The Substantially Similar Weblog

Spring is here, with a vengeance. I hear it got over 80 degrees today, although I was in my office and couldn’t tell through the window.

These flowers appeared in our front yard overnight. Click for bigger versions.

My hope is to add more multimedia content to my blog. I don’t have a lot of time to write these days, but at least I can post images, audio, and eventually video.

Not only do I have a beautiful baby daughter—but she already has a number one Google PageRank! How great is that?

By the way, as a new father I think I’m going to need a three month “low frequency blogging” pass.

Esther Naomi Rosi-Kessel, born 4/6/05 at 4:13am, 8 lbs 9 oz, 20 inches.

We’re having a baby. Right now.

If you’d like to get announcements on the progress, drop me a note and I’ll add you to the list.

Over and out.

Sometimes the City of Boston surprises me with their effective use of technology. It’s generally pretty hard to find an example of the government doing a good job implementing a large technology/citizen service project, but I recently discovered the Boston Water and Sewer Commission has put all usage information online.

So you can actually see your monthly water usage, with the numbers for each month appearing with Javascript mouseover:

Incidentally, that spike in late July—that’s not us. We moved in a couple days after that. I understand the prior owner of the house reads my blog (hi Peter!) so he is to blame for taking too many showers that month.

In fact, you can even see daily usage, right up to yesterday (I suppose they can’t do today yet because you’re not done using your water):

The only problem with the site is that it has a stupid Flash/Shockwave entry screen. There’s absolutely no reason to do this—plain old HTML would have worked fine, and been more accessible to blind Internet users. That said, it’s at least well done Flash and doesn’t have unnecessary animation or blinkies.

The City of Boston Assessing Department has a similarly valuable tool, which also has the additional benefit of allowing you to spy on your neighbors. (Hey, my friends’ nearby house doubled in assessed value from 2003 to 2004—probably the result of a gut rehab). Being able to see the assessed value of any property, the history of assessments, and some of the basic information about the property without getting up from one’s desk makes it a lot easier to figure out if one is being treated fairly by the tax man.

The Suffolk County Registry of Deeds has a much clunkier interface, but has managed to get several year’s worth of filings indexed online, and is making progress at scanning the contents of those filings—another valuable way to snoop on your neighbors (“Oh, I see, they took out a second mortgage to build that addition!”) — on second thought, maybe this whole blog entry belongs in the ‘privacy’ category.

One of the most impressive projects is “The Boston Atlas” (aka mapjunction; Java client required). The Boston Atlas is an interactive map of Boston that includes various historical (back to the 1700’s!) and current aerial images, with the option to superpose several different data sets, including streets, open space, census data, wards, precincts, building footprints, etc., and select the color for plotting the various data sets. It’s really pretty cool.

Here’s my house, with a little blue arrow added to point to the house, yellow lines to indicate streets and red lines around open space. Click to get a more legible version:

(please don’t use this information to plot a terrorist attack against my house or the parking lot at the end of the street).

(front)

(back)

Today’s forecast reports:

Any travel is strongly discouraged. If you leave the safety of being indoors… you are putting your life at risk.

Above is our front yard picnic table and our back yard picnic table as of this morning—they might be totally gone by the end of the day. Good thing it’s no weather for a picnic.

Incidentally, if anyone has any ideas about how to take good quality digital photos of snow, or how to use the GIMP to get better whites, please let me know. I did a little fiddling with these shots, but it’s really much brighter out there than these images would have you believe.

Being both sick and snowed in inspires me to file bugs and ask mailing list questions. For example, this bug with mplayer that prevents me from playing AAC files that I’ve tagged with mp4tags has been bugging me for a couple of months. And I just learned that sending a USR2 signal to openbox forces ‘reconfigure’, which is quite useful if you script changes to the rc.xml file.

Now if someone could help me with this strange, intractable Apache bug my day would be complete.

Here is the newest member of the Rosi-Kessel family:

Her name is Simcha, or שמחה if your web browser supports unicode. Actually, that didn’t work at all. If anyone can give me a hand with how to do Hebrew unicode in HTML, I would appreciate it.

We think she is about 8-10 weeks old, and was found outside with a broken leg. She has a little purple cast with a heart on it while it heals.

Update: Thanks to my commenters, it’s fixed. Had to insert a utf-8 charset tag in the “content-type” header.

November 13 is a tad bit early for me. But at least it’s pretty. Unfortunately, in Boston, it seldom stays below freezing for long, so this will soon be a mixture of mud and ice.

Unfortunately, my blog layout gets screwy if a photo associated with a blog entry is longer than the entry itself. So I need to lengthen the entry to fix it. In order to do that, here is a Robert Frost poem, “A Patch of Old Snow”:

There’s a patch of old snow in a corner
That I should have guessed
Was a blow-away paper the rain
Had brought to rest.

It is speckled with grime as if
Small print overspread it,
The news of a day I’ve forgotten—
If I ever read it.

I’ve been moving into a new (to us) house over the last week and will probably be tied up another week or so before things settle down and the Internet connection is installed. I’ve gotten a lot of new stuff lately, ranging from a new phone (the Motorola v710, more on that when I have time) to a new coffee-maker to a new (electrical cordless) lawnmower. It’s been a long time since I was in the market for “new” (my last phone was a 1992-era Nokia) and — despite the wastefulness and consumerism of all this new stuff — I have to say a lot of stuff has improved noticeably in the last decade.

Anyway, expect more regular blog entries again in a week or two.

Oops! My sources inform me that the animal I identified as an alpaca is actually a llama. In the interest of accuracy and completeness, here is the real alpaca, who was not helpful with the RAID problem, either. This award-winning alpaca’s owner’s face has been clumsily obscured for her own privacy.