I tried to do as little as possible this weekend. And what I have done has mostly been Quicken-related.

I got the pieces together for my annual Quicken rebate, but I haven’t yet gotten around to finding an envelope in which to mail it.

I was all ready to be pissed at Roxio for not offering an XP upgrade to EasyCD Creator Basic, which came along with my Plextor CD writer, but so far, the base support in XP seems sufficient. I would like DirectCD, though, so that I can have Quicken back itself up to CD instead of having to go drag the Quicken data directory to the CD by hand, but I don’t feel like paying good money for that little convenience — and if I do decide to pay someone, it’ll probably be Ahead for Nero instead. Plextor claims that there will be an upgrade from Roxio, but I’m not holding my breath.

Jeffrey’s been hosting the boy who’ll be sharing his Bar Mitzvah — they’ve been having a good time, watching Mystery Science Theatre 3000, playing with Legos, and watching Battlebots. I think they’re actually twins.

I had hoped to go see Monsters, Inc. this weekend, but that doesn’t seem to have happened. It’ll be around next weekend, too, I bet.

I’ve been using the Web since the early ’90s, but I am sometimes still amazed at what’s out there and how easy it can be to find.

Tonight, we were watching last night’s Enterprise and heard Captain Archer telling the Andorians that the famous astronomer Tycho Brahe had lost his nose in a duel about an equation. I’d never known that and wondered if the writers had just made that up (certainly I never read anything like that in any of Isaac Asimov’s books, which is probably where I learned how to spell Tycho’s last name). So after the show, I sat down at my trusty browser and typed three words into the Google search bar:

Tycho Brahe duel

The first result from Google was one of Cecil Adams’s The Straight Dope columns, titled Did astronomer Tycho Brahe really have a silver nose?, which answered the question in the affirmative (though I don’t think Cecil got the equation quite right). Elapsed time from sitting down to having the answer: maybe 10 seconds.

What part of “Off” doesn’t Microsoft understand?

I’m still fairly happy with XP, but there are some truly weird things in the UI. I was ready to turn off my computer for the evening, so I clicked the “Start” bar, selected “Turn Off Computer”, waited for the popup asking me what I really wanted to do to appear, and hit Enter. The computer went into “Suspend” mode.

Silly me. I would have thought that the default action when you ask to “Turn Off Computer” would be to turn the computer off, but it isn’t.

At least Clippy doesn’t pop up to help.