But the plane got in at 10:30, and it took me over an hour to get my luggage. Didn’t get to bed until after 1 AM. I’m headed over to the conference, so maybe I’ll check in from there, bandwidth permitting.

But not LA, this time. Do you know the way to San Jose? I do. Fly into SFO via Dallas, rent car, and down the 101.

Excuse me. Make that down 101, just so the locals don’t confuse me with one of those degenerate hicks from southern California. In Sherman Oaks, it’s the 101, but no definite article is required in Silicon Valley. I’ve always wondered, driving up, just where it loses the “the.” I’m guessing somewhere around Paso Robles.

Anyway, that digression aside, I may do some conference blogging, but I’m there to schmooze mainly. I will feel an obligation to write up interesting things that go on there at some point, though. I have a press pass waiting. I hope.

It doesn’t look like Florida is going to avoid getting hit by Ernesto. Even the southeast coast (where I am) is in the cone, though to the extreme right side of it. I hope we’ll have a better idea of the situation by tomorrow.

[Update at noon]

Looking at the current forecast track, it’s looking an awful lot like Hurricane Charley a couple of years ago, that originally projected to come ashore in Tampa, but unexectedly took a right turn short of the goal, and pounded southwest Florida pretty hard. Batten down the hatches, Kathy.

[Update at 3 PM]

The latest Accuweather track seems way out of bed with everyone else (NHS, Weather Underground, Weather Channel). It has a much faster storm, heading up the Florida peninsula on Tuesday (forget about launching the Shuttle this week–they’ll almost certainly have to roll back to the VAB). And we’re right in the bulls eye (though at least it would be coming up through the swamp, so minimal storm surge).

Everyone else still centers it off the gulf coast, and not hitting until Wednesday. I hope that everyone else is right, but it looks like we’ll probably have to shutter up tomorrow. Anyone know why the disparity?

[Update a couple minutes later]

I just figured it out. They have their days mislabeled. They think that today is Saturday. That’s a relief, but I still don’t like the eastward trend of their track.

[Evening update]

It’s been downgraded to a tropical storm. Jeff Masters thinks there’s a good chance that it won’t be able to recover to hurricane strength in the Florida straights, and could come on shore as a tropical storm or a low-level hurrican at most.

…given Ernesto’s small size and the difficulty he is having with Hispanolia, there is hope that the expected 1-2 day traverse of Cuba will significantly weaken him. It may take Ernesto a day or two to regain hurricane strength once he emerges into the Florida Straits. This bodes well for the Florida Keys, which may dodge another hurricane. I think that only if Ernesto makes landfall north of Tampa will he have time to organize into a major hurricane.

Here’s hoping.

I cannot use my Windows 2000 desktop machine. (Almost) every time I boot it, it refuses to recognize the mouse. I say “almost” because once in a while it does. When it does, I use it, and hope that I won’t have to reboot again. It seems to be random, but it doesn’t work much more often than it does. Can anyone imagine what causes this behavior?

I’m writing this from my Fedora machine (which is on the same KVM switch as the Windows machine, and using the same mouse, with no problems). Fortunately, I finished up my work for the client, that required MS Word, before I had to reboot (I was installing a flurry of Windows security updates…)

[Update a few minutes later]

Well, the sixth time was the charm. Oh, did I mention that part of the ritual is making vigorous mouse motions during boot to get it to work (this seems to be a necessary, but not sufficient condition).

Microsoft, that is.

I haven’t been posting much because, even though I’m back home in Florida, we still have a lot of deliverables to complete this week. I’m working on a Word document, and when I try to save, I get a message that it can’t because I either have too many files open, or there’s no space on the disk. I only have one file open, and there’s lots of space on the disk (I can download things to it, and save to it from other applications, and the problem appears on whatever drive I attempt to save to, including network drives).

For some reason, Word thinks that it has a problem that it doesn’t. Has anyone ever seen this behavior? By the way, it’s Word 97…

I’d work in Open Office, but I can’t be sure that it will generate clean compatible files with tracked changes for the Word people to use when they integrate the book.

[Update about 6:30 Eastern]

It seems to be a problem with this particular file. I tried it on Patricia’s machine and had the same problem. I can save smaller files, so I’ll just have to cut’n’paste the sections I’m working on individually, and let them reintegrate it. But it doesn’t look like a reinstall of Word or Office would fix it.

I’ve got a red eye to FLL in four hours, and am going to go for a walk on the beach and dinner beforehand. No telling for sure when I’ll be back in California, pending a CEV announcement.

Does anyone know if there’s way to get Moveable Type to display comments on a certain date, or some other script that would do that, and allow their deletion? Somehow I was hit with many hundreds of comment spams back on May 5th of this year, and they apparently came in so fast that MT didn’t even send me email notifications of them. I’ve been looking at old posts, and they’re infested with them. Furthermore, they aren’t even blacklistable–the URLs are nonsense strings of characters (what was that all about, other than pure vandalism?).

I’ve been going through and deleting them as I find them, but it would take a long time to look at every one of thousands of posts. It would be nice to just see comments that were posted on that date. I’m sure that it would be possible to write such a script, but I’m wondering if one exists.

I’m flying back to Florida Friday night. It looks like the first business of the day will be putting up the shutters. I sure don’t like the track of this storm. If it holds up, it’s headed right for Palm Beach County.

[Update late morning EDT]

The latest track looks a little better for us, but not good for the Keys.

There’s an after-lunch session on arcane areas of space law. Because it’s after lunch, and an abstruse discussion under the best of blood-sugar levels, I’m not going to even attempt to blog it. It’s not that it’s not interesting, but it’s all over the map in topics, and it’s just too hard to blog, I know that the difference between “inherently risky activity” and “inherently dangerous activity” is important but I just can’t write down every jot and tittle of the discussion. At least right now. And it hardly seems worth reporting without doing it, other than saying that “three lawyers discussed space law.” Maybe Clark will do better.

[Update a few minutes after the session ends]

He did.

I just got in on an early morning flight.

I have to say that I really like Delta, at least that flight. Leaves Florida at 7 AM and gets me in to LA at 9 AM, non-stop (the American non-stop leaves at 9:15 and gets in at 11). Comfortable, not too packed (empty seat next to my window) with DirecTV on the seat back, which allowed me to follow the war on Fox and CNN.

Too bad I’m an elite flyer with American.

Probably not much blogging–I’ve got a lot of work to do over the next couple days, then I’m driving to Vegas tomorrow night or early Friday morning for the conference. Maybe some live blogging from there, though, wireless permitting.