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Saturday January 6, 2001
"Even perfect program verification can only establish that a program meets its specification. The hardest part of the software task is arriving at a complete and consistent specificaton, and much of the essence of building a program is in fact the debugging of the specification." Frederick P. Brooks, Jr.The Mythical Man-Month
Ornate gates guard the shell garden in West Austin. |
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the Saturday things Dog walks, taking Mom shopping, spending a little time with the parents, quality 'date' time with the spouse. That's what a good Saturday is. Our dog walk started at that shopping center on Exposition, the one with Starbucks and Randall's. I got a coffee at Starbucks and off we went, weaving south and a little east, almost touching Mopac. We hit some streets we'd never walked before, extra points in eXtreme dog walking. We figure we did three miles by the time we got back. The day was sunny and cool. It was trash day, which only happens when we all slip because of a holiday. The yard waste recycling truck came by us a couple of times, grinding Christmas trees and filling the air with their scent. A group on young boys played on their scooters. They asked to pat the dogs. They had a dog with them, but it had short hair. "I never touched a poodle before," one said. "My granddad has a poodle but it's smaller," another allowed. We passed the 'house of shells.' Shell wreaths adorn the iron gate that protects the large garden in the vacant lot next to it. Giant shells hang from the trees. Concrete dolphins flank the front walk. When SuRu drove Chalow and I back into the driveway, the yard man, Bart, is in the front bed, spreading mulch. The heating and air conditioning guy, cousin Clyde, is in the house, trying to figure out why the main heater isn't heating. SuRu and I went to Aranda's and eat a Mexican breakfast and while FFP supervised the house maintenance. I took Mom out to look for a computer desk. We haven't gotten the computer yet. It will probably come in a week or so from Dell. We end up picking a $99 desk (on sale) at OfficeMax that is backordered. They expect them in a week. Then they would expect to get it to us a week after that. I'm not confident in this deal, but they promise that they won't bill me until they ship it. And Mom is happy for now, although she wants a better chair, too. And a printer. The good news is that she is willing to pay for all this and after this is done I will have done everything I promised when I got her to move! The new computer comes with Windows ME which I haven't used at all. I am planning to keep her machine as pristine as possible in a possibly futile effort to keep it from crashing. I may go so far as to have her use Outlook Express and IE. This is why Microsoft was sued, wasn't it? Home from the shopping experience, I rummage around the house, trying to get things done, talk to FFP. We decide on a date to the movies. We consider 'Best of Show' but end up with 'You Can Count on Me' at the Arbor. Which means that we buy the tickets and then kill time in the Barnes and Noble. I decide to glance through two kinds of Windows ME books...the deep 'secrets' kind I might buy and the Idiot kind for possibly giving Mom. I take the books upstairs to one of the library tables that is empty. There is stuff left from the last occupant. A book on the Kama Sutra, a book calle 'Tripping' about drug taking and three magazines on hair styles. We don't buy any books. The movie is good. You meet these people for a tiny slice of their life, set up by a couple of scenes from the past to give a sense of it. Home again, we have some wine and Boursin and crackers. We turn on some jazz and doze over newspapers and New Yorkers.i
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