Why doesn't e-mail have a "send and flag for follow-up" button?

I hope to have one or two more publications to announce by or around the end of the month. Keep your fingers crossed!

I broke the SASAG Web site. The main site worked, but I had a 500 error on the admin interface, with the HTTP error logs reporting Fatal error: Call to undefined function get_home_path() in wordpress/wp-admin/includes/misc.php on line 128.

I found other reports of the problem, which turns out to have been because I had upgraded WordPress before upgrading the backupwordpress plugin to 2.1.1.

In order to fix the problem, I needed to connect to the Web server with SSH. But I needed to use the Socks5 proxy we use at work to access the outside world. I'd never run SSH via a SOCKS5 proxy before, but it turns out to be very easy: I just added -o 'ProxyCommand /usr/bin/nc -x localhost:1080 %h %p' to use the proxy forward I had running on port 1080.

Once connected via SSH, I solved the problem by moving the old plugin version out of the way and installing the new version. (This did preserve my settings, fortunately.)

Later, at home, I wanted Microsoft Word for Mac 2011 to report its word count rounded to the nearest 100 words. A little bit of searching revealed a helpful answer for that too.

I'm thankful to live in a time when, when my 11 month old son has a 104 degree fever, I can give him acetaminophen and his fever will decline. (And I'm thankful to be able to afford it.)

I'm thankful to be able to call a nurse after hours, and get guidelines on what changes in my son's condition indicate that we should seek immediate medical attention. (And I'm thankful that, had we needed to go, we have health care coverage.)

Yup, I'm a lucky guy. And my son's a lucky guy, even if he isn't feeling so great right now.

Courtesty Michael Bentley

Recently, several scuba divers did the unthinkable: captured and ultimately killed a Giant Pacific Octopus that was living at Cove 2, one of Seattle's most popular dive sites.

I'm not opposed to hunting, including spearfishing. But taking creatures at popular dive sites impoverishes everyone who dives in these places.

While these divers acted antisocially, their behavior was apparently legal. There's now a petition to protect the Giant Pacific Octopus at Cove 2, as well as evaluate broader restrictions on harvesting the GPO.

Seeing a Giant Pacific Octopus is one of my favorite things to do on a dive. They are beautiful, majestic, intelligent, and utterly alien. The only underwater sight in my experience that compares was a manta ray night dive in Hawaii.

Please sign the petition to protect the GPO in Seattle.

The random images are nice, and could still be used if the Kindle locks while on its home page. But showing the book cover would be a lot more "booky" and might provide opportunities for casual conversation that the random images lack.

We've had a bug where an operation count was always reported as zero, even though the operation seemed to alter the filesystem. We've sort of shrugged, as it's an internal tool and it was doing what was required.

Today, a co-worker of mine found the bug: a piece of code was using a C-style increment operator.

Had the increment operator in question been variable++, this would have produced an error: Python doesn't support any increment operator; you write variable = variable + 1. This error would have prevented the program from running at all, and the bug would have been obvious.

Instead, the increment operator was a prefix rather than a suffix: ++variable.

In Python, a prepended plus is just a unary plus operator. It does, basically nothing. (Yes, that's not technically true, but it's effectively true in most cases.)

But, oddly, you can have two unary plus operators, which does double nothing! And runs without an error message! And, as a bonus, it looks to a C programmer as though it would increment a number.

Which would result in an operation count always equal to zero, no matter how many items you count.

I figured that with Judah around, the best mix of value and convenience would be to buy everything we could at the Ballard Farmer's Market (which we pretty much do anyway), and get everything else we needed from Amazon Fresh, running out to other grocery stores only when unavoidable.

Sad to say, it didn't work out like that.

I'd presumed that Amazon Fresh had the same core value proposition as Amazon: enormous selection, good (if not predatory) prices, and a convenient online shopping experience. Sadly, Amazon Fresh ran 0 for 3 on that.

The selection was okay, but even excluding local products, not as extensive as the QFC in our neighborhood or Ballard Market. I couldn't get the same kinds of juice; our first-choice toilet paper was unavailable, and any reasonable sizes for our second choice were out of stock. I searched extensively, but I couldn't find anything I really wanted that wasn't available at the other stores in our neighborhood.

The prices were the same story: all right, but not any better than the grocery store. The prices might have seemed better if we bought truly bulk sizes, but in an apples-to-apples price comparison, Amazon possessed no advantage — and possibly a disadvantage once I added in delivery fees (for orders of less than $100).

If selection and prices weren't ideal, the convenience still might have been sufficient for me to become a fan. Unfortunately, the online shopping experience was terrible.

The search section, at the top of each page, contains a search box, and below that three lists: Aisles, Brands, and Show Only. There's a bug (at least in my experience on Google Chrome on a Mac) where, if I press the button to clear the search box, and start typing my new search in, the three lists reset. When the lists reset, anything I've typed in the search box is cleared.

For example, let's say I had searched for 'toilet paper' and that was in the search box. I press the little 'x' button to clear it, and start typing 'ice cream.' But about halfway through my typing, the aisles, brands, and show only boxes refresh — and I'm left with a search for 'ream'.

This is, needless to say, poor UI. Has the Amazon Fresh team considered copying the rest of the Amazon UI? It would be a significant improvement over what they have in place.

Even so, I might have put up with the site if not for the final insult: inconsistent, and frequently wrong, product information.

Laura is allergic to peanuts, and so tends to avoid granola bars, which frequently contain peanuts and peanut flour. But I have found several types of granola bars that don't, including the classic crunchy "oat and honey" flavors.

Looking at Amazon Fresh, you wouldn't know it. The oat and honey granola bars from Barbara's Bakery don't have any ingredients listed. The Nature Valley bars list a whole bunch of ingredients that aren't in this particular flavor of bar, including peanut flour.

With missing and/or untrustworthy ingredient lists, I consider using Amazon Fresh risky at best. Given the impossible UI, unimpressive prices and selection, and often long waits for delivery, I just can't see myself continuing to use Amazon Fresh for groceries.