Building an Echo run

Over the last couple of weekends I put together an “Echo run” high up in the office.

More pictures of this, and a few other things, are up on Album 12.

Not my best moment

[Jared, to Lisp]: (setq *print-base* 16)
[Lisp]: 10
[Jared]: “Ten?! I just set it to 16.”
[Sol]: “Yeah, that’s what 16 looks like now.”
[Jared]: “Oh. Right.”

It’s a girl!

We went to the hospital this afternoon for an ultrasound, and we’re going to have a daughter! She appears to be in good shape with the right amount of heads, hearts, arms, legs, and so forth. And she was very active while we watched, kicking and stretching and making the doctor work to keep up. When we were finished, they burned us a CD with the pictures, which have made their way into a new Picasa album.

Summer’s here

This week was pretty busy. I started my internship at Centaur, and we bought another car so I can get there.

New house pictures

There aren’t a lot, but here they are:

• Album 11

I’ll probably expand this album as we do some more work.

Political odds and ends

On Obama’s Pastor. I watched him shout “God damn America, that’s in the Bible” over and over again on a lot of different shows, but I don’t think I saw anyone explain what he was talking about; the focus of all the coverage was on how severely this would damage Obama. Well, I found his sermons on Youtube and it turns out they actually aren’t the insane ramblings of an anti-American lunatic.

The first sermon [youtube, 10 minute clip] seems to have been given right after the 9/11 attacks. It’s where the “chickens coming home to roost” line comes from. Here’s a quick summary of his message:

What should our response to September 11 be? Remember Psalm 137, which gives us a dramatic warning against the cycle of vengeance.

But first, an aside.  A US ambassador recently pointed out that our own country has not shied away from terrorist acts. He asked, should we really be surprised that violence was committed against us, considering our own terrorism against Native Americans and slaves; our own terrorism in Grenada, Panama, Iraq, and Sudan; our own terrorism with nuclear weapons against the civilians in Japan; and our continued support for Israel’s terrorism against the Palestinians? End of aside.

With this in mind, what should our response be to this horrible, shocking act of terrorism? It should be three things. First, this is a time for reflection and self-examination. {{ The clip abruptly ends, so I don’t know what Second and Third would be. }}

I’m not sure when the second sermon [youtube, 7 minutes] was given. It’s where the “God damn America” line comes:

Governments change for good and for bad, but God does not change. And Governments throughout history have failed. {{ Exactly how they have failed is not apparent, but it seems like he’s saying, have failed to live up to God’s standards. }}

Our government failed when it put Indians on reservations, when it put Japanese citizens into internment camps, when it condoned slavery and segregation. And it fails today when it builds bigger prisons, passes three-strikes laws, etc. God Damn America for acting like she is God and she is supreme and for failing the vast majority of her Black citizens.

So basically, he just wants us to stop stomping on the rest of the world and take care of our own citizens.

I’d watched Obama’s “major speech” [youtube, 38 minutes] about the comments and about race in general before I saw the sermons. At the time, I thought it was a good speech — pretty standard for him, showing his ability to understand and explain yet another complicated topic. But after hearing Wright’s sermons in context, I’m pretty disappointed in the way that he distanced himself from the remarks instead of defending them. Bleh.

On “Clinton should drop out.” Obama’s lead in the popular vote is only 2.7%, and there are many states left to go. Events can occur and polls can be unreliable (e.g., New Hampshire), so maybe Clinton has a chance to overcome this lead. Even if she doesn’t manage to pull it out in the end, she certainly has every right to try.

Of course, I thought it was pretty absurd for Democrats to go after Nader for “stealing votes” from Al Gore in 2000, and this feels very similar somehow.

We’re pregnant!

Well, that was fast

We’re very happy, even if none of you seem to be the least bit surprised!

This is all still very early so we won’t know if it’s a boy or a girl anytime soon. A very preliminary guess would put the due date around Thanksgiving.

Andrew suggested that if we have twins they should be named car and cdr, which is perhaps the best idea ever. For my part, I’m just hoping to do better than Sam’s duck.

Aiksaurus-GTK on Win32

Now I’ve seen it all. Some particularly misguided soul got the GTK version of Aiksaurus working on Cygwin.

More countertops!

They finished the counters today — new pictures up on Album 10.

Virtual desktops on windows

This VirtuaWin program seems to be a pretty reasonable virtual-desktop manager for Windows.  This should be quite helpful.