Dubin visited me this weekend, and it was a lot of fun. Plenty of walks, lots of conversation, much of it on psychology and the mental health field, and some fun trips to some places in the area. I got my place relatively clean before the visit (and with any luck will maintain it as such), and am trying yet another food to see if Wally will gain some weight back and stop vomiting.. We hiked all over the Squirrel Hill/Oakland area, and because he had his GPS with him, I had my first real experience Geocaching. If you have an ID there, look for 'stone stash', and you'll see both of our notes. I need to get a GPS soon so I can keep doing it. On that trip, I got a good walking stick that I'm currently stripping and cleaning.. I might look into ways to keep it from rotting. Anyhow, we visited IKEA, Coffee Tree, CMU, Pitt, and India Garden, and also drove through Chatham, up Negley Hill, and down to the Waterfront. Yay.

I kind of missed Rosh Hassanah, and got a little bit sentimental passing the hill where about a year ago, Debb and I were carving pumpkins... Oh well.

Anyhow, it was one heck of a weekend.. I'm probably going to stay in tonight, make some spaghetti or other pasta, and get some reading done.

It's kind of odd, but since I no longer have a single tool to do aim, icq, and yahoo at the same time, but do have seperate tools, I don't actually use any of them as often. I'm not sure why.

Some news blurbs.. Defense of Bowling for Columbine Die Kunst, Recht zu behalten Computer Hum Perl 5.8.1 (of particular note is the hash randomization, a la OpenBSD pids)] More uranian moons

I'm in an odd situation. There's an opportunity I'd normally attempt to take in a heartbeat, but I realize that I can't because doing so would break a commitment I made, or at least endanger it. Sad thing is, that I recently found out that there's a better chance than normal that I'd get what I want. Chance.. that's an interesting thing we're chewing on in my philosophy of science class -- in particular probability as being based on randomness versus probability as being based on incomplete data. There've been a lot of awfully bright people taking various tacks on the issue, suggesting that one or the other notion is meaningless, or that one is more important than the other. I'm inclined towards determinism, myself, so the incomplete data notion is how I normally interpret statistics. Anyhow, yeah, by better chance than normal, what I meant is, given the data I have, there's a better chance than normal. That phrasing is interesting -- an alternative, less theory-advocating form would be, given the data I have, the inference that I'd get what I want is stronger. Yes, they mean exactly the same thing to me, but the first certainly flows more smoothly.. and it offends those with other views on statistics :)

Oh, one final answer from the straight dope that I once asked when I was much younger.. how do touch lamps work?

o/~ Victories don't mean a thing if they don't last o/~ That symbol.. I didn't get it for the longest time... it's a note.