Test test test…

Oooh!

Looks like is working.

Read all about it in A Mathematician’s Lament, an entertaining deconstruction of public math education by Paul Lockhart.

I’m writing this on my OLPC XO, which finally arrived. This little machine just rocks! It’s a real toy. Like an old fashioned chemistry set that you can make TNT with. Three cheers for the people who made these things!

Now I’m going to the beach to read about the universality and expressiveness of fold on the only laptop I’ve ever owned with a screen that works even better outdoors. Apple, eat your heart out.

I’ve spent most of the evening mesmerized by the TED talks. My dad recommended Sir Ken Robinson’s “Do Schools Kill Creativity?”, so I watched that one first. Wow! What a riveting speaker! So I thought I’d try another. While reading Lambda, the Ultimate earlier in the week, I’d seen mention of Murray Gell-Mann’s talk, so I watched that next. Neat! Hm, must be a fluke, try another…

I’ve watched six or seven of the talks now, and they’ve all been wonderful, mentally stimulating, and thoroughly entertaining. If television were like this, I too would construct a flatscreen temple to self dissolution and dutifully pay homage every evening, with a beer and maybe some potato chips.

In the most vicious sense. Let me know if you experience any problems.

redhat 7.3, it’s been nice knowin’ ya.

I just finished reading Dreaming In Code by Scott Rosenberg. If you’ve ever gotten bogged down on a software project and watched each deadline retreat like a desert mirage, (that is, if you’ve ever worked on any large commercial software project), you’ll love it. It’s exceptionally well researched and may give you some valuable insight into the difficulties of software development.

Thanks for loaning me the book, Oscar!

I’ve written up a recent emacs hack which gives you hints on function parameters when you’re programming in C. Read more here.

Janine got bitten by a dog today. In the afternoon the sun came out, so we went out for a walk. On the way back, as she passed, a German Shephard leapt up and bit her. She got some bruising on her upper thigh, and some torn skin.

At first I was very angry about that. The young descendant of a peon holding the leash did not apologize. He was in a large group of German Shephard owners (not kidding), so I bet he felt no need to. “Germans!” I thought. No, “Dog owners!”. Damn the dog owners. But then it dawned on me… in NYC, she’d probably have been shot. No, wait, in Iraq, she’d probably have been blown up!

Nice doggie.

I listened to a really awesome talk by George Dyson about John von Neumann and the history of computing today. Highly recommended.

Also not to be missed: these Don Knuth videos. My favorite so far is the musing entitled “Crossings and Nestings of Matchings and Partitions”, but it’s all been great so far.

Tony pointed out to me today that Ron Rivest is a closet lisper. Hmm.. that code might be handy next time I’m forced to program without useful tools.

In greener news, I finally got my order from Sunshine Seeds, including seeds for Dalbergia Melanoxylon (African Blackwood), Asimina Triloba (Paw Paw), Guaiacum Officinale (Lignum Vitae), and a few others. Whee!

We went for a beautiful bike ride today, and discovered a way to get all the way from our apartment to a lake several miles away without leaving the green areas. It’s like when you walk on the furniture because there’s lava, except breezier.

It recently dawned on me how many of the great books I’ve read came from my dad’s library. Dune. Neuromancer. ANSI C. Common Lisp, the Language. Reflections in an Empty Mirror. The list goes on. Thanks, dad. Without you, I may never have found them.

On another note, I put together a little music this evening. (Cringe). This is what’s called a “doodle”. This doodle is inspired by Richard Bona’s Dipita, and I’ve dubbed it dippy.

Oh, and today’s picture is a footnote from Anatomy of Lisp — also from dad’s library.

For years, I never got an error from google. Now I get them every couple of days. Have they reached critical mass? Does some law of nature dictate that they must now degenerate into crap?

We’ve finally got an exact date for our wedding: Friday, August 5th. If there’s somebody you don’t want to sit next to, better speak up now.

I’ve been spending a lot of time practicing the Peter Gabriel song “In Your Eyes”. I’ll spare you the pain until I can at least hit 75% of the notes, though.

Most of the tomato and pepper plants have already got their first real leaves. The little purple basil seedlings look cute.