Been to Richmond yesterday, Go was accepted into Phi-kappa-phi (which they don't pronounce as a fee or fi, but as fye... there's no rule). The hall where the ceremony was held used to be something else - a movie or a bordello or some such establishment. Funny how it's all dug in, you walk in from the street, pass the hall, and then find yourself at a top of an auditorium.
There was a funny moment when her name came up. The professor stumbled on the jay just like anyone else, but the result was mangled in a new and quite original way. Those art schools perhaps aren't a total waste of time.
This was also her graduation. She'll, however, stay in Richmond for a while, until Ricardo graduates, and he's got two more semesters, because he took a double major (programming and economics). He's reading the Economist like gospel, and, well, it does take faith. That's not science, so he believes he'll be a CFO somewhere, soon.
Today on UA, chatting with a lady from nCarolina
>I recently heard a history professor state that when events happen, everything should be documented and first-hand accounts taped by all who were there or had knowledge of it. Then it should sit for 20 years and after that time, all of the information gathered together and looked at again with the perspective of time and other events.
That's the ideal case, which almost never happens. The data are coming usually from the reports of those who had to report to their superiors - they are the poor guys who have to do some writing whenever it hits the fan, and their first worry is to save their own lower backs, then to satisfy the form, and the truth is somewhere lower in the list of priorities. They are also too close to events to grasp their importance, and often omit the really important stuff.
This is an old idea of mine, that the slips in an account of an event, or minor side details, suffice to refresh the memory of a witness to unravel much more of the story than was written down. Three years later, I was thankful that Netscape/Mozilla never lost my emails and I still have almost all of it (except the times in Zero, Orion and eHosp perhaps, when I was forced to use Outlook. I do have backups of those, so whatever I forgot, dates before everything else, is aided by timestamps on all those emails. What happened three years later? I started writing Byo, first as a plain copy of zod, but then introduced c7, a heir to catal6, as a way to keep these internal links. Then later, removed the hierarchy table, added more stuff...
On the norhern front, Gary is worried that once the website goes live, with lots of traffic (and he should know, he made The AMG), some caching may be required. This is the crucial moment - the prefabricated pieces of HTML that the web team will later pull from the database are the heaviest part (consider that it's at least a four-way join between two or three tables - each event has multiple participants, each in his role of the day, as a band, lights, artist, plus there's the venue, dates - or, worse, if it's a person's or venue's page, all of those "appeared together with" lists would have to be pulled). I did write that later, this is just the day when the idea was born.
More chat with David - work, work, work.