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I just saw an entry on the front page of Wikipedia that Oldsmobile has rolled the last car off the line yesterday, an Alero which was donated to the R.E. Olds Transportation Museum.
I guess this is confirmation: Oldsmobile gears up for last day of production and Dead at 106.
If you happen to be alone in the world and don't release a few noxious fumes now and then, please feel free not to read on...
Thankfully, those people have now all exploded, offering the rest of us the opportunity to explore Facts on Farts [via Clack], which contains a wealth of learning opportunity for everyone. Like everything else that leaks out of our fragile (and rather disgusting) human bodies, passing gas (as I learned to describe it as a youngster) is normal. The sooner you get past the adolescent humor and horror of it all , the better off you will be.
All in all, this is still quite disgustingly humorous...
I posted this on a work blog and I think for some of this kind of link collection information, I'm going to post it here as well in the future. Searching my personal weblog is becoming a standard way to handle data retrieval.
A small collection of RFCs related to digest authentication:
The annual Conejo Valley Days festival has been running for some time now (we forgot to go to the chili cookoff last Sunday darn it) and today the real craziness begins with the opening of the carnival. Janss Road is littered with people and cars and it can get really ugly. Pedestrians think they're in the middle of a mall parking lot and drivers are frustrated by the sudden change in traffic patterns. The area is a zoo. There was some kind of major accident on the 23 freeway around 10 this morning and Sarah wondered if it was related (someone staring at the ferris wheel and driving off the road perhaps?), it certainly wouldn't be the first time.
On the way home from bowling this evening, we got off at Janss without thinking about it (oops) and in less than a mile saw a police officer nearly get run over (those flashlights are not enough armor to just go wandering into the street folks) and then we nearly hit another car when one officer waved us forward and the cop who almost got run over waved on a car from our right (communication is key here). Then we had to dodge two separate groups walking on Janss who were wandering further and further into the traffic lanes.
Reminder to self, avoid Janss Road at all costs.
Jeff passed along a link to SenderBase the other day and I've been tinkering with it ever since.
The number of end user systems on the major networks that are running some sort of malware mail transfer agent is astounding in some ways. SenderBase does a pretty nice job of wrapping the available information and making it easily available.
We've all had projects of some sort that we've been involved in which didn't turn out all that well, and many of us on have worked on Death Marches (with mixed results). David Isen linked to a middenheap blog entry which terminates at AT&T Wireless Self-Destructs, a CIO Magazine article which examines the cutover of an AT&T Wireless CRM system, the mis-management that surrounded the cutover and some of resulting damage. It's news worthy for a lot more than the out sourcing angle, but that just helped to make it worse.
Among the failures was a lack of vision on the part of the original Siebel CRM migration group. A plan for tomorrow wasn't part of the deal (then again, they might not have been allowed that freedom). As a company with a big investment, AT&T should have realized that it could go either way and planned for it. Everything was a giant hack without regard for where the future might lie (the common deadly middleware assumption... its middleware, so we'll just whip up something there and hide the extension cords).
That initial failure lead to the massive teams needed for integration when Siebel 7 rolled around... there were no abstraction services available to talk to. It's a sad reality that as a group of systems expands and matures, the interfaces fray with remarkable speed. We really suck at creating long term, extensible APIs that allow systems to grow independently of one another.
They also followed the typical performance upgrade boogie man without ever doing any testing to verify vendor claims. Although everyone wasn't specifically outsourced, much of the infrastructure was implemented via one vendor layer on top of another. When things finally went wrong, no one could explain it.
Toss in downsizing, outsourcing and numerous other negative morale factors and you have a pretty good recipe for disaster...
I dunno about you, but it seems pretty rediculous to have three of us sitting at the corner of Erbes and Hillcrest at 11:30 PM, waiting for absolutely no one for more than three minutes.
I was the last to arrive, headed north on Erbes. A car headed south was on the other side and another vehicle was waiting to proceed east on Hillcrest. After I pulled up, we all sat waiting patiently for quite some time before a care travelling west on Hillcrest showed up, made a right onto Erbes and disappeared. Eventually, the light changed and the southbound car departed. A few seconds later I got my chance. For all I know there is still someone waiting to go east.
This light has been screwed up for a while but things are getting silly.
Are we in for a really bad fire season come fall? It certainly feels that way. When coastal cities like San Luis Obispo reach triple digits in April, that's not a good sign for the summer (when it really gets hot).
Most years, the hills in this area are wildly alive with colors and most of the growth is still very deeply green. Not so this time around. We've already got the small brush fires popping up around SoCal and we aren't anywhere near July. We didn't get a much rain as we typically do and the hillsides are already wilting under the early hot temperatures.
It's going to get interesting I fear...
It really is amazing how much processing our brains do on faces and how it can be subverted so easily by orientiation. [Bill de hÓra]
It's time to buy a new car. I don't know when I made up my mind for sure, but over the last few months it's become more important somehow. My car is six years old this week and it seems like the right time. I want something a bit bigger with better engine performance and a little more luxury (cloth seats ain't happening — I'm tired of getting shocked regularly over a four month period of each year).
Back in January, I'd squirreled away a link to Jamie's advice on buying a car (don't?!) which links to an Edmunds series called Confessions of a Car Salesman. People whined (jwz's readers demand new stuff now) that it was old (six months, ooohhh!) so I didn't bother posting it here, but now its relevent. The whole story is a great read, but if you want to digest version, read the last part: Buying Tips.
A very good friend has suggested leasing, which I'm going to look into (I've never done it before). We're going to talk about it on Monday but I need 15,000 miles per year and won't be comfortable until I have 16,000 which seems to screw up the deal. I also tried to reach some old friends today without luck... at one point my friends husband was running a car brokerage and I wanted to solicit some advice on that side of the road. I'd never heard of this before... the AAA Endorsed Auto Buying Program but it doesn't seem to be available here in California.
After lunch today, Stephen and I headed out on a whim to a couple dealerships and I was actually surprised at how hands off the folks were on the lot. I haven't yet gotten to the "let's drive one" point, where things could get ugly, but I did spend a lot of time crawling around a couple different cars, making inane comments and asking a bunch of stupid questions. They also left us to browse in peace, which is so very different from how it's been every other time I've ever been to a dealership.
I wonder if the fact that so many people are using the Internet as a research mechanism before showing up at the dealership is causing some sort of behavioral change? We probably just managed to hit things at the right time and appear casual enough about the whole process to ward off the demons. As I get more serious about picking a car, that might change (car sales people seem to trust customers less than we trust them).
I am often mistaken for other people. There must be a bunch of us forty-ish, portly (oh yeah, we covered that already), balding (that too!) and bearded fellows around because I am regularly mistaken for being someone else, even at close range and occasionally even by family members.
Some recent examples...
Today, a young man rolled up next to me at an intersection and started waving madly, trying to get my attention. I put down the window and he said hello. I asked if I could help him and he seemed confused for a moment and then I asked if I taught at Moorpark. Well, no. Turned out he'd mistaken me for his Logic Professor.
A couple weeks ago in Florida, my aunt was aware that I was going to be at their condo, but as she passed the hotel where we were staying she spotted someone who she mistook to be me on the beach and assumed that I hadn't gone over yet. She was quite startled to find me sitting in the living room reading a book on her return home.
It's not a big deal, but can be a pretty strange experience when someone walks up and starts a conversation that assumes we know each other in considerable detail.
This can't really be a word, can it?
parallelization
I made it up, like I do a lot of things and then I searched for it hoping for an alternative. No luck!
Fark ran a really interesting photo competition on Sunday. The basic idea was to merge animals with hardware and the results are well worth viewing.
My favorite is the rather Flintstones tech turntable (although a lot of people really liked the Parrot Pliers). I guess if I had to keep going and pick additional places, the next would go to the giraffe lamp followed by the flash cats and finally the plookelbird (what the hell is that?) Go see the whole thing for yourself.
Thanks to Susan for pointing the way.
I'm still catching up on things that have happened over the last couple of weeks, but I did want to mention Showstoppers, an article by Richard H. Shultz Jr. (a defense industry policy consultant) which covers his nine reasons that we have not (and generally will not) use our highly publicized special forces against terrorists.
It's quite interesting.
Jeremy has posted a lot of interesting information last week from Orlando including notes from the MySQL Cluster talk at this years MySQL user conference.
First we're seeing an overview of the NDB architecture. If you've never seen it before, think "Oracle RAC without shared storage" and you're 95% of the way there.
The press release doesn't get into many details, but some of the follow up comments about the memory requirements on Jeremy's post are rather interesting. MySQL Storage Engine Architecture, Part 1: An Overview covers the in memory requirement for the NDB Cluster Storage engine.
It was really nice to spend so much time with family. It's been a couple years and the last time we spent it with Sarah's family. I was worried that Dorothy's illness could derail our plans, but it all worked out and Dorothy is doing quite a bit better (and now has a new grandson). I guess the next trip is back to North Carolina.
The kids (our boys, my sisters daughter) really enjoyed being together, even if does seem to bring out the worst in some ways (they tend to get carried away). Somehow, Krissy was responsible for a reconciliation between Adam and Stephen (sometime after my aunt mentioned something about losing her cousin Bob whom she considered to be a brother). I don't know the details, but the boys talked outside and came back very happy. I'm grateful.
We started out by hitting Epcot and Disney World. I've written about Epcot elsewhere and we all enjoyed Disney. Using fast pass tickets and creative park placement, we hit all the major attraction high points in one day except for the Jungle Cruise (which we realized we'd missed on the way out). One of the personal highlights for me was going through It's A Small World again. The kids didn't care for it (and Fantasyland was a giant swarm of people which I was glad to escape) but I got it once again, in a way I hadn't as a young adult. I deliberately tried to see it as I had the first time around as a youngster at the Worlds Fair in New York, and found myself enchanted. It carries a simple, yet potentially powerful message. Space Mountain is no longer the amazing experience it was as a teenager, but I still wish that I'd been able to ride it several times and then spend about an hour wandering around inside by myself. The general effects are terrific and I would really like to know more about the starscape used on the domed ceiling. The only long line we hit was about forty minutes for Splash Mountain the first time around. Some of us got a little carried away with the silly music, but I think we all had a good time on both runs. Stephen was able to play a special DDR version and get points for a kids coaster he took Jonathan on (both are important to him somehow).
We ate enough for a two week vacation, but that's how it goes at times. I wanted to spoil the kids in Orlando and my aunts wanted to spoil all of us once we got back to their neck of the woods. We introduced the kids to teppan style food in Kissimmee, where we all had a pretty good time (Jon freaked out when they wanted to put vegetables on his plate and later declared it the best meal he'd ever had). For the most part we had seafood, seafood and more seafood. It was everywhere once we got back to the west coast (we stayed on Treasure Island). Everyone served Grouper in some fashion or another, but a little joint called Mulligan's serves an interesting variation: a Grouper Reuben (it sounds weird, but I enjoyed it). They also have a seared Ahi Tuna sandwich with wasabi mayo that's pretty good. My aunts took us to a little tiny place one night that had terrific crab cakes (using lump Maryland crab). Another night we went to Crabby Bills where Jon won a shirt in some kind of crazy Let's Make a Deal variation that they play.
It'll probably be a while before we get back to Florida again, but we certainly had a great trip this time around.
Om Malik opines that with Sun killing off the UltraSparc V and Gemini (or at least delaying development in a significant way) that the future relationship between Sun and AMD looks quite bright. Perhaps. A stronger connection with Fujitsu seems a lot more likely bet given the history.
With all the coverage ecto has been getting lately because of the introduction of the Windows client, I decided to give it a whirl. I'd used the original Kung-Log for a little while and then moved on to other methods.
More after using it for a few days but my initial impression is quite good. It seems to handle my general blogging and mark up needs quite well (and it supports the MT draft status — stored online but unpublished which I use from time to time).
Congratulations to Mark and Christine Swan, who welcomed a new member of family named Zachary Edward yesterday (we think).
Keeping track of birthdays and other important dates in this family gets harder all the time.
We're back from our family vacation in Florida and glad to be here.
We had a great time and it was nice to be there and see so many people but it's also nice to be home in our own environment. The trip back was mostly uneventful and everyone worked together to get us all back smoothly. Luckily, the only problem was an accident on the other side of I-275 in St. Petersburg. Even the infamous traffic in Tampa wasn't much of a problem.
Lot's of stuff to catch up on...
It's been more than twenty years since I've been to Epcot and it just didn't feel the same to me. I enjoyed myself for the most part and Mission: SPACE is a really interesting experience.
Sarah and I were last here on our honeymoon. I remembered having a good time and I know I had a great time when I came as a kid and later in college. This time around it just felt like there was too much commercialism. That's always been true in the world based attractions (mostly shops and resturants) but I don't recall this being the case years ago in the general attractions.
Test Track for example is one never ending commercial for GM. I get the idea of sponsorship, but it seemed to go way over the top, more so when I'm paying to be there. ExxonMobil is the sponsor of Universe of Energy, which was a good tour of the subject, especially for the youngsters, but the opinions of this oil company come through loud and clear to this jaded adult (the general summary is that everything is fine, which I don't accept). I'll have to check with the kids to see what they think about it.
Innoventions (west) held a lot of promise but turned out to be one long commercial, from IBM's booth like area to all the Sony sponsorship in the future Video Gaming area to Lustron's area about future Home Theater. Both 'future' areas were sadly all about today, which may be useful for many people, but I remembered Epcot as being ahead of the curve, not somewhere back in the pack.
I guess I'm bummed and that's why this write up sounds more than a little negative. It's been a long time and I guess I was hoping to be blown away. My expectation exceeded reality.
What's the deal with Song airlines and why does Delta think the idea makes sense? It just doesn't compute for me, so I must be missing something. We ended using Song because they were the only carrier offering reasonable rates on a direct round trip between LAX and Tampa. They wouldn't have been my first choice (I would have been fine with Delta), but we wound up there anyway.
While they use many standard Delta features (Delta terminals and ticket agents for example and I noticed Delta branded hand soap in the rest room) they also have their own fleet and some interesting changes from other airlines. All tickets are coach, that's the only kind of seat they have. Food, even on cross country flights is a paid feature. There are no pillows and there is a real shortage of blankets. Don't take no for an answer in asking for a blanket before they are ready to pass them out, you might not get one. They've also added an interesting wrinkle to the clean up process before landing when they collect all the last bits of trash and the blankets (that just seemed odd to me). They do sell a $5 inflatable pillow which I might try on the flight back just to say that I've done it.
Rather than the 767's Delta normally uses for cross country flights, we flew in a 757 seating six across. They give out inexpensive headsets (ear buds actually) to everyone on board and each seat has a small television monitor (front seats use a collapsable monitor, all others use one built into the back of the seat in front). The audio connection is a typical stereo mini-din connection rather than the silly two prong thing they've used on airlines for years. Rather than a movie, they have DishTV based programming with 24 channels. I ended up watching CNN for a while, then the History channel to fill the time. They've also got a full time chef on staff (from the W in New York I think) who has apparently created a number of specialty items for the airline. I didn't try it so I can't speak to the quality. Paying for airline food, chef or no just didn't make a lot of sense.
The only thing left to mention is that the folks who act as airport personnel and flight stewards were apparently chosen for good cheer, at least initially. These people do all kinds of nutty things including leading pre-landing stretching exercises. I felt a bit like I'd been transported back to a junior high school gym class but most of the people in front of us joined in on the exercises (I thought everyone was nuts). The enthusiasm and friendliness seemed forced at times, but they've done a good job of finding people who genuinely want to help make others happy.
It's an odd duck of an airline but what do I know? It might be the perfect thing to make Delta a whole lot of money.
Update: I saw JetBlue in Tampa and thought we might be able to use them in the future, but they don't fly to Tampa from Long Beach yet. Hmmm.
I wonder if Song is meant to be used as a lever to force wage concessions which have been sited as a significant contributor to Delta's fiscal problems. I still can't make heads or tails of this darned venture.
On our flight back, the DishTV network was having issues and the channels I was looking for were AWOL (I wanted to see what was on Discovery and History, which along with A&E and one of the news channels were broadcasting dead air). No one can watch CNN for four hours plus, ESPN was doing hockey and the rest of it was pretty useless (many younger folks were watching E!). They did offer a couple kids movies (in theory), but we never even had a chance to think about buying it for Jon before the movies started. He and Sarah entertained themselves for most of the flight with the music trivia game (played amongst all the passengers) all the way home.
I stumbled onto an interesting Panther bug today involving Safari 1.1.1 (v100.1) and Panther (MacOS X 10.3.2 — 7D24).
In a nutshell, drag and drop from the Safari address bar (well? area? thingy?) works really well under most circumstances for passing URL data to most drag aware applications, including the Finder where the drag creates links (.webloc files) with the title of the link taken from the title of the page. I subsequently tested with OmniWeb and FireFox. OmniWeb had the same problem and FireFox uses the URL as the name (so it sort of doesn't count — does it?)
Today I was doing my normal thing (which is normally several things at once) and went looking for some information about using Oracle's dbca application on MacOS X (I came up empty so that'll have to wait until I get back from vacation). In the process I found a page with some useful Oracle related information and dragged the link to the desktop, something I do many times per day, every day. Although I had a lot of clutter, I didn't think I saw the visual feedback I expected from the file creation. I shoved a bunch of stuff out of way (hiding everything but the browser), couldn't find the file, assumed operator error and dragged the link to the Finder desktop again. Nothing. Hmm, this seemed odd so I switched to Finder and back to Safari and tried it one more time. I was batting a nice round .000 thus far.
At this point I was a little miffed but also curious.
I switched to Finder and opened my desktop link to a links directory (I shovel 'em in there on a constant basis and run a little clean up script from time to time which moves them around into dated directories). Anyway, I didn't know what was wrong with the desktop but knew that I'd never encountered a problem creating a link in a directory window. Drag once, nothing. Drag again, still nothing. At this point I was really puzzled.
Off to terminal to poke around. The problem was instantly obvious. Back to Safari once again to make sure I wasn't seeing things and sure enough, the title was the problem. Many (most) Mac users leave invisible files setting alone in the Finder (self included) and it's not easily toggled (it is an all or nothing operation for the most part) and any name which begins with a period ('.') is by default in unix systems, invisible. So, a page with a title of ".com blah blah blah" will never show up. This silly page should give you everything you need to duplicate my problem (with a name that's not mangled all to hell like the one I ended up with).
I don't use Excel much and when I do it's mostly as a single page, glorified dynamic calculator (or to view what amounts to tabular data and lists sent by others). Dates are the part of the application I've most struggled with over the years.
Someone asked a question today about date calculations and was using functions I didn't even know existed. Excel Dates Help from Mr Excel was pretty informative and the site has a bunch of other archived categories. Worth a check anyway.
I noticed today that a new version of CURLHandle (1.9) was released this week and Dan seems concerned that its reason for being may be eclipsed by WebKit. That seems unlikely to me, even in the longer term view of things.
I just can't see developers who have adopted CURLHandle as being likely to give it up just because a system framework supports most of their needs. This becomes more important if you want to support older systems (this seems less important to developers lately and yeah, that bugs me). By virtue of being wrapped around libcurl (I was surprised to see LDAP support mentioned — I wonder what that means?), there is widely deployed (and tested) functionality that doesn't seem to be available in WebKit along with access to lower levels of the protocol(s) (if needed, all source is there).
Among the many problems Windows developers have faced over the last few years when using the IE engine are boundary conditions (and whose code gets to own them) and updates. WebKit is no different. The engine's handling of cookies, headers, certificates, persistence and even protocols is still in flux and subject to significant changes. At some point (if it hasn't happened already) an API or behavioral change is going to break applications (and then the fingers will fly!) Worse (from purely a client perspective) is what could happen if support for WebKit wanes.
No real answers will be forthcoming from this paranoid corner of the universe, but I think I'd be inclined to use WebKit for display and stay away from the transport side of things.
Python is really beginning to grow on me. Like every other language I've ever tried, there are things I don't like but the likes seem to vastly outweigh the dislikes at this point.
One of the things to really like is pydoc, a system documentation module that also has the ability to generate a web documentation engine by passing a port number. Many thanks to Roland Tanglao who mentioned Simon Willison's post on the subject.
Another reason for digging into python is Apple's support, which shows up in interesting ways like Panther, Python, and CoreGraphics, an article which explores the use of the CoreGraphics library bindings added in 10.3. The PyObjC folks are doing some interesting things with Python and Objective C, and Bill Bumgarner (who works for Apple) is somehow in the middle of it all.
I would be remiss if I glossed over one other feature of the core language that I find fascinating. Specifically, the string formatting options. While I haven't yet found a good way to use the feature in real code, the ability to use a dictionary as the input to a template string (coupled with the fact that python does multiline templates quite nicely) makes for extremely clear example and test code. Case in point: Sam Ruby's simple python example of a Microsoft service using WS-Security and SOAP. Self documenting samples just don't get much better (I've never really used WS-S, but I learned a tremendous amount from this one example).
I meant to post this the other day and then the subject came up last night during dinner last night. We talked about the amount of sleep children need and I promised I'd send the links to Sarah. This way is just easier...
American Children Not Getting Enough Sleep and Poll Finds Even Babies Don't Get Enough Rest.
Just back from the next to last trip I plan to do for a while. I feel like I've been traveling since the beginning of the year and I'm tired of it (OK, I was tired of it after the first trip — I don't really enjoy being away from home). I figured I'd jot down some travel related bits from this trip. No goofy pilot statements this time around although the flight attendant that we'd pegged as having no sense of humor had me in stitches relating stories about jacket mishaps as we descended towards LAX. I think you had to be there.
Atlanta's Midtown Sheraton Hotel is an inexpensive (as these things go) place to stay, just don't eat there. I'd been warned but they don't even really know how to do breakfast (soggy canned peaches? whatever). It's a bit worn around the edges but it works. Three (tiny) bottles of water from room service is about thirteen bucks (better to buy it from the store downstairs if you can find it open, just under five dollars for the same quantity of water) and in my case, the delivery person decided to walk around my room and generally invite herself in (what is the proper etiquette under those a circumstances to kick someone out quickly?)
Their broadband access is free and quite fast (not entirely surprising, one of the techs I spoke to on Monday evening told me there were eight active connections which means a data consuming pig such as me has it basically all to myself), but quite annoying. The first night it wouldn't work, DHCP was constantly assigning me a non-routable address until I finally asked the technical support person (call number four) to just give me an address that wasn't in use (that cured things and I could at least finally check email). By the time I got back on Tuesday night, it was working, such as it is. Service seemed to have a very short time out and I couldn't figure out why I had to keep opening a browser page and going through a couple pages to reactivate service. Last night I finally realized that it was monitoring port 80 traffic and setup a cron task to wget a page from a server I knew wasn't going to mind. It worked and the gateway wasn't shutting me down on a five minute interval while I was doing lots of things that weren't HTTP related. Weird.
This is the third (maybe the fourth?) hotel that I've stayed in this year which has used Starwood technical support (not all appear to be Starwood hotels) and every single one of them has a different service activation mechanism (and the service itself feels different). I dunno why, but I find the idea intriguing. This was certainly the first that assigned me a 192.168.1.x address and had a web server running on 192.168.1.1 (with lots of interesting links to poke at).
Moving on...
Atlanta at this time of year is everything you might be looking for. As Jeff mentioned yesterday (and has said before); if you don't like the weather just wait five minutes. An exaggeration to be sure, but it was seventy (or so) on a lovely Monday evening just before sunset and about thirty five just after dark last night while it was hailing with twenty mile per hour winds. While eating some pretty good She Crab Soup (first time in a long while I've had that, it just not a west coast thing) we had a pretty interesting conversation about the whole bad weather leading to milk and bread shortages issue which always makes me laugh.
Electric razors suck. Considering what you pay for one, they don't hold up well at all. Being bearded, I've been slacking off and shaving every other day (or so) for a while. I shaved with a razor on Monday before leaving and took the electric (and its cord because the charge cycle had become negligible) with me. The damned thing was dead on Wednesday morning when I really needed it and no amount of fiddling would revive it. Disgusted, I threw the damned thing in the trash. I think my razor jumped the gun and fired its fools day salvo a wee bit ahead of time. It's time to consider alternatives because I don't think anyone at TSA is going to look kindly at shaving soap and a straight razor in my toiletry kit.
With today being April Fools, some stars had an interesting trick played on them. Jim and Kerri Caviezel were in the seats just in front of me and I'm pretty sure they weren't all that excited about it. It's bad enough to be recognized and pestered but in this case I didn't recognize him and when Saeid told me who it was I wasn't sure and then (more loudly than was appropriate) mumbled something like "Oh, you mean Jim <complete manglement of his last name>?" I still didn't believe it was him until later when I saw him reviewing some scripts (not too good I think, he was bored to sleep). When I mentioned my 'confirmation', Saeid was offended that I didn't trust his hollywood identification skills. As we were getting ready to depart the plane at LAX, Malcolm McDowell popped up behind us and was talking to the Caviezel family about their continuing travel plans (they're off to Monterey I think). There wasn't any sign of the security reported to be traveling with them early last month when The Passion of the Christ opened (including in the terminal, when Mrs. Caviezel ended up standing around the wrong baggage carousel with me and a bunch of other confused people — one more trick for all of us?), I guess that phase has passed.
Finally, the folks who operate the car service we normally use had some serious issues today with a relatively new car (an alternator was playing its own tricks) which led to some silly games at the airport. No real delays for us, but they have a lot of business today and tomorrow and this was the wrong time for a car to get sick.
