Sunday, December 22, 2002

Stubborn Cats. There are two kinds of cats in the world.  There are cats that don't take crap, and cats that do.  My sister's cat doesn't take crap from people.  He's sitting there on a chair, and I give him a push.  He just absorbs my push, redirecting the energy into some cat energy zone, a place for that momentum.  Other cats will, at the slightest infraction, flounce off in a huff.  I can give Bailey (my sister's cat) a good shove, and he won't move.  I can do quite a bit, and every time I do it he'll just adjust and absorb and make it abundantly clear that under no circumstances will he be moving, and I might as well just give up now and no damn way is this chair anything other than his.  Of course this is a game I can win, and so I do. The wildcard is the tail.  Touch the tail and it really pisses him off. Ha ha.  I am the human.  I have no tail to piss me off with. 10:06:03 PM

Government Efficiency. I hit the airport earlier today figuring that I was going to spend an awful lot of time in lines. Security lines, ticket lines, customs lines, etc...but not today. The flight got away on time, landed about ten minutes early...seat 1C had me out of the aircraft as soon as the door opened; first in line to customs, paid my duty, and I was out of there. The system worked, for a change. 3:59:31 PM

Flying. On a plane to Ottawa, knocking out some additional stuff in my book. It's slow progress, but hey, Graham Glass' zinger about making 250k off of his Unix book has me getting back to work! It's going to be a strange book. In the opener I admit freely that it's a book of questions, not a book of answers. There's a new kind of system out there that we need to build -- it's a system that goes beyond objects. Beyond Objects is the title of the book. It's about knowledge, rule-systems, aspect-oriented programming, distributed fact bases, and the kinds of things you can build with them. I hope to get at the heart of why it's so difficult to build large-scale classic OO systems, and so hard to get some of the basic stuff right with them. 1:45:51 PM