Thursday, October 31.

Alison and I bought about twelve pounds of candy at K-mart a few weeks ago. The local newspaper said that our street was going to be shut down (with police and gates) for trick-or-treaters. So far, about seven kids have come by. And there are no cops or gates to be seen. Oh well, I guess I'll donate what's left over to Cathleen's candy jar.

Check out Camino Dental: it's a great read, but definitely a teaser. What happens to the note, Ian? Does Turner's wife find it? It seems clear that Turner would never give it to Shayna...or will he? I demand closure. (Nice use of the word avuncular, by the way. That sent me scurrying to the dictionary!)

Got an hour or two in at Pacifica today after staying up all night with Becca. ∴

Wednesday, October 30.

Found an ocean engineering course linked from Surfline, and couldn't help but think of Michael L., my source for wave geek knowledge. Wave energy density and flux! ∴

Tuesday, October 29.

It's strange living life measured out by three- to four-hour intervals. Kind of puts a new perspective on things: days are measured by bottles. There's just enough time between 'em to think that you might actually do something useful (like sleep, or read, or something), but not enough time to really do it. So this lasts for a year? Oh boy... ∴

Saturday, October 26.

Jack and Lumpy have been a bit skeptical of their new little sister. In fact, Jack welcomed her home with his "oh no, there's an intruder" bark. He followed this performance by running into the backyard, screaming bloody murder. This is typical behavior when, say, the (scary, evil) UPS man offers to bring a package inside (clearly with malicious intent). But a seven pound sack of sleep seems like it might be a bit less intimidating to a seventy pound Labrador Retriever. Or not, who knows. Lumpy seems to be taking things in stride, though.

I have, of course, been busy with my camera. (What self-respecting geek of a new father wouldn't be?) Here is a good one of Alison and Becca sitting downstairs, followed by a close up of Becca, contemplating. Finally, a blurry family portrait that I think looks pretty cool. ∴

Thursday, October 24.

Rebecca Quinn Waterson was born yesterday morning at 8:45am! She's 7 pounds, 10 1/2 ounces, and has a good set o' lungs. Both she and Alison are doing great, and we're back home now chillin'.

Becca Q came out in quite a hurry, as it turns out. At about 6:30am yesterday, Alison had been on petocin all night and was about 1cm dialated. "We may decide to break your water around noon to help things along," the midwife commented nonchalantly. I went to get breakfast at about 8am, and returned 20 minutes later to find Alison in full labor. The nurse was with her, and was struggling to find the baby's heartbeat. After a few minutes, she found the heartbeat and it had dipped from about 140 down to 50. The nurse pulled the alarm and a veritable episode from ER ensued. Alison was rushed to the operating room with cries of "we're gonna have to cut this one out" echoing up and down the hall. "Stay here," a nurse instructed me, "we'll come get you when it's over." Needless to say, I was a wreck at this point.

As it turned out, there was no need for a Caesarean: the baby had descended and, well, just popped out. Whew! Anyway, it's great to have her. Allright, she's hollerin'. Gotta run. ∴

Tuesday, October 22.

Alison is spilling protein, and they've decided to induce her. Wow. Next time I see you, I'll be a dad! Wish us luck! ∴

Tuesday, October 15.

Great morning with John at the Hook. Nice slow three to five footers, and only about ten other people there.

Spent some time removing bitfield stuff from TinySoar. Saved maybe 200 bytes of H8300 code out of about 20K. Turns out chunk.c accounts for about 5K of code alone: --disable-chunking drops the code footprint to about 15K, almost all of which can be attributed to that file.

Oops, got some better data: I hadn't been specifying -fomit-frame-pointer, which improves things by about 5% across the board: 19K with chunking, 13.5K without. ∴

Monday, October 14.

Got chunking and justifications nominally working in TinySoar, yay! Now to make it fit on the RCX again. ∴

Tuesday, October 8.

Nisheeth sent me a link to Haystack: it's a cool project, but it's all the stuff we were trying to do in Mozilla four years ago. Oh well, everything old gets new again. (And it looks like these guys might pull it off, which we certainly didn't!)

It's interesting to be a lab rat. I'm having a hard time remembering the names of all twenty six "core RDF team members", though. ∴

Saturday, October 5.

Law school in a nutshell, cool.

Oh. After upgrading to this box to the latest RH 6.2 bits (2.2.19 kernel, etc.), and replacing the RAM, I still get random crashes when slamming NFS while ripping songs (yes, I updated nfs-utils, too). Is it time for a new motherboard? Or is it just time to retire this old horse altogether? I just have such an affection for cranky old hardware (this box is almost eight years old, now). It's so hard to let go. ∴

Friday, October 4.

I really need to upgrade this server. Sigh.

We went to see Enrique's show at The Office of Supervisor Matt Gonzales. (Hmm, that link doesn't work for me either, but it's the one on the invitation, I swear!) I felt like such a socialite! Then to My Big Fat Greek Wedding, which was grand. A taste of what Traeger (my cousin) must be going through! He was just baptized in the Greek Orthodox church this summer, in Greece, for exactly the same reason. She's on the left -- and is a fine reason, I might add!

Interesting article on video codecs in the Economist. Also, a fluffy article about DRM for music. ∴

Tuesday, October 1.

Why must Apple make it so hard to print? Trying to print some PDF files using the "Preview" application just sucks (it takes literally minutes per page!), but that's the only way you can get something to print full-duplex by default: printing PostScript papers using lpr burns trees like there's no tomorrow. I posted to the Apple OS/X discussion group, perhaps someone else has felt my pain. ∴