Dale Miller

The Computing Services annual retreat was Thursday and Friday at the Winrock center on the top of Petit Jean Mountain. The facility is nice, and it’s a good idea, but it doesn’t work well for me. At one point in an introduction, Jeannie made the comment that part of the reason for the retreat was to get away from the office and de-stress. For most people it seems to do that. I’m just the opposite. This is the third year we have done this, and the first year I’ve come away from it without being seriously depressed. The first year I was actually in tears at one point, and last year was only marginally better.

I am comfortable when I’m at work. I have things to do, I’m good at my job, and I’m in my comfort zone. When in a social situation (and the retreat, while business, is closer to a social situation), I don’t function well. I’m not sure why this is. There was nothing that I *should* have reacted badly to in any of the times I’ve been on a retreat, but I *do*. Interestingly enough, the speaker on Thursday covered the topic “Emotional Intelligence”. It is a good topic, and one on which I need to do more reading. In the “pretest” that we all took, I scored second-lowest in the room. That’s not too surprising, since I tend to allow my emotions to have too much control over me, and they don’t seem to always follow standard patterns.

In any case, it’s over for another year. I ate too much and am still recovering, but that’s a minor issue.

Yesterday at Interstate Park was interesting. Neither our team nor the Atomic Catsickles had won a game this season, and we didn’t want to break our streaks at the penultimate week in the regular season. We decided that we were going to have a tie game (and play all positions sitting in lawn chairs). The initial thought was to have a zero-zero tie, but we failed to communicate that to all the players, and one of ours scored a run. We ended up with a 2-2 tie at the end of the fourth inning, and then broke away for a game of Red Rover to fill the rest of the time. At the end of our time slot we were reminded that the LRKA rules don’t permit tie games and we would have to play until someone won. In order not to do that, we decided to turn in that game as a double forfeit. That is the only time that both teams have shown up in full force and actually played part of a game that that has happened. I’m wondering how they are going to put it into the stats.

As I was driving home (far too late) last night, I thought to myself that I know it’s been a good day at the ball park when I want to get home and wash the chocolate syrup out of my hair. I’m sure others felt the same way.

The Community Chorus performance was this evening. I think we did very well. The Mt. St. Mary choir was excellent, and the venue (Second Presbyterian) was very nice. I only wish we could do it more than once. It seems a shame to work for that long on a piece and only be able to perform it one time. In some respects, however, it’s probably good. We all do our best because we know it *is* the only time we’re going to be singing that particular piece. A recording was made. Now I have to figure out how to get a copy.

Fiona was sitting on my desk beside the monitor when I came home. Unfortunately when I sat down, she ran away. That little girl needs to learn that sitting down at a keyboard means it’s a good time for some petting. The other cats seemed to have figured that out. Cinderella is presently “helping” me type.

I decided that her name is to be Fiona. I don’t know why, it just sounded right.

She’s a sweetie, but I rarely see her. She has spent most of her time here hiding under or behind things. Then she will suddenly run from one end of the house to the other and back, occasionally multiple times. She allows herself to be petted on rare occasions. She hasn’t been welcomed with open paws by the other cats, but there’s been no open warfare. Everyone seems to have a wait-and-see attitude.

The only bad thing about bringing her home has been that I have awakened the past two mornings to the smell and feel of cat urine on my bed. I caught her at it this morning, but it was too late. My washing machine is getting a workout doing the bedding twice in two days. Hopefully she will get out of that habit once she settles in (if she doesn’t, she may not settle very well).

Choir concert this evening, kickball tomorrow, and work next week. Sometime I’ll find a couple of days to rest.

I have a new, yet-to-be-named feline. landley and fadethecat had been trying to find a home for one since last November. Yesterday Rob decided to drive from Pittsburgh (yes, Pennsylvania!) to bring me a kitten (small cat by this time). I expected them to be in town sometime around 9 or 10 in the evening. That was not to be so. We ended up transferring the kitty in the Wal-Mart parking lot at around 2:30 in the morning. Needless to say, I didn’t try to get up and go to work this morning. I now need to take kitty (I must find a name) to the vet. Maybe I can do that today, but it means a lot of driving. Usually I try to schedule appointments on a day when I don’t have other things that require me to be in town. Today I have class and a rehearsal this evening.

I skipped kickball yesterday to see The Pirates of the Penzance by the UALR Opera Theatre. It was excellent. We have so many talented people in the music department.

I came back from class today to find this email waiting for me:

Hi Dale. I am a producer on The Montel Williams Show. I came across
your blog and I thought you would be perfect for our show about the
ways people go to seek a date or find love. We tape in NYC on April
19th. Please let me know if this is something that you would be
interested in. I would be happy to give you more information about the
show and the guests we have on.

Thanks

Leah Kaplan
Associate Producer
The Montel Williams Show
(contact information removed)

Unfortunately, that’s the final rehearsal for the community chorus before the concert. I wrote back and told her I wasn’t available that day, but I’m tempted to send another message telling her that I have cleared my schedule and I would be happy to appear. I rarely get a chance to be on national television.

I buy paperbacks. I read paperbacks. I keep paperbacks.

Many years ago I started keeping a list of my books on the computer. The first iteration was a text file on my CP/M system which I edited initially with the Cromemco CDOS eScreen editor, and later with a BASIC program to alphabetize for me. This converted, over the years to an Excel spreadsheet, and kept growing.

In July of last year, I discovered LibraryThing and thought it would be a great way to maintain my list. Unfortunately, there was one problem. My spreadsheet had author and title, but not ISBN. Okay, no big deal, just write a program to take author and title, hit Amazon, and bring back the ISBN for the books it knows about. I wrote and tested it, then turned it loose. It returned hits on about 80% of my collection, which I thought was great. I uploaded the ISBNs and then didn’t do much with it. My LibraryThing collection had 2311 books in it, and I was in no hurry to finish it, since it seemed to involve manual labor.

Last night I realized my stack of “read but not logged” books was getting out of hand. Usually I would have grabbed them up and entered them into the spreadsheet. This time I decided to use LibraryThing as the initial entry. But … typing in ISBNs is slow and error-prone. I knew that somewhere in the house I have a bar-code wand or two, so I went searching. The first one I found is an excellent wand, but it is unfortunately a keyboard wedge for a DEC LK201 keyboard. While I do have a VAXStation in the back of the closet I could have hooked up and used, it seemed like too much work. I kept digging and found my Cue-Cat (Or Colon-Cat as it is sometimes known). I hadn’t messed much with it in the past, but thought it an interesting way to spend an evening. I plugged it in and it worked! However, “worked” means that it spit out a string of gibberish when it read a barcode. I went searching for CueCat hacks and found a hardware modification to turn it into a dumb scanner, but looked a bit further and found a simple Perl program that would decode the gibberish. A little bit of work and I was scanning barcodes into a file just beautifully.

Things are never that simple, though. There are two types of barcodes on books. Universal Produce Codes (UPCs) and European Article Numbers (EANs). All newer books have EANs, most also have UPCs. Older books have only UPCs (or some older rare coding schemes, or nothing at all). The EAN for a book is the ISBN-10 (sans checksum) prefaced with the country code 978 (for Bookland) and checksummed in the proper manner. UPCs, on the other hand, hint at the ISBN, but don’t really encode it. A UPC encodes a vendor code, price, and the product-specific section of the ISBN. The vendor code can be mapped to a publisher code, but there is no master chart available to do this. But, a bit more messing with the program, and entering publisher codes by inspection, and I can now read a UPC, look up the publisher, slap the product-specific digits on, calculate the checksum, and produce ISBN-10s from a UPC (I could produce EANs also, but there’s no real need).

I then proceeded to scan in the 150ish books that had accumulated since the last time I updated, uploaded them to LibraryThing, and was feeling good about the whole situation, when I noticed something about my collection — there were books listed that I don’t have! It seems that my initial ISBN lookup from the spreadsheet returned false results on occasion. That was annoying. So, I decided to bite the bullet, delete my LibraryThing collection, start over, and scan all my books. Since I still don’t have them shelved, that’s quite an undertaking. I worked most of the morning on it, and have made headway. Including the ones from last night, I have 668 scanned as of this writing. I certainly won’t finish this weekend, but if I can do a couple of boxes a night, it won’t take me too many days.

I woke up this morning with a headache and decided that I just simply didn’t want to go to work. Since I have copious sick leave, I turned in a notice and went back to bed. That pretty much sums up my day. I haven’t accomplished much of anything except reading most of a book.

Choir rehearsal last night was good, but I need to work on memorizing the rest of the mass. Apparently we will be allowed to have the music, but I don’t want to have to look at it. I never feel right singing a concert with a folder in front of me. Most of the times I have done so, I make it a point to have it empty so I won’t even be tempted to look. I have most of the mass down, but I need to work on the Agnus Dei and the Finale.

I think my plans for the weekend are going to consist of staying at home. There’s just not much I need or want to do, and it saves money.

I miss LSE. Most people have never heard of the VMS Language Sensitive Editor. It’s a neat product that was only ever ported to TRU-64 Unix. Since I no longer spend time on either of those OSes, I’ve been forced to learn other editors. Initially on Unix I learned vi. While it’s adequate for simple tasks, I miss the more advanced features of a “real” text editor. UltraEdit for the PC is pretty good, but only exists for windows, not Unix. I have known for quite some time that emacs is the editor of choice, that it will do everything I want, and is available for all platforms I use. The only thing holding me back was sitting down and internalizing the keystrokes.

Tonight I needed to edit several files, copying text back and forth between them, etc. This seemed like a good opportunity to change my ways. I fired up Cygwin-X on my laptop, started up emacs in X-windows mode on the Linux system, and started to work. I made myself pretend that the mouse didn’t exist and used only keystrokes to maneuver. I may not have learned the best way to accomplish my tasks, but I at least learned a way. I’m still going to need a lot more practice before my hands memorize things, but I’m on my way. I should probably alias vi to emacs on most Unix systems to force myself to do things the right way.

I realize that I’m in the minority of computer users in that I want a text editor, not a word processor. The features of Word and its ilk aren’t what interest me. I don’t care about margins, fonts, or pagination. I care about automatic indentation, matching parentheses, brackets and braces, and the ability to run system commands from inside the editor. Regular expression searches and keyboard macros are high on my list also.

Unfortunately, my LiveJournal application won’t post when I press <ctrl>-x <ctrl>-s, so I’ll have to do this with a mouse. Oh, well.