As poor a first language C is, I have a particular love of teaching it to people. I'm doing a little bit of that this semester, remotely, for a friend at the University of Hawaii. I think it's particularly fun because the path to deep C knowledge involves learning a number of tricks that slowly assemble into C's design philosophy. Most other languages are a bit simpler (learning closures, partial parameterisation, and a few other things arn't taught while learning C, but learning C is a decent foundation for understanding computer architectures). I might be helping someone else (also remotely) learn Perl as well - even though Perl is far more fun to program in, it's not as fun to teach.

Apparently my old landlord still wants money from me for further repairs that were done to my old apartment, and is mailing me an itemised bill soon. I hope he doesn't want too much - that might delay my reaching a zone of financial comfort I need to have to move to Europe. :(

On that, at some point I'll probably need to get used to the idea of passing Tortfeasor back to Debb - moving overseas with two cats seems impractical. I hate the idea of giving him up though.

As for Google Earth, I'm kind of worried about the vendor lock-in inherent in the product. Some of this may not be Google's fault -- they license most of their data from other companies, and so the "personal use only" may not be something they can change. I wonder if there might be a way they could facilitate pushing vendors of such data to make it legally unencumbered, and further wonder if there's an easy way we could slurp all of it, ignoring all the license crap, and start projects legally akin to mplayer. I've occasionally heard rumours of efforts to make fully open (sometimes legal, sometimes not) alternatives to google maps - doing so for google earth would be a good thing.