The Kiewiets are gathering outside my window and having them for supper. I count twelve Kiewiets and a couple of odd Doves. If they knew about it, Diva and Smokey would be chomping them as well.
So the air echoes with "Come and Get It" Plover calls.
I'm feeling somewhat domesticated today as well. Seeing that Alf, my landlord, has installed a smart new stove in the cottage, I bought a brand new Cooking Pot today, and have been boiling up vegetable matter.
Now of course I shall have to buy a Plate, and maybe a Knife and Fork, as this stuff is too hot to eat out of the pot. All manner of domestic mysteries are being revealed to me. Just as well I stocked up with Pizza.
The last couple of days have been satisfying as well. One of those rare occasions when the Web proves to be useful after all. It all started off with a series of Posts on the Year 2000 Compliance of Linux. After the usual "Yes it is", "No it isn't" rubbish, I did some tests on kernal 1.2.13 and found problems. And happily have already had feedback from folks using the later 2.0.30 and 2.0.32 kernels that the major bug (handling leap years) is now fixed. It gives a feeling of progress in a somewhat stalled and static area.
There is a lot of work to do on my machine just now. Year end means cleaning up and posting of archives and sorting out all the mail archives and storing to offline disk and generalised Search and Destroy.
My machine is definitely the Software Graveyard, the place where old software goes to die. I always seem to find tons of old junk which I have never had the heart to throw out because it might be useful some day. Well it will now be stripped off to floppy and purged.
1998 should be an interesting year. The last ditch stand against Y2k will have to take place soon, or maybe we should forget the whole thing and start hoarding Twinkies.
On January 12 1998, HAL, our friendly man-killing Series 9000 will be having his first Birthday party. His godfather, Arthur C Clarke made the Queen's Honours list this year along with Sir Elton John.
However, as with Human Intelligence, there have been no great leaps forward in Artificial Intelligence recently. Despite Deep Blue, Kasparov and Little Rovers That Could, algorithms have not got to the stage of understanding your opponents mental state, or (according to Greg Wilson) even recognising your opponent has a mental state.
If the Technology were available we could then model the thought processes of CEOs who are allowing mere flunkies to decide the future fate of their businesses. What are they thinking? How can they let the Help make Y2k decisions for them? I once had a hack at modelling "Management Thought Processes" but gave up when the program consistently returned NULL values.
Little black spots have now appeared on my nice clean tiled floor. Spilled coffee grains that have dissolved in the heat, I suspect. Now I shall have to go and clean them up. Rats, I should have bought a Mop.
Have an Excellent New Year.