Friday, 30 December, 2005. 11:45:23 PMBig news of today:
WASHINGTON - Federal prosecutors and lawyers for Republican lobbyist Jack Abramoff consulted briefly Friday with a federal judge in Miami as they put the finishing touches on a plea deal that could be announced as early as Tuesday, according to sources familiar with the negotiations.
Monday, 26 December, 2005. 12:10:23 AMI heard that Snoop Doggy Dogg was pleading with the governor of California
to spare Tookie Williams. He said "What's the dizzle, Schwartzenizzle?"
Saturday, 24 December, 2005. 09:40:31 PMI've got the whole family sitting around my parent's condo listening to
"Josh in Japan."
Friday, 23 December, 2005. 02:17:18 PMOsama bin Ladin's niece has renounced her family and also posed for (PG rated)
pictures in a men's magazine.
This funny thread on Fark.com is about that.
Tuesday, 20 December, 2005. 11:15:41 PMSen. John Cornyn: "None of your civil liberties matter much after you're dead."
Sen. Russ Feingold's retort: "Give me liberty or give me death."
Tuesday, 20 December, 2005. 10:43:24 AMWalmart Facts from someone at Buzzflash.com:
There are 1.2 million people working for Wal-Mart. On the average, Wal-Mart is paying these people $5,589 less per year than what they actually need to barely scrap by at poverty level. We, the taxpayers of this country, are making up the difference. That comes to 1,200,000 employees X $5,589 = $6,706,800,000. That's 6.7 billion dollars.
Tuesday, 20 December, 2005. 01:07:39 AMI haven't written much about the presidential scandals, but the current
one (there's been dozens and dozens of them so far) is my favorite.
Bush has admitted spying on Americans. He's not only admitted it, but
he's so stupid as to be proud of it. If there's any particular scandal
that is going to cause him to either resign or be removed from office,
this is the one. Spying on Americans is illegal, and it's clear that he
ordered an illegal act. Impeachment is very possible here.
Tuesday, 20 December, 2005. 12:43:55 AMAlex and I had a crazy/hectic weekend getting up to Michigan, but it's
settled down a bit now. It started on Saturday when I looked out into
my backyard and saw the head of a deer laying back there. I thought
right away that it was a coyote kill. I talked to my neighbor Jack
who said he heard a huge commotion involving coyotes the night before.
Probably a pack of coyotes killed a deer in the canyon behind his house,
tore it apart, and one of them hauled the head up to my yard to gnaw
on it a while. I got a shovel out and threw it over the cliff into the
canyon. No strong smell, except maybe a little bit of feces, almost no
blood, and just little bits of organs were visible. The neck was also
loose too, but I don't know what that means for how long it was laying
there. My guess is that it was only a few hours, maybe 8-14 hours. I have
photos, but not my camera cable, so they will have to wait until I get
back to Austin.
Right after I noticed the deer, Alex and I realized that we had waited
too long to take the dogs to the kennel, and it was closed until Monday
morning. We made quick arrangements with my neighbor Jack and one of
Alex's students to get the dogs taken care of, and can now report
that the dogs made it to the kennel safely Monday morning. That's a mistake
we won't make again
Last thing I saw was on Sunday. The Southwest Airlines aircraft known as
"Arizona One" was parked at the gate right next to our flight from
Nashville to Detroit. I got some nice photos of that plane. More than
once while I lived in Phoenix that aircraft flew very low over my car
as it took off or landed at Phoenix Sky Harbor Airport.
Aircraft travelled on this trip were: Austin to Nashville -
N510SW, and
Nashville to Detroit -
N744SW.
Friday, 16 December, 2005. 02:57:19 PMAlex just heard that she received tenure at the University of Texas.
Monday, 12 December, 2005. 10:34:44 PMMy game machine has an ECS motherboard with everything built-in. The onboard
LAN adaptor stopped working under both Windows and Linux. I disabled it and
replaced it with a PCI network adaptor.
Sunday, 11 December, 2005. 09:43:44 PMI just upgraded my spamprobe installation. The version I was running was
a couple years old, and was working very well until recently. There's
been quite a few mails slipping through my filters, and the latest
version reportedly stops those easily.
Friday, 09 December, 2005. 12:05:48 AMA plane just ran through the fence at Midway. The aircraft was
Southwest Airlines tail number N471WN. It is a 737-7H4 certified on
08/16/2004.
Photo 1
Photo 2
Photo 3
It's really snowing hard here in Chicago, but my flight back to Austin
isn't until tomorrow evening. I shouldn't have any problems.
Wednesday, 07 December, 2005. 09:25:03 PMKristiana is two today, and I turned 37 yesterday. I don't like being
away from home on our birthdays, and I don't like being in Chicago
when it's so cold.
Wednesday, 07 December, 2005. 10:19:22 AMRule of Modularity: Write simple parts connected by clean interfaces.
Rule of Clarity: Clarity is better than cleverness.
Rule of Composition: Design programs to be connected with other programs.
Rule of Separation: Separate policy from mechanism; separate interfaces from engines.
Rule of Simplicity: Design for simplicity; add complexity only where you must.
Rule of Parsimony: Write a big program only when it is clear by demonstration that nothing else will do.
Rule of Transparency: Design for visibility to make inspection and debugging easier.
Rule of Robustness: Robustness is the child of transparency and simplicity.
Rule of Representation: Fold knowledge into data, so program logic can be stupid and robust.
Rule of Least Surprise: In interface design, always do the least surprising thing.
Rule of Silence: When a program has nothing surprising to say, it should say nothing.
Rule of Repair: Repair what you can but when you must fail, fail noisily and as soon as possible.
Rule of Economy: Programmer time is expensive; conserve it in preference to machine time.
Rule of Generation: Avoid hand-hacking; write programs to write programs when you can.
Rule of Optimization: Prototype before polishing. Get it working before you optimize it.
Rule of Diversity: Distrust all claims for one true way.
Rule of Extensibility: Design for the future, because it will be here sooner than you think.