I had not flown for quite some time, but that has now changed with the interview season in full swing. From the media reports it would seem that the airports were jammed at security check points due to full-body scans and pat-downs. So far, I have seen but one of the full-body scanners and it remained unused while I was in line. Is it a hassle to remove my laptop, belt, shoes, jacket, and metal objects for scanning? Yes. But, I have found the TSA staff to be professional and fairly efficient. Early this morning during the security check, my belt made its way from my tray to another passenger's tray during the X-ray scanning. The passenger behind me in line alerted me—who knows, I may have left the security check point without it. All in all, travel this interview/holiday season has been full of people being both kind and courteous. Of course this has been largely unreported by the media. I know I have much to be grateful for this Thanksgiving. Happy Thanksgiving!

I know it has been a long time since I have posted anything new, but I have been busy adding a few hidden features to the web site. I write this blog using JD's wonderful Emacs package muse-blog that not only publishes an HTML page using the Emacs package muse, but also publishes an XML RSS feed. However, I am using javascript at the end of each blog entry to allow readers (if there are any) the ability to email me their comments. This javascript when left unfiltered makes for some really nasty looking RSS output. Using some git magic, I can keep using any updates that JD makes to the master repository of muse-blog while also re-basing my edits into a branch where I have added a new function to strip away any one-line scripts from the XML formatted RSS feed. I do not program in LISP, but making the function was fairly straightforward. I have also changed the RSS feed to use slightly less restrictive author tags that do not require full email addresses for valid RSS output. Although I find the RSS 2.0 output provided by JD's muse-blog to be cleaner, with my additions the RSS validators no longer complain about the output. I will also make a link on the front page for those who would like to subscribe to the RSS feed. Even after more than 50 years, LISP remains a viable language and those that know it, seem to swear by it. It may be time for me to take the plunge.

The betterment to one's soul that another human being imparts can be obtained from surprisingly short interactions in time. I had the pleasure of working with Dr. R. Pryor Baird III — a warm hearted and incredibly funny man who loved teaching would-be doctors about the art of patient interaction. I remember him recalling how on one day the students were interviewing and performing a preset examination on an elderly gentleman-actor who was portraying the part of someone having palpitations. Dr. Baird had real concerns for the well-being of his elderly actor that only a few students were able to recognize and account for in their predetermined examinations. Those students were verbally encouraged and rewarded. There was an honesty in character about Dr. Baird that always surrounded him even though he never let on to any of his personal struggles with cancer. He continued to drink his Nestlé Nesquik strawberry milks as though they were his chemotherapy. On every occasion that I met him he was concerned with how I was doing. He was encouraging on my path back to running. He was always worried about my car not working especially before the hot Summer months. On my last meeting with him, I suggested that he go see a doctor. I was concerned. He otherwise had so much energy that it was easy to overlook the battle his body was losing. I am thankful that I introduced him to my daughter as I happened to run into him while walking to Kroger one weekend. Life is fleeting. I will miss him and forever laugh about the nonsense we often talked about.

We have finished reading Heidi. Well, I have finished reading Heidi to my son. After the last page was read, my son looked sincerely at me and asked, "Does this mean we can never read Heidi again?" "Of course we can," I answered. Seriously, we have been reading Heidi for so long that the act of reading Heidi was the bedtime tradition—not bedtime reading. Our next adventure will be The Book of Dragons by Edith Nesbit available in paper form and as an e-text. I used Read ETexts on the olpc to download the free e-text version from Project Gutenberg. This time I properly set-up the reader to display a full page of text by rotating the screen 90 degrees (easily accomplished on the olpc by pressing once on the "screen rotate" button). By clicking the text in the middle of screen, one can then scroll page-by-page when pressing the "directional pad". On my previous use of this program, I had not properly activated the pad by clicking on the text with the mouse pointer. My mistake. I then twisted the screen 180 degrees to place the screen pointing outwards in "Ebook-Mode." The font is very readable when displaying a full page of text. Likewise, the pad controller works well navigating page-by-page through the text. I need to test the reader out in sunlight. Read ETexts works as well as stanza for my iPod. Wonderful!

It has taken me a few hours to convert my kludge of a blog onto one that uses JD's muse-blog. muse-blog allows me to write, and more importantly, keep an organized journal without the hassles of having a million directories or a database backend. I could have written this site as a Perl Catalyst application, but it would certainly be over-kill for a site this small. The site itself contains entirely static content, but I hope it remains somewhat interactive.

It was incredibly hot on June 14th when I left the bus in a hurry to get home before my children went to bed. As soon as I left the bus, I realized that I was no longer wearing an old, heavily worn hat that had even accompanied me on my sole marathon. The hat was lost somewhere on the bus. My daughter has become accustomed to wearing it out on hot sunny days. To my surprise, the hat was placed in the UTS lost and found and I was able to retrieve it from them today. They could have easily slipped the old hat into the trash instead of transporting it to the UTS central lost and found storage area. But, they did not. Thanks for a job well-done.

My son was given an OLPC with the first Give1 Get1 campaign. It is a really great little device that has a few quirks for sure, but it has held up well and looks and behaves like new. The quirky touchpad is easy enough to fix with a four finger reset that any olpc user becomes an expert at doing routinely. If one tries not to overload the system with multiple applications running simultaneously, then the machine is rarely too slow for a single task. It is easy for kids to have many, many applications running on it though.

I appreciated the decent battery life when my daughter was an infant in my left arm while my right hand was typing on an emacs window using a Logitech USB Playstation 2 keyboard (small, $10, but the kids prefer the green membrane keyboard). As an educational device, my son enjoys Scratch, Speak, Calculate, Record, and Colors. I enjoy finally having an e-text reader, Read ETexts. It takes about a second to load a book onto the laptop. At night I alternate using this application and one on my iPod to read books (currently, Heidi) to my son. It is a shame that Read ETexts did not originally ship with the olpc. It is still not quite perfect in that it does not paginate by screen size and it does not effectively use the screen buttons on the olpc to flip pages, etc. But, at least now there are thousands of books at Project Gutenberg that can be downloaded and read from the little laptop. I hope this activity is now in widespread use.

Since my car has been side-lined due to a likely fuel delivery problem (relay, bad fuel pump?), I have been getting a bit more exercise walking my groceries home. The walk each way is brief at just under 2 miles. However, on two occasions the weather did not coöperate. We seem to be in full blown summer heat with high humidity although it is bound to get worse over the coming weeks. On the first occasion, I was hoping I could beat the afternoon thunderstorm, but I wound up missing the mark by about 15 minutes on my way home with 6 or more bags of groceries. Not 1 minute had passed during the downpour before another UVa student whom I had never met pulled over to over a ride. He had no concerns for the water seeping into his car, nor the fact that with my carriage of bags, that it took me awhile just to fit myself and my groceries into the front seat of his car. On the second occasion, I must have looked like a melted snowman with the 90+ heat when a different UVa student offered me a ride. These encounters made me proud to be associated with an institution with students like these although their random acts of kindness will normally go unreported. Thanks.

It is hard to start a journal entry for this inaugural edition of my blog without taking a few moments to contemplate the loss of Yeardley Love. I never met her. Yet, I am saddened by her loss. I think the mood on campus right after the event was close to the shock felt after the Virginia Tech slayings. I can't imagine what her family is going through. So pointless. This violent act was not done in isolation — there were warning signs that went largely unheard and unseen. No meaningful interventions were performed. Both of the Lacrosse teams continued to play. Then graduation. It will be interesting to see if any policies change next year irrespective of the outcome of the trial.