Random Thoughts inside Alan's head
family
My family
Dr. Dolittle
0Saturday was just packed with activities, but Sydney and I managed to sneak away for an hour to see a performance of Dr. Dolittle at Bond Park in Cary.
This is what their promotional teaser had to say.
Dr. Dolittle is being presented by Sign Stage on Tour, a specialist in Sign Language Theatre in which deaf and hearing actors perform together on stage. Whenever a character speaks, the character speaking uses Sign Language and the audience also hears the voice. The voice comes from a different actor speaking through a microphone, sometimes on-stage and sometimes off-stage. Visually, the stage is filled with the movement of hands and bodies yet every word is spoken to make sure all audience members, both deaf and hearing, don’t miss a thing. It’s a magical blend of language created when performing a play simultaneously in spoken English and in the spatial beauty of American Sign Language.
Dr. Dolittle features the good doctor who gives up treating people, after Polynesia, his parrot, teaches him animal languages. He already knew sign language. His fame in the animal kingdom quickly spreads throughout the world. Using all of his language skills, he sets off to cure a monkey epidemic in Africa, finding all sorts of adventures on the way.
The best part of the performance, by far, was the way that the lines were delivered in sign language by the actor in focus, while being spoken by another actor. It took me a while to realize that the audio was live, and not a recording. At times, you could see one actor delivering his own lines in sign language, and then his partner’s lines by voice.
All of this was accomplished by a team of four very talented individuals, who endured the 90° NC heat to entertain and educate us for an hour.
Happy @1234567890
0
17 years
Computers usually tell time by counting the number of seconds since a certain “epoch” time. Then, before displaying the time to you, they do all of the crazy math that defines days of the year and leap years, and even time zones daylight savings time. On Linux systems, the “epoch” is midnight on January 1st, 1970.
At any time, you can tell how many seconds have passed since the epoch by typing:
date +%s
Tonight, at 6:31:30 pm local time, we reached a magic moment when the date was exactly 1234567890 seconds since epoch.
I took this opportunity to show the kids how computers keep track of the time, and to explain time zones (even though they are comfortable with the fact that is it morning in Malaysia when it’s evening here, they did not know about time zones). At the magic moment, we took time out from our pizza supper to watch the time change on my laptop.
Over the Top
0This week, the Ringling Brothers and Barnum & Bailey Circus is in Raleigh, and we took the girls to go see it on opening night.
The show was, as they claimed in one of their songs, “Over the Top”… wild animals, motorcycles, jugglers and acrobats, and plenty of people with no fear of heights.
The Greatest Show on Earth? Possibly. It was certainly worth the (discounted opening night) ticket price.
Snow-bama
0Today was dominated by two events.
Locally, we woke up to find the ground covered with three inches of snow. Our girls have not experienced too many snow days… the few times it has snowed in recent years, we only got a light dusting. This time, we had enough to enjoy a snowball fight and some disc sledding in our back yard.
On a national scale, we enjoyed watching President Obama’s inauguration (and equally as important, the orderly end of the Bush regime). Our new president had some powerful words to mark the event. For me, the most memorable line of his speech was: “As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals.” I welcome our new president, and I look forward to participating in a new America.
Nerds of a feather
0
17 years
My first exposure to computers was in 1981, when my neighbor “Howdy” (Howard) Petree showed me his family’s TRS-80 Color Computer. His dad gave me some sage advice: “do whatever you want to… you’re not going to break it”. I wrote a simple game called “Al-Zap”, which led the player through a series of scenarios, each followed by three choices: “(1) Eat it, (2) Shoot it, (3) Run away”. I kept the program on three hand-written pages on a note pad, and I manually re-entered it when I wanted to work on it some more.
My interest in computers continued, but I could not go bug Howdy every time I had the urge to tinker. That’s when my friend Greg Reid told me that the public library in downtown Winston-Salem had a lab with four Apple II computers. So my early years of computing were primarily spent hacking on the Apple II’s. Eventually, my dad bought one for our family.
The rest, as they say, is history.
This week, Jeff Mercer from the Triangle Linux User Group offered a working Apple II computer to whoever would come and take it off of his hands. I took Jeff’s offer, and I hooked the old computer up so I could show the girls what “old school” computing was like.
Audrey and I did a little bit of tinkering with Applesoft BASIC, and then I gave her an assignment: to print out a multiplication table. She worked on her FOR/NEXT loops, and soon she had a very nice looking 10×10 table of numbers.
I am very proud of her accomplishment, and even more proud that she took such an interest in her daddy’s past.
Space shuttle fly-by
0
17 years
Tonight, we were treated to a visible pass of Space Shuttle Endeavour while it was docked to the International Space Station. On Friday, the girls and I watched the shuttle launch on NASA TV (via internet). So it was pretty cool to see it again, this time live, and in orbit.
So proud of her…
0This week, I have been slowly exposing Audrey (age 7) to computer programming. This morning, I showed her a short shell script that blinks the LED’s on our router.
while true ; do led white on sleep 2 led white off sleep 1 done
I explained to her how the loop works: LED on, sleep, LED off, sleep, repeat forever. Then I pointed out that I had started it blinking last night, but that it was not blinking this morning.
She told me “you might have a bug”.
I am so proud of her.