Vitanuova for 2002 June 30

More indirection

"That's very Christian of you."

(I.e., Christians are supposed to act virtuously, and you acted virtuously. Now archaic in many places.)

Saturday

I went to a computer show in Oakland with Duncan; after that, I visited Andy and Michelle and played Dance Dance Revolution.

Sunday

I went to the auction which various people told me about. It was fun! I did bid on a couple of items, but I was quickly and dramatically outbid.

The 4-foot demonstration slide rule sold for about $450; that was the item I most wanted, but I couldn't afford anywhere near that. I also bid unsuccessfully on some antique voltmeters (fine voltmeters with hardwood panelling, etc.), and they generally ended up going for about $200 apiece.

The big news today was probably that my foot was run over by a car. It doesn't seem that I broke any bones; I can still move all of my toes and still feel all of them, and the pain is relatively mild. In fact, I can still walk without too much trouble. But my toes are certainly sore. I'm icing my foot, and I'll see how it feels over the next few days.

I've never been run over by a car before. When I was really little, I tended to think that accidents were inherently divided into "fatal" and "nonfatal", in the sense that a particular kind of accident had a particular quality of either inflicting or not inflicting death. For example, I thought that everyone who had ever been shot with a gun had died of the gunshot wound. (I had heard of several instances of people killed by shooting, and never heard of anybody surviving it.) Similarly, I thought that "being run over by a car" and probably even "being in a car crash" were necessarily fatal. It took a while for me to realize that practical every injury, accident, and disease exists along a continuum, so that it can have fatal, acute, or chronic characteristics, and different people will be affected by it in different ways. (Maybe I still haven't fully realized this.)

After we'd satisfied ourselves that I hadn't broken any bones, we went down to Campbell for an LNX-BBC meeting. We stayed there for a few hours and then came up to Emeryville, where we had dinner at the Emeryville Food Court. (This is a cool place -- officially known as the Emeryville Public Market -- with a huge variety of inexpensive fast food restaurants.)

We continued the BBC meeting in Berkeley, and I got the whole thing building an iso9660 image! The problem is that the resulting image won't quite boot -- you get a shell but you can't use most of the software we've compiled. It shouldn't take long to get the whole thing working properly.