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Andrea found a treasure at the thrift store near her office; a 1984 book called Computer Olympics. Apparently a tie in with the U.S. held summer games that year (Los Angeles, California), it's got a slew of olympic and international community related programming code in BASIC for kids to type in and play with. It's got a standard listing for each program and offers modifications so they can be run on everything from a Commodore 64 to a TRS-80 to a PCjr to a TI 99/4A. Slick! Even if I hate coding BASIC I just love this book. I wish you'd see stuff like that for kids nowadays. This is how you get kids to grow up into thinking adults; give them things to make them think!

More geekage. I learned in class today that I could telnet into my mail server and read my mail from a command prompt! We were telnetting into a server set up in the classroom when I realized that I could do this to my setup at home. I was so excited that I got totally lost in learning telnet commands to interface with my SMTP and POP3 servers. Promptly after beginning said exploration, I deleted 5 email messages, including a couple of important ones, because I didn't realize I had to reset the server before ending the session. Oops. *sigh* This is so cool though! I tried telnetting into mail servers at AOL and Comcast too, feeling very much the L337 H4XX0r. Of course I didn't get anywhere, but I absolutely love just exploring the concept...

I got home today and found that Andrea had brought me a four foot chubby plush raccoon! He/she's so cute! (I haven't determined a gender yet. My Meeko still doesn't have one and I've had Meeko for over two years.) I think a picture will be forthcoming in this space. Andrea said she picked it up for me because she knows it's comforting for me to snuggle up with something big, fuzzy and squishy when she can't be there. It was deeply touching. She also brought home a nifty little locket that she though might work as part of a pirate garb ensemble for faire; I promptly printed out a copy of a photo of the two of us and inserted it therein.

Finally, I have a new icon.






This is Peter Puppy. He gets to be my angry icon for those moments when such a thing seems appropriate. (If this seems like a strange choice to you allow me to show you a classic video game by the name of Earthworm Jim sometime.) He was a pain to steal procure from behind the java script right-click disabler on the page he was on too... *grins evilly* Don't they know those things just make people more determined to get past them?