A Rube Goldberg device? Or a Von Neumann device? In the beginning, I'm sure the second seemed like the first, and only long efforts of engineering have made it real. The current attempts at Quantum Computing take the idea back to square one.. almost, although once the fundamentals are in place again, perhaps all the levels of abstraction beyond a certain point will be movable.
And recently, I've been seeing a lot of hammer and glue. Her? She's wonderful, and we're building something really great. It's great to have someone so intelligent and pretty and cool in my life. And yet, slightly over a week from finding the person of my dreams, a bad thing happened relating to my family, an invisible crack in a foundation revealed itself, and tainted memories and relations spill out. I'm trying to keep out of it until the dust settles, but it's really ugly.
Things are going really well otherwise -- I'm in love, and I'm happy there. I feel like my grinch heart is growing three sizes, under the hair-drier of romance. I stopped by the bike shop, and although they ordered the wrong part (again) to repair it, I asked them about possible upgrades, and they actually have the parts to put better brakes/gears on it, for $20 more than I was quoted to just repair it as it was, meaning it'll be done tonight. I'll have the nicer combined gear-shifter/brake thing that I've tried when borrowing bikes from people when visiting other places.
Wikipedia recently had hardware problems, and put up a letter asking for $20k in donations to replace/upgrade their servers. I was going to plug them, but within 3 days, they had almost $30k. Wikipedia is so much a case story of the open-source community's triumphs over closed/commercial areas of society that people care enough to donate, often giving much more than they would to buy a fancier (although with less content) encyclopedia like MS Encarta. There's value in my ability to point anyone I meet at Wikipedia articles, without their needing to spend money to get access to something on a CDROM. It's beautiful.