Thursday, August 29.
In a fit of bad judgement, I bought a new board yesterday from
Lance & Sons in Santa Cruz. Isn't it be-yoo-tee-ful?
(Here
is a really big version of the picture.) It's a 7' jumbo fish kind
of thing, and Lance based it on a shape he did for his son (Colin
Eppard). I took it out for the first time this morning to Waddel
Creek with John, Scotty, and Lynne. It's fast and longboard easy
to catch waves with; indeed, one is truly Surfing for The Lord on
this bad boy. Sadly, John's ear was still bugging him, so we only
were out for about an hour and a half.
Shaver and Brendan and I spent some time going through Brand's stuff. Being a crypto-neophyte, I asked about negligible functions and the random oracle model. That should get me a little bit further through Chapter Two. I'm struggling to remember the little bit of abstract algebra that I'd learned in a grad-level number theory course, and Shaver pointed out that there's an online textbook that covers abstract and linear algebra. Nifty! ∴
Friday, August 23.
So it's "eighty percent" almost certainly surely going to be a girl! Since the first ultrasound (back -- when, May?) was a bit inconclusive due to "Judy" being shy, Alison signed up to be a guinea pig for ultrasound school. In other words, she was a subject upon which residents learn how to do ultrasounds from the experienced techs. We got some really great pictures (which I'll scan, either when I upgrad to Jaguar and buy a new scanner, or when I figure out how to fix my old scanner up to my Linux box), and although the techs say you can never really be sure until it's born, it seems like we're safe to buy pink now.
Oh, and it looks like Chomsky was right. ∴
Saturday, August 17.
We went to the ballgame today, Giants versus the Pirates. Of
course, the real draw was the fact that it was "bring
your dog to the game" day. Jack and Lumpy were in attendance, of
course! Before the game started, we got to parade around the
outfield with the dogs, which was cool. On the way in, there was
a cameraman who shot each dog's entry, projected on the Jumbotron.
When Jack arrived center-stage, he decided it would be a wonderful
time to relieve himself. So, to the cheers of thousands of fans,
he took a pee on PacBell park, captured for everyone's enjoyment
on the Jumbotron. That's my boy!
∴
Monday, August 12.
More interesting facts from Brendan! Primes in P posted on Slashdot. Couldn't get to the paper, so I thought I'd save a link here and try again later. ∴
Wednesday, August 7.
Brendan forwarded me a great speech from the O'Reilley Open Source Conference. Also, read an interesting article about Lisp that Richard Gabriel forwarded to Warren's list. ("[That more efficient programs were developed more quickly in Lisp than in other languages] might be because good programmers tend to gravitate towards Lisp, or it might be because programming in Lisp tends to make one a good programmer.") ∴