If it was Thursday, I must have been in Berkeley…

…visiting the Computer Science department at UC Berkeley and finding myself completely without connectivity. There were Ethernet outlets everywhere, but they were all turned off (“…we don’t trust the students not to start sniffing the Ethernet…”, or so I was told). But it was an interesting day anyway, seeing what’s happening in the Iceberg and Endeavour projects and meeting enthusiastic graduate students. Made me feel old, though — these folks can crank out more code in one afternoon than I can do in a month these days! I’m also impressed at the relevance of their projects, compared to what we did back in the mid-70’s at RPI (my Master’s project was a self-hosted compiler for a toy language (a subset of Pascal) — to call it useless would be to give it far too much praise; one of the projects I saw yesterday dealt with making it safe to deal with financial sites from untrusted environments like public Web kiosks).

I am so glad that I don’t have to go to Berkeley very often, though — the trip there took nearly 2 hours. I stayed for dinner and so rush hour was over by the time I came home, but I was still on the road for an hour. And people make that trip every day…but not me if I can avoid it! At least it was 20 degrees cooler in Berkeley than at home.

Today has been a quiet day; Jeffrey’s school year ended yesterday, and summer day camp/child care doesn’t start until Monday, so I stayed home with him. We spent the morning fiddling about the house (he decided he’d like to watch Some Like It Hot again after hearing that it was number 1 on the
American Film Institute‘s
“100 funniest films” list), mid-day getting his passport renewed (and visiting the library), and now we’re home again on our computers. I had thought we might go to see
Titan AE
, but Jeffrey doesn’t seem to be terribly interested, and the review I read in today’s Merc wasn’t very promising. Fortunately, it’s cooler today than Wednesday (we were lucky on Wednesday that we never lost power; the map in yesterday’s Merc indicated that our area was one of the areas hit by rolling blackouts, but the clocks all had the right time, so I guess we were spared), and so it’s not unpleasant to be home or even out and about.

I did fix one long-standing problem on his computer — one of the games he likes is Star Trek: Starship Creator, but it would never save his work, so he had to start from scratch every time. This, as you can imagine, was not a satisfactory state of affairs. I tried reinstalling the game and installing a new version of QuickTime, but that didn’t help; eventually, I noticed that the icon he was using to start the game pointed to the CD and had the CD’s root directory as its working directory. I changed it to use the installed directory as the working directory, and lo and behold, suddenly the game saved its state automagically! The programmers had never bothered to test whether they were able to write to the disk, or if they had tested, they didn’t bother to issue error messages. “Not caring” is endemic in the industry, I’m afraid.

I’m hoping for a quiet weekend with as little time spent on the computers as possible, so I’d better plan ahead and say Happy Birthday, Cliff! now instead of being late.

How do they do that?

It was pointed out to me that the link to my letter in the online version of Business Week doesn’t work (at least not from MSIE; it seems to work from Netscape). But in Netscape, I get a different URL than I get in MSIE. I am confused. So I’ll exercise my moral rights as the author of the letter in question and print it here (I don’t know who holds the actual copyright at this point, me or Business Week, but I think this is also fair use).

Basic Nutrition for Just Peanuts

After reading ”It ain’t exactly Julia Child” (Up Front, May 1) on the Stigler Diet, I now
know where the airlines get their menu ideas for coach-class meals. Thanks for clarifying
one of life’s least-appetizing mysteries.

Software I like

I feel almost compelled to put in a plug for Cerious Systems’ Thumbs Plus, which I’ve used to edit the pictures on the site. It’s shareware; I found it well worth the registration fee ($75). It may not be as fancy as Photoshop or even PhotoDeluxe, but it makes simple operations (like cropping) simple, and that’s a win in my book.

The heat goes on

It was hot again today. We have the air conditioner on, and hope that PG&E won’t find it necessary to include us in their rolling blackouts. Lots of people had problems commuting today because pavements buckled, rails buckled, and traffic lights were out — I didn’t run into much of that, but tomorrow, I have to go to UC Berkeley for a meeting, and I’m not looking forward to it. I was advised, in all seriousness, to go there this evening and take a hotel room, so that I could make the 60-mile trip in an hour instead of 2.5 hours at rush hour. I decided I’d rather stay home and get up early — I don’t have to be there until 10am, so maybe I have a chance.

Would somebody bring back the fog?

It’s warm outside. Hot, by Bay Area standards. Normally, I would have telecommuted on a day like today, but it was also the day of a friend’s going-away luncheon, and so since I had to fire up the car anyway, I decided to come into the office and enjoy the free air-conditioning. :-)

More later, if there’s anything interesting to write about.

Extreme Blue

I finally got around to visiting the Extreme Blue crew this afternoon; it’s good to see so many enthusiastic faces, hard at work on interesting problems. Especially after attending a farewell luncheon, filled with old, no longer enthusiastic faces.

I hope to spend a lot of time in the Extreme Blue lab this summer.

Business Week printed a letter from me

The doctor says I’m OK

Or as OK as I ever was, anyway. And he took off the Steri-Strips, so I no longer look like I’m auditioning for a part in Young Frankenstein. So much for my Hollywood career!

There was an amusing moment when he started to look through the X-rays and CT scans I’d been given in Montréal — he couldn’t figure out why there was a CT scan of my chest, and I sure didn’t remember having one done. After a moment, he looked at the name on the sheet, and it wasn’t mine (even misspelled, as the hospital folks tended to do). Nor were any of the next four sheets mine. Finally, he got to a sheet with “David Signer” and pictures of a brain on it and he was pleased — so was I, because I was beginning to wonder if I really did have a brain!

In View From The Heart, Al Hawkins mentions post-concussion syndrome as something I need to watch out for as an after-effect of my ice-skating adventure. So far, I haven’t noticed any of the symptoms — though I must admit to having been somewhat depressed when I came to work and found 500 e-mails waiting for me, most of which actually required work on my part to dispose of. Of course, this is how I normally feel when I come back from a vacation without e-mail, so I don’t think it counts. But I appreciate the pointer and the concern; it’s better to know what might happen than to be completely unaware.

Pet Thoughts

We lived a long time without any pets, but we acquired a guppy at Shir Hadash’s Purim Carnival. Guppies don’t have the staying power of some other pets, so I’m thinking that we might need to get a new pet sometime soon.

2.4 million dollars….yikes!

This afternoon, Diane and I walked over to a new home development near here, Heritage Grove. The builder had a long struggle with the town to get the development approved (it’s on land which used to be an orchard), and once they finally succeeded, they were unable to build as many homes as they’d wanted. So they decided to build expensive homes, just in time for real estate prices here in Los Gatos to skyrocket. When they first opened up the development, they were quoting prices “from the 900,000’s”, but that’s ancient history (at least six months old). They released five homes yesterday, all of which sold immediately, at prices from 1.8 to 2.4 million dollars. These houses are ok — 2900 to 3700 square feet, but they’re not on enormous lots (and there’s no privacy — the back yards are easily viewed from the neighboring home’s second floor), and our recently remodelled kitchen has better cabinetry than these houses do. The smallest house is nearly 50% larger than our house, but somehow the bedrooms felt cramped. Fortunately, we were only looking for decorating ideas rather than actually being in the market, but it was still frightening to see these prices for houses in our extended neighborhood.

Diane says my eye hasn’t changed enough to warrant posting a new picture. I guess that’s good…. But I have posted Montréal pictures and updated the narrative for June 6th. I think that finishes that particular trip.

Happy Birthday, Allison!