Scott Williams

I stumbled on Damon Lord’s analysis of pronoun dropping in English and wanted to add a bit more data because I happened to already be thinking about it. English uses pronoun dropping to convey the imperative (the command form) of a verb: the “you” is dropped in the sentence “you go to the store” to come up with the command “go to the store.” This is only productive in the present tense—If you said “went to the store” or “will go to the store,” the native English speaker wouldn’t hear a command. Instead, the implied subject is “I.” It isn’t a literarily acceptable form, but is easily recognized as a kind of meditative self-comment. “Went to the store yesterday; saw a giant panda eating a bag of marbles. Must remember to get marbles next time.”

Where did I put the Cheerios? It’s one in the morning, and the cereal has hidden itself in one of my many bank-vault-quality cabinets. The gusto I expend in my exhaustive search translates into a volley of thunderous claps as I rummage through the cabinetry in search of the fugitive cereal. Because of my habit of keeping each spoon in a separate drawer, I have to open and slam several closed before I discover the hidden trove of utensils so essential to cereal-eating. Now where did I put the bowls? Though I have only a 700 square foot apartment, I seem to have more cabinets in my kitchen than rocks on the ocean shore. And due to my poor location memory, I have to consistently open and close all of them in order to find anything! Oh woe to the one who uses a linear search to find something in my kitchen.

It’s now three in the morning, and having completed the barrage of kitchen-door banging that provides the cheerful staccato accompaniment to my cereal preparations, I retire to the bathroom to begin a 2-hour deluge of cabinetry percussion sure to delight my neighbors and myself.

[Ed. Trompey’s regular place on this blog will be discontinued, as I no longer live below her. In her place, I introduce Slamantha, the acoustic genius next door. Selections from Slamantha’s Diary will appear here periodically.]

I found a snippet from NIST unveils tool to foil attacks via DNS to be highly suggestive:

Network researchers at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) have unveiled a method that federal systems administrators can use to protect their systems from increasingly complex attacks launched via the Domain Name System (DNS) of the Internet and private IP networks.

The italicized words, federal systems administrators, sound strange to my ears. Not to imply that such things don’t exist, because they clearly must, but it sounds like a news blurb from a fictional high-tech story. It gives me this “Big Brother runs the Internet” feeling, or maybe a stand-off between federal DNS administrators and state DNS administrators. Interesting food for thought.

Man am I ever tired! I finally got around to tromping over to the hardware store for more boots, only to find they were sold out of my size; so I had to tromp back two miles to my apartment. With only my elegant evening wear for foot cover. Talk about embarrassing. I know for a fact that at least one person looked at me funny (and I’m sure it’s not for tromping twice in every sidewalk square: everyone I know does that). What do you want me to do, moron, wear sandals? It’s not like it’s warm in California! Anyways, tonight I packed for my trip to Idaho. I need a bigger suitcase, I was up til one packing. It’s not like it’s easy to fit four watermelons in a suitcase using only your boots. Even after hurling them onto the apartment floor several times, I still had to tromp on them for maybe half an hour solid to get them to fit. Still easier than last weekend, when I had to pack all those bowling balls to go to Toronto.

Yours, Trompey.

I noticed some of the readers of this blog are looking for the sqlite bindings I wrote for clisp a few years ago. Since the Great Blog Deletion Event of aught-eight, I’ve moved clisp-sqlite to a more permanent home on Google Code. Without further ado, here it is: http://code.google.com/p/clisp-sqlite. I hope someone gets some use out of it! I don’t actively use it, but it worked last time I needed it. I will gladly accept patches.

From The New York Times coverage of a new paper at the Medical Device Security Center:

[A] team of computer security researchers plans to report Wednesday that it had been able to gain wireless access to a combination heart defibrillator and pacemaker.

They were able to reprogram it to shut down and to deliver jolts of electricity that would potentially be fatal — if the device had been in a person. In this case, the researcher were hacking into a device in a laboratory.

How’s that for terrifying? This is further proof of the necessity of machine-aided proofs of security.

Yum! I found this recipe the other day. Except Chris doesn’t like kale, so I went with spinach instead. There’s a little produce stand half a mile from my apartment with delicious produce in much better condition than Safeway for a much lower price–so fresh tomatoes, squash (my first encounter with butternut: what an amazing smell), garlic, carrots, an onion, a bag of oranges and a bunch of spinach for $7. Not bad! Unfortunately the soup feeds 6 and I ran out of freezer bags, so I’ll have to wait and spring the soup on some unsuspecting house guests when I can reasonably thaw three servings at once.

After a long series of misunderstandings, my hosting situation has been figured out again. Woo! So I can go back to blogging. Unfortunately, I’d have to re-import all my old blog posts from Facebook to make my collection complete. Maybe I will, but it’ll have to wait for another day.