jcole’s weblog

Well, it was bound to happen… after four years of travelling for MySQL AB I have now officially filled up my passport.

I sent my and Adrienne’s passports to the Swedish Consulate in New York to get our Permanent Residency visa stickers entered into them, and I got a call today saying that my passport is full and they have nowhere to attach my visa sticker. So I have to get a new passport before they can attach it.

Doh. So now I have to get a new passport expedited so I can have it in time to leave for London and Malta. How fun!

Nalle managed to almost catch another mole. Yesterday afternoon, Adrienne and I are laying around half-asleep-napping and we hear “thud! bang bang! eeeeeeeeeek!!”

The “thud” was Nalle’s head hitting the glass of the door, and the “bangs” were her paws as she was frantically pawing under the door trying to get the mole. The “eek” was, well, the mole. She was very dissapointed to have not succeeded in getting this one.

Well, this month has been interesting as far as traffic goes. MSNBOT has apparently gone apeshit on my site. For the first 26 full days of this month, they have hit my site over 56,000 times. That means they are averaging over 2,000 hits a day, with some truly exceptional days, like today.

Today, MSNBOT hit my site 6,261 times. On August 18th, they hit me 10,309 times. Most of their hits are coming at intervals of 1-2 seconds apart. I know when I was looking into writing a simple search spider for a former employer some time ago, everything I read about writing “polite” spiders indicated that you should only fetch one page from each site every minute at the most.

It seems like, as usual, greedy Microsoft wants to cheat a bit and get their search going ASAP, so of course they need to index faster, to everyone’s chagrin. Jeremy Zawodny mentioned MSNBOT on June 17th, and some of the comments there are very interesting.

I just created a plugin for WordPress to automatically link strings of the form “#,###,###” or “D###,###” to the USPTO website search for the appropriate patent or design patent number. For an example, just visit my old blog entry about Gillette Mach 3 Patents.

If you’re interested in it, I put it up for download here.

Adrienne and I were discussing what we need to do so we can move to Sweden, and she grabs a pad of paper and asks:

“What should we call this list?

And of course, my reply was:

“The list that should be completed digitally.”

Whereupon, she faithfully titles the page until I point out her mistake. “The list that should be .. bah!”

Somewhat less exciting, but still exciting news: As of July 3, 2004, the rules for importation of pet animals into Sweden have changed in line with an EU decision. In short: My cat will no longer have to be quarantined upon arrival in Sweden!

The rules for Sweden used to be that a cat would have to be quarantined for four months, and wouldn’t be allowed to interact with any other animal for an additional two months after that. With these new rules, all she needs are some additional shots!

I have some exciting news today: Adrienne and I are approved for permanent residence in Sweden!

After waiting 55 days to receive ANY kind of answer from the Swedish Migration Board, today I received the following, by email from Boel, our HR Manager:

I got the decision from Migrationsverket today; they’re giving you a
permanent residence permit – maybe you haven’t even received the papers
yourself. Congratulations!

Wish us luck as we make our plans for moving to Sweden!

I just re-added the the last of the big albums in my gallery albums that were lost when I lost a hard drive back in December. Check them out if you haven’t seen them:

• Uppsala, Sweden
• Stockholm, Sweden
• Gothenburg, Sweden
• Aurora Borealis on October 30, 2003
• Marseille, France

My cat, Nalle, managed to get ahold of a small mole today. At least I think it was a mole.

The story: When I open the main front door of my apartment, there is another glass door. That door doesn’t match up with the floor exactly, so there is a somewhat sizable gap between the door and the doorframe. I’ve had the main door open for the past few days because it’s been nice outside, and Nalle is usually sitting right in front of the door, staring incessantly out the door.

Today, I found out why the door had been getting so much attention from the cat. She was sitting in front of it like normal, and all of the sudden she’s in the middle of the room and I am hearing “EEEEEK SQUEEAAAAKKK!!” and I look over and there is a small grey-black rodent running around in my living room, with a cat in tow. She picks up the rodent in her mouth, doesn’t know what to do, spits it out again, and proceeds to chase it around. I grabbed a jar, and after a bit of a chase, scooped it up and, since it wasn’t going anywhere, examined it.

It seemed to be a mole. It was about mouse-sized, grey-black, and had a very pointy nose, and very very small eyes. Its tail was about half the length of a normal mouse’s tail. I let it go back outside, where it quickly ran into one of the holes in my front garden area. Bad kitty.

I am speaking in San Francisco, New York, and London on September 9^th, 14^th, and 16^th, respectively, for a joint MySQL migration seminar with MySQL Inc., Embarcadero Technologies, and Sogeti. The seminar is free for all to attend, but space is limited.

Sign up now!