7/8/2001:

This strip is a day late because I was in Orange County for the weekend, visiting my adopted Jewish grandpa. It's a long story how I came to have an adopted Jewish grandpa, but the short version is that when my parents first came to the country, they bought furniture from this guy and he befriended them and... yeah, we've always called him Grandpa. Heartwarming, huh?

So I had to catch a flight down there on Friday and only when I was up in the air did I realize that I'd forgotten to upload the HTML I'd made. So now I'm working from home (and back in emacs style). Speaking of emacs, a friend asked me the best way to master it. I told her about the included tutorial ( C-h t ) and then redid it. So while I don't call myself a master by any means, I am 200% more productive now than I was at the beginning of the summer.

Oh, yeah, the strip itself... Um, I'm not going to explain it. I think it's one of those where you either love it or hate it (depending on whether you get it at first or not. But if you didn't, give it some time. Sil didn't like it at first either.

The weekend was nice. Quiet, as is to be expected when you're hanging around retirement communities. My parents and I again ate a lot. We also saw A.I.

What a beautiful movie. See this movie with your mom. Sorta the same feeling as seeing Frequency with your dad. I just realized how sad that sounds, watching movies with your parents to see familial emotions, but I guess it's because movies put those emotions so big on the screen that you can't help feeling them a little more strongly or at least reflecting on them.

About the movie itself, I don't want to spoil anything, but I will say that it's pretty long and broken into stages and that these stages really help it feel like a fable. A technofable.

Sil is back in the States and she actually has more consistent net access than I do. Welcome her back to the county, if not the strip and you and she will be glad to note that I managed to get through some writer's block and put some graphite to paper on the flight back from Orange County.

I posted on the 4th of July but I didn't really post about my experiences during the day. Hm, I'll just say that fireworks these days suck. Not the big fireworks let off (those are becoming really cool) but the ones that people buy and light. I know, I know, fireworks are illegal so it's hard, but still. The most annoying ones don't even have any explosions, just a whiny screeching noise. Which idiot invented this? The fireworks that shoot sparks are nice but get boring after a while...

When I think of the crap my friends and I used to do with fireworks, I feel really sad for kids growing up with these tiny strobe crackers and spark fountains. We had roman candles and bottle rockets. We had slightly less powerful than M80 type explosives that were made more powerful with common household items. :-) We had 35mm film cannisters filled with gasoline. It's a wonder I have 10 fingers to type this.

-kip