Last night we discovered that I'd left the car door open when we parked the car. I parked the car on Sunday, four days earlier. So I pushed the car back and forth on the 30 feet of flat pavement we had in the parking garage while Amy tried to pop the clutch and get it running. Unfortunately, I'd decided to park at the very bottom, so it was a uphill on one end, and a wall on the other. Finally, a dude in a jeep showed up and gave me a jump start. Today I'm sore.
After pushing the car around for a while, we went back to UW. I went to Bill's room and checked out this system he's got rigged up to measure gas flow with some kind of Data Acquisition board he's got hooked up to the parallel port of an old laptop. They're doing it in DOS, and I talked to the guy writing the code about writing an interrupt handler for the timer interrupt to do hard realtime sampling of this port (you have to poll it, which makes me wonder why they didn't just go straight into the parallel port). It brought back fond memories of writing 8086 assembly code when I explaied to the dude what AH and AL were, and how they were the same as AX. He was a junior CS student and didn't know what a union was. C++ is evil.
A guy on thunk was bugging me to add "last article posted on..." text to the article overview functionailty of mod_virgule, so I did, and sent the diff in to raph. Does that mean I get to register myself as a Helper on mod_virgule? There's no option for "know the code fairly well, sent in a diff, feel free to ask me questions" :-)
When she requested last week I put Linux on her computer, I asked Amy if she felt like she knew it well enough to use it as her primary OS. Her response was, "what exactly is it I'm supposed to learn how to do?" I think that speaks well of where things have come. I guess most people need an email client, web browser, mp3 player, and word processor, in that order. KDE gives her all of that in a nice package.
Waldo: don't just drop your idea, dude, it's cool. I already volunteered my company, I'm sure other people are excited. Flesh it out and start a project on sourceforge. We don't care if you don't know how to do it technically, just be glue and provide architectural oversight.