Snowcrash: 05/23/06
The last couple of nights I have been kept up past my bed time reading a great cyberpunk
novel: Snow Crash by
Neal Stephenson. I liked the near future vision of California (especially Los Angeles) as
being divided up by a series of corporate and religious run city-states. The question at
hand is what is "snow crash" beyond a typical all out computer crash and who is controlling
the distribution of it? Unfortunately the book loses some of its momentum near the end as
the story moves to the ocean. The long bit at sea on the pirate ships, yachts and lifeboat
seems out of place compared to the fast paced scenes on the roads of Los Angeles and the
fights in the Metaverse. Some of my favorite bits of the book were Hiro's lenghty discussions
with the Librarian over the nature of language, religion and viruses.
Carport Painted:
The weather cooperated with the painters and they were able to make a good start on
the two carports on our tier. They need to finish some of the light color and all of the
green trim. As the weather seems to be holding out today (although rain is predicted) they
should be able to finish; I hope they do.
Besides the carports being painted today, our front stairs are getting a new coat of paint.
They tried two or three times laster year just as the rainy season started. Unfortunately
they hadn't realized that the pre-primed stairs had been done with oil based paint but the
top coats they've been using are an acrylic based spray. Acrylic and oil don't play together
nicely. The acrylic will eventually peel off the oil as our stairs have done over the last
nine months.
Our Smart Son:
Sean received two wonderful compliments from his teacher. She called him brave for handling
his bloody nose so well yesterday and she also said that he's very bright. She only has to
tell him something one time for him to learn it!
I have to thank my mother for a great piece
of parenting advice: always talk to your children and avoid baby talk. That's what we've
done with Sean from day one and of course we don't expect him to always understand us and
often times we end up having to run through a long list of similar words to finally get him
to understand but things do stick.
Of course it sometimes leads to funny public encounters.
Once when Ian an Sean were in a public bathroom and Ian asked Sean how he was doing with
going potty, Sean responded with: "Don't worry about me; worry about yourself!" (something
I had said to him once when we were going potty in different stalls). Sean's quip had the
other men in stitches.Steps: 6000
