I am so deeply grateful for the messages of support here, in email, in cards, and via intermediaries. I will write more fully about that when I’m a bit better as it has been humbling and amazing. Meanwhile, please forgive me if a personal reply to your email is delayed a little more.
I am still very very weak, and can't type well as two fingers are numb (nerve got bruised in surgery; it will heal in time). I am likely to be discharged soon — next day or two I think — but while my progress is real, I have a long way to go.
If I am no longer as weak as a kitten, I would still be hesitant to take on a litter of them.
Basically, if it can't be done sitting or reclining, I still need help to do it. But that will change.
For those of you who may have been wondering why there haven’t been any posts here since Feb. 12, the reason is that I had emergency open-heart surgery, and now I’m recovering.
If there’s a really great way to ruin a writing sabbatical, it is by spending it in the hospital.
The prognosis is good, but I was under heavy sedation until just recently, and I’m still very weak. (My brother Dan is entering this for me.) So posting will be light to nonexistent for a while longer.
1. Lincoln Diaz-Balart (R-FL21), who won a comfortable victory against a very flawed challenger in 2008, is retiring from Congress. Word has it that he's keeping his powder dry for a restoration of the ancestral kleptocracy in Cuba.
2. His brother, Mario Diaz-Balart (R-FL25), who didn't win a huge victory despite a flawed campaign by a good challenger in 2008, is going to change districts and run from FL-21 instead of FL-25, because FL-25 is trending Democrat faster than FL-21, which remains a quality gerrymander.
3. Speculation is that Joe Garcia, currently heading the Office of Minority Economic Impact for the Department of Energy, may run again in FL-25. If so, I hope he runs a more grass-rootsy and less expensive-consultant-driven campaign. We don't need and can't afford Joe Trippi for this one. We do need a very experienced and organized campaign manger.
(More coverage in the Herald, Lincoln Diaz-Balart's exit from Congress sets off political scramble)
Via Blenderlaw (what? you don't read Blenderlaw.com???)
Update: It looks like it is canceled.
From the abstract:
We show how Alice and Bob can establish whether they love each other, but without the embarrassement of revealing that they do if the other party does not share their feelings.
(Via Light Blue Touchpaper)
I am pleased to be able to announce that there will be NO tuition increase for the 2010-2011 academic year. In fact, while full-time tuition will remain at its current level of $18,709 per semester, the per credit tuition amount charged for part-time attendance will be reduced to $1337 from its current level of $1633.
The new part-time number lowers the cost of summer classes and of taking non-cross-listed courses elsewhere in the university.
I suppose this is one good outcome from the salary freeze.
Update: All fixed. Seems the A/C went out in the server room….
Yes, it's a Baltimore weather forecast, but it's right next door….
Now if I could just decide which I more wish I had never heard of…
Update: To ice the cake, according to the folks from South Africa in this comment thread, Die Antwoord are playing roles. The lead rapper, for example, is Waddy Jones, who is anglophone, not an Afrikaner.
…but forgive me.
There is a very serious error in the IT World posting Can you trust Chinese computer equipment?. I've written to the author to ask him to correct it, and to post the correction to Slashdot, which has repeated the error (which is how I came to find it).
The original item states,
Indeed, back in 1983, Ken Thompson, one the creators of Unix, admitted that he had included a backdoor in early Unix versions. Thompson's backdoor gave him access to every Unix system then in existence.
“Why am I always the last guy in the world to hear about this stuff?” I wondered. In this case, it is because it is not so. If you look at the actual article referenced, Ken Thompson's Reflections on Trusting Trust, his famous acceptance speech for the Turing Award, you will see it basically says the opposite of what the quote above suggests.
For starters, the very elegant backdoor attack presented in Ken Thompson's paper is a PROOF OF CONCEPT not an “admission” that anyone in fact did anything like it to early or late Unix builds. Ken Thompson in fact takes a very strong stand against such hacks. His point, though, is that the nature of compilers makes what have become known as “Thompson hack” or trusting trust attack very hard to detect.
It would be good if IT World ran a correction; if not maybe someone trying to chase down this latest piece of tin foil will find this posting instead.