First day of school. Isabella is now in the third grade. Saturday was the busiest day I've had since Xmas, but it doesn't even come close to break even for the month. This week I'll be working my tail off renting instruments until they run out. It's my fourth school season. Depression is mounting. Why am I working my tail off? I've got no economic incentive to do so. Four years working for free. Well, that's not entirely true. In fact I've been paying to work here...

Once again the government is considering tapping into the strategic oil reserves because of emergency needs following hurricane Katrina and also the continuing price hikes. One has to wonder how much of this request is based on fear factor and how much is based on the simple fact that the hurricane is rolling right over the top of the underground storage caverns. Oil and water don't mix. [Oil and politics? Oil and money? Different story...]

Nobody had to tell me the UMICH consumer confidence numbers. Down sharply, right? I could have told you yesterday. The music instruments business has been almost a perfect microcosm of the CC index. When people see even a hint of better times ahead, they're shopping and engaged. They'll buy $100 items. The last month or two sales of everything over $20 went flatline. I've been selling guitar strings (single strings, not sets) to folks who 'found' a guitar somewhere. Dumpster divers. Nobody is looking at merchandise and dreaming. They're here for a specific purpose - get in and get out.

One dollar bills have been the currency of choice. Usually the one dollar notes tend to balance out as I take them in and use them for change and I've only rarely had an excess to take to the bank. Last week I deposited a pile of ones. Nothing else. I've used significantly less credit-card paper supplies. Normal usage is about a roll of paper in two weeks. The current roll is just starting to get low. I last replaced it in June.

If it's any consolation, consumer confidence went up a teeny bit a few days ago. Will it stay that way until the next UMICH report? Who knows... but it won't matter because the report isn't going to tell me anything I don't already know.

A guy walks in with a guitar he bought yesterday. A $99 electric. This doesn't work! I want another one! Well OK but hold your horses a minute. What exactly doesn't work? The volume control doesn't change the volume. OK, so I plug it in and give it a spin or three. Works just fine. No! I want another one! That one!. But it works fine, there's something he's not telling me. The tuning gears are broken! So I tune it up. Nope, tuning gears work fine. But he's obviously unhappy with his purchase. I'm willing to swap it out and make him happy. But the first thing I have to do is give it a good eyeball and make sure there aren't any noticeable scratches that'll prevent me from putting it back on the shelf. Ah, now I see what the problem is. Somebody banged it against a wall (or something) - and then tried to cover up the damage with black spray paint (it's a black guitar). The spray paint dripped and partially dissolved the lacquer finish. What a mess. Sorry - I'm not taking it back. But I want another one, he insisted. No way Jose. You flucked it up. It doesn't work! I want another one! Over and over. But I held my ground. You've got a nice (albeit cheap) guitar with a screwed up finish. Stop whining and go home and play the durn thing. That's why you bought it.

The lady at the liquor store gave me a puzzled look. It's a mom and pop shop. She's mom. Pop just left. Both Indian immigrants around 60. There are half a dozen large photos of their swami looking down on you. That's one ugly swami, but I digress... "The cash register is broken!" OK, I know about that kind of thing. At least it's not a bar code operation where you need the computer system to tell you the prices. The price is on the bag of chips and the six-pack I picked up. No big deal. Just add it up and take my money. Here's a twenty. You've got an adding machine don't you? Her head nodded sideways. OK. No big deal either. Pencil and paper. It's consumeable so you don't even have to do the tax. There's probably a deposit or something on the bottles for the state, but she had never bothered with it before so I didn't try and complicate things by mentioning it. She struggled with the numbers but came up with something that looked reasonable. Then she froze completely. A minute went by. Uhm, is everything OK? Can I get my change? Then it occurred to me what the problem was. She didn't have a clue how to make change. I thought I should break the impasse. You said $12.07. So you owe me $7.93 back. She said thank you and I shook my head as I walked away. In my shoppe this kind of event would have been at most a minor irritant. She's got a major crisis on her hands. The smartest thing for her to do is lock the door and go home.

Yeah, I know... I missed the school reunion picnic again.

Seems kind of odd that I've had three or four of my old high school classmates and a couple of friends of high school classmates solicit me for sex in the last year. Found me on the internet (not too difficult). They're in funky relationships and/or recently divorced and think a fling with somebody they went to school with is somehow 'safe'. Amusing. I've had a total of fifteen (sixteen?) propositions, etc. from high school acquaintances since 1994. Twenty years after the fact. Now it's thirty something years later. I'm not going to bore you with the details. I couldn't get a date for the life of me when I was in high school and actually saw these people every day. Go figure.

I notice at Safeway that you can pick up swordfish steaks for about half the cost (per pound) of a ribeye. Remember when it was the other way around?

Iraq has a constitution. Oops. I take it back. Maybe tomorrow.

The DEA just announced with great hoopla the arrest of a bunch of people across the country in a methamphetamine crackdown. They estimate the group of people moved about 50 pounds of meth every month and about 3000 pounds of cocaine a month. Hmmm... Why aren't they touting the cocaine figures? Think they missed some folks? They (the DEA) calculate that 545 grams of meth crystals correlates to one pound of 'product'. There are 453.59237 grams in a pound and add to that the fact that drug dealers are notorious for 'cutting' their product with inert ingredients. Maybe we should find out where all this missing meth is - or perhaps we should send our DEA agents back to school.

Oh, here's a blast from the past...

I found an old copy of mosaic and installed it. After making attempts at about thirty different primitive web sites, I finally found one that didn't crash the program outright. Thank goodness for w3.org - about the only place on the web that's still viewable on an eleven year old web browser. Remember this is pre-frames, no text colors except black and blue, no background but grey. No animations. No multiple columns. No CSS. No javascript. Tables were still pretty buggy. About the only things you could rely on were paragraphs, lists, links, and GIF's (provided you kept the colormap to less than 218).

And if that weren't enough...

Yup, that's "Mosaic Communications" Netscape version 0.9 BETA. It doesn't load much more than mosaic. It won't load w3.org at all because it's aware of utf-8 and knows it can't handle it. Mosaic just ignores the utf-8 directive entirely.

I can still recall the very first beta of NCSA mosaic. A guy named Marc Andreessen posted a message in the comp.infosystems USENET forums. Called it a graphical WWW browser. They had binaries for 9 or 10 operating systems prebuilt on the NCSA public FTP site - which they also cross-posted to the alt.binaries group. I was skeptical, but being a geek and in charge of the computers for the Stanford Med School information systems research group - I had to check it out. Hopefully it was better than the sample code from the guys at CERN. They (CERN) had something that read hypertext pages and followed links. On a text terminal. I had been using gopher - which was a competing technology. I had been involved in extending gopher to display things like pictures - which each showed up in a separate window. I had also exchanged a lot of email with Marc and others on the limitations of gopher images and data types. I had just finished integrating gopher with WAIS, a text search system from Thinking Machines, Inc. It was a painful integration.

So I gave mosaic a try. Nobody posted binaries for ten operating systems unless it was commercial software with fees and unlock codes. But this was free - university software. Unheard of at the time. I ran it - on an 'X' terminal. The first page I tried looked like a newspaper. Pictures, text. Links. My jaw dropped. Anywhere you clicked you went to another page with pictures and text and links. One of the universities had written HTML pages for their art museum. You could go to the gopher pages as well - and the pictures came up in the same window. No more popup windows! (Right.) There was one thought going through my brain - the entire world just changed.

By mid-afternoon I had installed mosaic on every machine in the lab. I sent out a group email - you've got to try this thing. By the next day, everybody was surfing the web. We frantically wrote web pages. Within two weeks, the number of hits on our gopher server went from thousands a day to zero. The number of hits on the HTTP server (which I had installed a month or two earlier) went from zero to thousands.

About a month earlier I had given a talk to my colleagues on the future of information systems. Gopher, I said, was easy to catalogue information. That's why I was working with the developers. If you pointed a gopher server at a filesystem directory, it would serve up the information to the internet. But the developers were short-sighted. The protocol didn't anticipate the needs of information groups such as ours with vast stores of information resources of many different types. The future, I said, was in the technology coming out of the CERN labs - they called it the World Wide Web. The drawbacks were that somebody actually had to write pages containing hypertext in the HTML language, which would involve paying humans to type. But on the plus side, there were no limits to the types of information you could provide access to. HTTP, gopher, FTP, usenet, email, and no restrictions on search and media formats. I told my colleagues that a few years from now, gopher will be gone. WWW will rule.

They were skeptical. Who in their right mind would pay people to learn how to type HTML documents? It's a computer language. Software developers aren't very good at typing readable documentation. Documentation writers don't have the technical background to write computer code. This WWW thing would require an entirely new job description. Where are these people going to come from?

Just finished upgrading the weblog to version 2.0 (although I'll still call it beta for now). Hopefully, about the only difference you'll see is that the user comments are now a hyperlink instead of a button. So what changed? Everything. I've pretty much re-written the whole kit-n-kaboodle. That's what we do for version two of software. Make it a whole lot better, but make it look pretty much the same. There are huge differences to the owner of the blog. A whole lot easier to setup and use. Easier to post, that kind of thing.

Ya' know what I have against muslims? No, I really don't have anything against their belief system. I also don't believe they're all terrorists. But I'm deeply offended that nobody seems to have taught them that the letter 'Q' is always followed by the letter 'U'. Al Qaeda. Iraq. Qatar. See what I mean?

Eighteen weeks. January 1, 2006. Not much time. On that day I will be headed into my fifth year in business. The store will be celebrating 50 years in business. And... it looks like the anniversary sale will be colliding head-on with the going out of business sale. For the last month, practically my entire income has been provided by selling a dozen or so guitar picks a day. If I do the math, it will take about 1500 picks a day to break even. Divide that by four or five customers a day. I don't think that even my best efforts can get each and every one of them to buy 300 picks a day. A few years ago, I could make up the shortfall out of pocket. There's nothing left in the pockets, and this month was about 80% short of break-even. Can't make it up in school rentals - now just a couple of weeks away. If I rent out every band instrument I've got, I might hit break even for one month. Without profits, there won't be anything left to buy stuff for Christmas, which dooms any chances of breaking out during that season. It's a death spiral.

Here's the newest member of the family. Toldja' I was outnumbered.

Across the pond, the British are expelling, deporting, whatever - a bunch of people because their presence is "not conducive to the public good". Why can't we do that?

My sleep was interrupted in the middle of the night by an electric guitar. An 'E' chord, crashing loudly through the speakers in the ceiling above me. What in tarnations? I jumped a foot in the air. The guitar I need to make that sound is hanging on the wall - right there - untouched. It's connected to a wireless transmitter (that isn't turned on) that's connected to my sound system by a wireless receiver (that is turned on). Welcome to crowded spectrum. Somebody else in the neighborhood has a wireless diversity guitar system. And for a second or two the signal was able to lock into mine.

I turned off the wi-fi network at the store. Had it for convenience when I was using a wireless card, and left it on for parents to use while their kids were taking sax lessons. But after a few months I started noticing the activity light was always on. Somebody in the neighborhood, latching onto the free service. But they weren't reading their mail. They weren't surfing the web. They were downloading files. And downloading more files, and downloading more files. Day after day. Nonstop. For weeks. Stealing my bandwidth. If I interruped the service they would start again shortly after it came back. Sigh. You try and do something nice and somebody is out there to abuse it. Oh well. Click. Problem solved.

Oh now this is cool. I can take a picture on my cell phone and post it to my blog in about a minute. How interesting... Here's the new wall of guitars at the store...

A tractor-trailer loaded with 35000 pounds of explosives explodes in Utah. (That is after all what explosives are designed to do.) Think about that next time you're cruising anxiously behind an 18-wheeler...

Salman Rushdie is calling for Islamic reform, beginning with downgrading the Quoran from a holy book to a 'historical document'. You'd think he would have learned his lesson the first time around.

This had me chuckling... a helicopter crashed in Estonia. From the newswire...

"When rescuers arrived, the tail section of the chopper, operated by Finnish company Copterline, was sticking out of the water while the rest of the aircraft was submerged, said Mati Raidma, head of the Estonian rescue service."

Yay Copterline. Your piece came out OK. This seems like bad news for the company that was in charge of the fuselage.

Now I'm in a quandary... Kaman Corp. just bought Musicorp. I've ranted about Kaman before, though perhaps not by name. I refuse to do business with them. Haven't for a couple of years. Musicorp is one of two wholesale music products suppliers that I like. I probably couldn't survive without them. Hence the quandary. Oh well... Perhaps it won't matter. It's not looking like this business is going to survive anyway. I can count daily customers on one hand now. My hottest selling item is 25-cent guitar picks - of which I sell maybe a dozen a day. The most often heard statement by customers - I don't have any money.

Which makes it particularly ironic that today is the tenth anniversary of the Netscape Initial Public Offering. Ten years?!? What a long strange trip it's been...

Time to dig into the daylight savings algorithms and tweak them once again. At least we've got two years to fix 'em. Bush signed the energy bill today. Oh, and I got my energy bill today. Ouch.

Nuclear war is sixty years old today. Happy Birthday! Hope you're thinking seriously about retirement...

A half dozen US gasoline refineries have been forced into unplanned shutdowns and several have delayed restarting. This in turn is driving up the price of oil. This all sounds vaguely familiar. Remember the California energy crisis a few years back? Energy plants shutdown for no apparent reason and the prices went up to astronomical levels. Which made it profitable to keep shutting down the plants for no apparent reason. This is a crock.

There seems to be a housing shortage over in Mosul for insurgent foreign fighters. Too many people coming in to kill Americans - not enough places for them to stay. Ironically this is good for the economy as it raises the price of rental property. The warriors are also being chastised for squandering Allah's money on cars and cell phones for their new digs. They don't sound like spartan idealists to me. They sound like any other young capitalist.

The latest communique from number two guy Zawahiri is interesting. He is shown with the now standard AK-47 behind him. But wait, that's not an AK-47. That's an AK-74. With a grenade launcher. Unusual. Now you can buy an AK-47 anywhere in the world. AK-74's in a few less places. You can also buy the standard 7.62 x .39 ammo anywhere on the planet. But Russian grenades don't have that wide of a spread. There are only a few places where they are common. In Pakistan for instance they can be bought, but they are not common. There's no point having a grenade launcher unless you have lots of grenades. Granted, the picture is staged for sure. Everything is there for a reason. Which is precisely what makes the grenade launcher interesting.

If you pull out a map of the region, you notice a little 'finger' of Afghanistan which separates Pakistan and the Russian 'Stans' (Uzbekistan, Turkmenistan, etc.). It extends all the way to the China border. This is the general area where everybody seems to think Osama is hanging out. But everybody is looking for him on the Pakistan side. The best place to hide would be on the other side of the finger in Tajikistan. The baddest of the badlands. Nothing there but abandoned Russian military outposts. The US military won't set foot there. Just outside Musharaff's grasp. Russian grenades are common. A grenade launcher attached to a rifle would be normal. Now if you pull up a terrain map, there aren't many defensible positions or escape routes in the area. I would put him between Khorog and Murgab, probably around Rozh. Here the principal economic activity is the movement of opium. The only military uniforms you'll see will be at the local bazaar - right behind the grenades.

In a retail business, it's hard to give up selling an item that you sell a lot of. But I'm doing it. My most popular guitar is the one that sells for $75.00. I sell six-packs of the things every 2-3 weeks. Why would I give it up? The reason it sells so well is because it's the cheapest guitar in the store. I sell ten times as many as the next step up, which is $89.00. So.... I performed an experiment. I took out all the $75 and $89 guitars. The cheapest one I have in the place (not counting the kid's toy guitars) is now $99.00 . Ya' know what? It's now my most popular selling guitar. I'm selling just as many of them now as I once did the $75 guitar - and making a few dollars more off the sale. I've learned something...

It's too bad, though - that it won't scale much beyond that. I still have the cheapest guitars in about a ten mile radius. As soon as you hit $100, everybody is in the game. But as it turns out, the largest local competitor for $99 guitars was myself. Why buy a $99 guitar if you can buy one for $75?

King Fahd had been slipping away for months, if not years. There were rumours of his death back in May. He held on for another few months. But now he's gone - and the news media is surprisingly quiet about it. Almost hidden in the bylines - they give even more information about dead movie actors that starred in one minor role in the 1930's than they did this high-impact event. Hello?!? King Fahd! One of the world's wealthiest, most powerful, and influential men. Protector of Islam and its holy site of Mecca. American ally - sometimes. Saudi Arabia is having a regime change! Home to most of the 9/11 hijackers. Home to Osama and his family. Wealthiest country per capita on the planet. And the media has nothing to say about it? I would say that was 'odd' but that's not the half of it. There's a continuing pattern of the media not touching anything that has Saudi Arabia written on it. That's just plain spooky.

Several facets of news coverage today focused on space exploration. Everybody was being asked 'Do you believe there's life out there?'. Being space explorers, pretty much everybody said yes, that's what they believe. Do you believe in aliens? It's all in how you ask the question...