Another short night...
Coming home, I noticed the comet... the skies were actually clear! So Karen and I drove out into the country a ways and looked at it without the benefit of the light pollution. I was again impressed with it, and also with Mars.
We came home and went to bed around 22:30. I slept like a log until 03:30, and then I was wide awake. I tried several times to go back to sleep but I just couldn't do it. So I'm sitting here feeling sleep-deprived and wondering what I'm gonna do about it. I guess I'll do what I always do... besides bitch and whine. I'll just keep going until I fall asleep.
I did the install of MSIE 4.0 and it went very smoothly and I'm pretty happy with it. There are some features that don't work and some that are klutzy, but overall I'd have to give it an excellent rating. I'm also using Homesite 2.0 for an editor, and I'm pretty impressed with it, too, probably enough to buy it. For $25 it's a good value... the spell-checker I really use, and the multi-file search-and-replace feature is great. Someone (Willa? or maybe Sage?) told me about it quite a while ago, and I wasn't impressed then at all. Funny... my head did a complete turn-around in six months without any jogging at all. Actually, I had thought that I'd deleted it, but I did a right-click in explorer on yesterday's HTM file, and one of the selections was "edit with Homesite?" so I thought what the hell, why not? I guess I approached it with an open mind this time...
I finally got the tax stuff done and off yesterday... yeah, I'd said that it was done on 03 March... and it was, except for the last step... putting the stuff in the envelope and mailing it off. But no, I needed to procrastinate more, just to maintain my image. Did it work? No? Right.... I'm just lazy.
Lisa has been staying out very late lately... like she came in yesterday morning at 06:00, and this morning at 04:30. I hope that she's not getting herself into any trouble...
It looks like a beautiful day, clear sky, supposed to get up to 60 degrees F... no more snow? Hopefully... spring will progress normally from this point on. Karen and I are going to do something fun today, I have no idea what it might be, though.
Damn! This editor is slick! Just think of how dangerous I would be with a combination of this editor and a voice dictation system... I was sitting here thinking of how funny it would be to assign nonsense words to do different commands. "ERG" for paragraph, "BRRR" for break, "ORF" to insert a certain graphic break, "ORFONE" for a different one. Then imagine someone eavesdropping on the conversation between me and the computer...
Hell, the more I think about it, the more I think that I might go get that $70 system from Kurtzwel that I saw out at Best Buy. It would be damned fun to play with, anyway, and a helluva lot easier to afford that most of the other systems out there.
O'yeah... I've added some to the Dying Diary recently....
I did a vanity search (c'mon, you all do it, and you know you do it!) this afternoon, and found out that there's a Doug Franklin guy in Canada that's pretty famous. Some sort of minister of finance or something. I would like to be the minister of something, too. Minister of love. Minister of cats, maybe. Or sloth and gluttony. On the other hand, maybe not...
Internet Explorer 4.0 has a new search thingie... you do the search in the left-hand panel, and if you click on a URL it shows up in the right panel, and they're re-sizable. Pretty neat, but after about the fifth time, it blows MSIE 4.0 apart and it dies. No problem-o... it's a developer's version and it's free and I like it anyway! And I really like the way that they've done Microsoft Mail. Much easier to use, and you can send blind CC's to people on lists, so that they don't know who else is on the list, whereas before everybody's name was just a'hangin' out there. And now I can lie about how many people are on my list..... :^) Now why did I do that? I despise smileys! Well, despise is a pretty strong word... more like eschew. Damn, I gotta get out my dictionary for that one... OK, I passed that one. I even spelled it right, besides getting the meaning correct. Sometimes I wonder why I even keep a dictionary around... then someone reminds me.
One thing I don't like about MSIE 4.0 is that I can't tell when I'm on-line. I try not to be a band-width hog and stay online constantly... but MSIE 4.0 does some things that the older versions didn't... like it stays on-line after it does a scheduled mail check. And the older version had two little computers talking to each other in the tray... now that visual is gone. And I miss it. I guess I'll turn the mail-check off for now, it's kinda silly anyway. Nobody ever writes to me anyway... if it weren't for the lists I'm on I'd never get any mail.
Damn! I just lied to you... the little computers are back! However, I was checking my front page... and my counter has been reset. I had 7850 last time I looked... or was it 5870? Anyway, it's 8 right now. I'm not sure if I really care or not. I guess I don't since I can't do anything about it anyway.
I went to the hospital to help Eileene out with her project, that only took a few minutes, and I was very disappointed with the results. What we had done was scan some pix in from a medical book, and were using them in a presentation using MS PowerPoint. She had scanned them in before, but each slide file was huge... over a meg each! So I scanned them in different formats, trying to retain the quality and reduce the file size. I had given them to her in both *.gif and *.JPG formats, each taking about 60K. But NO! PP wants a TIF file type... so I converted them and the files were 300 K. And they looked crappy in the PP slides.
I have read that continuous voice recognition is just around the corner, but it will require a lot of processing power and a lot of memory. I happen to be set up pretty well with both.