It’s almost always a pleasure to find a new domain in one’s referral log (unless one is an insufferably big shot). My newest referrer, not counting spam, is Degrees of Freedom, by James. I don’t yet know which James.

What d’ya know — this is allegedly the 13th most popular website in .nu. How they work that out I have no idea.

A comfy chair, a blue sky, a mild breeze, the season’s first watermelon . . . .

Is there a standard Unix shell command to pause for a given amount of time? One wouldn’t use this from the prompt, of course, but it might have its uses in scripts. Mine is to open a large number of files (local or Web), but not all at once:

cat list-of-files | xargs slow-open &

where slow-open looks like

#!/bin/sh
for i in $*
  do
    open $i
    pause 60
  done

It seems like unnecessary overkill to write pause in Python.

In unrelated news — I’ve heard that you can discourage vermin from stealing your pets’ food by setting out a sample spiked with emetic. Have you tried this, does it work? What drug is appropriate for a cat? A neighborhood tom has recently found our cats’ dish, and drops in every night as if he owns the place (if I’m not watching).

Yester evening a neighbor’s car engine caught fire, and I gave him my extinguisher. Just now he came by to replace it.

I have twice raised the question: “In what country was the battle of Waterloo fought?” Waterloo is now in Belgium, but that state was created fifteen years later. Well, I finally bothered to go looking for an answer to the question . .

Waterloo was fought nine days after the end of the Congress of Vienna, during which the United Kingdom of the Netherlands, which included what we now call Belgium, was created.

Somewhere in MS Word’s infinitely deep dialog boxes there must be a checkbox whose default setting is Do what I explicitly asked you not to do.