Wednesday, July 21, 2004

Unbelievable!

"The Miss America pageant is a different medium for an MIT grad, a medium that requires significantly more communication skills than a typical MIT endeavor. So I feel like I'm expanding the Institute's boundaries in a way, and I'm doing it while having fun and earning money to continue my education."

If you're not familiar with MIT, I guess you'd have no idea why this is unbelievable. But then I haven't been on campus for many, many years so I'm sure the student body has changed quite a bit. (For the better, apparently.) For those of you who've never trodded down the infinite corridor, course V is a chemistry major.

Tuesday, July 13, 2004

Learning to Program

Say there's a High School student who wants to start learning to program and he comes to you for advice asking, "How should I start?" What language would you recommend and why? If you do respond to this, please don't leave out the why. Thanks.

Friday, July 9, 2004

Oddpost

Enjoyed reading about this. I can just imagine how much fun the folks at Oddpost had while putting this page together. It's going to be a fun weekend for a bunch of people. [via ScriptingNews]

I can also picture my weblog buddies Suman and Erehwon reading this and daydreaming about their big day. I sincerely hope the day comes for both of you!

By the way, it's been incredibly hectic for me since my last post here. If I can manage, I'll add some notes here about the past few weeks a bit later. Feels like it's been a lot longer than a few weeks. 

Tuesday, June 22, 2004

Where do we go from here?

[added July 9]

"Most of the major key judgments" in an October 2002 National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq's illicit weapons were "either overstated, or were not supported by, the underlying intelligence reporting," the committee report said. "A series of failures, particularly in analytic trade craft, led to the mischaracterization of intelligence." [NYTimes] 

Monday, June 21, 2004

Space Shot

Wish I could have gone down to Mojave to see this today. Scaled Composites (Burt Rutan the designer and Paul Allen the financier) launched their SpaceShipOne aircraft into the edge of space with a single pilot and made it back. Congratulations to everyone on the team. Cool!

Friday, June 18, 2004

New Choir

My wife's choir just had its Spring-Summer concert; two performances on June 5th and 6th. Got pretty hectic near the concert so I didn't get to do my usual pre-concert post. (Not that anybody comes to the concert based on my posts here...)

The performances went very well. You can read more about the choir and you can listen to some of the pieces from the concert. The theme of this concert was For the beauty of the earth. Not too much beauty in the news these days. Hope you find the music soothing.

Drop us a note here or at the New Choir site if you like the music. It will mean a lot to my wife.

My son graduated from Kindergarten last week. My wife went. It never ceases to amaze us how big a deal the other parents make about a Kindergarten graduation. I didn't go to Kindergarten so I always have a biased view of Kindergarten as a glorified day care center. Probably why I didn't make it to any of the Kindergarten graduations for my three kids.

Well... out of the 15 graduations (that should be it unless some of the kids go to grad school) I've missed three so far. Will have to plan better for the other ones. Can't use the "didn't go to Kindergarten" excuse anymore.

Tuesday, June 15, 2004

Yahoo!

Yahoo just upgraded its e-mail services. The free accounts now get 100MB of storage with 10MB attachments and their premium accounts get 2GB of storage. I'm quite happy with my free 100MBs.

UPDATE: Funny coincidence. A little bit after I posted this, I received an invitation for a Gmail account.

Sunday, May 23, 2004

Mother's Day

  

For Mother's day, my wife had these pictures framed and sent them to my parents in New York. Apparently, it made their whole day. My mom was very, very happy. Pictures are better than roses.