Miscellaneous crap
I really do mean to put my travelogue up here, but it turns out
that it's a big PITA to do. I haven't taken much of an inventory
of our photos yet, and I've got about four hours of videotape
to run through, and I just haven't been able to bear to do any
of that work yet.
So here's what I have been up to, for those who care.
I spent the last week cleaning the pool. It was getting to the call-in-the-EPA stage, a green quagmire that you could spot from geosynchronous orbit. The robot vacuum died a few months ago (an overly complex and prone-to-breakage piece of shit manufactured by Hayward) and so I sort of let the pool fester. So last weekend I bought a manual vacuum, and a double arseload of chemicals and went to work. Been backwashing the filter cartridge four or five times a day, morning, noon and night, vacuuming, adding noxious chemicals, and other stuff. Finally today the pool is no longer green, but the water is cloudy. Bozhemoi, this happy homeowner stuff is the pits.
I've resigned my position as board member for the community theatre that I'm always yacking about. Business has been way bad for us, and we've decided to suspend mainstage productions for this year while we worry about our future. In the meantime our Junior Theatre folks are going great guns, so at least something is going right.
While I'm officially off the board as of the end of June, the sad truth is that I'll still be pretty active in the group. I told them that I wanted to concentrate on some apolitical things, maybe work on the website or something. I have in the back of my mind doing some dynamic web service stuff, administrative crap that they're currently using a single central computer for (using Win-XP-Home and Access). The website is running Gentoo Linux and Apache2, and I've added in PostgreSQL and a couple different Lisps. If I do any applications, it's almost certainly going to be in Lisp.
Lisp? WTF? Well, y'see, Paul Graham is a smooth talker, and his exhortations to consider Lisp have been seductive. Hackers and Painters was an entertaining read, and On Lisp is probably the best treatise on Common Lisp macros that you can find anywhere. I've been working through Peter Seibel's Practical Common Lisp and am currently trying to wrap my mind around CL condition handling. Due partly to Jerry's nudge, and partly because it seems to be universally recommended, emacs has become my standard editor. SLIME has received my first tentative advances relatively well, and I'm beginning to think that I might - just might - soon have enough knowledge that I can do something useful in Lisp. (I've written lots of hello-worlds and compute-factorials and towers-of-hanoi, but that's not what I mean.)
Beer of the moment: Mojo IPA, Boulder Beer Company.
Music of the moment: The Carl Stalling Project (music from Warner Bros. cartoons).
Before that we heard Kovcheg (Russian men's choir), the Jeff Beck Group,
Westminster Choir College, some piano pieces by Marjorie Fierstadt
I found on the intarweb someplace, and Jonathan Coulton's
Thing a Week.
posted at: 16:09 | path: /dailies | permanent link to this entry