Watt's Up Musings of an original geek

So don’t try phoning home because I’m not there. I’m at Matthew’s this weekend. It’s parents weekend, and he’s being nice to me. Oh yeah, I’m paying for everything so that’s why he’s nice to me. Also I met and had dinner with Matthew’s girlfriend Beth and her parents, Becky and Tom.

I was at grocery store picking up a few things tonight. In the background music was playing. For as far back as I remember there has been music playing. I expect symphonic, big band, Benny Goodman, Sinatra, or other stuff. But tonight a Beatle’s song was playing. Now this struck me as different. The Beatles are now part of the day-to-day landscape of our lives. They, the Lovin’ Spoonful, the Herman’s Hermits, the Stones, and numerous others are now injected into our lifes in these subtle ways. The rock-and-roll revolution is now common place. And it unites my generation with my children’s and separates me from my parent’s generation.

Spent most of the weekend doing taxes. It wasn’t feeding the program all the numbers that gets me so involved, it’s the sale of stock. It seems that last year I sold more stock that I expected and it calculating the basis that is the most time consuming thing. Hopefully I did it right, but in any case I tried. Well not to worry, it’s over now. I’ve submitted it electronically to the IRS, so it’s up to them now.

The house is real quiet. It’s just me and my thoughts.

For the past week Katie has been home on spring break. We did a few things together, and she slept a lot, because she arrived home kinda sick. The past two days Matthew was home too so we had 2/3 of our bunch. Yesterday we saw “Bride and Prejudice” which was cute. Today we played Scrabble and Hearts while watching several DVDs. A good time was had by all. Tomorrow they both leave and then Tuesday Kathy heads to New York for three weeks, so it’s gonna get real quiet around here real soon.

During a design discussion of parsing that we needed to do, I got the idea that we should create two parsers, that is, a set of cascading parsers. One parser that reads from another parser that reads from the input file. The former is an expression parser and the latter parser is preprocessing parser. This requires that the latter parser appears to the former one as a stream of characters. After an hour of protoyping, a co-worker and I had developed a sample. It was neat and it was good.

Some of the work I’m doing is to migrate capability that is currently written in C/C++ over to Java. To insure that we’re doing it right we need to exercise the C/C++ code. However this code is a very large system so we need to pare it down to just a subset. Yesterday a co-worker and I started cutting out a piece of the C/C++ system. This required us to copy function by function into a new source file while minimizing the number of tenticles or strings of references to the overall system. We started in the afternoon, then took a break for dinner. We were going to continue on Monday, but I was stoked and kept working on it until midnight. This morning I woke, did my exercise (13 mile long run for class), and then went back to it. Now it compiles and runs and is only about 3000 lines of a 150,000 lines system. This should help my co-worker develop the equivalent subset in Java. The source can be used to understand how the capability is implemented, and the executable can be used for comparison during testing. Finally I need to understand it to be able to write a design document on what we’re planning to do.

I woke early. The weather was great – sunny with a light breeze. Our front oak tree doesn’t drop leaves in the fall instead it drops leaves, newly grown last year, in the spring. So I had to rake our little front lawn, and then made a pass with the leaf blower. Three thirty-gallon bags later I was done with that job. Next Matthew, who came home yesterday to say goodbye to Dylan who is moving to Kentucky, left for San Antonio to be with Beth. Then I mowed the front lawn. Next I had to remove one stump of the front shrubs we removed last fall. Then I planted new shrubs to replace them. After an early lunch I went to see the movie “Robots”, which was ok, but not great. Next I drove down to Zilker Park because today was the yearly kite flying day. There were thousands of people and hundreds of kites sailing in the breeze. After an hour I returned home and went to Goodwill to drop off old clothes of mine – getting rid of stuff. On the way home I went shopping. Whew! I’m tired and need to get off my feet.

Kathy and I went to the Melting Pot restaurant. It’s a fondue place and it’s was very good. We were joined by Debbie, and Janet from Kathy’s work, and Jim, Janet’s husband. Dinner took two hours, but everything was fresh and delicious. I would recommend it.

In the article “Are Bloggers Journalists?”. It mentions the phrase “Web diarists, aka bloggers”. Now that’s a new one on me. I’m a web diarist.