Two cats

#1) Owen brought home a painting of a leopard he made in 2nd grade:

#2) Investigating the poor delivery of air from the Yosemite house heater/air conditioner into the house through the ducts under it, the repair guy told Gloria there was a "fresh carcass" under the house and that it's very likely the bobcat I managed to photograph prowling around the house in September actually lives under the house. "It wouldn't have been so nice to meet up with her there, in your crawlspace," he observed.

"You need to call pest patrol," he concluded.

Somehow I can't think of a largish feline predator as a "pest." Does the Orkin man really know how to deal with this?

Our friend the kitty cat pest

I'm glad I'm scared of spiders and declined to look into this matter myself.

SGI delisted

Today was the first day since 1986 that the stock of Silicon Graphics Inc., better known as SGI, has not been traded on the New York Stock Exchange....

link (via langreiter).

From that Penguin Classics Library list

Con men and Cutpurses: Scenes from the Hogarthian Underworld

Sounds good.

1081 to go.

I should finish Oliver Twist, first.

Penguin Classics Library

Today's NYT has this interesting article about a woman whose house burned down in a Los Alamos wildfire, taking her library of thousands of books with it. She spent $8000 to get started replacing her collection by buying the Penguin Classics Library at Amazon (1082 volumes).

"Wait! if you add just $2340 to your order, shipping will be free!"

Here's the complete list of books in the collection.

Why I'll probably drop my ACM membership again, as I have before

I joined again to get access to the papers that they've put online in the ACM Digital Library. It's a nice service, although I wish it convered more of the CS literature.

As a "member in good standing," I'm sent the flagship publication, the Communications of the ACM. Here's a large font quotebite from the Nov 2005 issue, on my desk:

Any attempt to deskill programmers would certainly be counterproductive (and counter-creative) to the world of software as we know it.

Ack. Whatever possible meaning is encoded in that horrible sentence [perhaps it should be called a "Communication," instead], it's going to depend on what the mysterious word "deskill" is supposed to mean, and it's not even a word.

Is more bad writing to be found in the IEEE Spectrum, or the Communications of the ACM?

Just wondering.