I just chased a squatter out of the basement of my apartment building. After the fact adrenaline buzzs are weird.

I'm heading out for a week tomorrow. Verizon will probably change my ip address the second I walk out the door so my website will probably go down while I'm away. I could get an update client running to avoid that, but then my apartment will lose power and the server will be down anyway.

US lawmakers pass 'doomsday bill'. In case 100 or more House Representatives are killed. Also "Planning for catastrophe".
Looks like the new measure(law?) requires states to hold elections within 45 days. A Constitutional Amendment is being considered to allow emergency appointment by someone in an executive branch (Pres or Governers).

Draft bill in the works. Girls too this time.

Bills S. 89 in the U.S. Senate and H.R. 163 in the House of Representatives introduced early last year, which comprise the “National Service Act of 2003,” are aimed at restoring equity within the draft. The bills state:

"To provide for the common defense byrequiring that all young persons in the United States, including women, perform a period of military service or a period of civilian service in furtherance of the national defense and homeland security, and for other purposes."
from "Draft bill working it's way through Congress"

Links to bills mine. (Linking to Bills)

The bills don't seem to include any language concerning the end of the draft. They only say that a person's duration will be 2 years give or take.

Some history on Conscription.

And Rumsfeld sees no need to resume draft.

Armour Archive concerning the creation of SCA armour.
Plastic Scales sorry Jim, it was a good idea.

Just to learn some COBOL, I did a small project in COBOL today. It shows the interesting pieces of the end of my web server's Access Log. ( I cheated and used tail to get the last 50 lines. At some point, I'll read the file backwards instead.) COBOL is not the best language for the job, but it was good exercise.

COBOL is a bit of a pain to handle text in actually. For example, I had to write a routine to read one line of a file. In honor of all the other languages that have this routine, I called mine ReadLine.

It's also a pain to use subroutines because they can't have local variables. All the stupid little things that each routine need to track for 5 milliseconds are globally visible and permenant.

Anyway, my next goal is to grab the searches that people ran to get to my site. You can read them in the forth column but they're all jumbled. I don't know if I've got the interest to make COBOL parse all the different query structures from all the different search engines out there. For example, google uses this url when I search on Tom Cerul:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&q=tom+cerul&btnG=Search
Yahoo gives this on a search for "how to make leather armor": http://search.yahoo.com/search?p=how+to+make+leather+armor&ei=UTF-8&fr=fp-pull-web-t&n=20&fl=0&x=wrt
And MSN on "Resizing jpeg images for the web" http://search.msn.com/pass/results.asp?RS=CHECKED&FORM=MSNH&v=1&q=&q=resizing+jpeg+images+for+the+web&cp=1252

Actually it would be entertaining to make the referer entry have hotlinks instead of just displayed URLs.

The Cape(lyrics) by Kathy Mattea.
See also: my Temp folder

Marathon(lyrics) by Rush

Russain to English Translation
History of Russian Navy's

Sooner or later, I'm going to create a Slavic or Rus persona for the SCA.

And I'm having connection issues again today. *cheer* I'm sure I can impress all those potential employers who keep finding my resume with my amazing ability to eek some UPTIME out of Verizon.

Cerul's Law of Wire Sedimentation: Devices with the highest uptime are connected to the wires at the bottom of the jumble.

The more it breaks, the easier it is to disconnect.

Chris (Fraser) points out that in the movie Daredevil, they un-killed Bullseye during the credits. The cool, fighting woman remains dead though. Edit: They unkilled Elektra and they're making a movie about her.

Jaime hit me with a clue by four today. Linux has a couple of programs, ispell and aspell, which will check my spelling for me. I've had them all the time and never knew. (That is the way Linux works though. The perfect program might be hidden in the huge pile of stuff and you might never find out it exists until you ask someone or they offer. )

Jenny and I will be taking a trip down to Georgia to visit my family there. :)

I just finished watching "All the Interesting People Died" which was released under the title "Daredevil". I like Daredevil, but the movie relied too heavily on computer animations. Bullseye and Elektra were more interesting characters and they both died.

Vocera implemented Star Trek style communicators. Thanks Chris Fraser for the link.

I added some pictures to my miscellaneous gallery today. Pics on page 4 include my car computer and the lake near Corinth, NY that we wandered (in the car) up to yesterday.

An accident on 787 southbound blocked us in traffic for about a hour this evening. Jenny counted 5 ambulances responding. When traffic started flowing again we saw a minivan, a medium car and a small car with damage.

We were disappointed by several of the other drivers who filled up all three lanes and the shoulder. Luckily, the lanes were wide enough that emergency vehicles were still able to get through. Someone might have died if the medics had been blocked. One driver on the shoulder said "I am so late for work, I don't want to get fired."

XinhuaNet.com is a Chinese news site in English.

I'm learning some Cobol today. The University of Limerick (in Ireland) has an online COBOL Programming Course which includes a section titled: What Is COBOL which makes a good case for learning COBOL. (It's really popular.) I should note that comparing the number of lines of code written in various languages is not fair. COBOL is an overly verbose language so it should win on that metric. But the total number of applications written and number of programmers who know COBOL are compelling. It's all the more compelling when I consider the number of job posting that have asked for it.

I spent today helping the network administrator of the Cairo-Durham School District replace 160 odd ports worth of network switches. Volunteer work is kinda fun.

I also noticed that my resume shows up on Google's results for "software developer resume" at number 20 out of 937,000. :D hehe, almost a million.

I saw a Hummer today with the license plate "1 MPG". Someone out there has decided global warming isn't an issue.

Jaime provides a link to a government site, SmallStep.gov, which contains a list of small steps that we can take to improve our fitness level. Take a second and look at the list.

Photographic Escher a short looping flash movie. Follow the picture frame.

Everything else on the site is pretty high on the offensive-o-meter.

Jargon File in frames. It's a pain to look up words in it. They never have direct links to the lexicon. So here it is.

The local SCA group was invited to do a demo at Doane Stuart (Private) School. I helped out. A Mistress of the Laurel played several medieval instrumentents for them including the crumhorn and a shawm. Then the kids learned Callithian/Maltese Brasle/Suicide, which is a fairly simple dance that gets faster and faster. After a whole lot of delaying, the other fighter arrived after getting lost on the way. We armored up quickly and gave a fighting demo. The kids loved it and were bursting with questions. The demo ran 30-40 minutes overtime.

I wasn't at all prepared to speak to the kids (I was told I wouldn't have to.). I managed and avoided embarrassing myself (mostly).

At one point, I asked who played chess. 75% of the 100ish 5th-8th graders raised their hands. I was very surprised. In a public school like mine, there would be maybe 10 chess players in a crowd of 100. When the kids were invited to dance, the same weird thing happened. Most of them got up by themselves to try it out. It was really impressive.

It's time to start bugging all your friends to get registered to vote. About half of America voted AT ALL in 2000. About half of them voted for Bush and about half for Gore. There are enough people who aren't talking (voting) that we could actually pick a candidate that we WANT rather then the lesser of two evils. 49% beats %25.

REGISTER, VOTE FOR THE CANDIDATE YOU WANT! PASS IT ON!

Register online at YourVoteMatters.Org

A friend of mine, Jessie Ivan, formerly Jessie Shields, is looking for her old friends. She has an email account on yahoo.com under the name Jesalonian. If that doesn't work for you, send me an email (address at bottom) or sign my guest book. She's living vaguely in Kingston.

No kung fu for me today. I can't afford the $20 in gas right now. Well, I shouldn't spend the money. Kinda bummed about that.

Watched a cool French movie called "Thomas in Love" about an agoraphobic (open spaces) who hasn't left his apartment in 8 years and does everything over Visiphone. I related to the never photographed main character to a high degree.

I installed mod_bandwidth tonight so my website will eat up less of my DSL line. Only folks on cable modems will notice any change at all. I think. Tell me if it's too slow.

It never rains except when it pours. Another ex-girlfriend from days gone by stopped by to say hi. Hi Rebecca and Hello Amanda.

It is, of course, no one's fault that my DSL line randomly disconnects me. Exactly at the most tense moment of the online game that I'm playing. And yet it annoys me a lot. It is amusing that these bits of flakeyness happen more often when I pay my bill late.

In happier news, my web presence has continued its cool trick of connecting me with only the cool people from my past. Got an email from my first ever girlfriend. She found one of my overly sweet love notes from days gone by, looked me up on a search engine and said "Hi". She's doing well and, like me, is also about to get married.

And again, time to pay the rent and rotate my weblog. March 2004 blog

On the advice of one of my Career Advisors (read "Mom") I'm adding my unemployed learning to my resume. In the process of adding my Game of Life (needs Java) I found this great article titled What is the Game of Life?. They have an implementation of GoL which puts mine to shame and a completely awesome write-up of GoL.