time

This domain of mine has had stuff on it for a long, long time — before WordPress or MovableType or even Blogger. The original davidgagne.net is, sadly, lost forever. Some pieces of it have been kicking around on my various hard drives and FTP locations for a decade now.

One file that I could never seem to bring myself to delete was an ancient hand-coded HTML <TABLE> listing of a bunch of important events in my life. A few friends of mine actually built a company based on the idea. It was called “ShareTimelines.com”, had a magnificent interface, was all webbed up, and the site — last I checked — is completely dead. I wanted to have that timeline on this site again. I hadn’t updated it in years and years, and I would rather poke hot needles in my eyes than sit and hand-code a bunch of <td>s all day. “It should all be in a database, of course,” I said to myself. “And I should be able to edit it right in the WordPress Administrator, too. And seriously it should be written so that I can just give other people the ability to add timelines like that to their own sites.” ( I should stop talking to myself.)

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I finished reading Longitude: The True Story of a Lone Genius Who Solved the Greatest Scientific Problem of His Time by Dava Sobel this afternoon. It is a wonderful book.
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“There!” said Ford, shooting out his arm; “there, behind that sofa!”
Arthur looked. Much to his surprise, there was a velvet paisley-covered Chesterfield sofa in the field in front of them. He boggled intelligently at it. Shrewd questions sprang into his mind.
“Why,” he said, “is there a sofa in that field?”
“I told you!” shouted Ford, leaping to his feet. “Eddies in the space-time continuum!”
“And this is his sofa, is it?” asked Arthur, struggling to his feet and, he hoped, though not very optimistically, to his senses.
“Arthur!” Ford shouted at him, “that sofa is there because of the space-time instability I’ve been trying to get your terminally softened brain to come to grips with. It’s been washed up out of the continuum, it’s space-time jetsam, it doesn’t matter what it is, we’ve got to catch it, it’s our only way out of here!”
He scrambled rapidly down the rocky outcrop and made off across the field.
“Catch it?” muttered Arthur, then frowned in bemusement as he saw that the Chesterfield was lazily bobbing and wafting away across the grass.
With a wild whoop of utterly unexpected delight he leaped down the rock and plunged off in hectic pursuit of Ford Prefect and the irrational piece of furniture.

Very Informative: Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Daylight Saving Time

For two days now I’ve been trying to get a report to run from my Visual Basic application. The report calls a stored procedure on the SQL Server from a Crystal Reports ocx in the app. I needed to pass two simple parameters through the ocx, from the app, to the storedproc so the report file that the ocx calls would have the right dates in its query. The Seagate Software Knowledge Base Article c2003724 finally showed me what I was doing incorrectly. Silly me! I wasn’t correctly formatting the milliseconds in the date! The milliseconds.
<mumble>milliseconds</grumble>

Note that 00:04:47 am is 4 minutes, 47 seconds and not 4 hours, 47 minutes after midnight. <grin>

I used to be fascinated with the passage of time. I still am, I suppose. My watch chirps at me on the hour to remind me that my time is passing. I love calendars and diaries and journals and notebooks and all things similar. (Have you noticed?!) When I was younger and not as digital, I used to write things on calendars. I always had one handy. I used to write every little thing. I pulled a few out of the closet tonight to look for something. I can tell you now, for instance, almost a decade later, that on January 31, 1991, I wrote myself a note to, “Be T.C. not C.B.” And I can sit here in August 2000 and remember that at that particular point in my life I wanted to be more like Tom Cruise and less like Charlie Brown. I can tell you that on July 25 (my half-brother Michael’s birthday) I really “broke up” with Kim Taylor. Apparently I had attempted to break up with her on the 21st, but it didn’t stick. Comically enough I started seeing a different girl named Kim on the 28th and on the 31st we watched 101 Dalmations at her house before she left for Texas for two weeks. It’s funny that I can look back at the shortest little comments - “Pizza & Molson w/Lanie & D. Bloom”, “wrote note to Liz”, “Mr. Tux w/Paula & Jenny” - and they can remind me exactly what was happening. This blog isn’t anything like that. I can’t go back to a date three weeks ago and tell you what I was doing or why I blogged something. Well. Okay. Maybe I can. Hmmm. I guess I’m just thinking out loud. You go ahead and go about your business. I’ll come back later and maybe make a point. Don’t hold your breath.