I may not have been blogging it but I’ve been doing some reading. I’m
not sure what to make of this list:
- Lee Parks’ Total Control. Readable
with nice glossy pictures. I didn’t learn anything particularly new
but I will use the drill diagrams in my next parking lot practice.
- David S. Touretzkys Common Lisp: A Gentle Introduction to Symbolic
Computation. Possibly the best $2.75 I’ve
spent on a programming textbook. Genuinely entertaining for an
introductory text though the LISP dialect is outdated and I was
sometimes frustrated piecing it together on a modern implementation. I
may throw a current edition to my son when he’s old enough.
- Eugene Charniak’s Introduction to Artificial
Intelligence. I don’t have an interest in
A.I. but it has a LISP orientation and presents two very good chapters
on Parsing and Searching. For $2.25, I couldn’t pass it by.
- Guy L. Steele’s Common Lisp: The Language.
Actually, that link is to the reference I should have bought. I mistakenly picked up the 1984 edition. Fortunately, it was only $2.80 and electronic versions of CLtL2 are in the CMU AI Repository.
Nathan is developing fast. He can roll over from both belly and back and sit up if someone seats him. He can inch along by digging in his toes and pushing off in this commando crawl sort of maneuver. He can hold his pacifier and get it into his mouth without help. He will entertain himself for several minutes just by putting a hand down to prop himself up and playing with his toes with the other hand. Babies are amazingly fast learners.
Except he doesn’t show any of that when he’s put down for the night after his bath and feeding. He was sleeping through most of the night but has recently taken to acting like a newborn: repeated waking and snacking, wailing when he can’t find the pacifier and howling as he pretends he can’t roll over. It’s as if he’ll try anything to get someone over to his crib and won’t quiet until he’s picked up. My Mom pointed out that we should break him of this novel new trick of his before it becomes a habit, but asked that we wait until after we get back home from visiting so we don’t keep her up.
So this weekend we warned the neighbors and got out the earplugs. So far, so good on the modified Ferber method. He’s not happy about it but he does get himself back to sleep (or cry himself out) in a few tens of minutes.
I’ve decided that the failure of the USENIX and SAGE boards to spin off SAGE, the systems administrators guild, is done and over except for the acrimonious hashing and rehashing of it in email. I’ll extend my USENIX membership but SAGE is done.
I’ve joined the newly created LOPSA, the League of Professional Systems Administrators, as a token of support for the effort to pick up where SAGE left off.
Here are some numbers for New York City:
- According to the NYC Department of Planning and the U.S. Census, there are 8,168,338 people in the Big Apple.
- The 2000 U.S. Census demographics show that about 89% of those people were over age 18, which means that there should be roughly 7 million potential voters.
- The Board of Elections reported in March there were only 3,903,852 registered voters across the five boroughs.
- On Wednesday, 1.2 million people voted.
The next time you hear someone grousing about or praising the city government you can feel comfortable that the odds are better than 3-1 that they didn’t have anything to do with it.
