Woodpress

I took a series of photos with my son and his identical twin. Here are a few.

It’s story time.

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.

This piece of wood once stood where there is now a sign in front of the office building where I work. Originally, it just said “Sign” which I guess was a warning of what was to come, so nobody would be too surprised. After a while though, my friend Thom decided someone needed to follow through and made his contribution.

At my last job, I made some new friends who play a game (usually over lunch) they call Ban Chi (or Banqi). It’s played with a Chinese chess set (on half the board) starting with the pieces face down. A typical game takes around 15 minutes.

They began playing Ban Chi after they got good enough at Chinese Chess (AKA Xiangqi) that games were taking multiple hours.

A couple of these people (Thom and Brian) work with me at my current job, and we still play Ban Chi.

Once in a while someone new will express interest in learning the game. This happened recently at a company lunch, so Thom printed out a chart of the pieces. We work with many clever people, and one of our co-workers (Shaun, I think) suggested that it might be useful to combine that chart with the playing board. So I did:

Sometimes I like to make logos for which I have no practical use. Here’s one I made for myself. It’s my initials (WAT). The “IT” part isn’t really deliberate, but as a software engineer, I work in “Information Technology”, so I guess that works. This is just a rough concept. Maybe eventually I’ll refine it.

A few weeks ago we took our kids to the Hogle Zoo, where my seven-year-old son learned to wrangle metal rhinos.

About the time we got to the hot and stinky reptile exhibit, we decided to split up and I got to explore the zoo one-on-one with my son.

In addition to the regular attractions, we discovered thousands of tiny caterpillars climbing all over things.

We probably spent more time watching them than we spent looking at official exhibits.

While watching caterpillars, people passing by would occasionally see a caterpillar hanging from a silk strand (seeming to float in mid-air), but they didn’t seem to notice the hundreds of caterpillars on the fence. At one point, some kids noticed the floating caterpillar, yanked it down, and stomped on it. I yelled “hey!” and they scurried off without looking back. I’m not sure they even knew the “hey” was directed at them. My son and I expressed our disapproval to each other, but didn’t dwell on it long.

My son managed to coax a caterpillar onto his finger splint. (He slammed his finger in the bathroom door the night before. It wasn’t serious, and it’s fine now.)

I went for a walk a few days ago and took some pictures of rusty farm equipment near the office where I work.

I never realized how alike Albert Einstein and Paul Reubens looked until I saw the cover of this book:

Check it out: