Daily Doings at the Line of Death Bar & Grill

Just as I (almost) predicted. The Pittsburgh Penguins beat the Philadelphia Flyers in 5 games. The Detroit Red Wings defeated the Dallas Stars in 6 games.

(There's a good topic for Outburst: Other words to use instead of "beat" when referring to winning sports competitions.)

The Stanley Cup finals -- another 7-game series -- begins on Saturday. My head says the Red Wings will win it; my heart says the Penguins will win it. This will go for either 6 or 7 games.

Unreladed and tangential anecdote: What if Microsoft and Sun were to take their battles to the hockey rink?

Get it here.

When I last talked about this project, I was in the process of updating my email address on as many lists as I could find myself subscribed to with my old email address. Many of the lists were gracious enough to provide links in their messages to websites from where I could change the address myself. And for the few that didn't, I'll either unsubscribe from them or let them deal with my bounced messages.

I get very few messages of interest at my old email address now. I delete the ones that look like spam to me, and that's saved me a lot of downloading time. I should have started doing that a long time ago.

I'm also updating my business cards, with the help of a rubber stamp kit. I set up my new email address in the stamp, and have been stamping the business cards, along with putting a line through the old email address.

I should be getting a bill from my old ISP early next month. At that time, I'll tell them my intention to let my account lapse, and give them my reasons why.

No, I haven't dropped off the face of the earth, at least not yet. I just haven't had much of a chance to post or do anything else recently. I'd come home from work, and the first thing I want to do is to watch the hockey game, if one is on. (Not just any hockey game. The Stanley Cup Playoffs.) So I haven't had the desire nor the spoons to do much else.

Speaking of hockey, who else out there remembers Peter Puck? Peter was the star of 3-minute cartoon segments that were produced by Hanna-Barbera and used to air between periods on NBC when they televised hockey games in the early '70s. (I have audio tape of a couple of the cartoons.) A Google search on "Peter Puck" reveals that all the shorts have been released on DVD. I'd love to get a copy, even if the cartoons are somewhat dated -- old rules, old teams, etc.

So, now that there's no hockey game on tonight, what is there to do? Right. Post to LJ.

Pittsburgh is playing Philadelphia, and Detroit is playing Dallas. Who would I like to see win? I'm not crazy about the Flyers; years after the famed Broad Street Bullies (and beating my Sabres in the '75 Cup final), they still play aggressive hockey. And the Stars beat my Sabres in the '99 Cup final -- 'nuff said! Pittsburgh in 7, Detroit in 5.

I didn't feel the earthquake at all. Despite this, I woke up earlier than usual this morning.

Now would be a good time to mention these links:

Multidisciplinary Center for Earthquake Engineering Research (MCEER)

US Geological Survey Eathquake Hazards Program

Yesterday for lunch, I went to El Rancho Grande for lunch (a taco and burrito). For dinner, I had some leftover canned corned beef and potatoes. Last night and this morning, it felt like my stomach was doing back flips. I was chugging Mylanta, and it wasn't helping. I didn't get any sleep. I called in sick to work this morning. Then I rested.

I'm feeling a lot better now. But my energy level is still kind of low.

I reconfigured Eudora to use IMAP so I could get copies of the outgoing mail messages I sent from my old ISP in the past two years. It worked great....until I decided to delete the messages on the server that were older than 90 days.

I tried to transfer the messages to other folders, but the operation kept failing.

The next time I did a synchronize, I lost the messages that I sent in 2006 and 2007.

Now I don't know if my ISP can recover those messages from a backup. I'll have to call them up and ask them tomorrow (and be prepared to hear a "no"). [Updated 10-Apr 15:50] I called them and no, they don't do backups of mail.

In the meantime, I'm bummed out. I like to keep copies of my correspondence in case I ever need to refer back to them.

But if they're gone for good, I don't have to worry about going through them. :-|

Last week, I received 2 Gb of memory to install in my Dell Optiplex 740 desktop computer at work. I'm running with 3 Gb of memory now. So why is Eclipse telling me it's running out of memory? There should be plenty of room for heap space and eden space!

At least it's only taking me 90 seconds to restart Tomcat.

I now have a GMail account. I've also upgraded Thunderbird to version 2.0.0.12. And I've done the necessary configuration in Thunderbird so I can upload and download my GMail mail.

My new ISP account should be active on Monday.

The next step is the arduous task of finding out what email lists I'm on, and getting them switched over.