I spoke this morning down in Castile for about forty-five minutes. Min had gotten home just in time to be able to go down to Castile with me so we ended up getting to spend much of the day together. I think that things went really well while we were down there and we were pretty productive with our time.
After speaking at the school, Min and I went over to the Country Cafe to get some lunch. Then we came back home and she went to bed and I headed down to the office.
Thay are blasting again today. The house just keeps shaking, all of the time. It is getting to be pretty annoying. I can’t believe how much blasting they are allowed to do without telling anyone what is going on.
I was doing some research tonight for the school and came across a LOGO programming tool. Boy does that bring back memories. I never really learned LOGO myself but I remember it going on around me all of the time. The school that I attended didn’t teach LOGO and I am pretty sure that they didn’t have it. It is really a pretty silly thing but it is great for getting young students acclimated to procedural thinking at a very early age. So I was looking for a version of it that we can use down at the Castile school. I did find one from UC Berkeley that looks like it will be really good.
Min ended up going to bed shortly after we got back. She couldn’t fall asleep for hours, though so she read “Just A Geek” which I finished reading last night. She fell asleep sometime around 4:00. Her Wednesdays are always tough.
I spoke with Nicklin in person this evening. I am pretty sure that that proves that he is alive and not just sending emails through a Turing contest email generator bot.
Here is some cool new technology that I found out about today. I knew that stuff like this would be coming but I wasn’t expecting it to be out quite this soon. A company has announced that they are making a PPU or Physics Processing Unit which is basically like the 3D graphics accelerator cards for your computer only this one accelerated the physics engine. This will affect the same type of games that the GPUs are used for, for the most part. This is some really cool technology.
For all of you Linux geeks out there, like me, who are into SUSE – SUSE 9.3 Pro released today. I don’t know yet how it is being made available but I am trying to look into it. I am surprised that I haven’t even been able to find any mention of it on SUSE’s website and there is no sign of the directory on either SUSE’s or the mirror’s FTP servers. If Novell is doing what SUSE has always done, then the download won’t be available until months from now when the store version has aged considerably. But I was hoping for, at very least, a Live CD to play around with. – I have done some additional looking around and it looks like the release announcement may be nothing more than a hoax. We will have to wait and see.
I ran over to Wegmans and picked up a pizza for dinner. I brought it home and Min and I sat down and watched The Alamo with Dennis Quaid and Billy Bob Thorton. I was prepared to really dislike the movie for glorifying what was actually a really awful thing. But they actually did a decent job of portraying the men that were there and their motivations for being there. They didn’t make Davy Crockett to be anything more than a disinfranchised pro-slavery politician looking for an easy career boost or Sam Houston as much more than a real estate salesmen (until the very end of the movie where he amazingly became a decent general). They should the men of the Alamo, which were mostly Mexican traitors who wanted to be able to keep slaves when Mexico didn’t allow them. The men who fought “bravely” there did so only after being trapped and being abandoned by their fellow separatists. But, you have to wonder, how smart is it to rely on the honor of someone to risk their lives to come save yours when the thing that they are fighting for is the right to enslave others and to take away their basic human rights? So I was pretty happy with the film.
After The Alamo we watched the classic World War II bomber movie Memphis Belle with Sean Astin. I haven’t seen that movie in a long time. There are a lot of good people in it. Min and I both noticed, long before he had his one speaking line of “Oh no, they only have one wheel down!”, that the guy who plays the captain in Red Dwarf was in the movie. It had to be about the same time he was filming Dwarf.
It was close to 2:00 in the morning by the time we finished watched the second movie. Min wasn’t tired but I needed to get to bed. I don’t get to sleep in in the mornings like some people.