A few things before I get to the main point of this post, which is about shopping for a new synthesizer. First, thanks to everyone for the enthusiastic response to the publication of my first origami book, Zing Origami, on kindle, android and iOS formats.
Next, just to bring you up to date in the life-and-times department, I’ve been pretty focused on work the last month, and we just had a big demo/review session Friday. In some sense, however it’s a losing game. The better the code I write, the smaller and weirder the bugs that rise up to bother me on the one hand, and the larger and deeper the strategic problems I have to beat my head against on the other. Ah well I guess that’s what I’m there for, and I should be grateful things are on an even keel. Next week starts summer Fridays!
Thursday nite was a carnival at the kid’s new school where they’ll be going in September. It was really nice, with high class midway carnival rides (the kind that roll in on a tractor trailer), games, food, etc. It goes on for four days, and is apparently the major fundraiser for the school, and the local police and fire department get involoved and everything. The first night was largely for families of the school, so they sent out an invite to families of new students. The kids had a great time and we met a bunch of new patents and students. So it was a very positive scene. The kids are gonna be in for a shock come September when the find out they gotta do math homework just like any other school. Speaking of which, Lizzy placed out of her math final, which was the following day, on account of her having an “A” average.
Today was a street fair in our neighborhood that included a classic car show. Lots of 60’s and 70’s muscle cars, and a few souped-up 80’s cars, and a few from the 50’s and before. The was a ’71 Boss Mustang, a giant 60’s Lincoln Continental and a Model A Ford, but I think my favorite was a white 1960 Jaguar V-12.
Yesterday we spent the whole day on yardwork, the big trimming and weeding session. We seem to need to do this about 3x/summer and this was the first. It was also big trimming day for the neighbor’s landscaper, and he saved me a bunch of time and effort by doing all the hedges on the border of our property. This is a job he’s technically supposed to do, but usually skips if he thinks he can get away with it, but since I was out today and talked to him about it, he was very friendly and helpful.
Since my new book is out, I need to add a new page to my website to promote it. I went to go ahead and start making it, only to discover that the web server on my computer wasn’t working (macs these days run an Apache server). After some spelunking, Jeannie and I determined that there was a problem with Apache, namely that the directory for the log files didn’t exist. We figured this was a side effect of my recent hard drive upgrade. The next problem was that when we went to create the log directory in the Unix shell the command failed (silently). After some more spelunking, we determined that the problem was sudo didn’t work becuase my system password was blank. So once I changed my password to something with more than zero characters I was able to crate the directory and Apache started working again. Then we had to get my PHP going again, and next is my MySQL instance. Yeesh. Stupid computers.