Reading through the last week's CVS commits just now. It's a perfect post-holiday ice water bucket. Reminds me of the rigors of my job. Like for instance the [INTERN] who spells license "lisence". Or the cat who is still agitated by our vacation and keeps demanding attention -- now clawing at the laundry room door, now sitting on my lap, now threatening to short out the power strips with a well-placed stream of urine.

Even when he sits on my lap, he'd be digging his claws into my leg (lovingly of course) if I wasn't still wearing a towel. (And who am I to complain about my job, you might wonder, when I work from home, set my own hours, and commute naked? Feh.)

But that's all right because there was one good commit last week and it makes it all worth while:

global.cpp, global.h: BugzId: N Remove rOldClipBox from globals and move it in to print.cpp.

That's my cheerful thought of the day. Somebody eliminated a global variable, and it wasn't me.

A quick link -- Arnold Kling (q.v.) refers to this post briefly in his latest column. Mainly the graphs. I gave it a quick look and read the first line:

With the conquest of Iraq, the American Empire stands at its zenith.

And he proceeds to argue so for several pages. I haven't read it, just looked at the graphs, so I have no comment on the rest of the content. But I wonder how Mr. billmon can feel so sure that he has found the zenith of the American Empire, which he claims we now stand upon.

Perhaps he believes he has a general zenith-predicting ability? If so, why isn't he working in financial services?

On the first leg of our drive down, we headed south along the 2 -- the main north-south highway in Alberta.

I'm haven't had many thunderstorms in the last 25 years. In northern California you see about one thunderstorm every seven or so years, and in SoCal they're even less frequent. When I was three years old, and we had just moved to California from Texas, one of those infrequent thunderstorms came while I was at Montessori. I was the only kid who went to the window and watched -- the California kids hid under their desks, thinking it was an earthquake. (Good thing it wasn't an earthquake, so there was no breaking falling glass to kill me.)

We hit the first thunderstorm around Red Deer. Fat heavy drops of rain started pounding into the windshield, and my wife soon had the wipers up on maximum. Then it slackened off a little. Then OH SHIT! Nothing was visible at all through the entire windshield. I've only ever had that experience in a car wash, not going 80km/hr on a major freeway. People were pulling off the road to sit out the thunderstorm. The lucky ones found a space under the freeway bridges.

Two more thunderstorms between Red Deer and our first night's sleep in Fernie, B.C. Only one more total windshield wipeout.

And another thunderstorm this morning, looks like. What happened to "Sunny Alberta"?

Back from our road trip. We left last Wednesday after 4:00 PM and returned last night around half past eight. Strange dreams this morning in which, among other things, I was responsible for the starving death of a rat.

Last night I was feeling up to writing a long entry about the road trip and what we found there, but now I've reconsidered. Too lazy, too tired, and too busy this morning. So it'll all be coming out in dribs and drabs over the next week or so, except the stuff that I forget about, which will haunt me evermore.