My weekends

I’ve mentioned before that my wife and I are coaching our wise son in driving on the weekends. He’s wise because he wasn’t at all interested in driving, still isn’t, but only needs the instruction to make getting to work more manageable in a place with poor mass transit (he and I will both be happy in the next decade when smart self-driving cars become available). Anyway, here’s a taste of what being a driving instructor is like.

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Sometimes, the spam is kind of flattering

I just got sent a listing for a TWIN SCREW MOTOR YACHT WITH BOWTHRUSTER, only €185,000. It’s a little bit out of the price range of a college professor, even one who gets a little cash on the side from blogging, but it’s still nice that someone thinks I might be in the market for my very own personal yacht. If any of my readers is shopping for yachts right now, let me know and I can pass along the details.

Party in July at our place!

Good news, everyone! Our application has been approved, and that means that FtB will be sponsoring a party room at Convergence on 2-5 July. We’re going to do the typical things one does at a nerd party: we’re planning on a table for games, we’ll have healthy fresh fruit and unhealthy quantities of liquor available, and inspired by those clever people at Skepchick who did this last year, we’re going to have some afternoon salons in which we discuss deep sciencey things.

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It’s not our fault! Really!

We’re getting a lot of complaints about ads redirecting people to the app store — and I agree, they’re obnoxious and spammy and we’re killing them as fast as we can find them. But it’s not our fault! We really don’t want them either. But apparently, spammers are currently ahead of the spamblockers. It sounds like it’s going to take OS updates to purge us of this plague.

Baffled

So #GamerGate is outraged at auto-blocking software. There are several blockers out there; a lot of people are finding them useful. I think they’re fine…and I’d say that even if my name were on any of them. I simply do not understand the attitude that it is somehow a violation of a person’s right to free speech if a mechanism is provided to make it easy for other to exercise their right to not listen.

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Oh, right, it’s today

We first met in 3rd grade, which would have been 50 years ago. We used to sometimes walk home together from school — we lived about 4 blocks apart — in junior high, about 43, maybe 44 years ago. I worked up the nerve to ask her out on one date in high school, the homecoming dance in 1974, which was 41 years ago. We started dating regularly in 1976, so 39 years ago. We took our time with the courtship, and got married over spring break while we were in grad school, on 16 March 1980, 35 years ago.

It seems kind of silly to say that today is our anniversary. It was more of a long and ongoing process with a few arbitrary dates flagged as discrete points in the evolution of a relationship.