Returning (long D/N train journey)
from somewhere in Brooklyn. Russian restaurant. -----'s 40th
birthday. Well, that was a week or so ago. Ancient Strap-On.
Awesome food - eggplant with peanuts: heavy on the garlic & olive oil
delicious; assorted fish appetizer: super (especially good lox, which seems
difficult to get these days); lamb and chicken kebabs, very juicy and
tender. A red velvety catsup with oomph. Grey Goose (French)
vodka. Total came to $70, which blows my student budget plan. I
have, however, been thus far disciplined enough to keep track of expenditures.
Cramming the last bits of the C++
Primer Plus into my skull. Many pages, few concepts retained. I
feel like the author stopped having fun with this book around chapter 10.
Zip through by Thursday, try to get the programming exercises done, then hit
Dave Marks's Learn C++ Under Windows. Then Stroustrup. I
have way too much stuff to learn. How about the two new Palm OS
books? How about Creating Web Pages for Dummies?
Writing in the evening feels good. It's way past my current bedtime. I am a little tired and a little high from the vodka. Only two days till we drive to Maine. Gotta love that. I must call ----- soon. ----- died just a short while ago; I have yet to convey my condolences. ----- was a lovely fellow.
A subtle nonverbal communication has developed between ----- and myself (or was it always there? and only now have I become aware of it?)... I was telling him about the Kurzweil's The Age of Spiritual Machines and he went right into an extremely contradictory role; somehow bluntly denying that he would be at all interested in communicating with a "mind" fashioned after his own in a machine. There seems to be some sort of friction going on, though this is relieved soon.
Got a hold of -----, confirmed receipt of his Casio, Palm etc. He somehow figured out how to get to HorseSense and had tested it enough to find a simple bug in P6 - the "price" variables were not working correctly with negative values. I must have overlooked something for sure, but the debug was simple enough - 2 lines of code, found nearly instantly once I understood the math of sports betting. How do I get the new version to him, being computer illiterate and not having a computer? On diskette, and hope his daughter can figure out how to HotSync and install stuff. He said if I came to visit him in Vegas I'd have a room at the Bellagio and all my needs taken care of. Tempting.
Another question: will I play in the
Las Vegas Open? end of November. Free room w/ ----- if I want
it. Low stakes poker and free beer all night long. Hmmm... must
check air fares to Vegas...