I wonder whether anyone keeps track of how many times PVP has restructured its archives making old links invalid.

I reloaded MacOS, restored my home directory from backup, and was surprised to learn that I have 3e5 files. Most of the bulk is music, but that’s only 7e3 files. Is there a tool analogous to du that gives the number of files in each directory, rather than their aggregate size? —Later: When Apple Mail imported my Thunderbird archives, it made huge numbers of files, but I don’t know yet whether they’re enough to answer the question.

In other news, the medical jargon specimen of the week:

Infant is status post a negative rule out sepsis workup . . .

I guess that means sepsis was ruled out, rather than that it was not ruled out. The weird thing is that “rule out sepsis” is often listed as a diagnosis rather than a procedure.

… that I can depend on.

I updated my MacOS to 10.5 “Leopard”, and now the shell command sort no longer recognizes the ‘+’ option (to skip a specified number of words before beginning the key). Argh.

Tsk. A current radio spot gives the web address “wachovia dot com backslash new”.

Meanwhile, what’s new with me?

I’m reading Coxeter’s Non-Euclidean Geometry in the hope that it will give me the stuff I’ve sought in vain in other books: the actual formulae for coordinate transforms under the various isometries, rather than useless taunts like “a matrix with such-and-such properties” (which I don’t know how to recognize let alone generate). But it uses so many cryptic notations that I’m afraid I won’t understand the formulae if they do show up. Exercises would help. [Later: No such luck. It barely touches on H3 at all.]

My car’s starter burned itself out. Luckily this happened at home on my day off; a few hours later, all was well. My housemate pointed out that my last bit of car trouble (a dead battery) also happened at home. What a well-behaved car!

Pillow, the junior cat, has been smelling of smoke lately; and we don’t know where he’s pooping. It would seem he has found a second home, though that’s odd since he consistently flees human strangers. Perhaps he was seduced with catnip.

Sunday my monitor gave an emphatic death-rattle; at this point repair makes less sense than buying a new flat one – when I have the dosh available. Meanwhile I’m using the spare, which has about 4/7 as many pixels (1024×768 vs 1344×1008). It feels so cramped!

Fellow WordPress users! If you find that bits of Unicode in your archives have recently (=in version 2.2 or later) become illegible, comment out these lines in wp-config.php:

define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');
define('DB_COLLATE', '');

Amara Graps writes: “Not being a blogger, myself, I’m seeing if the bloggers I know want to pick up this story I wrote.”

What happened to Bush’s Cadillac 1?

As recorded by a viewer of the motorcade and posted to YouTube, it apparently sputtered to a stop. [The car first appears at 3:20 in this video.] It broke down, right there, on via del Tritone (near the Trevi fountain) in Rome, in the middle of the motorcade. He was ripe picking for a sharp shooter too; no wonder the police were pushing people further back, off of the street. ( . . more . . )