We forgot to buy candy, and sensing that handing out organic produce wouldn’t be a good idea, we turned off the lights in the front of the house and pretended not to hear the doorbell (which only rang twice).

Hrothgar, Son of Macintosh, who killed Bjortguaard in Sochnadale in Norway over Cudreed, daughter of Thorkel Long, the son of Kettle-Trout, the half son of Harviyoun Half-troll, father of Ingbare the Brave, who with Isenbert of Gottenberg the daughter of Hangbard the Fierce…

Ahem. Perhaps there is an end to the saga after all.

Madam X went down fighting at the Apple Store, resisting repairs and killing two Cinema Displays in the process. The powers that be were not amused; she’s off to the scrapheap, and will be replaced by another (faster and preferably non-evil) computer on Apple’s tab in a few days.

There is a real possibility that the Madam worked her poison on my innocent display. This will be dealt with in good time. For now, the prospect of a trouble-free computer happily humming in the corner is pleasing enough. It’s a man’s life in hardware!

I’m playing everyone’s favorite game, “how many hours of work can you cram into a week?” It is not helping my mood. Varia is earning an infinite number of brownie points (not that she needs more) by taking good care of me, making sure I am fed and rested, and putting up with a very cranky Jeffrey.

Entertaining moments included the discovery of the Dresden Dolls, an odd little duo which classifies itself as “Brechtian Punk Caberet,” and a number of failed attempts to extemporize jokes featuring God, Jesus, and Buddha in various locales.

And the leaves are changing color.

It is very easy to get hung up on the past or the future. On days like today, where the future begins to blur into a mass of generally uninteresting weeks, I tend to retreat back into some of the more memorable events of the past. Not even 30 and I’m turning into Nostalgia Man™, superhero of the Olde Days. Just the thing to make things even more bleak.

Though I tend to do this, I didn’t today. I don’t know why, but today was more real, more vibrant than usual; it was not the contents of the day, but the way in which I went through it.

If I had to make a conjecture as to why , it would run something like: it’s not the nature of the activity that counts so much as the zeal put into the activity. I’m not talking frothy-mouthed glazed-eyed zeal, but rather the conviction that what one is doing counts somehow, someway. That this moment, this one right now (and this one!), matters. For some reason, this happened today, and most likely won’t tomorrow.

Ten years ago I would have insinuated that I’d discovered a secret, had it all figured out somehow, and then I’d affect a smug grin. However, if I’ve learned one thing, it’s that I am generally wrong whenever I think I’ve figured something out. Systems that promise the lure of the complete solution never deliver.

Philosophy has become more of a practical matter than it used to be. I mark this as an improvement.

After watching the three Indiana Jones movies for the first time in years, I am left pondering death traps.

It seems that ancient civilizations had incredible mechanical engineers. They could build complex and intricate death traps, apparently maintenance-free death traps that would last for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Collapsing temples, rolling boulders, pressurized blowgun tripwires, razor sharp blades. Nothing was too devious or lethal for these unsung geniuses, and I salute them.

Now I am curious as to the origins and development of the death trap as a concept. Clearly, somewhere in our collective social psyche there the desire for chambers full of poisonous snakes, flame spurts, and weighted pendulum-scythes. When did our craving for doom temples begin? Does the Minotaur’s labyrinth count as a death trap, or is it a proto-death trap? When was the first instance of the room with the collapsing ceiling/walls (spikes optional) in fiction? Did any of these things actually exist in real life?

Save me, Joseph Campbell. You’re my only hope.

Daylight savings has kicked in, which is good and bad. It’s easier to get up earlier, as the light coincides with my normal rising time, but it is dark before 5. Ah, the joys of Winter.

Energy levels have, unfortunately, been quite low at Camp Boston. The echos of illness linger well past their welcome. Measures are being taken, including vitamins, juice, and enough garlic to make a battalion of Vampires (at the very least) woozy.

Lest anyone think I spent the entirety weekend installing operating systems (O, Glorious OS X!), other things did go on, including the reading of Terry Pratchett’s latest, Monstrous Regiment. I don’t know how he does it, but his recent books have been multi-layered, complex, and socially relevant, while at the same time being amiable humorous. His writing has grown stronger and deeper, and I am eager to see what he will do next.

Right. So there we were, Fall of ‘03. The lines! Man, I tell you, I could tell you about the line, but you weren’t there; you had to have been there to really know. The place was crawling. Laptops everywhere.

They had us line up. There we were, hungry, tired and afraid, waiting for 8pm, when we’d rush in those doors, into God-knows-what. And we did, we charged; almost trampled a poor slob sitting on the floor checking his e-mail. Get in, get out. That was the plan.

All I can say is I’m lucky to be here, writing this. I don’t know what happened to the Joe in front of me; I lost him in the rush. I hope to God he got his copy of Panther, and got it installed, but it was every nerd for himself.

As for me, I made it out, though I don’t know how much of me is left. Those glowing Apples still haunt my sleep, probably always will. But I made it out — I’ve got my dog tags to prove it.

10.3. Never forget.

I am presently sitting on the floor at the mall in a queue. We are waiting to get into the Apple Store for the OS X 10.3 release party; there is quite a line behind us. Many, many people (such as myself) have their Apple laptops and are availing themselves of the wireless connection to get online and make posts about how they are in line.

Varia is indifferent and cranky, and threatening to answer the next mall shopper who asks us what we are waiting in line for with “your mom.” I still am unsure whether to be proud or ashamed.

I’m sick today. What exactly I’m sick of hasn’t been determined, but I haven’t felt entirely well in weeks, and felt it was worth a day of Paid Time Off to recover. A regimen of rest and cleaning the kitchen has done some good, and though I’m still physically tired my mental state has improved somewhat.

While deep thinking isn’t on the plate for today, I can’t help but contemplate issues raised by the excellent Chinese film Ying xiong (Hero), which we saw last night, in particular the subjective nature of truth. It is not easy to divide the world into heroes and villains, as a change in perspective can easily bend roles, if not reverse them.

Cleaning out the refrigerator is much more compelling when these things are in one’s head.

The weekly box of organic produce arrived an hour ago. This has become our culinary puzzle, as the contents of the box will dictate the menu for the coming week. The vast number of apples, pears and plums guarantees a Saturday bakefest, in which the oven will poetically burn, ne’er to be quenchéd, and a garden salad and califlour-something-or-other are also on the menu. I’m also going to attempt ginger tea.

Tonight I am going to escort Madam X, Power Mac of the sagas, to the Apple Store one more time, where various and sundry parts (including CPUs) will be replaced and re-replaced. Since we’re already going to be there, my lovely wife and I will sup and then attend the release party for Mac OS X 10.3. Yes, the only event on my social calendar for the week is a party celebrating the point release of an operating system. I don’t know whether to be ashamed or proud.

I believe that I am personally putting the child of whoever owns Susan’s Deli of Course (in all likelihood not Susan, what with these topsy-turvy times) through college.

We had the first snowfall of the season this morning, which has since turned into icy rain. Luckily for me, it’s just the sort of day designed for staying inside and making hundreds of small decisions about application design. This is not entirely captivating work, and as such my train of thought has derailed and sidetracked itself onto diverse and sundry paths, including but not limited to:

a) Expressing eagerness to continue working through the British History text; Charles I has a lot more reigning to do before he [insert decapitation pun here].

b) Marveling at the folks who took the time to translate “Baby Got Back” into both Greek and Latin. I’m especially fond of the translation of Sir Mixalot’s name as τοῦ Πόλλύ Μιγνύοντος, ὁ ἱππεύς, “The Much-Mixing One, The Equestrian.” My Greek class enjoyed translating corporate jingles into Ancient Greek, but this is quite ambitious and my hat is off.

On the subway last week Varia and I saw an advertisement for a game; it was a clever advertisement as it had a logic puzzle on it, and as such it kept us amused until we got off the train.

There were 12 objects, each of which had 4 different characteristics (shape, color, number, and opacity), each characteristic having three states (red, blue, green, etc.). The game itself was to find the number of sets of three that met a particular condition; for every object, the characteristics either had to be all similar or all different, but if two shared a trait and the third did not, the set was rejected.

For some reason this got my mind racing, and I started to devise a way to solve this problem. As much fun as it was to pick three and check them, it wasn’t going to give me a definitive answer. What I wanted was a way to solve this problem for good.

Superb. Well, how many groups of 3 can one make from 12 objects? This belongs to a subset of discrete mathematics called counting, something I enjoyed very muc and had mostly forgotten. I did remember where to go, so a trip to my algorithms book later I was armed with the following equation:

n is the number of objects available, and k is the number of objects that make up a group. Turns out that there are 220 ways to make up groups of 3 with 12 objects. So now all I had to do was write out all of the possibilities.

Doing this by hand is a drag; it’s like making a list of all the possible combo meals at a Chinese restaurant, the kind of place where one can choose any 3 entrees on the list. So instead of giving in to monotony, I wrote a program to do it. Doing it with fixed variables of 12 and 3 was pretty easy, but not elegant, so I ended up writing a script to do it for any value of n and k, which I could check using the above equation, to ensure I got them all. A second script looked at each of these and gave it a Caesarian thumbs up or thumbs down.

This might seem like a lot of work to check the answer of an ad (the answer I came up with was the same as was printed in small letters on the ad), but it was very enjoyable. In my job as a humble applications programmer I don’t use math in any real capacity, and the algorithms are generally nothing complex. Not that this was complicated, but it was enough to stretch my mind and give it a walk around the park.

The results have been strange; I’ve been wondering just how many combo platter permutations there are, and thinking of creating a rules-based system to select a multiple-topping pizza.

Had I been working for my old company, I likely would be home, wrapped in bed with a cup of tea; however, our new company, in their infinite wisdom, has a plan in place called Paid Time Off. Sick days and vacation days come out of the same pool. I don’t have very much by way of vacation, and so I’m here, propped up and problem-solving at about one-tenth my normal rate.

As far as illnesses go, this is not a bad one. I’m not achy, not in great pain. All it really comes down to is a slightly sore throat and an inability to think straight.

Man is the only animal that laughs and weeps;
for he is the only animal that is struck with the difference
between what things are and what they ought to be.

— William Hazlitt, Lectures on the English Comic Writers

I tend to feel guilty when I use a bon mot from the preface of a book; it strikes me as cheating, as someone has already done the work of finding and framing. I, agreeing with the author’s good taste, pass it on and end up looking more erudite than I already am. As I doubt that there will be a run on A History of Britain, Volume II and as such the chances of this quotation being seen in the field, as it were, are rather low, I will swallow my guilt and present it to you, giving all due credit to Simon Schama (and of course, William Hazlitt).

The history of 17th century Britain itself might be nasty and brutish, but it is not short, and will take me some time to work through. It will be a joyous labor, as it looks delightful.

The theme for October seems to be the relation of fact and fancy, and Hazlitt’s quote speaks well to that. The gap between what is and what ought to be expands and contracts; some days it can be spanned by another cup of coffee and other days I cannot even see the far horizon. Usually I am content, sometimes I weep, and sometimes I laugh, but most of all I start to long for a change.

After five solid days of intensive labor, Sunday has never felt so good. Each minute is made that much more precious by the very nature of it being a minute I am not concerned with the niggling details of voice application frameworks.

Do not get the impression that I have been idle. Not working has given me the chance to concentrate on the much more engaging task of applying myself to Quicksilver, which I have now finished. While I have a lot to say about the novel, it can wait a few weeks more until a few others get a chance to finish it. After 900 pages, I was surprised to find myself clamoring for more. As it stands I’ll have a few seasons to cleanse my palate before the next volume of the Baroque Cycle is released. Then we shall see if Frodo manages to throw the ring into Mount Doom.

I shall invest the rest of day in various household tasks including dishwashing, sweeping, mopping, &tc.