Reading

[ This essay was originally published on gnu.org. ]

When I was in grade school, right here in the United States of America, I was taught that our country was the “land of opportunity”. My teachers told me that my country was special, because anyone with a good idea and a drive to do good work could make a living, and be successful too. They called it the “American Dream”.

What was the cornerstone to the “American Dream”? It was equality — everyone had the same chance in our society to choose their own way. I could have any career I wanted, and if I worked hard, I would be successful.

It turned out that I had some talent for working with computers — in particular, computer software. Indoctrinated with the “American Dream”, I learned as much as I could about computer software. I wanted my chance at success.

My thesis is nearly complete. I defend tomorrow, and as usual, I let the deadline run up until the end. I just finished my slides for the defense, and practiced once. I have some time in the schedule tomorrow to practice at least once, although I have to find some empty room up at the University to do it in.

I'll be glad to be done. It's been annoying to spend three or four weeks here sitting around writing about perljvm, and not hacking on it. I have a Cosource deadline coming up this week, so now's a good a time as any to release the first version of the Kawa-based perljvm.

I am really excited about how Kawa works, and how easy it is to massage perl's IR into Kawa's IR. I got more excited about it as I wrote my thesis defense talk. I really think great things can happen with Kawa in the future.

Tonight, I finished the actual document of my Master's thesis. I had to vet it by reading it out loud, about three times. I have a real hard time finding subtle grammar errors. I believe that when I read, I parse them out in my head. Reading out loud usually helps, but it wasn't working so well this time. (The first draft had many errors, even though I read it out loud.)

This time, I went through it twice, reading it out loud while bouncing the mouse along each word. This seemed to help a lot, as I was catching errors left and right. I hope I got them all.

I sent the final document off to the committee. I haven't heard from Larry Wall, whose an external member of my committee, at all. I haven't heard from since we set up the plane tickets months ago. I am sure he's insanely busy, and that's likely why. No big deal, I suppose, I am just overly nervous.

Welcome to Tregeagle.
I have decided to revamp this site, so expect to see some major changes in the future. I have moved our training and computer help to rentageek which will be maintained by Matt and me.

I am going to return this site to its original path and …

On the original version of my website I wrote a long blether about Tregeagle. My version of his story, much of it inspired no doubt by that early Kneehigh Theatre production I saw at the Minack. Like much from back then it has been …

I wrote this in 1990 and later copied it out neatly because I like the memory.

It was probably the first decent sub-tropical storm I had ever seen. Being in the middle east at the time lent a distinct Old Testament air to my thoughts.

Here’s a sample:

The …