RLPF.ar

This was one of those trips where the flight was the least eventful part of the journey! (The alternative could only be worse.) The skinny --

• Some heavy flash storms gummed up DC traffic as badly as I've ever seen. The storms themselves were brief, but the aftereffects on traffic last for hours. Normally it takes roughly an hour to get from Northern Virginia to BWI. Yesterday, it was 2 1/2 hours. We planned for the worst and left at 3:30 PM for a 7:20 PM flight, and needed every minute of it. I got through security, grabbed something to eat on the plane, and made it to the gate just in time to hear them call all the boarding zones.
• My suitcase weighed 59 pounds at check-in -- 9 pounds overweight! I guess I didn't make as many of those hard decisions as I should have. So, I was one of those dweebs kneeling on the ground frantically moving things between bags. Fortunately, I have a magical carry-on bag. No matter how much I put in it, no matter how overstuffed it appears, it always fits in the overhead bin!

The new machine is working nicely. I put in a full afternoon of coding on it, after sorting out some new-environment configuration issues. SuperCollider itself runs beautifully, after getting past some fiddly bits that are specific to my working arrangement (that is, my software engineering weaknesses, not SuperCollider's).

Dictation was another of my worries. I'm actually using Dragon NaturallySpeaking 10 to write this now -- Windows software, in Linux under WINE. Functionally I'd say it's about 80%, good enough to use as long as you avoid some specific actions that will make it unstable. The alternative is to boot into Windows whenever I need to write something extended. You can guess how I feel about that.

Penka and Daniel's cat Jenny, who is extremely skittish around new people, paid me the courtesy of not running away when I saw her dozing in the back room around lunchtime. She stayed put just long enough for me to grab a photo! Then she got suspicious of this big creature looking at her, and she ducked under the sofa -- which would have worked as a disguise apart from the tail sticking out.