Has it really been a whole week since I updated? Wow… I had no idea.

One reason for the lack of late-week updates was that I was at game 5 of the World Series. Amazing game, as was the entire series; it’s a shame that most of the country didn’t tune in, because it was one of the best-played Series in my lifetime. The best part of game 5, though, was that I was lucky enough to have had a media pass, so I stayed on the field after the game until nearly 2 AM, watching the celebration. Awesome.

Holy shit! Despite talking about it about a hundred times this past week, I almost completely forgot that tonight’s when we roll back our clocks an hour, meaning that I get an extra hour’s sleep tonight. Happy happy joy joy!

The dink speaketh:

“It’s important for us to explain to our nation that life is important. It’s not only life of babies, but it’s life of children living in, you know, the dark dungeons of the Internet.”

Here’s an excellent IIS 5.0 reference from Microsoft, which includes an Apache directive to IIS conversion table. I’m linking mostly as a bookmark for myself, but I figured others could get some use out of it, too…

From MetaFilter comes a news story about an Oklahoma school which suspended a student for allegedly casting a spell which made a teacher sick. The best part of the story, though, has to be that the principal of the school really is named Charlie Bushyhead.

So, because of the flu vaccine shortage in the U.S., my normal supplier of the vaccine (the pediatric pulmonology department) isn’t giving shots this year. Instead, everyone has to go down to the occupational health department, and wait about two hours before being seen by a nurse who will determine if I’m eligible for an early shot. Thus, despite the fact that a bunch of us are working in the neonatal ICU and should be some of the first to get the shot, none of us can go get it — there’s just not that much time that any of us can take off in the middle of the day. Ridiculous.

Does anyone else think it’s sorta funny that the latest version of WinAmp is v2.666?

What the hell was this father doing leaving a two-year-old boy alone in his truck for almost two hours? I hope that they find they boy, but I also hope that they don’t return him to the father.

Once again, the level of spam seems to have picked up significantly. Even with the Realtime Blackhole List feature turned on at my mailserver, I’m getting hit hard. (Wow, it turns out that Wired has an article about this today.)

The members of the Samba development team that have been working on a version compatible with Windows 2000 (among many other things) has officially forked into a new codebase. Interesting.

The NICU is a whole new world. Babies are the size of my hands, their veins are as thin as strands of hair, the doses of drugs we give them are less than a droplet of fluid at times. Sometimes, we put the babies under UV lights to help break down high bilirubin levels (making them look like they’re laying out at the beach). Other times, we knock them out with drugs so that they don’t fight the resipirator keeping them alive (making them look limp and lifeless). At times, it’s pretty spooky.

My one huge issue with working in the NICU, though, is that I’ve been reduced back to the level of a third-year medical student. The language is different, the computer systems are different, the hierarchy of care is different. Most of my decisions have to be filtered through about fourteen levels of approval; in some cases, that’s appropriate (it is an ICU, after all), but in other cases, it’s depressing that I can’t do things on my own.

The esteemed Dubya:

“Families is where our nation finds hope, where wings take dream.”

Bush Horrified to Learn Presidential Salary. “I know my dad made a bundle off the Gulf War,” Bush continued. “But I guess it wasn’t through the job. I’ll have to ask him just exactly how he did it. Maybe something like that would work again.”

I’m honored to be included in Nik’s We Didn’t Start the Weblogs, and on the same line as Rebecca at that!

ESPN has put together a Subway Series home. I’m sooooo excited about tonight’s game, Leiter vs. Pettitte, southpaw vs. southpaw. I’m rooting for the Yanks, but I’d love to see this drawn out into a competitive series, unlike last year’s brutalization of the Braves.

Of course, Bostonians aren’t too happy about the Subway Series; perhaps it’s because they can’t deal with the perpetual suckiness of the Red Sox.

The season premiere of Law & Order was pretty good, but I’m not sure that I’m going to like Dianne Wiest as the new New York District Attorney — she doesn’t have the crotchety, everyone’s-opinionated-grandparent appeal that Steven Hill had. Only time will tell.

On the other hand, this week’s episode of The West Wing was terrific. By far, the best scene was when President Bartlett appropriated the oft-forwarded Open Letter to Dr. Laura; it was one of the best-executed anti-Dr. Laura tirades I’ve heard, and coming from the the (faux) President, it was priceless.

Thanks to Anil for letting the world know that the Unix command ln has come to Windows 2000.

Hello everyone. I started a new rotation, in the neonatal ICU, this week, so things have been rather hectic around here; it’s a lot harder than any other rotation I’ve done, and I’ve never been so tired. Now, at 5:45 AM, I’m off to the hospital, to start another day…

Of course, one thing keeping my energy level up is the Subway Series. For those who scoff at the enthusiasm of us New Yorkers, understand that most of us couldn’t care less about your opinion; we can see your lips movin’, but we don’t hear you speakin’. It is exciting to have one of the biggest sports events completely within your city, involving the two prides of most New Yorkers’ hearts.

Let’s go Yankees! The Rocket pitched a complete game, one-hit wonder; he struck out 15 batters, setting a new nine-inning ALCS record. The Yanks are finally showing their stuff.

For those of you who were wondering, yes, the U.S. government again is operating without a budget. It never ceases to amaze me how a bunch of people so bent on telling others how to do things can be so inept at actually doing the things that they need to do.

Mozilla Milestone release 18 is out; what do you think the chances are that the CSS here shows up correctly, or that it will connect to my WebMail servers? (Answer: slim chances. The CSS borders on tables are still screwed up, as this screenshot shows; M18 also doesn’t connect to the WebMail servers.)

One of the beautiful things about a drug finally gaining FDA approval is that, once approved, the drug can be used for indications that aren’t the ones for which the drug got approval. These uses are called “off-label,” and there are a ton of drugs that are now standard-of-care for conditions despite never being approved by the FDA for those conditions. And what all this means is that Searle whining about misoprostol not being labeled for use in abortions is meaningless — even though misopristol was approved as an antiulcer drug, it is used regularly by obstetricians to induce labor in full-term pregnancies, and to limit post-partum hemorrhage, and it will continue to be used for reasons other than ulcers.

Fun, fun — George W. Bush magnetic poetry, from the safety of your own computer.

Ever have a day where it’s all you can do to prevent your frustration from getting the better of you? Yesterday was one of those days. We had a famous, famous professor of pediatric cardiology visiting the hospital, and while cool, it meant that it was incredibly tough to get anything done for kids on the inpatient cardiology floor, and I could feel my impatience level rising. And once all of the little, “standard” annoyances were added to this, I just wanted to come home, curl up in a little ball, and wake up next week.

On the flipside, though, I got some very nice compliments from people whose opinions matter; it definitely took the edge off of the day enough to keep me from dissolving, and made taking call last night tolerable.

Ford’s having a very, very bad run of things lately. If they were a dot-com, they’d be declaring bankruptcy right about now.

Thanks go to Firda for the link to the button with anger. I like sites like this…

And more thanks to Heather for the link to a very silly kitty. I want another kitten…

A federal jury gave Heather Mercer a cool $2 million today, ruling that Duke excluded her from being a placekicker on their Division I football team solely due to her gender. I’m not clear on something — does the NCAA have a rule that players on a men’s football team should be men? Is it considered a men’s football league? I admit that I assumed it was; I think I’m wrong.

I just declared George W. Bush a big smirky doofus; merci beaucoup to GeekForce for giving me the opportunity to do so.

UrbanFetch, we hardly knew ye. I’ll miss them; they were much better than Kozmo, and I think that I’m going to end up back at Blockbuster more.

I am now a full-fledged, no-holds-barred member of the TiVolution. Right now, I’m watching St. Elsewhere, which Bravo started running in syndication recently; I’m soooooo happy.

David Theige’s MedEd News is back! David is an internal medicine doc at the University of North Dakota School of Medicine. He’s also the director of the medicine clerkship there (it’s the course that every third-year medical student has to take to learn about general inpatient medicine), and MedEd News is his site devoted to topics about academic medicine.

Damn it! How did I not know that last week’s Breakfast Table over at Slate involved Dahlia Lithwick? I love her writing; time to curl up with the laptop on the sofa and read away.

I can’t say more about this than the headline says itself: Man with No Hands Fails to Climb Mount Everest.

Dan Budiac != DanDot. Dan Budiac = DanSays.

OK, the rate of influx of spam in my inbox has definitely rocketed — 13 pieces in about four hours today, to an email address that usually gets 1-2 pieces a day. I guess it’s time to turn on the MAPS Realtime Blackhole List block on my mail server…

The first two years of medical school involve many, many, many lectures, and I have to admit that I gave into the temptation to skip some here and there. Very early, though, I learned that any lecture given by Eric Kandel was not to be missed — he is probably the smartest man I’ve met, and one of the best lecturers I’ve come across. It appears that others share my admiration for him; he won the Nobel Prize yesterday. Cool.

Last Friday, Marty McSorley was convicted of assault with a weapon for his dirty, dirty hit on Donald Brashear last year during an NHL game. He was given only probation; he also has to ask the commissioner for permission to return to the league. It will be interesting if other sports leagues go the legal route for transgressions in their arenas; I can see the power forward position in basketball having to change pretty drastically.

I got my TiVo today, and I’m struggling a little bit with the upgrade. Nothing that will stop me, just stuff that’s popping up in the way.

First, never have I been happier to receive the worst model of something. (The 14-hour, single-drive TiVo is the easiest to upgrade. There were some winners of the essay contest who received the two-drive, 30-hour model; it cannot be upgraded easily.) With the one I got, I should easily be able to slip the 82 Gb drive I bought in as the second hard disk.

I got the top of the case off easily, after hearing that it could be really difficult. There’s not much inside the machine — a motherboard, a power supply, and a single hard disk, with a space for a second disk.

First, I needed to back up the hard disk. The best way to do it is disk-to-disk, but for this, you need a 15 Gb disk that you’ll store the backup on. I ordered one, but it isn’t here yet, and in my impatience, I decided to move onto the second-best way to do it — make a compressed backup onto a smaller hard disk. Unfortunately, the largest FAT partition that I could make (and you need a FAT partition to make the backup) was 2 Gb, which isn’t big enough to store the whole backup.

So, right now, I’m formatting a second hard disk, will copy the first three parts of the backup onto it, and then let the backup restart; as it’s going, I’ll delete these same three parts as they’re made, leaving room for the remaining two or three.

After that, I just need to bless the new hard disk, install it inside the TiVo, and away I go.

UPDATE #1: The backup’s done; I’m now just waiting for the write-verify to finish on the 82 Gb drive. I decided to follow these instructions after reading that doing so is the best way to avoid a periodic video stutter that can be seen with this drive.

UPDATE #2: I’m done setting up the 82 Gb drive. Dylan’s Bootdisk ran perfectly; it’s an example (along with the TiVo itself!) of a great modification of TiVo for a specific purpose. The drive’s installed in my TiVo, but I won’t know if it worked until I finish the guided setup. Since I’ve been doing all of this in my office, it’s time to head home and see what we’ve got…

UPDATE #3: Since it’s late, I ran home, quickly crimped two temporary jacks onto the line that I ran from the master phone jack to the TV, and threw the TiVo up on the shelf. Ten minutes later, I’ve gotten to the part of the guided setup that takes a few hours; things look good, and it’s time for bed.

UPDATE #4: I woke up this morning and turned on my TV, only to find that the TiVo thought that it was September, not October. Having to rush off to work, I couldn’t really do anything about it. I called TiVo when I got into work, and their answer is that the servers had had a time problem the night before; since the box gets its time from the servers when it calls in each night, the box got the wrong time. They promised that I could initiate a daily call when I got home, and all would be well.

UPDATE #5: I did initate the daily call, and TiVo was right — now it knows the right date. The box also downloaded the latest version of the operating system — but what that means is that it will have to reboot and make another daily call to get all the program information. So I did that, and now it has to index everything (a process that could take hours).

UPDATE #6: Indexing complete! I now have full guide information, and am setting my prefs so that it will record things for me during the day as it finds thing that it thinks I will like.

Good morning, all. I went to the Mets game yesterday, and had no idea that I’d get to witness an all-time classic. Benny Agbayani hit a solo home run in the bottom of the 13th inning to win the game; more importantly, he did so after failing to lay down a sacrifice bunt in the bottom of the 11th (and setting himself up to be the goat of the game if the Mets had lost). Great game; the Mets can finish off the series at home today.

Here’s an interesting tidbit about the game that you won’t hear anywhere else. The ESPN article relates a “bit of intrigue” related to when the Mets were accused of stealing signs in the bottom of the 10th. A “small camera” was behind the plate, waist-high, and Bobby Valentine covered the camera up; “an inning later, the camera was gone.” The truth of the story: the camera was a remote set up by a magazine photographer (who has nothing to do with either team), the towel didn’t even cover the lens of the camera, and the camera stayed in place through the end of the postgame celebration.

I got my TiVo today, and decided to start the upgrade process immediately. Right now, I’m struggling a bit; it’s purely a function of my impatience, though. I’ll update the above-linked page as things progress.

If you live in New York, this coming Friday, October 13th, is the deadline to register to vote. There are many websites set up to help you do just that — Online Democracy, Election.com, and Be A Voter (although the latter is now limited to helping you figure out a place to go to register). Do your part!

Marcia Kramer is an idiot. The fact that she carries the title of journalist is appalling.

More CueCat stuff. It appears that Digital Convergence can’t do crap to anyone who received their barcode scanner free in the mail, since free mail gifts, by law, can be used in any manner that the recipient sees fit. Also, someone has figured out how to turn off the built-in barcode encryption in the CueCat, meaning that the output is pure ASCII data. Looks like Digital Convergence needs to start looking for a new business model, fast; in the mean time, I recommend that everyone go out and get a free scanner while they’re still available.

What does everyone think — should the Clintons choose Harlem for their Manhattan pied-a-terre? Personally, I think it wouldn’t be too bad a choice; Harlem’s bark is much, much worse than its bite, and actually has some beautiful areas within it.

Tres, tres interresant — if this document is trustworthy, then Dubya was suspended from the Texas Air National Guard, apparently for neglecting to get a physical. The Democrats (obviously, not an unbiased reporting source) believe that there is some credibility behind the notion that Bush avoided a physical because of the newly-implemented military policy of random drug screenings during physicals; I’d believe that. (Thanks to MetaFilter for the link.)

Brad is excellent form. And, in the world of meta-meta, Jason noticed the same thing that Brad did. Strange…

Frickin’ Yankees. I didn’t even get to watch the game; I was on call.

Piddlin’ around the web last night while on call, I ran into the dot.TV domain registrar again, and decided to check out what their crazy suggested bid for queso.tv would be. Crazy, indeed — do these people think that they’re going to remain solvent for long?

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit spent an extra amount of time Monday on the Barnes & Noble appeal of the injunction preventing the company from using Amazon’s single-click order system. And while this case doesn’t deal with the validity of the patent, the panel is clearly thinking about that issue, or they wouldn’t have spent over twice the normal time on this case.

If you’ve ever needed a dictionary for the lingo of typography, then counterspace is for you. It’s damn beautiful, too; the only ding on it is the Flash intro page (although it’s about 4 seconds long, so it’s not too bad).

Take it from a pediatrician — Greg is a wise, wise man.

Hmmm — Derek won his TiVo on September 27th, and got it today; I haven’t seen hide nor hair of mine, and I won it a day earlier. I want my TiVo!!!

Yesterday, I registered a couple of domain names with Register.com, and the level of service that they provide is so far and away better than Network Solutions it’s ridiculous. First of all, the domain is ready-to-use today (as opposed to the eons that it takes with NSI); also, I can make changes to my DNS information on a convenient web-based system, rather than the idiotic mail-based, who-knows-if-it-will-get-done system that NSI employs. Looks like I have a new registrar.

Excellent summary of Al Gore’s actual role in fostering the development of the Internet, written by Robert Kahn and Vinton Cerf. (Who, you may ask, are Kahn and Cerf? They’re the two guys who invented TCP/IP, the basic language of the Internet.)

The Republicans really are idiots. At the end of many of their current commercials, they run a URL, gorewillsayanything.com. Try clicking on that link.

Lots and lots and lots of news out of the Supreme Court today. In bullet-point form:

• The Court set aside a ruling that permitted students at Florida schools to elect prayer-leaders, in light of their decision in the Santa Fe school prayer case.
• The ability to reverse-engineer code was upheld by the Court’s refusal to hear Sony’s appeal against Connectix for the company’s GameBoy emulator. This will be particularly interesting in relation to the UCITA, which specifically forbids reverse-engineering and is slowly being enacted across the country.
• AOL’s status as more than a common carrier was upheld in the Court’s refusal to revive a lawsuit against the provider by subscribers.
• George Wendt and John Ratzenberger (Norm and Cliff) have standing to sue Paramount in an effort to prevent the studio from licensing robots of the two Cheers characters to bars around the country.
• The Court let standing rulings by the Federal District Court in California that allows schools to use race in consideration of applications if they have a justifiable reason to do so. Of interest, it isn’t college applications that are at issue, it’s elementary school applications.

I love that, as the election nears, the Bushism of the Week has turned into Bushisms of the Day. Two of the latest:

“I will have a foreign-handed foreign policy.”

“One of the common denominators I have found is that expectations rise above that which is expected.”

Today, I went and picked myself up a free CueCat barcode scanner at the Radio Shack that’s on my way home from the subway. Interestingly, the exact summary of the pickup was the following: ask for a CueCat, receive a CueCat. No license to sign, no paperwork to fill out, nothing. And so far as I can tell, there is no license that I have to read in order to plug the device in; the only place where there could exist a license to which I could even implicitly agree would be when I install the software, which I’m not going to do. So I can’t help but wonder what legal principles Digital Convergence thought they could rely upon when they decided to start sending C&D letters to people who were writing alternate software for the device… the company doesn’t have a chance, at least not with this distribution strategy.

In the mean time, I have a free barcode scanner at home.

Does anyone know what happened to the Free Font of the Day subsite over at Andover?

Pretty funny…

The Yankees are sucking as badly as is possible right now; I wonder if they’ll even make it through the first round of the playoffs. Part of me (the part that’s a dreamer, and knows how ridiculous he can be) wants the 15-losses-in-18-games streak to be a mindgame on the part of the Yanks… but nope, they just suck right now.