I took the kids to the park the other day. Kamran immediately made friends with a little girl and we all ended up playing golf and batting together.

As they were leaving her mom went to get the car, leaving dad in charge of the girl. A minute later the girl ran after the mom, almost running into the street. The dad, clearly upset, ran, picked her up, and held her. It was a bit of a scene, with the girl kicking and crying as her dad scolded her.

Kamran and I were still batting, but Kamran couldn’t concentrate. His eyes were locked on the girl and the dad. A minute into it he just couldn’t take it anymore; he dropped the bat and ran all the way across the field to confront the dad.

Kamran is not quite 4 years old yet. The dad was a 6 foot 2 gruff looking marine type.

It really gave me pause. In a 4 year old’s mind, this was an emergency – a little girl being threatened by a large grizzly guy. Many people – myself included – would’ve probably stood and watched in such a situation. Kamran ran to the girl’s help. It wasn’t so much that he was being brave or being hero – you could just see that he couldn’t stand it. It was as if he was physically in pain watching this.

Of course there was no real emergency; the dad was a nice enough guy just trying to protect his daughter from running into the street. They got in the car and left. But it left me wondering. More and more I’m convinced the vast majority of who we are and what we do is genetically wired into us, as opposed to learned behavior…

… and swim around for about an hour. What survives?

The 5 year old was pretty anxious to jump into the pool. I had barely finished putting sun screen on him when he dove in.

Which is a bit of a problem since he doesn’t quite swim yet.

I was smart enough to take my shirt off, but managed to jump in with wallet, keys, and cell phone still in my pocket.

I was further smart enough to forget they were still there and swim around with them for an hour or so.

The wallet survived pretty much intact. All of the credit cards seem to still work, the money was ok, no damage there.

The cell phone, obviously, is done for. I don’t know if any part of it is usable (maybe the battery), but I gave up on it.

The SIM card from the cell phone survived just fine. Popped it into another phone and it sprang back to life.

The Lexus key is dead. Or, I should say, the remote entry / alarm part is dead. I’m hoping it’ll come back to life at some point…

The after market $300 alarm + auto-lock key dongle experienced some severe hiccups, but has come back to life. It was submerged for a good hour, so I’m shocked it still works.

Another fun little rant from Steve Yegge:

If you don’t know how compilers work, then you don’t know how computers work. If you’re not 100% sure whether you know how compilers work, then you don’t know how they work.

I agree. The compiler class taught me far more than any other class in my undergrad studies. The operating system course in grad school was a close second.

This is the reason I value a UCSD CS degree more highly than that of most other reputable universities: because you have to write a full compiler, building and living with your code base over a course of 2 quarters. If your university doesn’t require you to write a full compiler, you’re getting gypped. If they don’t offer a course that involves writing a compiler (not talking about one, actually writing one), you’re not going to a real school.

Btw, if you know how to write a compiler, please drop me a line, I’d love to hire you.

Also btw, I haven’t actually read all of Stevey’s rant. I’m hoping to find a nice week or two to set aside to get through the whole thing. The man is generous with words…

I have a couple of Spock invites as well as Joost invites, if you want one leave a comment with your email address and I’ll see about getting you one.

If you’ve been around for me the last couple of weeks you’ve no doubt heard me profess how much I hate my brand new shiny MacBook Pro. The incredibly lack of responsiveness, whether falling behind keypresses when typing or the 5 second pause of death between switching windows, had me nostalgic for the days of vi over a 2400 baud modem.

Well, as suspected, the issue turned out to be related to the particular setup of my mac. There is something severly wrong with the corporate image installed on this mac that was remedied by creating a new user from scratch.

So, I am now less in hate with the mac. It feels and respondes like a soviet era 386, which is a vast improvement over how it has been the last month or so. I’m still not drinking the coolaid, but at least now I’m willing to taste a small sip.