

Progress everlasting...

I'm keeping pace with The Big Edit™, and expect to finish the most recent chunk tomorrow.

Yesterday, I went back to dig through a series of CDs that I burned 8-10 years ago to look for a Perl CGI script that I'd like to "translate" into PHP, and managed to find it. Now comes the hard part...

En passant, I ran across a directory for the first Windows version of a program called InfoSelect, which had previously been a DOS TSR program called "Tornado Notes." (Extra points for you if you knew that TSR stands for terminate-and-stay-resident, which described a class of program that was popular back when computer operating environments were designed to run only one program at a time.)

The thing that made InfoSelect so great was its inherent lack of structure - everything was text contained within a window - and so the program excelled at what it was designed for: entering information and finding it again later. Later versions of the program suffered greatly, IMO, from creeping featuritis, so much so that I eventually stopped using it.

The program won't run in Windows 7 but will run in a Windows 2000 session in VMPlayer. I am now tempted to routinely run VMPlayer as part of my setup just so I can have InfoSelect close at hand.

* * *My friend Feht suggested that this is a bad time of year to put stamps up for auction on eBay, and I am thinking he's right. Over the years, he's sold more than 2500 items on eBay, enough to make him a "Top-rated seller," mostly during slow translation periods, and I've found his advice regarding eBay (and stamps) to be spot on. Over the past couple of weeks, I've picked up some pretty good buys, not all of which I am going to want to sell when the market gets hotter later in the year, but that's why it's called "collecting," I guess.

Time to close down for the night, go upstairs, have another (small) portion of buckwheat, and settle down to watch Covert Affairs. The series sort of grows on you.

Cheers...