Wednesday Mar 5th

“Sail away from the safe harbor, Catch the trade winds in your sails. Explore. Dream. Discover.” Mark Twain

Another lovely day, talked to family and friends, walked on the beach, and had lunch with Charles. This afternoon I turned my groceries into salsa, and then I painted. I think I’ll give the painting to Cindy who keeps giving us treats, and telling us it’s time to close the windows before the bugs come out. I wish I could speak better Spanish. I’m trying to find someone who will teach me, but I’m starting to get the hang of it.

I’ve picked up a stray cat. I’ve named him Mangy Mucska. He’s not well. Mangy and flea infested and skinny, skinny, skinny. He might still be sick, but at least his belly will be full when I’m done with him. He insists on coming inside, but he’s got fleas so forget it. There are enough bugs in our house already.

Speaking of bugs… Last night we saw the coolest bug. He was about one and a half inches long. He had these 2 green dots that lit up on each side of his head. When he flew the lit up his wings and he looked like the biggest fire fly you’ve ever seen. Later we actually saw a more normal looking fire fly, but the giant one was pretty cool.




Charlie’s Day

More new friends today, and six and a half working computers – and I left a little early. Not too shabby for an old fart, although I now sport a rather nasty high voltage burn from sticking my fingers into a switching power supply, just minutes after warning someone about the cathode on a CRT (picture tube) that can hold a charge for a long time. Do as I say, not as I do. J Some of you are familiar with the OLPC (one laptop per child) initiative. If you’re not, do a google search on OLPC and do some reading. The basis of the project is to design a laptop that costs 100 dollars and get one into the hands of every child on the planet. It works in bright sun or dark shadow; it’s good with sand and limited amounts of water, and it will run off of anything from car batteries to hand cranks to plugging it into the wall. I actually have one, and brought it along in the hopes of validating its usefulness. Frankly, my opinion is that it is a brilliant piece of hardware, and too bad the software is being put together by a bunch of anti-Microsoft Linux geeks. It really suffers if you have ever had a computer in your hands. However, if you are six to eight years old, and have never seen a computer, maybe it’s not so bad. So I fired it up today while some software was loading, and launched one of the music making programs. The noise quickly generated an audience, and while they looked for a while, only one little girl was brave enough to risk the big furry guy that speaks only gibberish to get her fingers on this weird green machine. I showed her how to run a couple apps and she was busy for at lease two hours. She even brought a friend to play, but when she tried to launch applications on her own, she soon got bored waiting for them to boot (Linux = crap), and tried others, which of course took even longer to boot… well you get the picture. They were back to playing in the dirt pile with some dolls before too long, while the OLPS was still trying to launch eight programs simultaneously without multi-threading or a windowing environment. My batteries needed a charge anyway, so I’ll wait until tomorrow to try again. She managed to take a picture of herself with the machine – here she is.