News: April 1999

April 28, 1999
I received Adobe GoLive 4.0 in the mail today, and I've converted the Davison Online site to use that editor. On the surface there don't appear to be too many changes, but let me say that I'd be happy with the same level functionality I had in GoLive CyberStudio 3.11 (the previous version before Adobe's purchase of GoLive) without all the crashing. Version 3.11 simply was not a stable program (though I concede it's also the best web site editor I've ever seen—what a trade-off!).

The GoLive 4.0 package includes a manual with the thickness of brick. It will be a good long while before I'm able to digest everything that in it, but I hope to add a few more goodies to the site without outrageously expanding page sizes or download times. (Adobe ImageReady is also very helpful in this respect.)

Erin finished up the 12 week grading period on Tuesday and now enters the home stretch—the final six weeks of classes at St. Francis. Never one to take much of a break, Erin has a summer teaching job lined up in Oregon, and it looks like we'll be moving in late June so that she can start those classes and take advantage of Oregon comparatively lower rent. More details to follow.

April 26, 1999
I finished the very intriguing Simple Social Graces: Recapturing the Joys of Gracious Victorian Living by Linda S. Lichter. Though often strident in tone, the book raises numerous interesting points about how American society has abandoned a wealth of Victorian-era wisdom which we are only now beginning to rediscover as different elements of our society fall apart. Much, if not all, of what Lichter has to say is fascinating, but the most important element is surely the comprehensive moral integration Victorians achieved in their day-to-day living. These were people of high ideals, and though they failed badly in areas like women's suffrage (at least until 1920), that is not to say that they had less respect for women than we see in today's society. Indeed, Lichter makes the case that the Victorian view of women was in many respects far more advanced. To get some idea what I'm talking about, here's a blurb from the dust cover:

As you can see, it's fairly compelling. I didn't agree with everything that Lichter put forth, and book's tone gets somewhat grating after 310 pages. Regardless, this excellent work is a superb reminder not to forget our own history, a history that many of us were never taught and which society as a whole is now in many ways struggling to relearn. Highly recommended.

April 24, 1999
Last night Bernard, Liz, Erin and I attended the St. Francis High School production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, perhaps the best high school musical I've seen. Every lead gave a strong performance including a particularly heroic effort by one cast member who had lung surgery(!) two days prior. (He concluded the first act but had to be replaced in second.) The acting, as I say, was very good, and in a couple cases, I'd say there are high schoolers ready for professional work. Amazing stuff.

I've ordered Adobe GoLive 4.0, the upgrade to the web site creation program I'm currently using, GoLive CyberStudio 3.11. The current version, which is what has enabled this montrosity of a web site to be built, is powerful and crash-happy. I'm hoping for more power and less crash out of the next version. (The upgrade cost, by the way, is $99 until September 1 for owners of Adobe PageMill or GoLive CyberStudio.)

April 22, 1999
Attended a speech at Stanford by world chess champion Garry Kasparov this evening. Though supposedly on the topic of the limits of human performance, it was more a recap of Kasparov's chess career to date (which was fine by me). The several hundred seat auditorium was packed to Fire Marshal-calling capacity (indeed the Fire Marshal did later show up to lay down the law), but the resulting body heat did little to wilt the crowd's enthusiasm.

There was a politically correct academic panel convened to ask the first questions of Garry, and with the exception of the Stanford chess team captain who had no public speaking talent (unfortunately he was also the introducer of Kasparov) and a token woman professor of slavic languages (for the topic of limits of human performance?), the panel acquitted itself nicely.

There was very little that was new information about what Kasparov said this evening. It was almost entirely material that I had read in ChessLife or on the Internet, but it was nonetheless interesting to see Kasparov in person. It was, as the eloquent MC of the event said, an honor to be in his presence—an honor, meaning it made us feel good about ourselves when we had no reason to feel so. That's was an apt description of tonight.

April 21, 1999
Did the second of three runs this week at Rancho San Antonio today. The distance is about 5.5 miles—it's the same course I was doing religiously a year or so ago—and the terrain is hilly. It takes me a little less than an hour to cover it right now, but I anticipate that within a few weeks I'll have my times back down into the 40s where they were before.

I've added a small audio sample ("Welcome to Davison Online") to the main page of the site. It's a Qualcomm PureVoice™ recording which I made utilizing Eudora Pro 4.0 and my PlainTalk microphone. From there I opened it in MoviePlayer and converted it into a QuickTime 3 movie. I ran resulting 90k file through Media Cleaner Pro 2.0 (a compressor), and posted the final 13k file to the page. It shouldn't be too annoying since it only runs once (though you can re-load the page and hear it multiple times).

I'm uncertain about how this technological jump will be received, and I'm eager to hear what you think, so love it, hate it, or just don't care, let me know. I'm not looking to add more audio to the site (except in the Music section, but that's a little way off), so don't worry about me going crazy with this. I just wanted to see what I could do, and now that I've done it I'd like to know if I should undo it.

April 20, 1999
I headed over to the BMUG (Berkeley Macintosh Users Group) South meeting last night at the Apple Campus. There were about 45 of us there. We spent an enjoyable 90 minutes chatting about Mac-related events, products, problems, etc., then watched a product demo of FWB Hard Disk Toolkit 3.02 by an FWB representative. In all, a very enjoyable evening, and I confess I'm looking forward to joining either PMUG (Portland Macintosh Users Group) or SMUG (Salem Macintosh Users Group) upon our return to Oregon.

Erin wrapped up the season with an end-of-year cheerleading party last night as the team celebrated the school's first trip ever to the national cheerleading competition.

April 18, 1999
With Erin's help I've begun a diet restricted to 2000 daily calories or under. This, complimented by glass after glass of water and too many fruits and vegetables to count, will be added to my 5x a week exercise schedule to form the basis of my weight loss plan. It's a plan that more or less springs from "Make the Connection," the Oprah Winfrey book I mentioned last month. Now that my back has returned to usable form, I'm ready to have at everything again.

The good news is that I've managed three days straight of sub-2000 calories. Trust me when I say that this hasn't happened in months. Will I be able to incorporate this diet strategy into an overall lifestyle change? That's a very interesting question, and right now all I can say is that I hope so.

(As a side note, I received an email from my friend Jenny who told me that the Weight Watchers philosophy is similar to the one I've outlined above. So I'm not a total crackpot, despite what the media claims.)

April 17, 1999
The Force has definitely not been with me. After struggling mightily to make various Microsoft Office 98 apps run (Word was repeatedly crashing on a base 8.5.1 extension set), my 1 GB Quantum Fireball hard drive decided it was time for a vacation. No amount of TechTool Pro 2 coaxing could even get the drive to mount, and that's never a good thing. Disk First Aid reported major Mountcheck errors, and if not for Norton Utilities 4.0, I dare say that my unforgivable lack of a recent hard drive backup would have been catastrophic.

As it was, this crash was serious enough to prompt me to buy a new hard drive. I'd been needing one for audio production work anyway, and Data-Tek, a local PC dealer made me an incredible deal on an IBM 9.1 GB, 7200 rpm, 1 MB buffer, 6.5 ms seek time hard drive. I was able to transfer almost all data to the new drive. I followed this by a low-level format of the original drive which was perhaps an unnecessary step but one which made me feel better.

Why did this hard drive failure occur? My best guess is that the crashing caused by Microsoft Office extensions, an answer which makes sense as well as allows me to continue my undying hatred of the software giant.

Despite the dire occurrence of the day and the subsequent solution, Erin and I partied over at our friends Shan and Heather's place in a celebration of Tax Day, Spring birthdays, and whatever else anyone could think of. Loads of fun, and a welcome respite from the downer of the day.

April 14, 1999
I just couldn't stand the suspense any more, so I downloaded both of the Star Wars Episode I trailers today. These were huge downloads—on the order of 24 MB for the second one—but, simply put, I've not wanted to see a movie this much since the original Star Wars series was going in the early '80s. This looks to be a brilliant movie, and not just for the special effects. It seems to carry a good deal of political intrigue as well.

Both trailers were in Apple's QuickTime 3 format, the same one I'm using for my QuickTime on the web test featuring Cindy Crawford. This movie will move to a back page some place soon, so count those sit-ups while you can. I'll be doing an equally interesting (though perhaps not as exciting) audio QuickTime test on Friday or Saturday.

April 13, 1999
Time for the big news I promised: Erin and I have decided to return to Oregon this summer. It is where I was raised. It is where we met, fell in love, and were married. It is home to many family members and friends.

In our three years in Mountain View, we've accomplished everything which we intended. Erin's gone from being a newbie teacher to a confident, mature educational professional. My student loans are history. We have a new(er) car. Our retirement savings is on-track so that when Social Security goes belly-up, we won't go with it. I have a G3-based Power Macintosh computer, enabling me to do things like this web site (which is theoretically a good thing). Our goals in moving to Mountain View have been achieved.

The flipside is that the outlook in Oregon is also very promising. There are teaching job opportunities aplenty in Oregon (and southwest Washington, for that matter), and the cost of living—particularly as it applies to real estate—is a lot lower. The idea of home ownership is pretty darn appealing when your rent has just been increased by 25 percent.

At this point, we're at least 10 weeks away from a move given Erin's teaching commitments. But we'll be looking to move up in the early summer, and I'm sure we'll be calling all cars for help when it comes time to pack and unpack all our junk. (Quick note to potential helpers: Free pizza!) More details on everything as they emerge.

[In case anyone remembers to wonder: Yes, this means we're postponing our trip to France for another year. It'll happen some day. Really.]

April 10, 1999
Thoroughly enjoyed Diana and Michael's wedding and reception with the exception of having someone accidentally run off with my London Fog trench coat. (Happily the mix-up was discovered the next day, and I got my coat back.) Bizarre incident: Woman nearly breaks arm after jumping up and catching the bride's bouquet. Made for a heck of a laugh at the time, but wasn't nearly so funny when they started packing her arm in ice. Important lesson learned: Don't jump in heels.

Finally got some of the long-overdue sleep I needed, though I confess when I had an opportunity to catch some shuteye in the morning hours, I ended up watching Speed 2 on HBO. (BTW, the critics were right: Even the charms of Sandra Bullock couldn't save this movie. The script writing is godawful and the jerky action photography is enough to induce seasickness by itself.)

April 9, 1999
Hopped an Amtrak train in the morn with Erin's sister Christine and her husband Mark. Together, we headed down to San Luis Obispo for Erin's cousin Diana's wedding. It's a gorgeous stretch of land between Mountain View and SLO, and the relatively inexpensive train ride was well-worth it. Would've liked to have been a little less exhausted from the week's events, but great scenery stops for no man.

Did a wonderful Italian dinner with Bernard, Liz, Mark and Christine. SLO is an interesting town. Hard to know what to make of it, but I suspect it would be a fun place to live. (Might be too close to LA, though.)

Spent the late evening watching Sumo Wrestling on ESPN2. A lot more interesting than one might imagine.

April 8, 1999
Up early to hit the road back to Mountain View, but not before spending time to get everything ship-shape on Quicken for Dad's company. I think everything is were it needs to be, but curses on Intuit for making the PC Quicken to Mac Quicken file transfer about as time-consuming as possible.

The drive back to California was notable for the range of weather we encounter. We got sun, wind, rain, and heavy snow. We even bought chains for the car down around Medford. Turns out we didn't need them, but better safe than sorry.

April 7, 1999
Day of the Macintosh Business Expo at the Oregon Convention Center in Portland, an event my friend Dave and I attended after a get-together breakfast with Erin, my grandmother, and my brother Bret. Nothing like the world's best pancakes of King's Omelets restaurant to start the day off right.

The expo itself was excellent, and we capped off our exciting day with a trip to Fry's Electronics in Wilsonville where I sold a copy of FileMaker Pro 4.1 and the appropriate "Dummies" book to a customer. (Not surprisingly, no commission from Fry's.)

After that, Dave and I returned to Salem where I stayed up with Mom into the wee hours of the morn while she learned about the basics of Macintosh usage.

April 6, 1999
Had a ball with my Mom, configuring and setting up and explaining about the new blue-and-white G3/300 which is gracing my parents' home. We even headed down to the local Mac shop to pick up an Iomega Zip disk, ethernet cable and Kensington trackball.

April 5, 1999
You'd think my frequent all-day car trips from Mountain View, California to Salem, Oregon—that's 11 hours in a car—would really be a morale-shattering experience, but I've got to tell you, today's trip in our Mazda 626 was easily the easiest of the lot. Having a car you enjoy driving makes a big difference.

April 2, 1999—Good Friday
My back is more-or-less in one piece again. I'm able to walk around, sit for extended periods, and sleep pain-free. And, gee, it only took about a week. As I've mentioned, I don't think it's a disc-related injury, though that hasn't stopped it from being fairly debilitating.

Latest update on April 28, 1999
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