Caution: Singularity Ahead

Not a terribly exciting day, but pretty relaxing. I took Nika for a walk first thing (that's 10am), and we headed straight north to Fisherman's Wharf. Rather than diverting to the usual directions (either towards Pier 39 or Fort Mason) I just kept going through the parking lot. Little did I know there's a submarine parked there open for tours every day, and a " liberty ship " (assisted at the landing at Normandy in WWII). Huh... well then, there's something to do with Caspian when he's back. The next pier over from that is just a tiny little spur that's got a big bell on it (which used to be at the Embarcadero Ferry Building ), but no docking positions. It was completely empty except for Nika and I - the whole pier. A nice sit in the sun, watching the bay, all to ourselves. Nice. Home again, after grabbing some pearl tea (for me) and some bloodworms (for the mollusc ). I puttered around for a bit at home, then took Nika up to Michaelangelo playgrou...

Su and C are out of town on a road trip with Grandpa, and I'm taking it easy. Slept in 'til 10:30 today. Yay! The weather was crappy so I stayed around the house, and got sucked into a project to the exclusion of all else. Ages ago, someone asked about coding up the Traveller trade rules (from Merchant Prince ) into a simulation, which turned into a long debate about languages and platforms. Given the desire to make the result useful to everyone, I thought it was a no-brainer to do it in JavaScript with a web interface. I even went so far as to extract the source code of the canonical implementation - "TRADER" - from an Apple II disk image and take a peek at the code. Pretty damned elegant, actually. So earlier this week I started translating from Applesoft BASIC to JavaScript . As I went, though, I kept changing directions - for example, did I want it to be a verbatim, mechanical translation, or did I want to optimize things to take advantage of JavaScript's s...