This morning I had a dream in which I got a Facebook email that said, "Marie Vaughn has tagged you in a note!" It turned out to be a note containing a picture of a party, which happened to include me. Why can't I just forget her? It would make me saner. (And I write this on the 48, sitting in front of a woman who looks suspiciously like her. It never ends, does it?)

The bus driver today is Mr. Absent-Minded. At least it's not Ms. Hardass, the afternoon driver who is ... a hardass. That's all I can really say. She is the most uptight bus driver ever. For example, at the (southbound) stop over the 520 bridge, where the passengers have to disembark onto a traffic island, she always says "Front door service only". About ten people always get off there, and the bus is often standing-room-only, so it's pretty unreasonable. (In her defense, however, that island is short enough that the back door of a double-length bus lets out into the onramp there. But these are adults!)

I'm going to the all-church retreat at Camp Indianola next week! Expect me to be offline 20-Apr-2007 until 22-Apr-2007.

From PostSecret. This one made me stop dead when I read it.

I've been to all three of those lines. Present company excepted, of course.

I went to Marie's house yesterday and had dinner. Her grandparents are nice people. More later.

I'm posting from Oregon. We are visiting a family friend who lives a few miles from Siletz, OR. Just before we left, I had the presence of mind to slap a copy of emacs and my latest code onto my bulla. I collected 13 payphones so far.

44.75531 deg N
123.90110 deg W

My file manager program (latest project) is now to the stage where it displays a list of files with all the goodies (name, user, group, size, mode). The mode is just octal, not -rw-r--r-- or anything nice like that; the size is in unadulterated bytes; and the date is not formatted or displayed. In short, it just looks pretty. :)

Day before yesterday (last day of school), Marie, Collin, and I went to the Seattle Telecommunications museum. It's great. They have four (4) working mechanical exchanges: Step by Step (SxS), No. 5 Crossbar (5xb), No. 1 Crossbar (1xb), and Panel. The brochure says that their panel exchange is believed to be the only working one in the country. (!) All the exchanges are connected together, and every working phone in the building is hooked up to them (but not to the outside world). The museum is in the top two floors of a working exchange in Georgetown.

I found the crossbar exchanges most interesting. It's fun to stand inside a working relay computer. I never thought I'd have the opportunity. You can hear streams of activity shuttling around the space surrounding you, and each stream makes a kind of grinding/chewing sound, even though an individual relay is just capable of making a clicking sound. I plan to organize another trip (or 3) this summer, and need at least ~5 people to get them to open the museum on a non-Tuesday. Since I'm working Mon-Fri, it will most likely be on a Saturday. I hope to go soon. Prospective customers: Collin, Rob, Alex, Marie, parents of above, etc. Reply if you're interested.