The Changelog

This weekend, Terah and I drove up to Nebraska to visit Cliff and Marilyn. We have never met them before, or even talked to them on the phone. We just know them from blogs -- Marty (Cliff's nephew) introduced us to them. We really had a blast -- quite a fun weekend, and we met lots of interesting Morrows.

I supose there's always something unexpected that happens when you visit people you've never met. With this visit, it was singing in a Baptist choir. Terah said, "Well, we've never even been to a Baptist service in English, but sure, sounds like fun!" I think it took Cliff about 2 seconds to decide we should both sing in the choir once he realized we're in our church choir back in Kansas. I suppose that's risk you run when you go and visit a choir director. Off course it's all fun with Cliff. We really enjoyed it, and Cliff & Marilyn's daughter did a fantastic job on the piano.

When we first arrived at Cliff & Marilyn's place, the first thing Terah noticed was that Marilyn had set out a giant Hershey's kiss and a Dr. Pepper for her! This was great. Terah's still talking about it, and is very impressed with a solid piece of chocolate that large.

At dinner on Saturday, I think Cliff and Terah were having a bit of a competition to see who could have the driest sense of humor and the most sarcasm. Maybe it was just a little Kansas bias, but I think Terah gave him quite the run for his money, and even edged him out by a bit.

Terah was also something of a celebrity around the Morrows, in one way anyway. It seems that, one way or another, almost everyone had heard about her carefully-planned underwear rotation scheme. And had gotten quite a good chuckle about it -- as well they should.

Cliff asked us to bring some photos of our home and family with us. I think he might be regretting that now. I downloaded as many as I could fit onto a laptop -- about 3000 -- to give us plenty to look at. Of course, we didn't look at 3000 photos, but you just never know what might come up. Cliff and Marilyn did a wonderful job of not falling asleep anyway.

We also got to see their photos, and they have some spectacular ones. Marilyn enjoys stereo photography and has some incredible stereo photos. I especially enjoyed the pictures of Germany.

Marty's parents were also around this weekend and were full of interesting stories. His mom makes a wonderful cheese spread. I think I need to have a putty knife to spread it on nice and thick. It's the sort of cheese spread that's good enough to layer on about twice as thick as the cracker. The cracker is just sort of a cheese delivery device.

I kept hearing that Marty had told the Morrows all about me. They all claimed that Marty said only good things about me. But we all know how the Morrows like to tell stories. So I made sure to get a few about Marty before we left, just in case. Don't worry, they're all good, Marty.

After church Sunday, there was a carry-in meal. We knew about this in advance, and Terah brought some of her famous chocolate-cherry cookies along from Kansas. Cliff later admitted to stealing "no more than one" during the sermon. But he couldn't quite say it with a straight face. Terah's cookies were a hit, though -- it seemed that lots of people were trying to figure out who brought them. A few enterprising people pulled out the lid from the pan, but of course seeing Terah's name there didn't really help all that much. I think she promised recipes to about half a dozen people.

We went geocaching Sunday afternoon. Cliff, Marilyn, and their grandson came along. We found the Summit Lake #1 cache with their grandson -- it was his first time geocaching, and I think he enjoyed it.

Well, that was a long post. I'll probably remember more to write about later in the week, and stay tuned for photos!

Wow. Some Haskell hackers have started paying a small bit of attention to the Great Computer Language Shootout site, and the results are impressive.

Haskell now takes first place in the lines of code competition. In the CPU time competition, Haskell is also doing quite respectably: it beats out OCaml by a small margin, and defeats Java, C++, Python, Perl, Erlang, Ruby, Mono, Tcl, etc. by significant margins.

These links are all using the Shootout default weightings for individual tests.

The only downside to the Shootout is that the programs -- for all languages -- are not really idomatic and don't show off a language's natural beauty. Sounds like it's time to gather up some Haskell hackers to rally around the PLEAC effort as well.

It seems that lately my presence seems to remind people of stories of me as a child.

I heard a new one tonight from the person that was my Bible School teacher in 2nd or 3rd grade. Apparently, each day of Bible School, one child would bring in something for show and tell. There were toys, dolls, maybe a pet. When it was my turn, I brought in something I was very proud of: my adding machine.

She asked me if I remembered this. "Nope, but it sounds like something I would have done."

I told Terah this story. She said, "You probably just brought the adding machine because your parents didn't want to have to carry the whole computer to church."

I remind people of other stories too.

My mom likes to mention that, when I was maybe 2 years old, I wanted to sleep with a real light bulb instead of some stuffed animal. She was a bit concerned about the safety of that, and apparently was only able to convince me to stop when she found an eraser in the shape of a light bulb that I accepted as a substitute.

Mom also likes to talk about my birthday or Christmas requests at that age: a "good-quality vacuum cleaner" and 12 ceiling fans.

My uncle tells me of the time I had a conversation with a math professor, when I was maybe preschool or kindergarten age. I had no idea who he was, but apparently was quite proud that my new calculator had a square root key, and told him how important it was to have that on a calculator.

It's not really fair, though -- Terah doesn't call up lots of stories in people's memory. So I have to help out a bit. I mention her underwear rotation system, or this story:

Terah has always been a big fan of deserts, and especially ice cream. Apparently her parents had a lot of trouble when the ice cream truck came around -- Terah always really, really wanted lots of ice cream. They thought that if they started calling it the "yuck truck" that Terah might think it only had nasty food. Nope, didn't work. She just started getting excited about the yuck truck.

I also have no problem hiding gifts from Terah. She knows exactly where I keep them, but she's concerned that maybe that particular room can't keep out mice very well. So, to her, I keep gifts in the "rodent closet". Although she'd really like to snoop, she just can't bring herself to do it. Very handy as far as I'm concerned.

I wrote about our cat Tux a few days ago. One other picture we have sitting around is of Terah petting him when he was just a few days old:

Yesterday I had the frustrating experience of trying to configure a machine so I could use the internal soundcard while simultaneously recording sound from a USB iMic.

While ALSA appears to fully support this setup, I discovered quite a few annoyances about what should be trivial:

• There appear to be no GUI sound recording apps that support ALSA directly.


• KDE's artsd normally provides good ALSA support, but it provides neither a systemwide nor an app-specific way to select either the recording or the playback source with ALSA.


• Some apps appear to use Jack, but configuration of it is extraordinarily complex and it seems to die in subtle and odd ways from time to time.


• ecawave segfaults on start, every time.


• audacity doesn't even support anything other than OSS! (A shame from what's otherwise a great program)


• The mechanics of OSS support in ALSA are anything but clear. There is the aoss LD_PRELOAD wrapper, and then there is also a kernel module, which appears to be rather under-documented. For whatever reason, ALSA is managing only one PCM device under /dev, despite having two PCM cards in the system.

Now this is probably no worse than the situation in Windows, but it is certainly not where we should be, and isn't where MacOS X is either.

Note that most of these problems are with the apps not supporting the second audio source *at all*.

We live out in the country and both have allergies. But we both enjoy cats, and we've had one almost continuously since we moved to Kansas.

Our cats are outdoor cats. They always seem to enjoy roaming around the yard so much, it's hard for me to imagine keeping a cat indoors. I know plenty of cats are happy there, but it's not for us -- especially since we're both allergic to cats.

We've had Tux for about 2 of his 3 years. Tux is not a cat with your typical cat personality. Tux loves attention and loves to be petted. But he is also afraid of just about everything. Here are a few things that have caused Tux to be scared over the years. I promise I am not making any of these up:

• His own shadow


• Rustling leaves


• Terah getting a new hairstyle


• People carrying grocery bags


• Grocery bags sitting perfectly still on the ground


• Other cats, even if smaller than him


• The wind


• Terah wearing a dress


• Snow


• The lack of snow (it melted since he was outside the day before)

Tux's favorite activity is hunting. We often joke that if he can work up the courage to not be afraid of his prey, he'll do well. And he does -- even catches rabbits sometimes. Here's Tux starting his morning patrol:



We always knew he had a routine, but only found out last month that our neighbors would see him coming up the hedge row, just poking his head around to look at their yard, and then head back to us -- each morning. He also jumps down in our window well, and we can see the shadow of a tail wisping by the basement windows, each afternoon.

Tux gets half of our 4-car garage/shed at night. He enjoys going in there -- it's safe. (We put him in to keep him safe from the coyotes.)

But he has a routine that Terah and I must follow precisely if he is to go in. First, we're supposed to go outside and look for him. Then, no matter where he is -- even if he's right by the garage door -- we have to walk to the house with him, then back to the garage. He doesn't like to be carried, but likes to walk just ahead of us, ears pointed backwards to make sure we're following properly. Then he will stop just outside the garage door and wait for us to step over him and go in first (to make sure it's safe). Then he'll go in.



Tux has become quite the popular cat. Terah set him up with a very funny blog on Catster.com, and he was a featured cat on their site one weekend.

Here's one entry:

June 16th 2005 5:06 am

I just love messing with their heads. Last night I hid in some tall grass so that when they tried to put me in, they couldn't see me right away. Then, just when they were giving up on me, I bounded toward them. I have them trained so that when I jump up when running they ooohh and aaahh. What a hoot!

Then I grossed them out by eating my barf.

Today just before I left work, Terah called. Tux was hiding under our porch, wheezing terribly and hyperventilating. He wouldn't move at all. Which is odd, since he had been doing great the past few days. He even looked in at us watching TV a few times lately.

After I got home, we managed to convince him to walk to the garage. He seemed a little better.

We checked on him again at about 8:00, and he was doing pretty bad. We took him into the vet, and they decided that he had either a rare incurable viral disease, a hernia, or fluid in his chest cavity. His prognosis was not good. His lungs were functioning at only 1/8 capacity. We could attempt to treat him, but treatment would only likely save him if it was the hernia, and it would cost well over $1000.

So we made the hard decision to have him put to sleep. Although I've lived around animals most of my life, this was the first time we had this decision to make. Outdoor cats usually live good lives, but rarely live long enough to become afflicted by serious disease. Cars, dogs, or coyotes usually cause a sudden end for them.

As I was typing this up, I got the call that he was put to sleep. They determined that he had the viral disease, so I don't feel too bad about our choice.

We have quite a few fond memories of Tux, plus some very funny video of his first experience with snow. He certainly liked to be scratched:



Goodbye, Tux. We'll keep an eye on the neighbors for you.

I wrote yesterday that I'm looking for a nice microphone.

I decided to go mostly with the setup suggested by The Roadhouse:

• MXL 990 Condensor Mic ($50)


• Behringer eurorack UB802 Mixer/Preamp ($50)

After assorted accessories (mic stand, XLR cable, pop filter, etc.) I wound up spending $143 at Musician's Friend. I just need a 1/4" to 1/8" adapter cable yet from RadioShack to hook this up to the audio input on a sound card (or my iMic USB gadget).

Librivox sounds great and I look forward to volunteering.