Scattered thoughts

[dtm]

So I've thought about several different journal entries I could write lately, but I somehow just don't feel I have the requisite will-to-type to write any of them. So here are some scattered thoughts I'm not journaling about:

• Katherine:
  • She has this nasty lingering cough, still, even after finishing off the antibiotic the doctor had her on for a sinus infection.
  • Tonight at bedtime she told me a story. Then, she told me another one. I wish I'd had some sort of recording device because I'd never be able to do them justice without writing out the whole thing stream-of-consciousness style, including the pant, pant, pant where she stopped to catch her breath. She tends to use ", and then, " where most adults would use a period and a short pause.
  • She's now over 40.5 inches tall. She was just about 39 inches around Halloween.
• Personal:
  • We've settled on a new car; as reported here on Jennifer's lj, our minivan was totaled. It is, like our other car, a Honda Civic. Unlike our other car, this one is a 1998 model, but it's the best we could reasonably afford.
  • We've finished our taxes for the year, and have discovered something nasty about the New York state tax code. If you as a non-resident work in both New York and from home, New York counts all of the work-at-home days as though they were days in New York. My employer, however, had counted those as days worked in NJ, and had withheld NJ taxes for those days, and NY taxes only for the days in NY. This meant a huge rebate from NJ that was swallowed and then some by the taxes owed to NY. (Since NY's tax rate is higher, plus the NY taxes included an underpayment penalty) Technically, I guess it's re-discovered, since we knew this before, but before my employer paid taxes only in NY, so it wasn't driven home what the bad consequences would be when my paychecks started showing a paltry NY withholding and a moderate NJ withholding.
  • At church, I've joined the ranks of lay reader/chalice bearer, which will mean something to those familiar with certain Christian liturgical practices, and won't to others. Anyway, I've also been leading evening prayer on Wednesdays during Lent, (average attendance: 2, but we do it every day anyway) and am currently scheduled for a slightly busy Holy Week: lay reader at the Palm Sunday service Saturday evening, lay reader at the noon service on Good Friday, and chalice bearer at the Easter Vigil service Saturday evening. The Palm Sunday and Good Friday services include part of the Gospel reading.
  • One of the reasons I'm not also scheduled for Easter Sunday is that I'll be at my parents' church, where my mother is going to finally become an Episcopalian officially. (Liturgically: she's being received into the fellowship of the Anglican Communion) This after attending Anglican/Episcopal churches since shortly before I was born. She hasn't done this until now because she was raised in a small fundamentalist church where she wasn't baptized until age 13; therefore, as far as she was concerned, she'd already made her "adult" commitment to Christ that is done at confirmation, and so wasn't going to get reconfirmed. Recently, however, the ECUSA expanded the set of people who could be received instead of confirmed, so she decided it was time.
• Technical:
  • One of the blogs I read frequently had a post asking "What was your first computer?" (This was in response to some parody of the Mac 1984 ad). I clicked through to the comments and searched for my answer and, not only was it already there, but it was naomikritzer. Cool. Naomi, let me introduce you to Classic99, a truly wonderful TI-99/4A emulator. A distressing amount of classical music still doesn't sound right to me unless it's played in short snippets on an 8-bit sound system capable of only three tones at once.
  • XSS bugs are everywhere. Not that anyone reading this does, but if you use the java-based roller blogging software, upgrade to one of the unofficial release candidates as soon as you can. I've recently submitted a ton of XSS bugs, with patches, to the authors. (If you can't find the release candidate versions, and can show me your public-facing roller-based page, I'll hand you patches that will guard you until the next release, at least from the stuff I found)
  • XSS bugs are in typepad.com too, but you'll have to take my word for it and just hope that they act quickly. (Though they still haven't addressed the other XSS bug I reported March 16th. I wonder what the generally accepted time frame is for disclosing these...)
  • When debugging a bizarre java NoClassDefFoundError, (i.e. one that's not a clear case of forgetting a jar file somewhere) your first assumption should be that there's been an ExceptionInInitializerError thrown somewhere, and one of the first things you should try is running Class.forName on all your classes from a piece of code that will give you a nice stacktrace when it blows up.
  • Someday, I need to write up what I've learned about building ones own language from this little expression language I wrote and have been maintaining for work for almost four years now. I doubt it's anything too original, but one of the things I've learned is that there are many more levels and layers to an interpreter/compiler than one might naively think.

Comments

[naomikritzer]

Heh. And just earlier today, I was amused to run across a comment by Marc Moskowitz in response to a question on John Scalzi's blog.

You wouldn't think the Internet would be a small world, but in some respects it really still is. (It was Helene who got me reading John Scalzi's blog in 1998, when he responded to Jerry Falwell's ranting about Tinky Winky by outing the rest of the Teletubbies plus the New Zoo Review and the Hamburgler.)

Yeah, it happens

[dtm]

When I first signed up for my livejournal account, I typed in a few interests, not really intending to get sucked into this livejournal thing.

One of my interests was rather math-geeky, and at the time (2002), only one other person on livejournal had listed the interest "numerical analysis": joxn