Family Gathering

We had a great family gathering with mom and my dad's side, Bill Lightfoot cruising through in his Aztek, having driven across continent in his friend's jeep recently.

I explained about open source again, our operating philosophy. Private silos suck down libraries, make them better, spit them back. We're not trying to "put each other out of business". If you're an oil company, like ConocoPhillips, you need a thriving restaurant business like Bridgeport's, for times off rig.

I've been mixing it up with the math teachers again. On the one hand, you have the obliviously retarded NCTM, a disgrace and laughing stock. On the other, the MAA, not much better, though Keith Devlin has a good column.

Fortunately, we have the IEEE and ACM, not to mention the ACC (American College of Cardiology), all way more steeped in the real needs of civilization and therefore more in a position to steer.

We'll not be expecting the NCTM to ever recover its position of status, as a 1900s bandwagoneer. That's a lost cause I think. Don't pick losers, if planning to win, is my motto.

I've started salivating over the latest Ubuntu Dells, even though the sale prices come courtesy of Vista (I'll pay extra to not have that). Tara wisely counsels just replacing the monitor, as KTU3 running WinXP is a fine device (HP Pavilion), not its fault the nVidia blew, and the Toshiba Satellite (also XP), though it has a loud fan, is perfectly acceptable in for CSN work.

Given I just found the VFP9 disk (thank you Glenn!), I'm back in the money on that score as well.

Here's a remix Tara and I both like (Buffy stakes creepy Twilight guy).