Sitting at my desk

Last night I sat at my new desk for the first time.  And I’m sitting at it now.  The cabinets are finished.  The audio equipment rack is finished.  The monitor is mounted and wired.   The computer is hooked up.  And amazingly, the desk fits very well.  The keyboard height, the monitor height and distance, and the speaker placement all work.  (And they’re all non-adjustable.  Yikes!)

There are still some things to be done.  I’m trying to order some prints from Paul Cliff in England.  I found the perfect speaker wire at Jerry’s (Jerry’s is a regional treasure, BTW)  and need to buy it and install it.  The wires behind the computer could be hidden better.  And Jacque and I are still looking for the perfect wall plates for the electrical outlets and Ethernet jacks.  But it’s looking really close to finished.

We’re taking the “official” photos this Friday.

Meanwhile, Jacque posted some new photos on Flickr this week.

Alaska Cruise

Last week, Anne and I cruised through Alaska’s Inside Passage.  It was quite an experience.

We embarked from Vancouver, BC, then over the next seven days, we visited Ketchikan, Juneau, Skagway, Sitka, and Whittier/Anchorage.

Best things about the cruise:

• An infinite amount of scenic beauty
• Comfortably cool temperatures (50-70 degrees F)
• Saw lots of bald eagles

Desk photos

Riley wants to be a model.

Jacque came by today to fit the drawer fronts to my new desk.  While she was here, we cleaned up the room and took some pictures.

Lots more pictures after the break.

The Journalism Crisis

The blogosphere is atwitter.  The twitsphere is ablog.  Newspapers are dying. Journalists are watching their careers swirl away.  Their childrens will have no shoes.  Oe noes!

Technology does that.   Whether it’s videotape factories closed by the DVD, railroads shut down by the commercial jet, buggy whip makers with no future but to symbolize obsolescence, or monks made redundant by Gutenberg, technology destroys industries, professions, and ways of life.

The difference this time is that these journalists can write.  It’s what they do all day every day, and they’re good at it.  The emotion behind the story behind the news is what they’re talented, trained and practiced at bringing to life.  So when a sad story shows up right there in the office, they’re going to jump on it and pump it hard.  They don’t even have to open a phone book ask Google for sources and leads, sources are right across the hall packing up their desks.

So we, the reading public, get front row seats for this transformation, and it’ll seem like a bigger deal than it is.  Or maybe the other industry shutdowns  seemed smaller than they were.

Scheming, part 7. The Reader.

I haven’t ‘blogged about my Scheme interpreter in ages.  Development stopped from January through March, but I’ve been working on it again.  Here are links to the earlier articles.

• Scheming, part 6
• Scheming, part 5
• Announcing kbscheme
• Scheming, part 3
• Scheming, part 2
• Scheming, part 1
• Not another Scheme interpreter!

The biggest new development  is the reader.  Most developers call them parsers, but Lisp people call them readers.  I have written six readers for Scheme now, and I’ve effectively completed a class in advanced parsing theory.  The current reader works very well, and I do not want to write another.

Still Life with Dog

Fetching is hard work.

Here’s Riley pretending to nap under my desk.

Photo by Jacque.

Jacque’s photostream of my desk

Jacque has been keeping a photo stream on Flickr about my desk.

Here’s the link.

The desk is now nearly installed.  It’s in place in my office and assembled, but it isn’t bolted to the wall yet.  And the drawers are not yet in, and some other details are unfinished.

Jacque intends to enter it into an on-line art exhibit and contestt that a friend of ours is organizing.  We’ll have to arrange a photo shoot to get the best possible images.

Now with Less Plastic!

Can you see them in there?

I bought three USB memory sticks from Costco recently.  They came in this package, which is almost big enough to hide a dog.

Less Plastic

But wait!  What’s this in the corner?  LESS PLASTIC!  Imagine what the old packaging must have looked like.

Baby steps, SanDisk.  Baby steps.

Desk delivery

Heave!

The concrete desk was carried up the stairs today.  We’re not sure how much it weighs.  We think it’s about 300 lb. plus another 40-50 lb. of packaging.

The brave and strong men in the picture work for Mayflower Cummings Moving.  They struggled.

Made it.

Cognitive Limits

On Sunday, Riley the Wonder Dog gave me a little insight into the limitations of doggie thinking.

We were at a house with an upstairs deck. Stairs at the west end of the desk lead to the lawn.  Riley and I were on the east end of the deck, and I had his squeaky toy.  Riley really wanted his toy.  I threw it off the deck onto the lawn.  Riley had already been down the stairs, but did not have any idea how to get to his squeaky toy.  I led him down the stairs, and he found the toy.  He was quite excited to have it again.

We went back upstairs, and I threw the toy off the deck again.  Once again, he really wanted the toy, which was in plain sight below him, but he couldn’t figure out how to get it.  I led him to the top of the stairs, and then he remembered and ran down and brought the toy back up.

The third time I threw the toy off the deck (yes, I’m cruel), he only hesitated for a moment before running down the stairs.

I haven’t postulated any grand theories of doggie intelligence from this story, but it was fascinating to me that moving away from the toy to get the toy was hard for Riley to figure out.