(no subject)

A great day for emails, from Chile, Israel, and Sweden! I heard from Sasha!! wow. It sounds like Sasha is doing extremely well at WIS and sounds cheery as always.. makes me want to go back and visit her in Israel immediately! (She writes, in part: "a week ago I learned to use your particle picker by myself! It is wonderful! By the way, I read your documentation and I wonder it was your idea to use Van der Monde matrix. It was a great feeling to know that in real life so close to me somebody uses Van der Monde matrix." -- how can you not love someone who is excited about Van der Monde matricies?) I got a nice email, too, from Jamie.. she writes (from Chile) in part that she really did enjoy having me as a roommate.. Awww.

(no subject)

This is from 2003-03-20 (last thursday night):

I am now logged in from my new machine 'Mortville' running FreeBSD 5.0. It's quite a cute machine, constructed entirely of parts I found in our 'free pile' (every co-op has such a pile of up-for-grabs items, mostly clothing). As a Packard Bell P120 with 16MB RAM it is certainly not the speedist machine. (-:

Today I met the guy who was Hunter S. Thompson (of Fear and Loathing fame)'s editor at Rolling Stone. One of the girls here is teaching Journalism 199 (on H.S.T.) and, for want of space at the University, the class is held here in our house every Wednesday. Very cool. Anyway, this guy was funny to me because he's soft spoken, well dressed with a suit and tie, obviously very well educated, cultured, sensitive.. and he's talking about all these drugs he and HST did back in the 60's and their adventures in Monterray and whatnot, and what parts of F.a.L. in Las Vegas he knows to be fact and which were literary fabrication (apparently ehe "my attourney was pouring beer down his chest, to facilitate the tanning process" part was afctuially written before the trip took place!). Now he's a food critic for the LA Times, fluent in Arabic, and pocessor of the largest collection of cookbooks from the 14th century.

A lot of people here are all upset about the attack on Iraq.. I mean, they are emotionally upset. I find this somewhat difficult to understand. Many of our housemembers are now in San Francisco to protest (it is now something like 1 am). I believe the plan is to "stop commerce". The upside of this is that it's quiet in the house since so many people left (especially the loud ones.. funny) or are sleeping. OTOH, I decided to get drunk and install FreeBSD.

looking bleak

WASHINGTON, March 25 — The nation's top military officer acknowledged today that the Pentagon's strategy to crack the Iraqi regime quickly with a huge early airstrike had not worked exactly as planned, but he warned "there was more to come."

So far in four days of bombing, the United States and Britain have attacked Iraqi air defenses, communication centers, leadership headquarters and other military targets with more than 600 cruise missiles and thousands of bombs.

Despite these attacks, broadcasts of Saddam Hussein continue to appear on state-run Iraqi television, his regime is still appears able to issue orders to its generals in the field, and there are no immediate signs of the mass surrenders or defections that many American officials had hoped for.