Chris posts about his ideal CS curriculum, which doesn't sound too bad by the way, but which brings me to a question I've wondered about...

For x dollars, I bet you could get Washington University to change its name. The big queestion is, what is a least upper bound on x? I've been tempted to try to find this out, by writing the University saying I might be interested in changing its name.

Actually, I am interested, and although I lack the inclination and the funds, there are many worthy people out there whose name could be affixed over Wash U.

Maybe if Chris strikes it rich at the UPS package handling, he can get the name changed to Chris University.

After all, we already have the Hill-top campus.

Nathan asks about venues for a road trip.

So how about Bryce Canyon? To tempt you to go there, take a look at this picture, and there are more where that came from. It was one of my favorite stops on the Great RV Trip 2003.

Posts are flying left and right about the great one, Don Knuth and the wonders of his home and travels.

His fascination with diamond-shaped signs (and, please, let's call a rhombus a rhombus) has been documented as has his quest to quash inferior delta symbols from publication.

Eileen has intimated that installing a gigantic pipe organ in one's home might be unusual.

Gee, next thing you know, somebody will post that acquiring seals from a zoo and training them to play said organ would be considered eccentric (too late, I just beat you to it).

I will come clean and confess that I have pipe envy. I have a not-so-gigantic simulated-pipe organ in my home. I had thought of rescuing a pipe organ from the Organ Historical Society, but when my wife asked if it came with headphones, I told her "only for those who don't want to hear it".

So, acquiring a true organ remains for me a pipe dream.

But if I did rescue one, or have one built for me, the pedal division would certainly not be electropneumatic, as is the case for Don Knuth's organ. I would think his disdain for deprecated deltas would extend to organs that are not authentically mechanical, but it appears he capitulated and (reasonably) settled on non-mechanical means of playing his pedalboard.

He won't read papers that contain the deprecated delta (I wonder if he has students who prescreen papers for such problems). In striving for greatness, I proclaim that I won't listen to or play organs buit with non-mechanical pedal action.

OK, I admit that my organ uses magnets (yes, magnets) to actuate the pedals. I guess professors that live with magnetically actuated pedalboards can't afford to be so critical.

Last night was the second meeting of the intermediate hockey skills class at Brentwood. Brentwood rink is one of the best in town, and I guess they've been offering this class for a long time, taught by two guys named Kurt and Tim. At the first meeting, we skated drills to get placed in class, and I got the class I wanted -- the intermediate class. The beginners can't skate and I have some fundamental things to work on before I'm ready for the advanced class.

So last night was the first actual class, and we spent 40 minutes on skating drills and 20 minutes on passing drills. One of the more advanced students told me i gave him an "awesome pass" and that was great to hear.

The only downside is that despite the instructor's name (Kurt) he is very long-winded and we stand around too much of the time hearing the same group-level comments. But I'm sure the class will pick up as the semester goes on. I just hope the grade I get doesn't bring down my GPA too much.

We went to the Blues game last night and tried out our new seats. I'm splitting a season with Dr. Robert and he and I attended the Fri night game against Columbus. Betsy and I went to the game last night.

Last night the Blues played against my birth-city team, Dallas Stars. The Stars weren't in Dallas when I grew up, but then again there wasn't ice in Dallas either except in iced tea.

After one intermission, we returned to our seats to find somebody in them, but they moved over. It turned out the squatters were from Dallas, and wanted to say hello to their ex-neighbor Dallas Star player as he went to or from the locker room. Our seats are right near the gangway for the visiting team to take the ice.

The player didn't come back after intermission (guess he had other things he had to do), so the squatters waited until the action got pretty intense to decide to leave, a not-so-cool thing to do at a hockey game. They squeezed past us and the other people sitting to our right. After they sortied, the guy to my right muttered something about rude people from Dallas.

Although I wore Blue on the outside, I was born and raised in Dallas, and the little child on the inside of me was deeply affected by that comment. I was about to start a fight with him when about 10 fights broke out on the ice, so we all turned our attention to the game.

I've been playing guitar Friday nights with some guys at my Temple, and one of them told me this story.

He had been hired to play for a party, and the party had also hired an Elvis impersonator (at least, I think he wasn't the real thing). PseudoElvis walks up to my friend and the band and says, in his pseudoelvis voice:

PE: So, what do you guys know?

Band: Well, we'll play anything you want. How about "Don't be cruel"?

PE: (still in PE voice) Uhhh, I don't know that one....

I and two others lunched at Cicero's on Tuesday, and we ended up at a table that wobbled substantially.

Others: This table wobbles too much, let's fix it.

Me: It's fine, we can deal with it.

Others: No, we should fix it or move.

Server: Let me see what I can do.

Me: This wouldn't happen if the table had just 3 legs, because 3 points define a plane.

Server: What? ::puts some coaster cards under two legs::

Others: But this table has a pedestal.

Me: Right, so it has 5 points of potential contact with the floor: the pedestal and the four feet coming out of the pedestal.

Server: Huh? ::puts coater cards under the third leg::

Others: You're not saying that a pedestal and two legs would do the job?

Me: No, the pedestal shouldn't count as a point in the plane; only the feet should.

Server: Almost have it! ::puts coaster cards under the fourth leg::

Me: The table is still wobbling, but it's about 3 inches higher than before.

Server: Let me get more coaster cards. ::starts to leave::

Others: What good will that do? You already have cards under all the legs, and the table's too high.

Server: I'll put some cards under your chairs' legs. ::leaves::

Nathan posted about the evil that gawk can drive a sane computer scientist to do.

I'm not sure why gawk attracts such fans, but I know they're out there.

Along similar lines, a scripting course has been proposed for CSe next semester, and it will taught using perl and CGI. From talking with students and industry I gather that .NET is becoming (has become) a more attractive platform for developing web-based applications, so I've been (unsuccessfully) trying to push for the course to include, if not be based upon, .NET.

Of course opinions are welcome to be posted here, but if you feel strongly you might talk with the course's potential instructor aobut this.

I wouldn't normally post about football, and I would never go to game or watch one on TV (unless invited to do so). The fact that I was born and raised in Texas comes out only on a need-to-brag basis, and I had my accent surgically removed when I settled in NY.

But Chris and Lucas have gone too far. They had their say about who would win at football this week. They disparaged my home-town team, and even made fun of Bill Parcells (well, I suppose it is irresistible).

Gentlemen, this means war.

Prophecy turned to pathos when Dallas beat the Giants last night:

Dallas blew a 13-point halftime lead as the Giants outscored the Cowboys 25-12 in the second half, but Cundiff overcame a disappointing week one performance to win the game for Dallas.

You have to admire a team whose own website claims they "blew a 13-point halftime lead" and goes on to say that the kicker who scored the winning field-goal went from "goat to hero".

Below, I post of the wonders of my clean office. But the piece de resistance is the reading chair whose constructor is executing concurrently with this post (translation: it is being fabricated at this very moment). After what seemed like hours of shopping I settled on a chair from "lazy boy" (how appropriate) and the chair should be tooling down the highway toward my office sometime in the next month.

Now comes the "related work" portion of this post. I found the chair after visiting a couple of other interesting furniture places. First, I went to Carol House, "because you like nice things". But unfortunately, Carol House is no longer selling leather because Brookie has gone on the wagon (or is it off the wagon) when it comes to furniture made from the hoof. They had one chair left, and even though it was made of leather, Brookie was evidently in no hurry to get rid of it as it was marked (on sale) twice the price of similar chairs I saw elsewhere. Also it was a bad color (not one found in nature) and it was too big and cushy for my hunble (but lovable and clean) office.

Next I went to Famous-Barr at that mall North on Lindbergh, and went downstairs to the furniture gallery. It looked like a scene from the Addams Family. The place was utterly devoid of people (buying or selling) and the furniture could have come from my grandmother's house.

I stopped at Jennifer Convertibles, not because I wanted a chair with a pop top, but because it's where I would have looked in NY for the kind of chair I wanted. They had a catalog with a lot of leather (Jennifer and Carol haven't spoken much lately, I guess) but not much I could actually try out, and I couldn't trust such an important purchase to faith in a catalog.

I visited various furniture stores on Manchester, but didn't see anything that belonged in an office as worthy and clean as mine.

Finally, at Lazy Boy, I saw it. It called to me from the back of the store. Soft leather, as comfortable as prewashed jeans; arms made of the finest wood, cut by lumberjacks of noble descent; a back that was supportive yet not solicitous. Oh, and it was on sale.

Nathan posts about the advantages of cleaning up his room. I recently made a pact with my office, that if I kept the office clean, my office would stop moving books and papers around to where I couldn't find anything. So far, the pact seems to be working.

Then, shamed by Scott and Ben, I made the semiannual pilgrimage to the supermarket to stock up on chocolate, so that when countless (but certainly countable and bijectable on aleph-nought) numbers of students stopped by to admire my office, they would have a tasty and pseudonutritious treat. But, like the spaghetti waiting for the sauce, like the instantiated object waiting for its constructor invocation, like the wait waiting (what else) for its notify, I sit alone in my uncluttered yet utterly unvisited office.

By the way, my other pact with my office is not to eat the chocolate I buy for students, so come by, claim your treat, and (in the words of Feynman translating from the Japanese) hang your eye on my beautiful office.

Mike Henrichs brought an interesting article to my attention this morning, so I thought I'd post it and see if others think it's on-target too.

We had dinner last night with a couple that has kids our kids' age. As usual, conversation turned to how the kids are doing, latest tips on kid-rearing, that sort of thing. My friend turned to me and in a hushed voice told me that he and his oldest son had had "the talk". His son is 12, so I asked, "The talk? The talk about sex?". "No!" he said, "he knows all about that already. The talk about not downloading mp3s".

Well, today was your chance to audition for Queer Eye for the Straight Guy, the hit show where 5 gay guys tell one straight guy things his wife have been telling him for years. I wonder what they look for at the audition. I suppose you have to be openly heterosexual but also dress, bathe, and live at a level some distance below fabulous.

I don't get it. The guy who's in charge of fashion puts a sweatshirt and a blazer on a guy, and everybody says how great it looks. If I did the same thing, people would just say I looked even stupider than usual. The guy in charge of shaving and that kind of stuff tells the victim to buy some brand of shaving gel I can't even pronounce. He's telling this to a guy who obviously hasn't shaved in a month or so. Doesn't chemistry inform us that the ingredients of two products, if they are the same, behave similarly even if one product costs 10x more and is unpronouncable?

How do I know so much about the show? It's become my wife's favorite show, and so we watch it every Tuesday night. It has replaced the succession of "our weekly show" which included over time The Practice, Twin Peaks, LA Law, Star Trek NG. Our latest show is decidedly different.

My favorite quote so far from the show is when the fashion guy is riding with the others to save a policeman from his awful plight, and he says "Guns don't kill people, bad fashion kills people."

How can you not like a show like that?

Every now and then we all have one of those weeks when everything seems to be happening, if not all at once, then in quick succession. If you're lucky, you can see it coming so you can plan ahead and leave town if necessary. If you're like me, then you see it coming but live in denial until it's over.

Our department hosted, 4-5 Sept, a group of researchers doing work on Java for a DARPA program called PCES. The meeting went really well, thanks to the great work of the DOC students, particularly Pavan, Roopa, Ravi, and Rob. The work they demonstrated or described included amazing things wrought by Angelo, Dave J, Jim, James, and John. It was so great to see all that work appreciated by my colleagues.

The meeting was held in the humble but lovable digs of Bryan 509C, and Magic Myrna made a lot of that happen effortlessly. The weather could not have been better, and people who had late flights hopped on metro link to ascend that inverted catenary I like to call the St Louis Arch.

Then this past week I got to cover CS 342 for Chris Gill who was at the PLOP conference. We have lots of conferences with PL in their names, but that one is Pattern Languages of Programming. Others include PLDI, POPL, and PPoPP. I'm still looking for something we could call POOPED. Of course, I would hold that conference after all the others, and it would have an exhaustive treatment of some subject, but I digress.

Because of its focus on C++, my covering 342 is a lot like asking oil to cover for water. I think deep down, my inner child is wounded from the way one of my favorite languages (C) was corrupted by C++ just to bring about the birth of objects in a popular language. But I digress.

It was great to see how far the students I had in 101/102 have come, and while I wish there were more of them continuing with CS, the future of the CS world at Wash U is in great hands.

I've gotten somewhat involved with music at my temple, and was scheduled to help out at the late service last Saturday by playing guitar for some stuff. I showed up early to go over some things with the organist, and found that through miscommunication, no cantor was there for the early service. So I ended up singing for the early service. More stress, not just on me but on the people who were within earshot. I can sing OK in a choir, but I don't have a great solo voice.

But then came the end of this week and some things I was really looking forward to. Our hockey team had a practice game with some people from other teams, and it was so great to be skating again. I am still the remedial player but in the words of that immortal movie Slap Shot, I'm working on it.

Yesterday I took the afternoon off and took my almost 5-year-old to City Museum. It's a great place, and open until 1 AM on Fridays and Saturdays. We didn't stay quite that long, but stayed long enough for him to explore lots of neat things.

And last night was the penultimate summer service for our temple, and I've been playing guitar at that almost all summer. There are three other guys who play too, and two of them were there last night. They are both amazing players and we had a blast playing last night. If the following doesn't make sense, I'll be glad to explain it over a beer or something. We were planning to play "Shalom Aleichem" as the opening song for many reasons: 9/11, the bad things going on in the Middle East (which you would think would be just east of the Midwest but it's not -- but I digress), and we were tired of the other opening songs we have been doing all summer. Playing that song on guitars is kind of like playing "Proud Mary" on a violin, but in reverse. Anyway, it worked out fine, and the great part was the introduction which Ron S. (not me, the other Ron) played as a tribute to Johnny Cash. We've been looking for a name for our group, and contenders include The Grateful Yids and The Jews Brothers. Some people never grow up.

Well this concludes a long post for the long, long week, and whlie I'm glad it's over, in retrospect it was a fun time.

Two years ago I was sleeping in a hospital room, to be near my daughter who was in serious trouble because her pediatrician, well intentioned though he was, had overlooked the fact that her appendix had ruptured a week before. I thought my world was coming to an end, but when I awoke and saw what was on TV, I thought the whole world was coming to an end.

Now, two years later, I still cannot help but think of the people who never saw their families, friends, or loved ones again after going to work in a place we all thought was safe.

I, and I suspect others too, suffered a dramatic loss of faith following the attack. I had faith that we were safe in this country, that our openness and views on personal liberty and freedom would insulate us from those who could not abide views different from their own. I had faith that if such evil were afood, that our national security and intelligence agencies were up to the task of recognizing and neutralizing such a threat before anybody got hurt.

May we all live to see the day when our world is a safe place and when faith in the humanity of others is never misplaced.

Well, I can't claim the link bar of wonders, but I have followed Chris's lead and have added Nathan to my link bar.

And because that real estate is so valuable I had to boot somebody. Ben "no post" Brodie has been banished for the time being.

The art fair was, as usual, much better than fair, and I had a good time walking around. One booth sported acrylic flatware, and boasted that the various pieces on display were bullet-proof. For the curious, check out the web site.

Ken Konchel was there again with his photography of local and remote architecture. His web site is here.

This is evidently the 10th year of the fair, but I only knew of it some 5 years ago. The food was great too, and the weather was -- of course -- fair.

If you're not in the loop, so to speak, you should know about the art fair that takes place annually in Clayton. It's this weekend and it's worth seeing. There is also lots of great food you can buy.

So take a look, but don't take my parking spot, OK?

But there is an "us" in chorus.

This week I got to resume something I was doing a few years ago, when our Temple (Shaare Emeth) was between cantors. I am the interim, temporary, fill-in, subsittute volunteer (ITFISV) choir director. I like to call my position "choir catalyst" as I see my job mainly as helping the inevitable happen more quickly.

I get to pick out music, conduct rehearsals, and arrange things for the services this choir sings. Occasionally they'll let me play piano or guitar if no better instrumentalist is within earshot.

One of the most rewarding things I did this past time was to arrange music, and you can find some of my efforts on that front here. There are several arrangements of Debbie Friedman tunes there, which leads me to the next bit of the story.

I posted these things on the web a few years ago, when I was the ITFISV choir director last time. About a year later, I was contacted by the Debbie Friedman Copyright Police (DFCP) and informed that I was in violation of the copyright of Debbie's tunes (which I was, I admit). They also told me the words were copyright, but then the words predate Debbie by quite a bit, as they are the blessings of Havdalah (separation after Shabbat). The DFCP told me all I had to do was to reference Debbie's recordings of the works, and that was no problem, so I am now in compliance.

One of my goals is to make a book of music arranged for the volunteer choir. I plan to put a picture of a volunteer tomato plant on the cover. I've got a bunch of other stuff arranged on my Mac here (ancient G3 running MacOS 8.6 but it does Finale very nicely).

There are various things that make my life better, and doing this music stuff is one of them, so if you see me smiling more you'll know why.

And if you try to convince me that there is indeed an "I" in "choir" I will stubbornly stick to my story that there is not. And if it turns out there is one, it is a silent "I".