khslinky

Check Please?

2009-01-28T03:47:52Z

Tonight, Elizabeth loudly said "Check" to me in the sense of checking something off. Along the lines of "Don't believe in God--Check!" As soon as she said it, Zoë looked up from her coloring and said "peas".

"What?" we asked.

"Please," she repeated. "Shrek, please."

As far as we know, Shrek is the only thing for which she will voluntarily say please. We explained that Mommy had said "check" not "Shrek," and that we weren't planning to watch Shrek tonight. She took it fairly well, but I was a little torn. I mean, we don't want her sitting in front of the TV all the time, and I certainly don't want to sit in front of Shrek any more than I have to (why couldn't she prefer Nemo--it's clearly the better film), but we do want to encourage her to say "please" when she wants things instead of demanding "Shrek! More Shrek!"

Biking

2008-06-28T18:13:58Z

I road my bike to work yesterday. It was the first time I'd ridden a bike in about 15 years, but it went okay. It took about 40 minutes to go a little over seven miles. I'm pretty sure that I can get that down under a half hour once I'm more used to biking. (I'm still getting the hang of gears—every bike I'd ever been on before had exactly two gears: sitting and standing.)

Resolutions

2008-01-02T04:29:05Z

I don't normally go in for new year's resolutions—I figure if you want to do something, why wait for a new calendar year. On the other hand, I have a number of non-urgent things that I've been thinking I need to do eventually, and I really need to just pick a day to start doing them (lest “eventually” never come). Today seems like as good a day as any other.

My resolutions are pretty concrete, and I'm going to list them here so that ohioana (and anyone else who happens to be around) can help me stick with them.

Exercise every day: I've gained between 20 and 30 pounds since ohioana got pregnant. The best way to reverse this trend is to exercise, but I haven't seriously exercised more than a dozen times since Zoë was born.
Only eat junk food when rude (or at least weird) not to: I'm not going to stop eating dessert at my mother-in-law's, nor do I plan to forego treats during holidays or at parties, but I can at least stop eating crap at home and at work.
Eat out less: We've been eating restaurant food (frequently take-out) about three times a week. That's unhealthy for both our bodies and our bank account. I think a limit of once a week for dinner would be a good start (I'll probably go out to lunch with people at work either once or twice a week). This is a resolution that I don't actually expect to meet consistently—circumstances can easily cause multiple restaurant meals in the same week—but having a goal of once a week will help.
No reading reddit: If I need to kill a half-hour, programming.reddit.com is a great way to do it, but these days I find that I desperately need to keep my free time alive. So no more reddit. I'm still debating whether or not to allow myself to look at the programming reddit while I'm waiting for code to compile at work, but I think a total ban is probably best for now.
Faster showers: I can also kill a half-hour in the shower, when it shouldn't take more than a few minutes to get myself clean. I used to think that shower time was prime thinking time, but my daydreaming in the shower is mostly wasted on TV shows (instead of, say, math). Eight minutes is my goal: if I have to start taking an egg timer into the bathroom, I will.

Volatile Function Pointers

2007-12-15T05:21:18Z

I was nearly blown away by Visual C++ this week. In the end, I was merely pleased with it, but for the space of about a half-hour, I thought Visual C++ was working magic.

At work recently, one of our co-ops (for privacy's sake, we'll call him Alonzo Church) was working on printing out nice stack traces from C++ code when we throw an exception. He was testing it with something like this:

f() { g(); }

g() { h(); }

h() { stack_trace(); }

int main() { f(); }

Unfortunately, the stack trace only showed h and main. Alonzo figured that f and g were missing because they'd been inlined, so he asked me if I knew of a way to turn off the inlining for just those functions without turning off optimizations altogether. I suggested that he change the calls to f() and g into indirect calls through global function pointers. There was absolutely no way, I assured him, that a compiler would inline such a call.

But it did! Both f and g were still missing from the stack trace. We even declared the function pointers volatile, and defined them in separate files, and it still inlined them. (The syntax is void (* volatile f_ptr)(), by the way—it took me a couple tries to figure that out.) Now, obviously no compiler is inlining indirect calls through volatile function pointers. So what's going on? Why aren't f and g in Alonzo's stack trace?

Alonzo and I experimented with adding small bits of code after the calls to f and g and using both direct and indirect calls, and I'm now fairly sure that they weren't showing up because Visual C++ was doing tail call elimination (as well as inlining with direct calls). So even though it was making the function calls, the stack frames were being overwritten, thus removing them from the stack trace.

That was a pleasant surprise: I don't normally think of C++ compilers as doing especially aggressive tail call optimization. But it would have been really awesome if it was doing some sophisticated analysis that allowed it to safely inline calls through volatile global function pointers.

Gelfand does Basic Algebra

2007-11-20T03:26:48Z

So I was browsing through math books on Amazon the other day, and it recommended a basic trigonometry book. I clicked on it thinking it might be the weird Australian trig book with quadrance and spread, but it turned out to be a traditional trig book. I almost closed the page, but then I saw the author's name and did a double take: Gelfand. (If you don't recognize the name immediately, it's because you haven't studied enough functional analysis.) It turns out he's written an entire series of high-school level math textbooks. How cool!

Hiring Programmers

2007-11-18T04:40:40Z

Some tips for anyone attempting to secure employment as a software engineer:

You should know how to write a for-loop. Especially if your current title is “Principal Software Engineer.”
If you claim to have worked on numerous C++ projects over the past fifteen years, you should know both (1) what a template is, and (2) what a virtual function is. And you should be able to write a for-loop.
When asked to write code on a whiteboard, it's acceptable to say “A whiteboard is a less-than-ideal development environment. It will be difficult to write and debug code without my editor and compiler.” It's probably not a good idea to say “Oh man, it's been so long since I had to write code!”
If asked to read a bunch of numbers from a file, your first impulse should not be to store them in a fixed-size array.
Don't try to convince your interviewer that frequently copying your source code to a network location is an acceptable substitute for a revision control system.
You really need to know how to write a for-loop. Now, I'm all for eliminating for-loops from your code—it's been months since I wrote my last for-loop at home. But loops are still common in professional settings, and frankly, nobody's going to believe that you're a professional programmer if you can't write one.

It's harder to find good programmers than I expected. In the end, though, we did hire someone that I'm pretty excited about.

Porn

2007-11-13T00:29:33Z

I was looking at some porn on the internet the other day. I don't think I quite understand the appeal of porn. I mean, I think of sex as touching someone that I like—looking at a stranger that I can't touch just doesn't cut it. And what's with all the shaved crotches? Half the time, I felt like I was watching middle-school girls have sex.

Marshmallows

2007-10-28T05:36:00Z

About a year ago, I overheard someone chastising a child for (intentionally) burning a marshmallow in a fire instead of eating it, because she couldn't stand to see food go to waste. I think this is silly for a number of reasons, chief among them that it's a bit of a stretch to call marshmallows “food”. Kroger apparently agrees with me.

For reasons I won't get into, I was looking for marshmallows at the grocery store tonight. My first thought was that they were a baking good, but all I could find in that aisle was marshmallow fluff. Then I thought that maybe they were an ice cream topping, but that section only had some sort of “process marshmallow food topping”—no real marshmallows. My next stop, the tea/coffee aisle, had marshmallows, but I would have had to rip open packages of hot chocolate to get them. I finally asked an employee, who told me that marshmallows were in aisle twelve. That aisle contained only baby food and toys, with marshmallows at the boundary. Since I can't imagine that Kroger thinks of marshmallows as baby food, I have to assume that they agree with me: a marshmallow is really more of a toy than a food.

Exhaustion

2007-10-03T01:12:19Z

You know how sometimes when you're sick your joints ache and your skin feels super sensitive and you don't want anything to touch you? I felt like that last night, from about four in the afternoon until I woke up this morning. Except I wasn't sick. I think Zoë has introduced me to a level of exhaustion I've never experienced before, even when I pulled all-nighters in college.

Hurray for Layoffs

2007-09-26T01:38:17Z

One of the best things about working where I do is the people I work with. The development team is small, but everyone is friendly, helpful, and extremely competent. When I've thought about this in the past, I've always chalked this up to good hiring practices, but I recently started to wonder if it might have to do with layoffs. Before I joined the company, but after most of the people I work with did, there were several significant rounds of layoffs. Could it be that this left only the top talent? Once this is accomplished, it might be self-sustaining, since really good people will hire other really good people (that's what I like to think, anyway).

I've always heard that it works the other way around—that once you start making cuts, everybody starts looking for other work and the best people have plenty of opportunities, so you end up losing them. But perhaps if you provide enough equity-based compensation and give your employees some reason to believe that the company is in good hands, you can avoid this. You'd have to do lots of other stuff right, too, such as figuring out who to get rid of. And of course it doesn't work at all unless you've got good people to begin with.

Linguistic side note: I almost wrote “figuring out whom to get rid of,” but I just couldn't bring myself to do it. I'm not sure I know anybody personally who would find that construction natural. It sounds like something a non-native speaker might come up with.

Wow, Ruby is slow

2007-09-25T00:31:03Z

I'd always heard that ruby's interpreter was remarkably slow, but I never really gave it much thought. I mean, people are always complaining about high-level languages being slow even when they're not, and I'd been using ruby for small projects here and there (basically as a perl replacement) since 2002 with no trouble. And when I say small projects, I don't necessarily mean that Ruby wasn't doing much work. I've processed some large chunks of text with it, but those were mostly with regular expressions that call some C library routine in the background. I recently wrote a ruby program that had to parse about five thousand lines (148KB) of XML, and I used REXML, which is written entirely in Ruby, because I was hoping this would simplify porting the program to Windows for my wife's use. Just creating a list of objects to represent all the entries in the file took eight seconds.

So I did a re-write in Haskell last week. The Haskell version requires about half as many lines of code and runs in under a second. I'd avoided Haskell initially because I didn't realize there was a good Windows implementation. It's not like one of the primary authors of GHC works for Microsoft or something.

Democratic Debate

2007-08-19T18:04:31Z

I finally got to see a presidential primary debate. (It sucks that many of the debates are only available on cable now, but that's a whole different topic.)

It makes some sense to me that Obama and Clinton are the front-runners. Both of them had a much more polished presentation than their colleagues. On the other hand, I didn't appreciate ABC News's decision to solidify their positions at the head of the pack by devoting a good five or ten minutes to each of them. Why wasn't every other candidate asked to comment on Gravel's fitness for the Presidency? And why did Kucinich and Gravel get about five minutes of total speaking time between them? The public is not well-served by this sort of pseudo-debate

Several candidates brought up energy independence, but no one really seems to have much of substance to offer there. Hint: slightly higher fuel-efficiency standards aren't going to break our dependence on foreign oil. Cellulosic ethanol might not do the trick, either, but this is one area where what I've heard from Bush seems (at least on its face) to be far more progressive thinking. Universal health care was also mentioned several times. I expect this to happen during the next president's term no matter who gets elected, so Hillary's previous experience in this area is probably a point in her favor.

The war in Iraq was discussed a great deal. It looks like every Democratic candidate wants to pull out of Iraq more-or-less immediately, which bothers me a bit (I'm of the opinion that if you make a mess, you should at least try to clean up after yourself). What bothers me more is that this is such a partisan issue. On broad philosophical topics like abortion, gun control, women's suffrage, or slavery, I can see why disagreements would run along party lines. But here where we have a particular situation, I'd expect people to examine the facts and determine the best course of action, and I don't see any reason to think that one's conclusions about it would be determined by party affiliation. Instead, it seems like everybody's using the war to play political games.

Speaking of political games, I can't believe that all the candidates kept going on about how badly we're getting screwed in trade with other countries. Sure we have a huge trade deficit, but we're also enormously wealthy and still seeing huge growth. It's a bit of a stretch to claim that we're “being taken advantage of by other countries” as Hillary put it. At least Obama recognizes that “globalization is here.” I wonder if that's sort of a generation gap thing.

On education I was pleased that at least some of the candidates thought merit-based pay for teachers was a good idea. If you think that teaching is a valuable endeavor and that some teachers are better than others, it's a slap in the face of good teachers not to reward them for their efforts and abilities. Several candidates also brought “universal pre-kindergarten,” which is something I'd never heard of before. I hope the intention is not to make such a thing mandatory. After Hillary talked up the importance of universal pre-kindergarten, she went on to say that the home was the best teaching environment. One of us is very confused, and I honestly don't know which.

On a personal level, I found the responses to the question about God and prayer somewhat troubling. All the candidates responded as if they had some sort of deep Christian faith. I suppose it's possible that they all do, but for some reason I have a hard time believing that Hillary Clinton thinks there's an invisible man running the universe. I never thought I'd see it as courageous for someone to say that they didn't think prayer could prevent hurricanes, but only a handful of the candidates could bring themselves to do even that.

Linguistic side notes: Obama consistently uses a double copula. I've heard him do it before, and he did it again during today's debate. Also, several different candidates made use of the word troop to mean a single person.

My (absurdly premature) prediction: Edwards will start losing ground because he's less impressive, both in presentation and (to me, at least) in substance, than Obama and Clinton. He'll then throw his support to Obama, who will take the nomination.

Inheriting Points

2007-08-08T04:26:43Z

I ran into an interesting problem at work. Part of our in-house libraries is a class that represents a point in 3-space. It's nothing special: just three numbers with no other context. The problem is that the application I'm currently working on uses points in two different coordinate systems, and I occasionally found myself using the wrong kind of point in the wrong place. I'm not going to get into my eventual solution, but I didn't quite manage to solve it the way I wanted to.

What I really wanted was for the type system to handle it. This is what type systems are supposed to do, right? I have two different types of things, and I want to make sure that I'm using the right one. Unfortunately, I still want to do point-like things with both of these types, and the only way to really get that behavior is to make them both subclasses of point. Which means that if I have defined point operator+( point, point ), and I do something like subclass_A + subclass_B, both types get promoted to point, and everything works just fine, which is exactly what I wanted to avoid.

There are a couple different options, all unpleasant. I could go forward with subclassing point and provide overloads for any operation involving a combination of the subclasses that throws an exception (I could probably even find a way to get a compile-time error with BOOST_STATIC_ASSERT). Or I could make new classes that contain a private point member and then go through and expose by hand all of the point functionality that I want. Both of these options involve a lot of annoyingly redundant code. I could also make a very thin wrapper class with, say, a public point member, but then any code involving that class will have lots of unwrapping and re-wrapping mixed in with the actual computation.

I briefly thought that I'd come up with a brilliant solution in which user-defined type conversions would allow implicit conversion from my classes into points but confuse the compiler in expressions involving points from both coordinate systems. But it didn't work because point is actually a class template, and user-defined conversion operators are applied during overload resolution, which comes after template instantiation. So when passing one of my classes to a function template that expects a point, the template can't figure out what kind of point it's looking at because the argument hasn't yet been converted to a point at all. As a side note, I think C++ is the only language I've ever used where I've made (on more than one occasion, in fact) a serious effort to confuse the compiler or trick it into doing what I wanted. Not coincidentally, it's also the only language I'm aware of where many of the standard idioms are referred to as “tricks” (e.g., the Barton-Nackman Trick and the Colvin-Gibbons Trick).

Baby on Board

2007-08-05T22:30:37Z

We went up to Cleveland this weekend for a wedding. According to Google, the trip from our house to the Holiday Inn Cleveland South takes three hours and seventeen minutes. When you factor in a Zoë who is slightly constipated and not at all happy about being strapped into a car seat, however, it takes closer to five hours. So we missed the actual wedding portion of the wedding. The reception was fun, but we didn't get to talk to people as much as we would have liked because we were constantly struggling to keep Zoë happy despite all the noise, the people, and the residual anger over being strapped into a car seat.

The return trip also took about five hours, so the Zoë factor is at least somewhat predictable. She slept all the way to Pittsburgh when we went there over the Fourth of July. Maybe it's only North-South travel that bothers her? I'll be curious to see how she reacts to our next Pittsburgh trip.

In other news, I apparently look just like someone named Austin. I was coming back to the hotel room after putting some stuff in the car this morning, and when I walked out of the elevator, a young (college-age) man said, "Hey--oh, I'm sorry. I thought you were someone else." Then his mother came around the corner, looked straight at me and said, "Are you guys downstairs?" To which her son said, "No, Mom. That's not Austin." She was shocked: "Good Lord! They could be brothers."

Numbers and Factorials

2007-06-28T04:29:18Z

There's a lengthy discussion of factorial functions over at Reddit. It was inspired by a Daily WTF article in which an interviewer asked a potential employee to write a “quick function” to compute the factorial of “any given number”. The candidate failed miserably, and the entire programming Reddit is howling at the sadness of it. The problem I have with this is that, assuming the interviewer expected an answer in Java, the question is designed to produce failure. Producing a Java function to compute the factorial of “any given number” is simply not a quick or easy thing to do, especially if the candidate didn't remember the details of java.lang.Bignum.

An int in Java can correctly represent the factorials of numbers from zero through (wait for it...) twelve. Java's long fares a bit better, going all the way up to 20!. This is actually a case where using floating-point numbers to represent integers is not a bad idea. With Java's double, you can represent integers exactly up to 53 bits, which is enough for 18!, and beyond that, you'll probably at least get the right order of magnitude for a while. Best of all, when the floating-point numbers finally give up on computing factorials, they'll give you infinity, which for many applications is probably a perfectly good approximation (and will almost always be better than the factorial mod 32 or 64).

What I really wish, of course, is that some mainstream programming language would start giving people actual integers when all they ask for is an int. I realize that 32- and 64-bit integers have their place, but unless I ask specifically for one of those, what I really want is an integer. The integers have some wonderful properties that I've grown really quite fond of, like

x < x + 1

x ≠ 0 and y ≠ 0 → xy ≠ 0

x > 0 and y > 0 → xy > 0

∀ x, ∃ y such that y > x

and, of course,

n ≥ 0 → n! > 0

Emacs/Keyboard Trivia

2007-06-19T03:34:57Z

That stupid Windows right-click-menu key is mapped to M-x in emacs (at least on the most recent Ubuntu). If anything needs a dedicated key, that does. Almost makes me wish that I had one in a convenient location.

Parable of the Sower

2007-06-17T20:19:29Z

I finally read Parable of the Sower recently, and it was fantastic. I should have read it years ago when wynndom first recommended it to me (happy belated birthday, by the way), but I was avoiding it because I hadn't enjoyed Butler's Wild Seed very much. This isn't the first time that I've done something like that: I avoided watching Buffy for years because I'd seen the (truly awful) movie. There's probably a lesson I should be learning here.

Anyway, both Parable and its sequel were excellent, and they were built around some ideas that appealed to me quite a bit (like the notion that we need to get off this planet). But they were also frightening. Parts of the story made me feel like I ought to keep some military-grade weapons around to defend my family in the event of an extended economic downturn.

If you're looking for a gripping story with extremely well-drawn characters, and you're not already terrified that your home will be overrun by angry mobs and/or Christians, take a look at Parable of the Sower

khslinky @ 2007-06-15T00:18:00

2007-06-15T04:28:36Z

Not too long ago, it occurred to me that I could recite the title of every Buffy episode in order, but I couldn't name all the U.S. presidents (in any order at all). I've finally started using the Nordic Track again (we both took a break from exercising for a while after Zoë was born), which means I've got some spare time now during which I can't really do anything useful, but my mind is basically unoccupied. I intend to use this time to memorize the Presidents of the United States along with the year each of them started to serve. Then I'm going to move on to the naturally occurring elements and their atomic numbers. Further suggestions are welcome.

khslinky @ 2007-06-07T23:57:00

2007-06-08T04:28:42Z

Elizabeth has apparently been to busy to tell the latest bunny story, so I guess I'll do it. While she was mowing the lawn the other day, Elizabeth discovered that a bunny had made a nest in our yard, inside the cat fence. This bunny has been inside the fence before, and every time she comes in, she gets harassed by our cats. What would make her think it was a good idea to put a nest in our yard is beyond our limited human understanding.

So Elizabeth mowed around the nest, and then went out to collect the (eight!) baby bunnies and put them outside the fence. Of course, we can't stop them from coming back inside the fence, and last night the cats had a baby bunny cornered in our bedroom in the middle of the night. Elizabeth grabbed the poor thing, put it outside the fence, and locked the cats inside the house, thereby saving the bunny.

So tonight, I was going to lock the cats in before going to bed. Unfortunately, I didn't go to bed early enough, and about an hour ago Tiger was chasing a bunny around our dining room. I chased them both outside but didn't escort the baby bunny out of the fence. I figured some of those bunnies are just doomed to die on account of their mother's stupidity no matter what I do. But I just brought the cats in for the night, and Tiger seemed hungry, so maybe the little guy got away

Programming Language Education

2007-06-05T05:47:03Z

I recently witnessed a discussion about what programming languages should be taught to impressionable young CS students. Not for the first time, I got to hear about how important it is to teach a practical language like Java in introductory programming courses. I never find the arguments in favor of Java especially convincing: it isn't actually possible to teach the average freshman enough of Java to make it a useful practical tool, and anecdotal evidence suggests that teaching students Scheme first helps them learn C++ better later on. But I can at least understand how an otherwise reasonable person could come to the erroneous conclusion that Java should be taught as a first language. What really bothers me is something I discovered today.

I was talking to one of our co-ops about the classes he'd taken this quarter when he mentioned Comparative Languages. Being a PL geek, I asked him what languages they'd studied. His answer: C++, Java, C#, and a little bit of Scheme at the end. Did they cover hygienic macros or continuations or any of the really cool stuff in Scheme? Of course not. I get the feeling they just tossed enough cars and cdrs around to give the impression that Scheme is “weird” and left it at that. This is like offering a comparative religions class that focuses primarily on Catholics, Anglicans, and Episcopalians, with a little Zoroastrianism at the end to provide an example of a goofy minority faith. How do you make a 10 week long class out of that?

Note to schools: If you really want to give your students a practical skill, tell them about revision control systems. I'm amazed by the number of new graduates we've interviewed that seem to have gotten all through school (sometimes even grad school) without ever encountering the concept.

Keyboard

2007-06-04T04:56:12Z

I recently bought a new keyboard, and I've decided that making frequent short LiveJournal posts would be a good way to get accustomed to it.

So far, I like it. It's going to take some time to get up to a decent typing speed, but the AG-5 immediately felt more comfortable and natural than, say, the Datahand or the Twiddler2. I did have to set my mouse acceleration pretty high (xset mouse 7 3) to get the built-in trackball to feel okay, but now that that's done it works fine. And having a mouse right at my fingertips has motivated me to (at least temporarily) put aside ratpoison and explore a window manager with a more mouse-driven interface.

BABY!

2007-04-19T05:27:04Z

Zoë was born at 5:27 PM on Tuesday, right on her due date. She was 8 pounds 5 ounces and 20.5 inches long. She has lots of hair, which looks either light brown or red depending on the light. Regardless of the lighting, she is absolutely adorable. Elizabeth and her mother both agree with me on that, so it must be true.

We left home at 1:30 in the morning--16 hourse before Zoë was born. Elizabeth's water had broken, but she hadn't had much in the way of contractions, so around 4:30 they started dosing her with pitocin. By eleven, Elizabeth was completely exhausted. She would hang on me and shake during contractions, and then sit on the edge of the bed and sleep (I had to hold her shoulder to keep her from falling over) for 30 to 60 seconds before being awakened by the pain of the next contraction. At this point, she decided to get an epidural, which was something she had really hoped to avoid. Then she slept for about five hours, woke up, and pushed out a baby like it was the easiest thing in the world. She is now a huge fan of epidural anesthesia.

Elizabeth and Zoë both seem to be doing very well, and they expect to come home this morning. It's a good thing, too: the cat's are starting to miss Elizabeth. It remains to be seen how they will react to their new friend Zoë. I just keep telling them that babies are friends--not food.

Angel and Potter

2005-07-26T03:55:06Z

This weekend, I finished reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and we also watched the last few episodes of the last season of Angel. Pivotal points in both involved killing a friend in order to avoid blowing a cover. The Half-Blood Prince won't have the luxury of whipping out a magic ball and explaining himself, though, so I expect the final Harry Potter book to be more interesting than the last episode of Angel.

A few predictions about Book Seven:

Ginny becomes a werewolf.
Harry becomes a Muppet.
Hermione gets infected by part of Voldemort's soul but inexplicably decides that she's still part of the good team.
Ron is a killer robot driving instructor from the future (since he's apparently not Dumbledore).

Cavities

2005-07-22T01:40:37Z

I went to the dentist this morning and found out that I have two cavities. I feel sort of like a failure as a human being—I can't even keep my mouth clean. I think the problem is that I haven't been brushing my teeth correctly for the past few years. During all my recent dental exams, someone has asked me about the stain on the chewing surfaces of my molars, suggesting that perhaps I drink a lot of pop or coffee or use tobacco. When I respond that I do none of those things, the dentist always seems confused. But as of this morning, my own theory is that I've been brushing in small circles around my gums to the point of neglecting the tops of my teeth.

My wife is coming home

2005-07-16T23:11:41Z

ohioana will be coming in later tonight. It'll be very nice to have her back. I didn't get as much done as I probably should have with the house, but at least the apartment is clean, so hopefully she'll be happy to be back.

So what did I do while she was away? During dinner (pizza every night), I watched some highlights from the early seasons of Buffy. I was pleasantly surprised when I got to season four, which I tend to think of as being weak. The main story arc might not be gripping, but it had a large number of above-average episodes that I wanted to re-watch.

I also tried (without much success) to whittle down my reading list. I finally finished Skinny Legs and All, only to have some books show up on my doorstep the next day. I now find myself about 100 pages into three separate books. One of them is Harry Potter, which should go by in a flash, but the other two are pretty hefty non-fiction. Some days I think my reading list is doomed to grow without bound.