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Over the weekend, my disk quota on my hosting and mail account with Toadnet mysteriously exceeded its ceiling. And rather than just shutting down uploads to the site, the host overwrote any files that were already on the site that had been changed with blank pages. In other words, my weblogs on that host were essentially wiped from existence.

For this, and dial-up access from the road, I've been paying $50 a month.

So, the time has come to completely pull the plug. I just redirected my domains to a new domain name server at my bargain-basement hosting service, where my disk quota is larger by more than a factor of 10 and my hosting bill is $8 a month. I will no longer suffer in the name of supporting locals. As soon as the DNS refreshes, my move of all my weblogs (except for the one hosted by Userland) will be complete.

My Neal Award arrived in the mail yesterday. Seven other Baseline staffers also received the award, for Best Department or Column, for Baseline's “Hands On” department.

So, now I have a handy brass paperweight.

Today, as bombs fell on Baghdad, Kevin and I began work on his science fair project. The goal– to build a helicopter with rotors powered by model rocket engines. $40 at the hobby shop (balsa wood and glue is expensive) and hardware store later, we were measuring, cutting, and gluing together a strange beast of an airframe based on a 1? by 1/4? backbone and a series of 4 A-frames and two pairs of skids. The result looks like a scale model saw-horse collection. We also built the first rotor from 3? of balsa wing; our initial attempts to build an axle for the rotor from a wooden dowel were aborted when we realized how hard it would be to stabilize and transfer lift to the airframe from it.

Over lunch, we discussed the various laws of physics that we were going to need to take into account as we built this strange bird. It?s great that his sixth grade science class is so focused on physics right now–we can talk about Bernoulli and Newton and apply what he?s learning now directly to this project.

Now, to get it to fly will take more than physics. But he does go to Catholic school…..