Ok, we’re giving this a shot for two reasons. First, I’m curious about how this whole Google ad thing works. I’m interested in tracking what kind of ads it determines my content merits, and I’m curious about just how much money per click one can make off the ads. Second, I wonder if I can actually make any money at this. I don’t expect I’ll get rich, given my sparse traffic, and I don’t especially aim to. It’s just an experiment. If you happen to read regularly (I know of only two people who keep track of the site at all) and having the ads up there chaps your hide, let me know and maybe I’ll move them. For now, I want them up high so maybe they’ll draw clicks, which after all are important data points for my experiment.

Having a four-day weekend for the holidays last week did me much good. It also did wonders for Lennie and me. Not that we don’t get along just dandy. Our screaming matches are few and far between, and she tells me she hates me only a few times a week. Ok, maybe I’m projecting 15 years into the future. Whenever I get home from work, Mleeka and I say “Daaadddy’s home” in a sing-songy voice and watch as Lennie lights up. The kid holds me in pretty high esteem unless it’s mealtime (an activity I like to call “taking a ride on the titty train” — all abooaard!). Lately, she’s been much more cuddly with me (and I think maybe in general) than in the past, and the long weekend gave me a chance to spend lots of good time with her (compared to the three hours of post-work walking the baby around so she doesn’t go apeshit time, some of which is quality but some of which borders on drudgery).

There have been several firsts lately. She had been sitting up a bit by herself, but now she’s a full-fledged sitter-upper-and-player baby. Sometimes I can just lie on the floor next to her and hand her toys to gnaw on rather than high-stepping all around the house to keep her happy. I can’t really peg the first time this happened, as it’s more of a continuum, but it’s definitely new in the last couple of weeks.

Then there was her first Xmas, which ushered in her first visit from Santa Claus. This visit was a surprise to Mleeka as well. I went out on Thursday to pick up a little present for Mleeka (we had decided not to do much of anything at all for one another). She wanted a dealie that lets you trim photos cleanly, and it could be found at Michael’s, which happens to be next to Babies R Us. So I popped over there thinking maybe I’d get just one little toy to set out for Lennie as a surprise to both her and Mleeka (whether or not Santa would be making visits to our house ever has been a minor bone of contention requiring some compromise). I got a Lamaze octopus with little air tubes in the feet that make musical notes when you squeeze them (a major scale — which one I’m not sure). While at the craft store, I also got a small wooden crate for us to store Lennie’s living room toys in. The plan was to set the octopus out on the crate in the morning before I left to go pick up Mleeka’s siblings to spend the day with us. Then I was off to Wal-Mart to buy some crackers and cheese to go with the ham Abbey was bringing for lunch on Xmas. While I was there, thinking about going to get the siblings and being generally in a holiday mood, it occurred to me that it might be fun to grab a few stockings and surprise everybody with that. Again, the surprise would be more for Mleeka, who would wake up to see all this stuff sitting out unexpected, than for the siblings, for whom it wasn’t an expectation but certainly wouldn’t have been beyond the realm of possibility that stockings should be prepared for them. I got a bunch of candy, nuts, fruit, crayons, pens, sticky notes, and some little blocks of a sort we’ve been stockpiling for Lennie, the idea being that Lennie’d probably be willing to trade some of her candy for blocks found in our stockings. I secreted all this stuff in the garage and planned on getting up an hour earlier than really necessary on Saturday morning to prepare stockings before waking Mleeka up to cook breakfast and leaving to go get the kids. Imagine my horror when I woke up and found Mleeka out of bed before me for probably the first time ever since I’ve lived in Knoxville when it wasn’t necessitated by conflicting work schedules. She had woken up and been unable to go back to sleep and was uploading photos of Lennie to send out as a surprise to our friends and family. I pestered her about getting her bath before I left in case Lennie woke up, but no dice. Then I went out ostensibly to clean the car but actually frantically stuffed stockings, hoping she didn’t wonder why it was taking me so long to pick up a little trash and remove the car seat. Finally, a few minutes before I had to leave, she went to get her bath, and I stuffed our three stockings and laid everything out for her to find while I was gone. Of course she was pleased and surprised, and it worked out pretty well in spite of the roadbump. So that was Lennie’s first Xmas.

Lennie also got her first solid food feeding from me. Mleeka’s tried it a few times but I hadn’t given it a whirl yet. Lennie doesn’t like rice cereal, it turns out, judging from the faces she made and her tendency to spit it back out. We’re going to try switching her to oatmeal cereal to see if she fares any better with that.

Last night, Lennie got her first bath with me. Again, she’s had many baths with Mleeka, but I generally find the practice of sitting in filthy water to be disgusting and so am disinclined to do so. Mleeka cajoled me into trying it last night, and I must say that it was fun. Lennie’s fun in the tub, but I’ve determined that we have to ditch the spongy toys and find some hard plastic toys for her to chew on while we’re in there or she’ll get sick from drinking bath water.

This one’s not a first, but it’s the first of something in a long time. Lennie slept on my chest for probably close to an hour the other night. I was walking her around the kitchen while listening to the radio, and she just dropped off to sleep. I kept walking for a few minutes but eventually decided to try to recline with her. So I grabbed a book, leaned the glider back a bit, and sat down. Out of character, she didn’t wake up, and we sat like that for a long time. It was not only a nice change from having to walk around and provide diversions, but it was just nice to have my baby cuddle me.

I’m starting to try to read to Lennie more now. I read her The Lorax two nights ago (along with some Wallace Stevens), and last night, I read her Fox in Socks, one of my all-time favorite Dr. Seuss books. She’s not always interested in listening, but if I bring along a toy, she’ll usually sit fairly still while I read, and I think it’s good for her to hear sounds besides those that fall within the speech patterns she’s accustomed to hearing from us.

I have another four-day weekend this week, hopefully with less stuff to do (besides some contract work), and I hope we can bond that much more this time around. When I got back to the office, I asked my boss if he’d mind switching us permanently to a four-day weekend schedule, but he declined.

The bit-heads behind Mozilla, Firefox, and related software sometimes feature off-topic blog posts at planet.mozilla.org, an aggregator of Mozilla-related blogs. Today, Gervase Markham replies to a post by Ian Hixie pertaining to evolution. Hixie maintains that evolution is a fact, while Gervase proposes that it’s a matter of faith (that macro-evolution is, at any rate).

Gervase’s tactic is common among those disinclined to believe in evolution, and it can be pretty easily swept aside. Talk Origins points out that evolution doesn’t require faith because it is based on observable phenomena (and further, I would add, phenomena that can be observed by anybody and everybody, unlike a personal relationship with the deity of your choice). In short, because we can review the fossil record and draw conclusions from relationships among creatures that emerge therefrom, we are using evidence rather than faith — and rather than a reliance upon old texts — to support hypotheses.

A general criterion for whether or not something can be classified as science is that it is falsifiable. And it is true enough that evolution as a whole can’t be falsified (because it can’t be reproduced — it’s one big long phenomenon that we have no way of duplicating on so large a scale). But conclusions within the theory can be falsified, and it seems pretty clear to me that there’s a scientific process based on observation rather than just an “I believe this” process going on. So nice try, Gerv, but it really doesn’t fly. There’s a big difference between “hey, look at the similarities and slight differences among these fossils sitting here in front of us and compare them to modern animals of type X” and “I believe Jesus will come back in three weeks because I had a dream about horsemen and beasts with horns and boy doesn’t it make me feel nice to think about heaven.”

Every once in a while, I get a chance to meet up with one of my old professors, and he’s kind enough to review what poems I’ve managed to write since we last visited. When I was still in school, I had dreams of maintaining contact with some of my fellow writing students, of one day having my letters with some of these future laureates bound into collections and archived in university libraries as literary commodities. I had hoped to maintain at least basic contact and possibly to trade poems for review from time to time whether or not the more lofty aspiration worked out. As it turns out, I’ve kept up with none of my partners in pens. Oh, there were a few letters near the beginning, and I recently thought I might rekindle a correspondence with one of the friends who had gone on to edit a magazine I had submitted some poems to. But by and large, my literary trajectory has been flat: I have neither produced much decent work nor managed to browbeat my favored classmates into staying in touch. Everyday life keeps me from thinking about this very often, but from time to time, I feel something like sorrow and profound disappointment at having essentially given up that part of my life.*

There are scattered nice moments, though, as when I got my packet of poems back from my former professor yesterday inked with many positive comments. Naturally, there were revision suggestions on all the poems, and some of them came off as duds (though he didn’t say as much), but several of them that I felt ok about he thought were pretty good. So while the urge to write is often dead or at any rate weaker than the urge to put food on my table and clothes on my baby, maybe all the talent’s not completely gone, and maybe every once in a while, I can shave some of the edge off my disappointment.

*This is not to say that I’m not happy with my life as it’s unfolded. It’s more like saying that while I chose the turkey, I sure would have liked to have had some ham as well.

Getting wireless to work on my new HP Pavilion (zv5320us) turned out to be a much bigger pain than originally anticipated. Try as I might, I couldn’t see my access point. I tried using ndiswrapper to wrap several different drivers with no success. I learned a few new commands, including iwlist, which can be used to scan for access points. My system could see none, though my own router was within four feet of the computer. Finally, it occurred to me to try pushing the little “wireless” button that lies above the function keys. On my last laptop, pushing the wireless button had no effect — wireless was just on. But sure enough, when I toggled the button on and ran iwlist, I could see not only my access point, but two other access points within range. I still couldn’t connect, though. I had been having occasional problems with my access point lately anyway, and so I thought I might as well try to update the firmware, something I haven’t done since I bought the router well over a year ago. And that did the trick. At last, I write this from my couch after much frustration.

A few weeks ago, my laptop started spontaneously shutting down. It did this a few months ago, and I sent it in for repair. All was well for a while. The day after I got it back this time, it shut itself down again. Sometimes it does this from a cold boot and sometimes after the system’s been up for a while. Best Buy sent it off for nearly three weeks, and they replaced the fan, cleaned things up, etc. Since it does it from a cold boot, we figured that it’s probably a motherboard issue rather than a cooling issue, and so I made them swap the laptop out for a new one. The one I really wanted, which looked and felt very much like my old one, wasn’t in stock. So I got the HP Pavilion (zv5320us) with widescreen display, on-board wireless, CD/RW, etc. It’s just a slight step up in some regards from my old system, though it’s a lot bigger. It also turns out that it’s a much bigger pain to put Linux on it than it was on my last system. So I’m briefly documenting the process for future reference.

I put Fedora Core 3 on this thing, figuring it’d be as easy an install as Fedora Core 2 was on my other system. The problem lies not in the transition between Fedora Core 2 and 3 but in the hardware on the new system. First off, the touchpad didn’t work, so I had to negotiate my screen using keys. Which is fine, but which isn’t good in the long term. So I spent a half a day trying to figure out how to get the mouse to work. Eventually, I downloaded the Synaptics driver rpm and installed that. I also downloaded the source, which has a patch for the ALPS driver that apparently powers my touchpad (as using just the synaptics driver didn’t do the trick). I wound up having to download a new kernel, patch in the ALPs driver, and proceed from there. I had never done a kernel update before, so it was intimidating but turned out to be pretty easy. I started the kernel build as follows:

rpm -ivh kernel-2.6.9-1.678_FC3.src.rpm
cd /usr/src/redhat
rpmbuild -bp --target=i686 SPECS/kernel-2.6.spec

Then, I copied the alps.patch file from the synaptics package into /usr/src/linux/drivers/input/mouse and applied it by executing “patch < alps.patch." I'm not sure whether or not I needed to do this (probably not), but I added "modprobe psmouse" to /etc/rc.local to make sure the mouse would load. Once I got all this done, I went into the kernel source directory and did "make && make modules_install && make install" to actually update the kernel. That took an hour or two. When I rebooted afterward, I had a working mouse. The motion was very slow, however. I'd be zipping my finger all over the touchpad, but the mouse would just creep along. So I tweaked /etc/X11/xorg.conf. My config is as follows:


Section "ServerLayout"
...
InputDevice "Synaptics Mouse" "AlwaysCore"
EndSection

Section "Monitor"
        Identifier   "Monitor0"
        VendorName   "Monitor Vendor"
        ModelName    "HP D2806 Ergo Ultra VGA 15-inch Display"
        HorizSync    31.0 - 100.0
        VertRefresh  59.0 - 76.0
        #Modeline "1280x800_75.00"  107.21  1280 1360 1496 1712  800 801 804 835  -HSync -Vsync
        #Modeline "1280x800"  107.21  1280 1360 1496 1712  800 801 804 835  -HSync -Vsync
        Modeline "1280x800" 83.91 1280 1312 1624 1656 800 816 824 841 -HSync -Vsync
        #ModeLine     "1280x800" 85.7 1280 1360 1496 1712 800 801 804 835
        Option      "dpms"
        Option "IgnoreEdid" "1"
        #UseModes "16:10"
EndSection

Section "Device"

        #Driver      "nv"
        Identifier  "Videocard0"
        Driver      "nvidia"
        VendorName  "Videocard vendor"
        BoardName   "NVIDIA GeForce 4 (generic)"
EndSection

Section "Screen"
        Identifier "Screen0"
        Device     "Videocard0"
        Monitor    "Monitor0"
        DefaultDepth     16

        SubSection "Display"
                Viewport   0 0
                Depth     16
                Modes    "1280x800" "1024x768" "800x600" "640x480"
        EndSubSection
EndSection