Our first Texas game

Laura’s boss gave us tickets to see Texas versus Kansas State today. It’s the first time we’ve gone to a game (the student ticket purchase system has always seemed very complicated to me, so I haven’t tried to get tickets before.) It was a pretty interesting experience.

Commas please

I hate that I can’t put commas in my Lisp numbers.
It’s really difficult to distinguish:
1400000000 versus 14000000000
But commas make this so much easier:
1,400,000,000 versus 14,000,000,000
I guess different locales write their numbers differently, e.g., apparently in French they write 11.222,33 or 11 222,33 instead of 11,222.33. But every programming language I’ve used already interprets periods [...]

A new cat toy

I built Echo a new tip for her wand toy on Sunday while watching Tennessee defeat Jacksonville. I call it a bee even though it doesn’t really look like one.
It’s pretty easy (and cheap) to build a sturdy wand toy. Months ago, I took a reasonably thick wooden dowel from Hobby Lobby [...]

Written proposal finished

I met with J yesterday and he is now happy with my proposal.  Here is the final draft in case anyone is interested in reading it.
Web version. (PDF; 305 KB)
Print version. (PDF; 305 KB)
I guess I get to start advancing to candidacy now.  The oral proposal will probably be in the middle of October, if [...]

Can’t stop the signal

Ever since the Beast broke off one of our old antenna’s bunny ears, we’ve known that cats and antennas are not a wonderful combination. Our reception had become frustratingly bad, so we headed to Fry’s to pick up a new bunny-ears antenna. We grabbed which featured a built-in amplifier and a more solid-looking, [...]

Living with a killer

Yesterday morning, around 7am, Laura woke me up abruptly. “Jared, you have to wake up. She has something; I think it’s a gecko!” Sure enough, Echo had an approximately 4-inch gecko was pinned and in terror. Emboldened by an oven mitt, I pushed her away and scooped it up. It [...]