Black Tip the squirrel is still alive. We tried a small mammal trap for several days; after his first exploration, he wouldn’t go into it. Then yesterday he was so slow that I tried chasing him and throwing a box over him, but he put on an amazing turn of speed and escaped into next door’s yard. After that, we decided to give up trying to catch him and euthanize him. ... Read more

(poem for Eric Whitacre) Whose words they are I think I know. His poem’s copyrighted though, With words you’re not allowed to hear About the dark woods in the snow. The man would maybe think it queer; His family dead for many a year, No heirs in need of royalties, Yet companies still profiteer. Ignoring other artists’ pleas The publisher alone decrees: None can set Frost’s words to music, None can share words such as these. ... Read more

I got a generic “We received your letter” letter from the Department of Justice antitrust division. (Well, that’s more acknowledgement than I ever got from writing to Kay Bailey Hutchison about net neutrality.)

I have a small Linux box which serves as a home server for the house. It performs a variety of duties: Each night rdiff-backup takes a snapshot of all our web sites. There’s a file sharing area available via netatalk and SSH. There’s a home wiki for organizing recipes, Christmas gifts and other household stuff. Currently I use JSPWiki, which runs on tomcat6. I’m not wild about its aesthetics, and would prefer a Rails solution, but haven’t found one I like. ... Read more

When we moved to our current house, we soon encountered an old squirrel who considered our back yard his territory. For the last six years he has visited regularly, gradually getting tamer and tamer. In 2006 he got mange, and we treated him. Eventually he decided it was OK to take peanuts from my hand. Throughout the years he remained Alpha Squirrel, seeing off all challengers. But a few weeks ago, I noticed he had an injury to his left front paw; some sort of swelling on one of the fingers. ... Read more