He was interested in what we were playing, so we explained the game to him. I recently bought 12 sets online from Game Center Online and have been selling them at cost (about $6 after shipping), so when he asked where he could pick up a set, we decided to give him the set we were playing with.

We gave Jeff the URL for the Wikipedia article and Woodpress so he can get detailed instructions and print his own board if the one we had with us wears out.

Now that I’m posting a link to where I bought the sets, Jeff will also know where to get additional sets. (Hi, Jeff.)

Once upon a time in high school, I had a really cool computer science teacher named Clarence Whetten.

Our computer lab consisted of a Unix system with 4 Meg of RAM and about 30 dumb terminals. As I understand it, Mr. Whetten approached a local company (ICON, where I later worked as an intern briefly) and convinced them to donate the system.

At the same time, people in the nearest high school were using Apple ][ computers and having a much less interesting (in my opinion) experience.

Because we were all using the same computer, we could interact with other users in very cool (and not always desirable) ways. A mischevious user could write to other users’ terminals. As I learned, a mischevious user who was not currently enrolled in a computer science class could lose his account that way. A single student could hog more than her share of CPU or RAM, and other users would check the process list and say “hey, cut that out!”

Among other things, the environment emphasized the importance of writing efficient code.

A little while after school ended (with a reasonable time buffer to allow students to stay after and get a little extra work done), a scheduled “cron” job would turn on public access to games.

When a student demonstrated trustworthiness and skill (or something), Clarence could be convinced to grant “root” access, allowing that user to perform administrative tasks (and occasional mischief such as turning on games when they weren’t supposed to be on). Eventually, I became one of those privileged users.

One day a fellow student was pestering me to turn on games, and I finally got sick of it, so I decided to play a trick on him. I called him over, typed a command to REMOVE games, then took the terminal offline, pressed enter, then put the terminal back online, quickly erased the command, and hit enter again.

He freaked out. I thought it was pretty funny, but after he told everyone in the room, I had to I reveal my trick. One of the other students quickly double-checked and said “no, they really are gone!” I checked too, and sure enough… they were! Apparently I had blown the trick somehow. CRAP!

I did not earn popularity points that day, but I probably learned a valuable lesson. I wonder what it was.

I wasn’t actually the one who ended up recompiling and reinstalling the games. That was a friend of mine. From time to time, he reminds me about the time I removed all the games. He did it recently, so I thought I’d write the story.

Thom went to a game store and bought a pound of dice (I had no idea they sold them by the pound). He brought them to lunch and shared. I found many dice I really liked. There were only enough for one complete set of platonic solids for each of us, though. This is the set I chose:

I find it interesting that with the pieces in ascending order (by number of adjacent faces) with ascending numbers on top oriented so they can be read right-side-up from the front, the numbers in front are in descending order, ending on the right with a vertex representing zero. I suspect that’s more than coincidence.

We had a mini-harvest, and ate it.

Then we went back to work.

The End

Like some insects and arachnids I’ve worked with, Matt was a very cooperative model. Unlike an insect, he takes requests for poses. (Matt is unlike an insect in several other ways, too.)

Here are another couple pictures of Matt from above.

This is the area where the next few photos were taken:

Some closer photos of the falling water:

Matt found a piece of fabric that someone had apparently left behind. It smelled like suntan lotion, and made a fabulous cape… so naturally he played superhero.

Somehow a couple ants got on the hat Matt was borrowing from my wife. I think they wanted their pictures taken. I only rewarded one of them.

Here’s Matt walking away from me:

We visited a pond with an incredible amount of life in it. I sat in one corner and took pictures of various little critters that showed up while Matt explored the area. Eventually he came back and directed the critters to help me get better photos.

This bug swims upside down under the water. Maybe it thinks the air is the ground, and the water is the atmosphere. I have decided to refer to this confused insect as “6nq umop apisdn”.

I don’t think I’ve ever seen one of these squiddy looking bug critters before. I haven’t tried yet to look it up.

This spider was swimming on top of the water. I took some video of that, but I haven’t watched it yet.

There were a few of these little guys moving around.

Here’s the same guy after crawling out of the water and onto the concrete.

Again, the same guy on the concrete. About the time I took the picture below, Matt made a comment about this being pretty much the way life evolved.

In this picture you can also see some odd little greenish blobbies. Those things were everywhere; floating on top of the water, sitting on the bottom, etc. You can see them in a couple other pictures too. I’m not sure what they are, but I suspect they’re eggs.

We also found a wasp nest. I suspect it had been poisoned and knocked down. After I took this picture, Matt turned over the nest with his foot (I stood a safe distance away) and a couple live wasps came out.

When the wasps came out of the nest, one flew away, and one writhed around in the grass. The writhing wasp is the reason for me thinking they may have been poisoned. Matt suggested that maybe it was a baby and its wings weren’t developed enough for it to fly yet. Here’s a picture of the writhing wasp.

A lock.

Here’s Matt wearing his cape on his head on the walk home.

There are many other pictures from that walk, but this is plenty for now. At the end of the walk, my wife and youngest child came to meet us, then we all went out to eat.