So here we are.

I'm copying an idea from several undergrads (Pete, Arun, Perk, Brian -- in no particular order; I have no idea who had the idea first). All besides Evil Brian have their own custom journal scripts (Evil Brian has his hosted on a .com). Similar to batch queueing systems, there's a complciated heirarchy of who is derived from whom, and who stole what features from who else (if the grammar is wrong, deal).

When I decided to get into "that crazy journal thing that all the wacky kids are doing these days", Pete gave me a copy of his journal code, and I thought to myself, "Wait, this can't be right. It's under 100 lines or so. Nope, can't be right." So what did I do? I wrote my own.

One week and 1,887 lines of new C++ code and 875 new lines of PHP code later, I have my own journal system. It's chock full of features; I think it will even write simple Pascal programs for you. But lest we be accused to plagerism, let's give full credit of the other code bases that I stole from to make the jeffjournal package:

• Shell client: 1,887 lines of C++ code

• Back end web support: 857 lines of PHP code

• GNU readline library: 21,222 lines of C code
  While readline actually set me back about a week (moral of the story: be very careful about including configure-generated C header files in C++ code), it is truly cool and extremely useful.

• inilib library: 2,178 lines of C code
  A truly cool project for reading/writing .INI-style files.

• minime libraries: 11,585 lines of code
  This is my dissertation project. I pirated the use of the socket and console (i.e., readline) interfaces out of it.

So this is actually... well, it's a lot of code (can't do simple math anymore and am too lazy to fire up bc). Ok, this was just over the top. But what else are you gonna do with a DSL connection?

I plan on having some semblance of a journal out here for the world to see. Readers can expect to see gritty coding nuances, general musings on [un]reality, and lots of other boring things. Probably mainly boring things (I'm a geek, what do you want?).

Readers should not expect to get too many journal entries next week, and should expect to get none the week after that (I'm getting married next weekend; I've been verbotten to touch computers on our honeymoon -- what's a geek to do? Oh yeah... :-).

That's enough for now. Outta here.

Got that + thing worked out -- the last journal message made it look like all the journal code stuff was written in C instead of C++. Ugh!

New C++ code
Still has some bugs to work out
Close enough now; sleep

In the words of Jimmy James, "No, I've never... had... much luck with jobs until I stumbled onto this multi-billionare thing."

Eric Roman mailed out an interesting project that he heard about recently: rexec. Seems to be a new project under the old name for transparant and secure remote execution from the CS folks at Berkeley. Printed out the paper; it should make a good read.

More wedding things today; finalizing contracts with the Marriott (pizza-n-beer, yum), finalized numbers to Tippecanoe (rehearsal dinner, yum), table layout for the reception, etc. Getting down to the finer details -- T-9 days.

Spent the afternoon cleaning up the minime code -- I made bunches of changes to the socket and console routines to be able to write the shell client for the journal system (jjc).

Hmm.. just found an annoying bug in jjc: C-h C-h (i.e., hitting backspace twice) brings up the emacs -nw appropros list, but hitting C-g to abort the appropos list somehow makes jjc think that the emacs child has finished, and therefore jumps back to the prompt, but then seg faults and dies. Ugh! Gonna have to fix that one. :-)

Some guy mailed me today about parallel bladeenc today. Apparently, his company (www.scyld.com) is releasing their own MPI soon. He suggested that I add a two-line fix to parallel bladeenc that allows MPI_INIT to fail, and then allow it to procede in a serial fashion. This is a truly cool idea, actually. He was motivated by the fact that they support a "serial" MPI dynamic library that allows mpirun-less invocations of MPI programs. In contains stubs of all the MPI functions and simply fails (i.e., returns != MPI_SUCCESS) if you invoke any of them (e.g., MPI_INIT). Hence, if your code is smart, it takes the failure of MPI_INIT to mean that it should run in serial. So I made the quick change to parallel bladeenc; it'll go out in the next release (whenever that is).

Speaking of parallel bladeenc, I mailed Tord about a week or two ago asking questions about the MP3 format itself -- Jeremy Faller and I spent about half a day trying to make parallel bladeenc generate diffable output to serial bladeenc. We didn't succeed, and actually came up with many more questions than answers/solutions, but we understood why parallel bladeenc's output is different than serial bladeenc's. The parallel output is actually probably lower quality -- something we'd like to fix. But we can't do that until we understand the output format of MP3 more... Still waiting for an answer from Tord. :-(

More wedding stuff today. Spent all day waiting for a friggen' package from UPS that never arrived (they tried to deliver it Friday, left a note saying that they'd deliver it Monday). Ugh. Got lots other wedding planning stuff done, though.

Helped Don Peterson with some C++ stuff today. I sent him a bunch of code (that I actually tested), and then discussed mods to this the rest of the day (well, actually discussed my typos in the mails mostly
-- 'cause I was sending him mods that I hadn't tested -- ugh!).

Talked to the DoD investigator that covers this area again today. An undergrad who graduated from CSE a year or two ago is in the Air Force (did the ROTC thing here at ND) is being assigned to a "sensitive" job in the Air Force. I've talked to this investigator several times over the past several years about various other students who I knew who went on to various DoD/DoE jobs. Pretty standard stuff, actually -- not as impressive at it sounds. :-)

He's a nice guy. I've talked to him about his daughter (she's a Signal Corps LT, like me) and various other military stuff (he's ex military himself -- a warrant officer). We talked about the person he came to talk about, and then we chatted for a while before he left.

Sepeta is coming over later to watch Fight Club.

Whoo hoo!!

Here we go into the home stretch... Journal readers should not expect another journal entry for about 1.5 weeks or so. It's Wednesday before my wedding, and I likely will only be in sporatic contact with internet-enabled computers (a new innovation, so I hear) for a while. There's much to do, and little time to do it!

vacation has been enabled, and I've proverbially passed the buck to others for the next 1.5 weeks.

My wedding day comes
Friends and family to South Bend
Screw the rest of you!

I wasn't an english major for nuttin'. Did I mention that I'm moving to Looieville?

See you all in 1.5 weeks.

("Hey, does anyone know how long Jeff will be gone?")

Back to reality.

What a week. This'll be a pretty long journal entry, as I have abbreviated entries for the entire past week in this one entry, as I have had little to no computer access the entire time (and I wanna know who bet that I would check my e-mail while on vacation -- they lost!). Some notes are kinda sketchy 'cause I didn't start taking journal notes until Friday or so. You'll deal.

Friday, 21 July, 2000

T-1 day. I spent the morning in the office hurriedly trying to finish the wedding program. My Big Thing was that the music had to be in the program (i.e., not just the words). Tracy's church in Looieville only puts the words in the Sunday programs, and it really annoys me because I don't know all their songs, and it makes it really hard to sing them. Since we have a lot of non-Domer folks coming to the ceremony, I wanted to put the music in the program.

So here's another problem: I decided to do the program in MS Word on the assumption that Tracy would be able to edit it as well. i.e., I could do some work, e-mail it to Tracy, have her make some edits, send it back to me, and repeat as necessary. Bad assumption on my part -- Tracy's MS Word couldn't read my file (i.e., it came out at garbage), even though they were the same version of word.

Know what I like about Microsoft products? Nothing at all.

Also particularly annoying is the scrolling behavior when in two-column landscape mode (that I used 'cause the programs were folded in half). If you go to the bottom of the left column and hit the down arrow, one would expect to go to the top of the right column -- i.e., go down with the text. Nope -- you go to the top of the left column on the next page. There's other non-intuitive (IMHO) scrolling like that was well. Needless to say, I was strongly wishing that I had just done the whole thing in LaTeX by the end of the ordeal.

I ended up scanning in the music and placing them in the document. It all turned out ok in the end, but I think that Word really made it take longer than it should have. Ugh!!!

Renzo (the best man) and Lynn (his wife) picked me up and we ran to Kinko's to run off the programs (I had some nice paper that I wanted to use). Kinko's could do it by 9pm at the earliest, but we needed them at the rehearsal at 5pm, so that was no good. This was kind of frightening, because Kinko's has never failed me before.

So we went to Copy Max (of Office Max). They were able to do it just fine. Dr. Romi was working, so I said hi to her as well. While they were doing it, Renzo and I went to pick up our tuxes at Bernardo's. Both of us needed slight alterations to our tuxes (which they do on the premises). While we were waiting, my dad called and was surprised when I reminded him to pick up his tux (<sigh> --
good help is so hard to find these days!). So I told him I would pick him up shortly and get his tux with him. John Shipman (another groomsman) also called during this time, so I told him I'd pick him up as well.

Renzo and I finished, swung by the Marriott and picked up my Dad and John and promptly went back to Bernardo's. We ran into Mark Payne (Tracy's brother, another groomsman) and her father getting fitted for their tuxes as well. After getting all of that straightened out, we ran by Copy Max and picked up the programs. John's response to the text that I wrote about him in program was, "Jeff, I have two words for you: rat bastard." BTW, be sure to ask him what "wizard fries" are. :-)

I got dropped off at my apartment so that I could change and go meet Fr. Hesburgh (Fr. Ted wanted to meet with Tracy and I for about an hour before the ceremony and have a chat). Tracy met me at his office on the 13th floor of the Hesburgh Library right at 4pm. While we were waiting, I looked around his waiting room and noticed a corner of it completely filled with military stuff. I saw a big picture of an SR-71. Apparently its the same SR-71 that he flew in and broke mach 3.3 in. This guy has had an amazing life, and is still a really down-to-earth guy.

Tracy had never met him before; I'd met him a handful of times. We had a nice chat, and Fr. Hesburgh gave us his collected wisdom of marriage from his life (he was a marriage counselor for many years, and has probably married thousands of couples in his time). I'm really glad that we were able to have him preside over our ceremony in the Basilica at Notre Dame -- it was way cool. If you've never met Fr. Hesburgh, I highly recommend making an appointment and just going to have a chat with him. He loves to meet with people (particularly current students) to just shoot the breeze. He's got some amazing stories and is probably the most famous person you or I will ever meet.

After our chat, Tracy and I went over to the Basilica for the rehearsal. The Basilica staff is very Draconian about schedules --
you have 45 minutes for your rehearsal, and that's it (which is completely understandable -- 4 couples get married there every Saturday; it takes a finely tuned machine to keep it running smoothly). We ran over a bit, but they were not able to interrupt Fr. Hesburgh (it's his church, after all!), which, I have to admit, we were kinda counting on. :-)

The rehearsal dinner was at Tippecanoe Place, and went very well. My dad gave a really nice speech at the end, and gave me his self-winding chronometer (a highly tuned watch, for all you laymen) that he got from Luzern, Switzerland (which, coincidentally, is where Dr. Lumsdaine's family is from, and is the name of 8 machines in the LSC) when he was a teenager. He gave a good speech which included the following statistic:

There are approximately 90,000 living ND graduates. Jeff has been at ND for the graduations of about 25% of them.

Wow -- if that doesn't date me, I don't know what will!

John, Renzo, and Darrell came over to my apartment for a cigar and a beer or two to calmly round out the evening. We hung out by the smoking table for perhaps the last time. There was a party going on in the apartment above mine, which was very amusing. Jeremy Faller and Kevin Barker their respective weekend significant-others showed up after a while, too. So we were all hanging out by the smoking table, which was fun.

After everyone left, it was just Kevin, Danielle, and me left at Chuck's old place. I packed for the cruise, and laid out my clothes for the wedding tomorrow.

Saturday, 22 July, 2000

Ms. Tracy Payne and I were married in the Basilica of the Sacred Heart on the campus of the University of Notre Dame on 22 July, 2000. Renzo and Lynn came and got me around 7:30am. Did a bunch of pictures before the ceremony (my parents were late... <sigh>). The wedding ceremony went well (aside from a little confusion about my name... :-). Pictures were good, too, but very numerous (a little rushed in the church, 'cause Hesburgh's homily went a bit long, but hey -- it's his house, he can do whatever he wants! Plus, it was a pretty nice homily :-). Oodles of pictures down in the grotto and whatnot, and then a limo with Renzo and V to the reception (Marriott, downtown South Bend).

The reception was a blast. It was way cool to see so many friends and family all in once place (thanks, everyone, for coming!). Started with a typical receiving line followed by dinner (ok, it was really lunch, but you have to s/lunch/dinner/g for a reception -- it's a protocol thing). Gotta love being at the head table -- you get served first! There was an open bar, etc., etc. Renzo gave a good best man toast. Cutting the cake went really well, too -- Tracy and I did an impromptu (and very minor) cake-on-the-nose deal that apparently went over pretty well (many "aww..."'s and "that's cute"'s, etc., etc.). When I was eating my piece of cake, however, Jeremy Faller had the verve to say right in my ear, "Hey Jeff... seafood!"

As a Pavlovian response (no, really!), I turned around to face the crowd, and did seafood with my wedding cake. Tounge out, cake/icing everywhere -- the whole 9.7 yards. True class all the way (Tracy was so proud. No, really!). Many flashbulbs went off, so I had better get a few copies of those pictures.

Sidenote: the only thing that I knew about my wedding for the past several years was that there was going to be free alcohol available during the whole schameel (Irish catholic and all that). We had an open bar before dinner, freely flowing wine during dinner (reference: Jesus/"that Cana wedding"), and open bar again after dinner. I mention this only because I was particularly proud to see the whole ND crowd cheer and stampede for the bar as soon as it opened again after dinner. I salute you, my fine feathered friends --
you inspire us all (reference: Bill McNeal/News Radio).

Many people danced, which was cool. The DJ did really well --
played all the typical ND songs which kept everyone dancing (except for the Madonna song, which cleared the floor -- and I again blame Faller [guilt by association]). I'll spare the details here, but I danced a good deal of the time, and still managed to greet most of the guests at least briefly.

After the reception broke up, we had a pizza-n-beer party (again in the Marriott) a few hours later in which a good number of people showed up (more than we anticipated, actually -- we ran the Marriott out of pizza, so we switched to hot wings). More way coolness, 'cause the setting was much more informal than the reception.

Sunday, 23 July, 2000

After all that, Tracy and I had to get up at 3:45am to catch our 5:15am flight to Miami (V drove us to the airport). Aside from being early, the flight went well, and we boarded the Royal Caribbean (RCCL) cruise ship Voyager of the Seas. It's an amazing ship. It's the largest cruise ship in the world (although not the largest ship in the world -- there's still a few oil tankers that have that prestigious honor). Here's some impressive stats about the ship:

• It has more crew space than RCCL had on their entire first cruise ship.

• I think there were 3200+ passengers on this trip; 108 honeymoon couples.

• Voyager is several times larger than a US nuclear aircraft carrier.

• It's so big that it has 2 wake-reduction generators under the ship to limit the size of its wake while in port.

• It has no rudders -- it has three propellers, two of which can rotate 360 degrees to steer the ship.

• Voyager has a climbing wall, miniature golf course, inline skating track, ice skating rink, countless pools, hot tubs, and bars, a full theater, 3 story dining room, a 3 story promenade, billions of deck chairs, etc., etc.

• It's just fricken' huge.
  

Voyager is a most excellent example of Engineering with Extreme Prejudice. Tracy and I actually borrowed my friend Darrell's 3-tape video series about the design and building of the ship. My deep admiration and respect goes out to all of the designers, architects, and builders.

So anyway, we arrived in Miami with no problems (although we were dead tired), and got to the boat via a shuttle bus. Did I mention that it's a big fricken' boat (hitherto referred to as BFB)? There was a monstrously long line for check in, but it actually went pretty quickly, and we got on the boat in fairly direct order.

After wandering aimlessly for a little while, we found our cabin (#7572). It had a little couch, mini table, dresk (i.e., combo dresser/desk), several large dressing mirrors, a mini safe, a closet with several shelves, a bathroom, a queen-sized bed (or possibly king-sized -- we never did figure that out), 2 nightstands, a phone, and a balcony. The balcony had two chairs and a mini table. The amount of furniture makes the whole arrangement sound larger than it really was; it was actually fairly... cozy (we're convinced that the cabin was actually built around some of the larger pieces of furniture [reference: Engineering with Extreme Prejudice]). But it was ours for the week, so it was perfect.

We wandered around for a bit (did I mention that this was a BFB?) and had lunch in the Windjammer Cafe.

Sidenote: It seems that they use the same names for things on all RCCL boats. Tracy and I took a cruise on Granduer of the Seas a few years ago, and it also had a Windjammer Cafe . Indeed, many of the other cafes, bars, pools, etc., etc., had the same names on Voyager as they did on Granduer. Coincidentally, the Cruise Director (i.e., the main PR face) was the same guy from our previous cruise on Granduer. This must have been a promotion for him --
Voyager has been at sea for less than a year (launched in November of 1999), and apparently RCCL took the brightest and best from its other cruise ships to staff it.

Sidenote: Food on a cruise ship is amazing. There's no end to the supply of it and it's all free. Drinks are just about the only food that you pay for. Sodas and regular stuff like that come free when you're having a meal, but you have to pay for them when you get one from a bar, for example. Alcoholic beverages always cost money. But you pay for everything with a cruise charge card (which also serves as a room key); no cash is used on the boat. Pretty handy, actually. And it works out well for RCCL, because you have no concept of how much money you're spending. Anyway, cruise food is never ending; there is really good food available just about 24 hours a day. It's a truly amazing feat of logistics, actually --
providing chef-level food (i.e., with all the little garnish decorations, ice sculptures, people in tall white hats, etc.) for so many people in various locations around the BFB around the clock. Let's call it Cooking with Extreme Prejudice.

We had a mandatory muster drill before the ship sailed. This is apparently required by maritime law in an attempt to prevent the need for movies like Titanic from ever being filmed again. All passengers meet on the muster deck underneath their life boat and stand in rank and file to for an attendance check (kinda like the Army). Our muster captain's name was Regina. Even though it was 4:30 in the afternoon, it was hot in the Miami port. The passengers were somewhat restless, but we got through it.

There was a lot of activity in the port while we were sitting there, waiting to sail; powerboats, jet skis, and even a water-based airplane were going hither and thither. Some powerboat even sped by the entire Voyager and mooned the entire BFB during the muster drill. Needless to say, this involved having his ass in the breeze for probably a full minute or so as his boat sped down the length of the BFB. True class!

We got a package with our cruise that entitled us to a bottle of Champagne in our cabin upon sailing, so Tracy and I enjoyed it on our balcony while sailing out of Miami Port. It was amazing to see how many powerboats, jet skis, and people on shore stopped to wave as we sailed. Indeed, a large number of cars pulled over on the highway to watch us go, too. Since there are a non-trivial number of cruise ships that have Miami as their home port, you'd think that Miamians would be jaded to seeing the cruise ships set sail. Apparently not. But this does raise the question: why is the fundamental human response to seeing a cruise ship sail by to wave? Without fail during the entire week, whenever we sailed by some group of people, one or more of them would wave. Is this a Pavlovian response? Have all of us, in some prior life, been conditioned to wave at cruise ships as they go by in order to receive a food pellet? Maybe it's just Waving with Extreme Prejudice.

We also discovered that our room's TV actually functioned as an interactive system that provided not only tons of information about our scheduled island stops, but allowed us to order room service, check our cruise charges, order excursion tickets, etc., etc. Pretty neat, actually.

The main dining room serves dinner in two shifts: main seating and second seating. Tracy and I opted for second seating. It is typical for cruise ships to ask a few demographic questions about you when you buy the ticket for the purposes of (among other reasons) finding compatible people to seat you with during dinner. However, there was some kind of mix up with our table. The matrid'D (whatever) took us to our table, but it was filled to capacity with 80 year old ladies. So they had to move us to a different table (which wasn't a bad thing
-- while I personally have nothing against 80 year old ladies, we were glad to sit with people closer to our own age). Amazingly enough, they did this with big paper maps of the entire dining room rather than on a computer. We got moved to table 476 with the following people (whose names we did not remember at all on the first night):

• Randall and his 8 year old son Blake from Texas. Blake (who appeared to be both highly intelligent for an 8 year old as well as highly annoying), only showed up to dinner once that week, though, and Randall only showed up twice. Indeed, you can get food just about anywhere on the boat -- the main dining room is not the only place to get dinner. I guess they didn't like us. Bah.

• Marty and her 18 year old son John. Friendly folk from the San Francisco area.

• Tina and her 14 year old son Peter. Also friendly folk from New York city.

• Mercedes and her ?15? year old daughter Daniella (not sure I spelled those right) from Florida. Nice people, but kinda quiet. They also usually sat directly on the other end of the table, so Tracy and I didn't get to talk to them much.
  

All in all, a pretty likeable crowd. Not exactly our age bracket, but much closer than the little old ladies at our real table. Tracy and I thought it highly ironic that we, the honeymooners, were at a table of divorcees with their children (indeed, we were pegged as honeymooners on the first night), but it actually worked out really well. As you'll see below, we got along quite well with everyone and had a great time all week. Indeed, we were frequently among the last to leave after dinner every night.

Monday, 24 July, 2000

This was a day at sea en route to our first destination: Labadee, Haiti (see Tuesday). Tracy and I did nothing, and did it all day. I mainly read Cryptonomicon while Tracy sunned on deck (while I did come back with a little bit of color, I'm not much of a sun worshiper. I sometimes come out of Cushing at ND at night and am surprised to see that entire weather systems have moved in and out during my day at work, completely unbeknownst to me).

The ship was moving at 17 knots which meant that it was really windy on deck. Some things that I have noticed so far:

• Many families are using walkie talkies to communicate with each other on the boat. I wonder how well they work -- i.e., if you're in the depths of the BFB, do they really work well enough to talk to your mother on the upper pool deck?

• The staff on the ship use 2-way phone/walkie talkie things to communicate with each other. And they even work when we're out at sea, miles from any possible commercial cell coverage. So do they have their own cell on the boat itself? Hmm. Interesting.

• The rank of the officers on the boat is widely different: the lowest seems to be indicated with shoulder boards that have a narrow white strip on a wide yellow stripe. But the shoulder board strip combinations are widely different after that -- different widths of yellow and white stripes, sometimes white on yellow, sometimes just plain yellow, etc., etc. I'll try to figure this out over the course of the week.

• All several hundred cash registers on board the BFB (the various shops, the bars, etc.) all use flat screen touch-sensitive monitors. No keyboards. This must have cost a large chunk of change! But it seems to work well for them -- very little footprint and no additional keyboard, and you can do all data entry with an index finger. Didn't really get a chance to look at them (they're inevitably always facing the other way), so I don't know what OS they were running, but it's probably either some flavor of Windoze or a custom OS/application. Probably 'doze.
  

Had lunch at an on board Johnny Rockets (reference: cruise food, above). Apparently, Johnny Rockets is a chain of 50s-style burger joints, complete with the staff in white aprons, paper hats, 50's music blaring out of jukeboxes, etc., but I'd never heard of them before. Had a good burger and shake (but it was not a $5 shake, mind you). I think the most surreal point of my Johnny Rockets experience was when the whole staff got up to do the Hand Jive when it started playing over the jukebox. Let me clarify exactly why this was surreal: the entire staff was multi-ethnic -- not a single soon-to-be-DWM (i.e., no Caucasians) among them. This is not intended to be a racist statement -- it just struck me as odd to see the Hand Jive, in which you picture John Travolta and a bunch of other decidedly white 50's males with greased back hair and leather jackets, performed by people from other countries (literally; every staff member's nametag also identified the country that they were from --
Voyager's crew was from something like 50+ different countries). Their English was markedly better during the song, too; is that how America is known and identified? By show tunes from Grease? If I ever get mistaken for a foreign spy and am interrogated by the CIA, am I going to have to (in addition to knowing all the world series and superbowl winners from the past 100 years) be able to sing any Grease show tune upon command?

We also attended a wine tasting in the afternoon. We got to sample nine different wines, which was pretty cool. Most of them were good, but I didn't like two of them. The people at our table (don't remember any of their names) immediately pegged us as honeymooners as well.

We went to the show before dinner -- an "intro" show, which had several acts, all punctuated/MC'ed by the Cruise Director.

Dinner attire was "smart casual" -- I wore my new suit. John showed us a game called "spoons". It's one of those "try and figure out the rules" kinds of games, so I won't go into detail here. I happened to figure out the rules first, which was irritating to the others at the table (reference: cocky, flippant, arrogant). I then introduced everyone to "Big Black Frying Pan" which, although different, is along the same lines. Tina was about ready to murder someone by the end of dinner because these games can be quite frustrating when you can't figure them out, but much fun was had by all.

Tuesday, 25 July, 2000

We arrived at RCCL's private area on Haiti: Labadee. In the words of a stand up comedian that we saw on the boat, "Labadee is apparently the Haitian word for 'damn hot'." Labadee is a little peninsula with nice beaches and all the usual water sports. Tracy and I rented a jet ski and took a tour several miles down the Haitian coast with it.

Neither of us had ridden a jet ski before, and it was BIG fun. We had to watch a Yamaha safety video before skiing off, which featured a perky US Coast Guard officer giving all kind of rules and safety tips. I found this pretty ironic, since we were in Haiti.

I drove down the coast, and Tracy drove back. Did I mention that jet skis are way fun? (reference: Top Gun movie, "I feel the need... the need for speed!", reference: Fr. Hesburgh's SR-71 flight) Our guide pointed out some nifty things about the island, all of which I promptly forgot. For safety reasons, they had us drive in a single file line, [supposedly] 100 yards behind each other. We got suck behind Slow Redhaired Lady twice, which was kind of a drag (pun intended), but other than that, the speed was great.

Jet skis are not hard to drive: just squeeze the trigger/throttle, steer with handlebars, and go. The only trick to get is that the steering is waterjet-powered, and can be delayed by fraction of a second or so -- something you have to get used to and compensate for.

The driver wears this harness thing that has two hand grips on the side for the passenger to hold on to. Since I drove down first, I had the harness on first. When we switched half way through the trip, we were somewhat rushed (since no one else switched drivers), and Tracy didn't adjust the harness at all, and it fit very loosely on her (there's just more of me to love, that's all!). Hence, the hand grips were pretty useless to me, and Tracy almost bounced me off the jet ski a few times. Much, much fun. I highly recommend it.

After the jet ski tour in the morning, we went back to the ship, got lunch on board (although most of the food service had been temporarily moved to the island), and went back and lounged on the beach for the rest of the day (i.e., I sat in the shade and continued the Cryptonomicon).

There was a "repeat cruiser"'s reception where they were passing out Champagne like water, so Tracy and I naturally attended. Got a closer look at the Captain's rank: 4 medium-wide yellow stripes with a big yellow diamond at the top. I think there are a small number of other ranks that have yellow diamonds as well.

The dress at dinner was "formal". I had rented a tux from the ship to wear that night (they tell you ahead of time that two dinners will be "formal dress"). This was Blake's one and only appearance at dinner, and he annoyed everyone by figuring out the spoons game within minutes (I told you he was smart!).

We went to the show after dinner, which was a stand up comedian. He was ok -- somewhat repetitive, but we laughed.

Sidenote: friends of mine mentioned that they didn't want to go on Voyager because it's just too many people -- the tendency to wait in line for things would be just too much. However, I've noticed that we rarely wait in lines very long. They seem to have the crowd/traffic control issues worked out pretty darn well (reference: Engineering with Extreme Prejudice). Yes, there are billions of people around, but once you get past that, it doesn't really impact much. There are, however, a noticeably larger number of children on this cruise than there were on our last cruise (many other people have remarked on this as well).

When we returned to our room, we found a manta ray made of towels on our bed. Very amusing and rather cute -- it was made by the cabin steward when he made up our room. I think our cabin guy from our last cruise did something similar as well. A friend of mine told me that when she went on a cruise, their cabin steward would make crash-test dummies from their clothes. For example, when they came back from dinner one night, there was a pair of legs and feed sticking out from one side of the bed and a body, arms, and head sticking out of the other (all made with their clothes), making it look like the bed had fallen on the crash-test dummy . Funny stuff.

Wednesday, 26 July, 2000

Arrival at Ocho Rios, Jamaica.

We slept in and got room service breakfast (reference: cruise food). We lounged around our balcony and continued to explore the ship before our afternoon excursion into Jamaica.

We signed up for a yacht tour that left right from the same dock as Voyager. The first stop was the Dunns River Falls. The falls were actually impressive enough -- a gently sloping 900 feet in the vertical direction, quite beautiful, and you actually can climb the falls (the main attraction). However, the climb was actually somewhat frustrating, because you are limited by really slow people in front of you, so you can take about 3 steps and then have to wait. So we both walked away from there with a less than "that was awesome" feeling.

The yacht tour continued on to some waters off the coast of Jamaica for snorkeling. We were further annoyed that they didn't have enough snorkel masks for everyone on the boat, and Tracy and I had to wait quite a while for someone to finish before we could go snorkeling. And then the water was really choppy, and Tracy got a little queasy. So all in all, the yacht tour was kind of a bust.

The BFB set sail again around 5pm, heading for Cozumel, Mexico. We went to a honeymooners reception that night, where, again, Champaign was poured freely (who can ignore free alcohol?).

Dinner attire was "casual". Can't remember anything eventful from dinner, but I'm sure it was fun. :-)

When we returned to our room, there was a towel elephant waiting for us.

Thursday, 27 July, 2000

Another day at sea, this time en route to Cozumel, Mexico. We basically did nothing all day again; I continued reading Cryptonomicon and Tracy sunned on the deck.

We went to the Bingo game in the afternoon. They play all week and have a rolling jackpot (more below). We didn't win at all (they play 5 games in one session), but it was fun anyway (must be deep-seated Irish/Catholic roots in me that enjoys a good rowdy, full-contact game of Bingo -- Bingo with Extreme Prejudice).

Dinner attire was formal, so I wore my tux again. I had a blue paisley vest this time, though, instead of the standard black cumberbund that I wore last time. We had a formal portrait taken too (same package as the champagne in our room when we first sailed). But we didn't go to the main dining room -- we went to the quaint Italian restaurant that you have to get reservations for (although everything is still free -- reference: cruise food). The food was excellent, and we got a nice bottle of wine with dinner.

Went to the show after dinner, entitled "Dreamscape" where we met up with Tina, Mercedes, and Marty. The theater is really quite excellent, and I haven't really talked about it much yet, so I'll describe it now. It's a 2-floor theater (main floor seating and a balcony), very nicely decorated such that you can easily imagine that you're in a mid-sized playhouse in London. The stage setup is very high-tech -- they can do many different kinds of effects and have tons of props, curtains, booms, etc. They even have an orchestra pit and movable sections in the state (i.e., in the vertical direction, which was handy during various portions of the shows). The sound booth was in the back on the first floor, and the lighting booth was in the back of the balcony (why do the lighting cronies always get shafted?). Full bar service on both floors with waiters/waitresses, which was nice.

"Dreamscape" was a bit trippy, but parts of it were good. My favorite part was several people dressed up in [apparently] velcro suits that would throw themselves up on a wall (Letterman-style) in various shapes and letters and whatnot. Very amusing. There was also a stand up comedian at 12:15am that we wanted to see, but we had to get up early for our tour in Cozumel, so we didn't go.

I accidentally put the "do not disturb/please make up room" card out facing the wrong way -- it said "do not disturb" so we didn't get a towel animal this evening. But we heard that it would have been a little dog.

Friday, 28 July, 2000

Arrival at Cozumel, Mexico.

We signed up for a rather lengthy tour of the Tulum ruins -- a Mayan city. This is actually on the Mexican mainland, not on the Cozumel island. So we took a ferry to the mainland, and a bus to the city itself. Our tour guide took us around the city a bit and told us all about it. Very cool stuff, actually (note to self: gotta investigate the Mayan numeral system -- the Mayans were really into math and calendars in their lifestyles and religion). Only a few buildings were left standing, but you could walk around much of it.

This was apparently the last city that the Mayans built, and actually enclosed it within a wall (which is evidently unusual for them). They did some amazing things with sunlight -- they made specific holes in walls and buildings so that on the equinox and solstice, the rising sun would appear in specific places in rooms, walls, etc., etc. Truly, the entire city was built with fundamentals and exactness that required Engineering with Mega-Extreme Prejudice. I wonder whether many modern contractors could achieve the level of exactness that the Mayans did (piping sunlight through strategic holes in walls and buildings across the entire city, for example --
amazing).

The city was directly on the coast, too; there were paths down the cliff which the city was built on to walk down to the beach (important for sea trade, apparently). They even had a light house to warn for reefs and whatnot.

After returning from the Tulum tour, Tracy and I ventured out to Cozumel itself for some shopping. I was looking for a good t-shirt, but came up empty (they all appeared cheesy to me. It's amazing how I'll take and wear any freebie computer t-shirt, but when it comes to buying one, I'm extremely picky). Tracy got a silver necklace. We walked around a bit and saw the waterfront of Cozumel, but then had to return to the ship before it sailed.

One surreal experience: on the approximately 3-5 minute cab ride from the BFB to downtown Cozumel, I saw 42 Volkswagen Beetles. Yes, 42 (and that's not even counting the VW busses). Not the new models -- the old-style VW beetles (and many of them were fairly new). Absolutely incredible. If you ever have a desire to get a VW Beetle, go to Cozumel. Apparently they still have a VW Beetle factory in Cozumel, hence, in an amazing show of local support, everyone proudly drives around in their locally-made Beetles yelling whatever it is that proud Beetle owners yell (in Spanish). Either that, or it's just amazingly cheap to buy a Beetle there.

Dinner dress was casual. I introduced Peter to the concept of placing a sugar packet on the handle of a fork (or spoon, but forks give straighter trajectories) and slamming down on the curved end to launch the sugar packet across the room. The heavier sugar packets work better, such as pure sugar cane sugar. It's actually amazingly hard to do right -- it's difficult to get any distance our of the sugar. It's a delicate balance of placing the sugar correctly on the handle of the utensil and hitting the other end just right to get any kind of distance. If you don't perform these steps just right, any/all of the following will happen:

• the sugar packet will only go straight up (and therefore straight down)

• the sugar packet will veer wildly off-course and end up in the soup of someone at an adjoining table

• you'll end up launching your eating utensil across the table/room
  

What followed was a medley of sugar football, where just about all of us at the table tried to make field goals from as far a distance away as possible. I actually managed to make one down the length of our [fairly long] table into Marty's lap (a perfect 3 pointer, if I do say so myself!). The rest were comical attempts that usually ended up horribly wrong (oops) followed by our whole table pretending that nothing happened ("Jeez, I don't know sir -- we don't have any sugar packets mysteriously ending up in our soup. Must be a problem with your table; you should call technical support."), punctuated by waiters, wine stewards, or any other Person of Responsibility walking by. Great fun was had by all (mothers included!).

When we got back to our room, there was a towel monkey hanging from the ceiling in our room. The best part was that he was wearing Tracy's sunglasses. It was so funny that we had to take some pictures with it.

Saturday, 29 July, 2000

Another day at sea, this time en route back to Miami.

Yet another day of doing nothing (one of the important reasons we took this cruise -- to relax!). Much more reading of Cryptonomicon and jotting notes for this journal down.

We went to the afternoon session of Bingo -- the rolling jackpot was over $10k. It works like this: the last game of the session is always "cover all", meaning that you have to get every number on your board before you can call Bingo. They start the week with a coverall bingo jackpot of some value X (which is some complicated formula that has to do with how many people play, the number of letters in the Roman number representation of number of seconds since midnight on January 1, 1970, and number of revolutions the engines have made since sailing away from Miami). You win the jackpot if you cover your board within the first 50 balls called. If no one wins, the jackpot rolls over to the next session (where a new and entirely different formula is applied to calculate the new value of X to add in).

So anyway, it's not unusual for the jackpot to be huge by the end of the week. During the last session of the week, the jackpot goes to whoever is the first to cover their board regardless how many balls it takes. Hence, everyone and their brother (and their dog, cat, and platypus) shows up for the last session. Tracy and I got to within 2 numbers on one of our boards, but didn't win. The jackpot was actually split between two winners -- lucky sods.

Nothing else memorable that day -- just lots of relaxing. There were some interesting lightening storms off the port side of the boat within the clouds and whatnot; very beautiful. Some rain actually came over the boat, too; Tracy and I were sitting in one of the covered hot tubs at the time and just watched the sheets of rain plummeting down onto the deck, with various thunder claps and lightening flashes. Cool.

There was a "goodbye" show before dinner which had several kinds of acts magic, comedy, music, dancing, etc. Not a bad show.

We played more sugar football at dinner (casual dress). John wasn't there last night, so he was introduced to it this evening. Two of Peter's friends joined us during desert (their parents had already finished dinner and left), so we introduced them to sugar football as well. I repeated my record-setting distance, but also flipped my fork all the way down the table as well, knocking over a glass and scaring the bejesus out of the new kids (no pain, no gain). Again, more fun was had by all. An elderly woman at an adjoining table was glaring heavily at us. Marty pointed her out to us, and as a unit, everyone at our table turned and looked at her (reference: cocky, flippant, arrogant). Most amusing.

The string quartet came by our table this evening and asked for requests. John, being a smartass, asked for "Stairway to Heaven". And wouldn't you know it -- they knew it. I've never heard Stairway rendered on an acoustic guitar, two violins, and a huge bass before. Most interesting. They did a pretty good job, I have to admit! But it was still surreal.

Tracy and I had a final stroll around the ship after dinner, and then went back to our cabin to pack (you have to put your luggage out before midnight so that they can collect it for debarkation in the morning by order of your flight time). No towel animal this evening; bummer.

Sunday, 30 July, 2000

We ran into Marty, John, Tina, and Peter in the morning right before debarkation. Said goodbyes and the like.

Flight from Miami to O'Hare was no problem (although the mysterious ecosystem that we call "airline travel" [hitherto referred to as the Nemesis] somehow changed our flight number and moved back our departure time by about 15 minutes. While this was slightly alarming (since the Nemesis had previously not informed us of this fact), it was actually no big deal because our layover in Chicago was supposed to be over 2 hours). However, upon arrival in Chicago, we discovered that our flight to South Bend had been canceled. Doh!!!

What followed was several hours of standing in line, attempting to communicate with lower echelon Nemesis peons (LENPs), and generally trying to discover a) where our luggage was, and b) how to finish our journey to South Bend. These are seemingly simply tasks, however they proved to be difficult to find answers for.

The location of our luggage is still a mystery -- it is currently lost within the vortex of the Nemesis. We hope to find it tomorrow (Monday); multiple LENPs assured me that it would find its own way to South Bend, and magically be delivered to my door. I attribute this proposed luggage self-exploratory behavior to the non-Euclidian properties found within the Nemesis (reference: price/distance ratios found on such sites as BizTravel, Travelocity, etc.); indeed, to my knowledge, my luggage has never moved itself before, but it is relatively new luggage (just got it this past Christmas), so it may have habits that I am unaware of. We ended up getting a rental car voucher from American and driving back to Sound Bend (which turned out to be uneventful).

Since we got a point-to-point rental (i.e., ORD to SBN), mileage and time don't matter -- the car just has to be at the SBN Avis terminal within 24 hours -- we decided to spite the Nemesis and drive straight to Macri's and celebrate being home with some Big Beers. Most excellent.

We're back in Turtle Creek now. Spoke briefly with Dog on the phone about news from the past week and checked my e-mail; only had 10MB of new mail, or 360 new messages (much, much lower than I thought, but I did unsubscribe from most lists and remove myself from most aliases before I left last week). Read some of the most important-looking messages; I'll check the rest tomorrow. Found several messages for Jeremy Faller on my answering machine (which I find rather amusing -- most were from a woman from his moving services who adopted an increasingly annoying tone that Jeremy was not answering her messages). Also found that the ceiling in my bathroom is leaking from the apartment above me again -- the floor was rather wet and smelly. Gonna have to talk to Turtle Creek management about this tomorrow.

Monday, 31 July, 2000

Well, this journal entry has taken a good amount of time to write, so we get Monday as well. :-)

The LENPs have located our luggage, and indeed, it has mysteriously made its way to South Bend by itself. We picked it up when we returned the rental car. Since then, it hasn't moved by itself (at least when I was looking); it must be tired from the trek to South Bend from Chicago.

Tracy and I spent the rest of the day packing her car with more junk from my apartment. There's now very, very little left. Mainly my TV, VCR, the server, an ND flag, some clothes, and all the junk in my office. Gotta take my stereo receiver in to Best Buy to get serviced, though -- I think 2 of the 3 video channels have been fried over the years (it's under warranty, so the service should be free. Woo hoo!).

Gonna go head in to work now, see if I can catch Lummy before he heads back to Cali, and say hello to everyone in the lab.

Finished Cryptonomicon this morning. A mostly good book, but I have to admit that I was a bit disappointed by the ending. It was too vague, and tried to imply a lot of answers but really left a bunch of things unanswered definitively (but not in a "wait for the sequel" kind of way). Plus, some of the things that were tied up in the last few pages of the book were (IMHO) plainly obvious by that point, and it was just a relief to get to the point where they actually stated what you had been assuming for the last 100-200 pages.

It's a monster of a book -- over 900 pages long. There's a bunch of good WWII storyline in there, as well as a somewhat-weak storyline about setting up a data haven in the modern world with a bunch of cool crypto stuff trying the two together. So my review: the first many-hundred pages were ok (indeed, the style of the book takes a few shifts a few hundred pages in), but the ending was decidedly week. Still, I'd recomend it to others.

I spent most of yesterday reading and answering e-mail, but spent a few hours with Jeremiah discussing what he wants to do for a master's project. He was initially leaning towards doing STL in OOMPI (to which end he's been cleaning up OOMPI and gearing it up for 1.0.3 release -- a nontrivial task!). It's been good, I think -- it was an excellent introduction to "real world" computing, and how hard it really is to write Quality Software.

In the past few weeks, he has been running regression compiles and tests on all kinds of combinations of platforms, operating systems, and compilers. He hacked up a bunch of shell scripts to do this, and has generally learned a lot about it (try it yourself -- it's a lot harder than you would think). But this has inspired him to move away from STL/OOMPI and to tackle a long-standing issue for the LSC: a rock-solid regression compiling and testing agent that can be used to perform compiles and runs on all manner of combinations of setups such that it can be used to test software before it is released. We talked about this for an hour or two last night and brought up all kinds of issues. He seems pretty interested in it, and it could be a great project for the lab as well as a good master's project.

Had to fix up some weirdness on wedding.squyres.com today -- it seems that the Apache's were spinning endlessly and creating a huge load. Dunno exactly what caused it, but Ed and Don have been working on their fantasy football pages, so they may have tickled some PHP bug or something. Restarting apache seemed to fix the problem. Gotta setup virtual hosting for their hostname, though. Will do that tonight.

Heading down to Looieville soon -- taking the latest Mandrake CD with me, and will bring my SBN router with me. The SBN router will become the router down in Looieville (hence, the web server, router, mail server, and soon, the DNS server). The current Kentucky router will become my desktop workstation and just sit behind the firewall. Might do other services from that machine (i.e., DHCP, NFS for home dirs, etc.). I plan to setup bind in a week or two, too -- Darrell and I will be secondaries for each other. Hence, my router machine will likely become squyres.com as well.

I'll probably keep the mail services on pennyhost, though. Who knows -- I might take that over as well, but I'd want to find some web-enabled email management software first (i.e., a good webmail client, ability to change forwarding/storage, etc.). A project for a future day.

Just found out that the OIT Solution Center sells W98 CD's, but only the first edition -- not OSR2 (hasn't OSR2 been out for 1-2 years now?). How much do they suck?

Do you know what do I like about the OIT Solution Center? Nothing at all.

Answered some IMPI mail apparently from the guy at HP who is working on their IMPI implementation. Looks like we may have left a sentence or two out of the IMPI standard -- he raised a valid clarification issue. Oops. I've pinged Judy and Bill at NIST to see what they want to do about this (i.e., how to fix the doc).

Tons of LAM and other MPI messages remain in my inbox -- will have to start getting to them tonight...

Take II on this entry (note to self: write some kind of primitive HTML tag checker to ensure that tags are closed properly in journal entries).

Spent the entire yesterday rearranging the computer room in Tracy's (er... our) apartment. Reconfigured the network to incorporate my router box properly -- now I have a desktop machine (albeit with a flakey 3Comm card... #$!@$!@$!!!!) that is not responsible for the router, web server, etc., etc. Still not finished yet, but we're closer.

The new router is the latest Mandrake (but without the latest Kernel -- couldn't get that to work with ReiserFS properly. Screw it). Its currently running apache/php/mysql and sendmail. Future plans include mailman and bind. I kinds need DNS running soon, 'cause mail is currently kludged to look like it came from lsc.nd.edu (shh!!); need a proper squyres.com name other than wedding.squyres.com. :-) It doesn't appear to be perfect yet (Don's still having X forwarding issues via OpenSSH), but I've already removed the monitor and hidden it under the desk.

The desktop is a compaq desktop with serious I/O suckage. I just backed up all the data on it [temporarily] to AFS, leaving the way clear to upgrade it to the latest Mandrake when I return to KY on Saturday. I'm also a bit wary of upgrading that machine because it has some special SCSI drivers in it that took Dog and I *several* days to get right the last time we installed Linux on here. Let's hope that these SCSI drivers are mainstream enough to be in the main distros these days!

Also spent a bit of time yesterday helping Don and Ed configure their fantasy football league on www.fhffl.com (which is really wedding.squyres.com gotta love DSL!) -- it's part of a long-standing deal which is now probably defunct because Lummy is likely moving to IU, but what the hey. In helping them possibly move to a real database rather than text-file-based data storage, I had to explain a lot of database concepts to them (no DB background at all, but they're smart guys). We're having another infamous "beer-n-computer science meeting" at MBC tonight. Yummy. Will code for beer!

Mmmm... Chemical Brothers... mmm...

While I'm upgrading everything, I just got the latest linux netscape (4.74). Let's see what kind of mess it can create, now!

Went to see a Louisville River Bats minor league baseball game last night with Tracy and a bunch of people from GE (a freebie from the good folks at GE). The stadium is brand new -- only been operating this year. The game was by no means a sellout, but it there was a pretty good sized crowd there. Nice stadium, too -- bigger than the Silverhawks stadium -- it even has an upper deck. Their mascot is a purple fuzzy dude who has some flaps hanging off his arms that are supposed to pass as bat wings. He came out during the later innings with a t-shirt gun. Very amusing -- it could launch tightly scrunched t-shirts into the upper deck from where he was standing near the dugout.

Met several of Tracy's coworker's kids, had some beer, and mmm... ballpark hot dogs. Is there anything in this life as good as a ballpark hot dog and/or brat? Quite yummy. And to top it all off, we won the game. The River Bats had a cool 3-run homer in the first or second, sucked for most of the 2-7th innings, and then had a rally and won something like 10-5.

Now I gotta drive back . Will solve the X forwarding problem later (seems to have something to do with the fact that openssh X auth != regular ssh X auth, and the fact that Goofy's shoes, contrary to popular belief, were at least 2 sizes too small).

Tied up some loose ends today:

• Checked into the error that Arun reported that he was getting with parallel bladeenc; couldn't reproduce it. Sent him the latest copy to try. Turned out to be an embarrassing use of a variable before it was initialized in LAM's mpirun. Additionally, we accrued command line arguments into a fixed-length string that could be overflowed (oh for STL strings...). Doh!

• Replied to mp3check author dude (see previous entry).

• Finally fixed the "delete" button in the MPI listing stuff; I think it was malfunctioning before and deleting all the data in the database. Oops!

• Replied to Bill George at NIST about some pending IMPI errata w.r.t. IMPI_H_ACKMARK and IMPI_H_HIWATER --
  the IMPI doc doesn't clearly state how these values should be arbitrated. Bill and I are discussing what the mechanism should be. Actually, the mechanism is clean: min(a, b). The discussion is between where the value should be applied universally to all hosts or on a host-pairwise basis. I'm [currently :-)] in favor of the latter. We'll see how it works out.

• Installed GNU mailman 2.0b5 on mail.lsc today. Apparently the previous versions had some security problems. Oops. I tried to setenv CFLAGS to -fast, 'cause there is a small C portion in mailman (most of it is in python), but it still used just "-O". I suspect non-careful use of AC_PROG_CC in its configure.in script (curses, autoconf foiled again!!).

• Got minime in a compilable state again. Working on a primitive html tag checker so that I won't leave unterminated tags again. It should bitch if you leave tags unterminated when you finish typing the rant, and automatically closes them if you "submit" without fixing them. Simple stack-based thing (gotta love the STL!). I also added warning if it removes "LocalWords:" lines when you submit (not when you re-edit).

• Finally had a meeting with the Grad School people (they're nice and reasonable people once we all get in a room together and talk over the issues -- they even want to take us out to lunch for our troubles. Free food -- strong>woo hoo!!), and we worked out all the "final" kinks in the ndthesis style. Changed a few things in the sample thesis, and we should be good to go!

• Helped Jeremiah ship OOMPI 1.0.3. It's on Freshmeat now --
  everyone go check it out! Artificially inflate our stats! Whooo hoo!!
  

Still to do:

1. Finish dissertation. Graduate. Earn lots of money. Take over the world (the DomeCam's still down, after all).
   

Must go join Brian and Pete for wings, beer, and a last "hang out" night at Chuck's old place.

I say, deliver me from Swedish furniture!

Got back up to ND. Lummy was here in the office -- I thought he was still in CA; pleasant surprise. Looks like we'll be heading to Berkeley in a few weeks for a few days for some design meetings about the BLD. Should be fun and interesting.

OOMPI 1.0.3 is just about ready to roll, but I found a possible problem; may require more testing...

Inilib is getting closer, too -- perhaps in a few weeks. It still rocks, though -- it's heavily used in this journal client, for example (gotta love pre-release access!). :-)

Spent last night talking with Ed and Don about databases and their fantasy football setup. They bought the beers and dinner, so I guess I couldn't complain. I gave them a database on www.fhffl.com, and they'll start playing with the setups that we described last night. They do some nifty things with pulling down info from other web sites (NFL sites and the like) to feed their data pool.

Mmmm... the power of PHP and MySQL... mmm...

Got a reply from the mp3check author dude (it doesn't work on big endian machines). He claimed to have fixed the endian problems, but I found a bunch of compiler issues (I'm assuming that he's using g++ --
wow, does g++ suck!). Even after getting it to compile, it still doesn't work on big endian machines properly. Bonk! I sent him a reply with tons of info to keep him busy.

It seems that I have way too many MP3s out in AFS space -- I filled up the lums CCSE volume. Whoops! The irony is -- I literally tried to download them all to wedding.squyres.com earlier that day, but realized that I don't have a hard drive large enough for all of them, so I deferred to this weekend when I'll buy a new hard drive large enough to hold them all (I currently have 8GB of MP3s, and that's perhaps 1/4-1/3 of my CDs). Since the CCSE volume was full, I downloaded a bunch of them and deleted them of AFS to give much more working space.

I closed a major chapter in my life today. I left the apartment where I have lived for just over 6 years. Indeed, I have lived in South Bend more-or-less continuously (minus some summers and Army time) for a few days shy of 11 years -- the majority of my adult life.

However, I'm about to start a new chapter, too -- I'm moving to Louisville, KY, to go live with my new wife, Mrs. Tracy Payne Squyres.

At the risk of sounding sentimental, I feel compelled to present a few reflections of my mixed feelings.

I have been gradually moving my stuff down to Louisville over the past two months or so. Still, today was the final day of my lease, and (by design) I loaded the last of my stuff in my car this morning, cleaned the apartment thoroughly for the last (first?) time, locked the door, and left.

It was surprisingly hard. I'm not an overly-sentimental kind of guy; indeed, I'm from the MTV generation and have the attention span and short-term memory of a skiddish cat. The apartment itself is pretty crappy; it's small, didn't have too much sound protection from other apartments in the building, had very hard water, crappy cabinets, etc., etc. But it was home. I have lived in that location for quite a long time -- it had become a part of me. I've had many good times, many bad times, and some just downright weird times in that apartment. The good times always come to mind first, which is one of the reason that it was hard.

This morning, as I was cleaning and packing, I was musing on the history of my time in that apartment. This is the end of a 7 year streak -- I initially moved in with Mr. Huy Phan (EE grad student) back in the summer of 1994 (he had some other roommate for the previous academic year; I never knew who it was). Huy eventually moved out and went back to France. Mr. Brian McCandless (CS grad student) then moved in with me. Brian graduated a few years later, and Chuck (EE grad student) moved in. Chuck was only around for a semester and a half; Kevin Barker (CS grad student) moved in before Chuck even left. So that apartment has seen a continuous stretch of a single lease since 1993 -- 6 people. And I got the clean the apartment today. Did I get the short end of the stick, or what?

I found all manner of interesting things in the apartment today:

• A grand total of 41 pens, pencils, markers, and various other insundry writing utensils. And all of my commonly-used pens are already down in Louisville -- where did these come from? Why did we have them? We certainly didn't write that much. A mystery.

• I found -- still in shrink wrap -- a mini gas grill. Who the heck did that belong to?

• I also found a boom box. I have no idea whose it is, nor how it got into my apartment. The left channel doesn't work, but I'll bet that it could be fixed fairly easily. I gave it to Pete and Brian.

• The couch that Tracy bought (used) in her freshman year and gave to me when I moved in the apartment in 1994 has now been passed on to Pete and Brian. May it continue to give them good service.

• The Christmas lights that have hung in the apartment for years (literally), and have been on continuously since April or so (it's all about uptime, baby) have also been bequeathed to Pete and Brian as a symbol of Bachelorhood.
  

All in all, I was surprisingly happy -- albeit sentimental --
about moving out today. This is surprising because I absolutely detest moving; after loading each carful of stuff over the past two months, I always found myself emotionally drained because a little piece of me was leaving. But today was different. I realized that I actually do have closure with this place -- I'm ready to move on and become a husband and start the next chapter of my life. This move has been planned for quite some time now, and I guess that I've been subconsciously preparing for it all along.

Flashback to last night. I went out with Pete (just graduated CS from ND in May, and is just starting as a CS grad here this semester) and Brian (CS undergrad, starting his senior year here at ND) -- the same guys who inherited most of my stuff. For those of you who don't know, Brain has been one of my students for a year or two now; Pete worked for me for about a year as well. We went to BW-3s, had some wings and beer, and played trivia. It was much fun. We went back to Turtle Creek, had a few more beers and pizza, and used the Smoking Table one last time. More fun. In short, it was a perfect evening; we just hung out, were generally stupid, and got a little philosophical at times. These guys will become the next set of urban legends in the College of Engineering at Notre Dame; I am leaving ND in capable hands.

Back to today.

I said goodbye to Troy (one of the maintenance guys at Turtle Creek), and asked him to be nice to me when he does the final inspection of the apartment. He always liked us, and took pretty good care of us (when things broke, he always came pretty quickly and fixed them). I said goodbye to my apartment (it's a thing that I have -- I always have to say goodbye to places that I've lived), and got in my car and drove away.

Metallica's "No Leaf Clover" was playing on the radio as I drove away.

Goodbye, Turtle Creek.

(that was surprisingly hard to type)

Louisville -- here I come!!! Woo hoo!!!

#              ##
###               #
 #                 #
       #####       #
 #                 #
###               #
 #              ##

(yes, that's a Unix banner ":-)")

9:45pm EDT. Took a little longer than usual because of weather and construction.

But I am now home.

Spent much of yesterday opening wedding presents. Yummy! Got lots of free stuff. Got lots of stuff that we didn't ask for, but hey --
don't look a gift horse in the mouth (who came up with that expression, anyway?). We cataloged everything in our handy-dandy wedding software database (don't laugh -- there are a good 10-15 wedding software packages out there these days; it's big business! And it was truly helpful in organizing stuff). Now comes the hard part -- gotta write all those thank you letters.

Got a 40GB hard drive from CompUSA for all my MP3s. I'll install that RSN. Got some net books at B&N, too. There's a new Cussler book out, but it's still in the Big Paperback size (which is just about as expensive as the hard cover). The final Reality Dysfunction book is still not out in paperback (bonk!). And the latest Area 51 book is still not out yet. (Ok, I just admitted it to the world --
I'm into cheesy sci-fi and action books for recreational reading. You'll deal.)

Got some replies from Tord about parallel bladeenc. I read them, and I think I understand what he's saying. Unfortunately, action on these items gets pushed on the stack until other things finish up. :-(

Setup GNU mailman on wedding.squyres.com for Don and Ed. Might move my journal mailing list here, too, but probably not before I get bind running to give this machine a decent name. Still haven't quite decided what to do with squyres.com mail yet, because several other members of the family use it, and I don't feel like hosting it. Hmm. Will require some thought.

Went over to Laura and Paul's later because they had tons of extra food from a wedding that they went to on Saturday. Saw Melinda and Reuben as well. Good fun. Came back and crashed afterwards. Mmm... sleep...

Oops - the GNU mailman that I setup for Don/Ed isn't quite functional. Had to fix a few things (I only briefly tested the web interface yesterday before we left for Laura/Paul's). Mailman's woes seem to be related to some sendmail issues, too.

I've now spent a good chunk of this morning fighting with sendmail w.r.t. my firewall and whatnot, and getting it to do what I want (it still doesn't). I remember the days when sendmail setup was simple and easy to understand. Wait... no I don't.

Spent too much time on ndthesis yesterday. Hopefully, we're 100% done with it.

Went out to switch my cell phone down here to Louisville yesterday (SBN's Alltell just got bought by Verizon, which is everywhere --
quite handy for me!), and found out that I only had something like 20 days left on my contract. So I ended up upgrading to one of those whacky digital phones that has voice mail, call waiting, no roaming (important because I'll be traveling a bunch), etc., etc. I think it even writes optimized high performance scientific code.

Talked to Faller yesterday; he sounds like he's doing well in Bahston. He had some ideas regarding parallel bladeenc and Tord's replies to us; he's still convinced that we can generate output from parallel bladeenc that is diffable to the serial bladeenc. The crux of the issue is that the parallel and serial outputs are the same up until the last frame of the first slave's output. And even that frame is the same... until a point. This is the point where slave 0 runs out of input data, and therefore -1 pads the rest of the frame (it took us a while to understand that this is what was happening). The next slave's output is completely different from the serial output --
it's not like the serial output is then just shifted down into the next frame (which would be easy to fix). I think it has something to do with what Tord mentioned: that MP3 is only differential within each frame, but does depend on a small number of bytes from the previous frame (which is somehow not strictly classified as differential across the frames -- I think it has to do with framing setup and the like, although it does affect the output data).

Anyway, Jeremy is convinced that we can have the master re-frame the output data from the slaves and thereby create diffable output. He's gonna spend a few days reading the MP3 file formats and papers; we'll talk again when he's done.

I rediscovered the Goodness of Streaming Audio yesterday. Gotta love DSL.

I was hit by two inspirations a few minutes ago, which I promptly mailed off to Arun (who is giving 1.5 LAM talks today):

LAM: The Code to Glory
PVM: The Code Less Traveled

Don't get me wrong -- while I'm certainly not a PVM guy, nor would I ever write any new code in PVM, let us not downplay the importance of PVM in the Grand Scheme of Things. It was the first widespread "standardized", portable parallel code tool ("standardized" is in quotes because it was really only a research project -- it wasn't a real standard). Hence, it was the first time that you could write a parallel code on one kind of machine and run it on others (rather than have to re-develop it for every new kind of parallel computer that you tried to run on). Plus, it worked on clusters -- a prime candidate for development of parallel codes (especially considering that running on the Big Iron costs $$$).

So my statement really reflects the Way It Is Now -- most new parallel users use MPI, not PVM. Indeed, many parallel hardware vendors don't actively develop PVM anymore; they only develop their MPI. However, there are probably uncountable millions of lines of legacy code out there. PVM is like fortran -- it will never really go away.

And this is not to say that MPI won't some day be replaced by something More Useful. I'm quite convinced that MPI is not The Answer; it's just the best that we have right now.

Spent this morning answering some backlogged LAM mail. Will spend the rest of today finishing off all the current backlog of LAM mail, continuing setup of queeg (my Linux desktop -- was having some problems getting SSL/pine to compile), wedding gift reconciliation (one of our registries screwed up an allowed people to buy 3-4 of an item that we only ask for 1 of), and minime hacking.

In the words of the Ancient Masters, "After 3 days without programming, life becomes meaningless."

Spent time yesterday and today going over the complexities of Health Insurance. I have become convinced that Health Insurance is a scam run by a bunch of ex-patriot armadillos down in Arizona. Only they could dream up such convoluted and bizarre rules, regulations, policies. Or perhaps it was just a committee.

I say, deliver me from ex-patriot Arizonian armadillos!

Engineering: overthrowing armadillos.

In other news, I finished the next round of enhancements for my journal client:

• it warns you about unclosed html tags, and will [admittedly stupidly] close them if you submit without fixing them

• it removes some tags automatically, like <html> and the like

• it warns you and automatically removes "LocalWords:" lines so that you can run ispell on your entry and not have to worry about remembering to delete those lines before you submit
  

Perk pointed out HTML Tidy, which does more or less what is outlined above, but doesn't do the disallowed-tags thing. But it is much smarter about closing tags, replacing incorrect tags with real tags, etc. It also [unfortunately] automatically adds a <TITLE>, which I don't want it to do.

Who knows -- might replace my functionality with HTML Tidy someday. But this works for today, and prevents one <strong from messing up all journal entries.

All for the glory of LAM.

Sadly my telephone headset is falling apart. I need new ear muff thingies (the current ones are flaking off one little black flake at a time), and some wire in the cord is loose -- it cuts in and out randomly. And you know what they say about hardware problems... Actually who the hell cares what they say? Just go buy another one; hardware isn't interesting.

Finally, I got to spend a little quality time with minime today (woo hoo!). Continued to work on the encryption and authentication schemes for the sockets; not quite right yet, but see an older journal entry that describes the scheme.

Minime: coding for fun and profit. Actually, wait, I'm a grad student. s/fun and profit, leaving us with "Minime: coding for".

Perfect.

Got minime to compile on Linux again. A while ago, I did some ugly things with signals in a solaris/sysv-specific way that disallowed compilation on Linux for a while. Finally got around to fixing it today; this marks the first journal entry in quite a while that has been submitted from a Linux box instead of ssh-ing to ND to use the Solaris journal client (which is ironic, actually, since the journal server is sitting right here next to me --
ssh-ing up to ND made the data go much farther to get to its ultimate destination). Whooo hoooo!!

At Brian's advice, I went and got Mozilla M17 (source). It's still compiling.

I love inilib. It does such nice things for me. :-)

Motivation for saying that: Perk and I have been having a conversation about using the "HTML Tidy" program to clean up journal entries before they are submitted vs. using an internal parser (that I have already written). Turns out that "HTML Tidy" is 95% better --
it's much smarter about closing tags, but it does a few icky things. Best way to resolve it? Have a user-definable option! Let them choose between the internal parser and HTML Tidy. And inilib just takes care of storing that for me. Make today an Inilib day.
Favorite phrase of today: "beaten on the head by a Mozilla stick."

Faller asked for a copy of the LSC Coding Standards today. Must be spreading that to the good folks at Analog Devices. LSC: The World Domination Tour.
Did some LAM work today; added auto-generation of man pages from structured comments in source code. It's something a) I foolishly promised on the LAM list, and b) oh yeah, users indicated that they wanted on the LAM user survey. Kinda neat, actually. Had to re-create man pages for MPI_Comm_spawn and MPI_Comm_spawn_multiple --
I had made all the MPI-1 man page comments back on Dec 31/Jan 1 while I was waiting for the world to implode. Had to do some icky things to fool automake into a) putting them in the distribution, and b) installing them when "make install" is invoked. Yuk.

Speaking of LAM, finally resolved Mr. Pascal's issues with LAM/MPI. Turns out that you have to use a special option to the Free Pascal compiler to tell it to link to libc; if you manually link with "-lc", it won't work (for lack of a longer explanation). I asked about such a thing a month or two ago in the initial set of e-mails with Mr. Pascal, but he didn't know about it then. Yesterday, we initiated contact with the Free Pascal developers, and they immediately mentioned this special switch. Oh well, live and learn (but try to avoid Cobol whenever possible).

We're still getting bounced messages from the LAM list from <ptavares@dsg.dei.uc.pt>. Dog claims they're nowhere to be found on mpi.nd.edu's sendmail queue, but the bounces keep coming back. We'll probably get them for another 2-3 days, <sigh> I'll be very happy when we can switch to GNU Mailman (gotta wait for IU vs. ND decision first).

Continued to rip my CDs. It's going nice and slow, but now I have plenty of disk space.

Back to minime hacking...

I'm up in South Bend, and yes, my cell phone works. It's not in digital mode, though (bummer!). I found that yet another company has been sucked into the Verizon Wireless void -- Air Touch Paging. So I tried to send myself a test text message from their web page, but it didn't work. Perhaps it will when I return to digital areas on Monday...

In other news, I had a good chat with Loomsdale yesterday (sorry, that's Dr. Loomsdale to you, Gentle Reader). We haven't really connected recently, especially with this whole wedding thing of mine that happened shortly ago. T'was good to catch up. Got a few more details on the whole IU vs. ND thing (sorry, not at liberty to put them in my journal, so get off my back already, ok?!?!) -- we'll see how that plays out.

This led to more chats with Jeremiah, Rich, Dog, and Brian, which led to nothing productive getting done yesterday. Dog and I finally gave up, got some food at Wendy's, and went to see Scary Movie. If you accept it as a totally stoopid movie, it's actually quite amusing.

I introduced Dog to some of the wonders of PHP and MySQL last night, too.

Stayed at Ed and Suzanne's last night. Saw them this morning and we chatted for a while. Came in to work and did various LAM/MPI things:

• squashed a bug relating to -laio not propogating down to hcc and hf77 properly when compiling with ROMIO

• squished another w.r.t. profiling and using both MPI_Init and PMPI_Init in the same program

• played with CVSweb and ViewCVS, mainly to see if it would be worthwhile to put the LAM/MPI CVS repository out on the web for read-only access (a thought that has been nagging me for a while, especially since 6.3.3 has taken so long to release!). Decided that I liked ViewCVS better than CVSweb. I mailed the LAM/MPI mailing list to see if anyone would be interested.

• in the middle of fixing some warnings from the Portland Group C compiler

• played some more with the doctext package from the MPICH group to fix some bugs w.r.t. the nroff-generating code. I'm iterating with Bill Gropp about this -- it affects the man pages that get generated for LAM/MPI.
  

But now, on to more interesting things! Minime calls. Had some interesting minime thoughts yesterday while driving up for Looieville. We'll put those in a separate journal entry.

It's been a bit since my last journal entry; the lapse is mostly due to travel. Woof! So here we go...

Added a few new features to the journal client: you can now preview your journal entry in lynx and/or netscape before submitting it. I'll probably add one more option to run HTML tidy (either automatically or manually -- haven't decided yet).

Spent this past weekend at Notre Dame. I was supposed to meet some friends, of whom one is entering ND's law school this semester. Signals got crossed (read: I had the wrong time in my palm pilot --
DOH!!!) and I missed them. So I spent the weekend with Suzanne and Ed, and helped them buy a laptop, second hard drive for their desktop (for Linux, of course), and a new monitor. Spent much of Sunday afternoon/evening installing stuff on the latop and desktop. The desktop's modem was flaky under linux; it was most frustrating. I think I have a spare to send to them.

I found out that I definitely don't have text paging enabled on my cell phone. I got back to a digital area (why is Verizon/SBN still analog? Grumble) and tried to page myself from their web page. It said that the page was sent, but it never came in on my phone. I guess I could pay more for such a thing, but I really don't think that I need it.

Saw Lummy on Friday and Monday; had some good chats with him. The Big News is that he's going to stay at ND. He accepted ND's offer, and we're just going to reap the benefits from it (read: lots and lots of funding!). Some side effects: guaranteed post doc funding (woo hoo!!), a new computer for me (800mhz soon-to-be linux box). Rock on!!

I noticed today that ND's college of engineering started giving out engineering rings this past graduation. I want one! Luckily, I've got a graduation left at ND, so I'll likely get one. :-) Pretty cool things, those rings.

Started looking at Vorbis as an alternative to MP3. I've had a disappointing show of contributions and whatnot from the bladeenc community -- Jeremy Faller and I still have some unanswered questions about MP3. Ogg/Vorbis appears to be a much cleaner process, and an active development community. It is supposedly Much Better than MP3 in terms of quality, documentation, legal issues (i.e., there are none), and encoding speed (the beta encoders are already faster than real time). They even have an XMMS plugin, which means that it's good enough for me!

I started a "has anyone thought about parallelism?" thread on the vorbis-dev list today and got several immediate replies. Talked to one of the dudes who is -- I think -- one of the main contributors, and we came to the conclusion that it should be possible to do a similar thing to the vorbis encoder that I did with parallel bladeenc (although there are still some unanswered questions). So it might be interesting.

Must continue with minime hacking now... must code minime... must code minime... must code minime...

Another day of coding.

Sent off an old modem to dad (mom's modem got fried last week). Sent an old CD rom to John, along with an ISA card and associated cable. Damn, I'm just a nice guy.

I'm re-downloading M17 mozilla (from CVS this time, as if it will make a difference) so that I can get SSL in mozilla (see previous journal entry about how netscape must die). It will probably compile for the next few hours.

inilib meeting with Brian today got pushed off until tomorrow morning.

Did a reconcile of our wedding registry gifts between what the stores say we got and what we actually got. We got more of some things than the stores listed, which means that people found deals elsewhere. I'm all in favor of people saving money when they buy us stuff.

(netscape just finished downloading itself, and is now running configure)

I really need new foam ear thingies for my telephone headset --
they shed on my ears and it looks like I have a five o'clock shadow on my ears (and my, that's attractive!) after using it. Must remember to go to Radio Shack tomorrow...

Getting closer to LAM release. The RedHat folks are freezing this weekend (did I mention this in a previous entry? Can't remember), so they want a version that is "as close as possible", but we're anticipating putting a out a LAM update RPM when it goes stable. Ugh
-- and he (the RedHat Guy, whose name has a non ASCII character, so I can't type it too easily) found an embarrassing bug in the 6.3.3b27 that I put out earlier today. 6.3.3b28, coming right up!

Found a particularly annoying bug in tping today; I thought it would be a simple bug to fix, but turned out to be hard to find until I realized that some buffers were getting allocated too small, thereby creating overflows. Damn the overflows -- LAMming speed!!

I have one major issue that I want to solve before putting LAM through all the regression tests; he can't get PTY support to work on SCO Unix -- at least one LAM node bails before MPI_Init. Hmm. I can't tell if it's his setup or if LAM is actually doing something wrong. Hmm.

dell.com says that my new computer is estimated to be shipped on August 22. Yummy!

I ripped all my Yes and Led Zeppelin CDs today. I have many, many Yes CDs. I'm in the middle of Pink Floyd now. I installed the beta vorbis XMMS plugin, and it works like a champ. However, it takes up 100% of the CPU vs. single-digit% when playing MP3s. Hmm. Let's hope it gets better (it is still beta, after all).

My lynx, netscape, and LocalWords enhancements to the journal client continue to please me.

My DSL alarm light just flashed alarmingly. I think it's a signal for me to go to bed.

Spent some time with Brian and inilib today; fixed a bunch of things in the docs, but it looks pretty damn good. Grasshopper has learned much in his inilib time.

"When you have learned to snatch the error code from the trap frame, it will be time for you to leave."
- The ancient masters

Spent some more time with the SCO LAM user who's been having problems. One of the two problems can definitely be chalked up to UTFS; the other may also be (he's testing now, and has to install a new compiler). In which case, LAM may be in the clear for all the regression tests and eventual release!!

Looks like the trip to Berkeley is going to happen next week. So I'll likely be up in the Bend in the early part of the week, and go to CA from there.

A productive weekend. Forgive typos; on a low-bandwidth link (minime doesn't seem to want to compile on Linux again... grr...)

My new computer unexpectedly showed up on Saturday (wasn't expecting it until mid this week or so; most likely after I went to CA). Wooo hoo!!! It's decked out to the gills (I can't resist the opportunity to list all its power features):

• Pentium III/800mhz. 32k L1, 256K L2.

• 256MB ECC/RDRAM.

• 20GB disk.

• 12x DVD drive (and windoze DVD software).

• 8x/4x/32x CDRW drive.

• 3 button mouse.

• Altec Lansing THX speaker setup. This stuff is amazing -- an approximately 2'-per-side cube subwoofer and 4 speakers. We hooked it up to the VCR on Saturday to watch Episode one -- amazing sound!

• 21" monitor trinitron monitor (19.8" viewable, .25-.26 dpi).

• 32MB DDR nVidia GeForce2 GTS 4x AGP video card (I don't know what most of those letters mean, so I assume it can be directly translated from Ancient Hebrew to "fucking cool").

• Windows 98 (I tried to keep a Windoze partition, but it completely barfed with my network card, so Windoze is gone gone gone... Linux!).
  

It's fast fast fast. However, I have noticed I/O constraints that are typical on Intel architectures. Oh well -- you can't have everything (where would you put it?). But with the speed of this machine, I'll likely do at least some local development rather than ssh to nd.edu and doing everything from up there.

As practically obligatory, I went out and bought the Matrix DVD to test my DVD drive with. Hopefully, I'll get to test it later today (gotta find some Linux DVD software...).

Other things this weekend, did some "apartment" errands; got me a bookshelf, keyboard tray-thing for my desk, a 4 drawer filing cabinet. Tracy got me a warm fuzzy robe for my birthday (because I really liked the complimentary robe on our cruise); soon enough it will be cool enough to wear it around here. Might as well subscribe to the telecommuting lifestyle, eh?

I should point out that this new 'puter ran rip/encode CDs like nobody's business (and what's what I've had it doing...).

Arun's tattoo has a drop shadow (saw it in person for the first time today). Way cool.

Quotes from the lab tonight:

"Yeah Yassir!"

"To the US Army!"

"He did some amazing work on wicker..."

"There's the 'public journal Arun' and the 'private Arun' that is much cruder and more disgusting..."

"Yeah, I thought I was going to have a life, but when I plugged it all into CorporateTime, it turns out that I can't swing it. But I've got a really cool room... so that's gotta count for something!"

Yeah, I think that about sums up the night fairly well.

That and we saw some fireworks at the end of the Mob quad to celebrate the beginning of the school year (and free food!); fireworks on campus -- a first for me.

Extremely interesting quote from the paper on small-world phenomenon:

This we see that minimizing the transmission rate of a network is not necessarily the same as minimizing its diameter... in addition to having short paths, a network should contain latent structural cues that can be used to guide a message towards a target.

I finished the paper today (ignoring all the complicated math stuff that went right over my head and into the wall behind me. I hope I don't get fined for the mark that it left).

CorporateTime may be nice, but it certainly has an interface that rivals that of a blind baboon's arrangement of sock drawer. I can't tell you how many times I made incorrect appointments in ctime last night because it put pm when I was expecting am, or when it put am when I was expecting pm, or, even worse, when it put pm when I really meant pm, but I changed it to am on general principle (or vice versa). I'm guessing that the ctime interface designers were in the Southern hemisphere, where all this makes sense.

I should mention that I went to see Arun's room in Stanford Hall last week. I promised him that I'd put it in my journal, but thought better of it so as not to ruin the surprise for anyone who hasn't seen it yet. So all I'll say is: it's FABULOUS. If you haven't been yet, I strongly urge you to go see it. It's much better than Cats; I'll go see it, again and again.

I'm helping proof a book that Jeremy is writing -- spent much of the day doing that. Hats off to Jeremy for a great use of the word "esoterica". To celebrate, everyone should use the word "esoterica" in a sentence today. Together, we can form a secret personhood of politically-correct dictionaphobics who use big words just for the pure art of it.

Also started Dog doing some LAM development. Yet another reason why LAM will take over the world -- when you have programmers like Dog, who in their right mind will refuse?

Interesting note that I discovered in pine yesterday and only correctly identified today... I'm on a few ezine lists, and have been for quite