Curriculum Night

So, I took off from work a little early to drive over to Yamaarashi-chan's daycare, pick her up and allow her at least an hour with her sister. That was all the spare time we had as later that evening her school was hosting curriculum night, where the parents get to meet the teachers and discuss with them the curriculum and expected outcome for the rest of the year.

Yamaarashi-chan and I stopped for dinner at a local high-end delicatessen I know, Husky Dely, one of Omaha's and my favorite places for food and ice cream and curious groceries one can't get anywhere else, at least not easily. A Ben & Jerry's opened nearby; I hope it doesn't hurt Husky's business too much. We ate sandwiches and talked about why I would go there rather than the McDonald's across the street. We also discussed her homework situation for the next year.

I came away from the meeting with her teacher feeling very impressed and honestly hopeful for her progress. The teacher really seemed to have her act together, was very cheerful and energetic, and the expected syllabus was sufficiently comprehensive for a second grader. She's sharing the class with third-graders, and my only concern is that she's so smart and fast that by the time she's halfway through third grade she may have run out of things for the system to teach her, become board the way all bright kids do, and start to fail out. I know lots of us went through that period.

They have multiple literacy tracks, and are concentrating on letterforms for writing; they don't have too much computer stuff, which I think is good as long as we need to be able to communicate with pen and paper. Her teacher said that subtitled foreign cartoons were a clever way to get her to read, but probably didn't count towards her daily reading homework. There's not a strong arts track, but there are art requirements, mostly receptive.

The math track looked pretty good. My one concern is this whole "whole numbers" concept, where instead of teaching the kid one algorithm for doing a process, say, addition, they let the kid "figure out on her own" how to do it. I can grok what she's saying; I have multiple strategies for doing basic arithmetic, but I don't know that I would have had the confidence to use any of them if I hadn't had one pre-determined way of checking my results.

I also ran into my old manager from my CompuServe days. It turns out that his kids go to Yamaarashi-chan's school as well. He seemed to be doing pretty well. A little grayer than I was, even though he's younger.

The one curious sense I got the whole time I was there was this notion that the school and its teachers have a surprising degree of independence, but at the same time they're hemmed in one side by state regulators and federal curricula requirements, and on the other by apathetic parents who can turn enraged without warning if the school teaches anything the parent doesn't like. It can't be a comfortable place for them, and it does become least-common-denominator driven. I understand a bit better now why public schools are the way they are.

Doom III

So, after all the dire warnings about how hard Linux gaming has turned out to be, and how I shouldn't get my hopes up about playing Doom 3 under Linux, I went ahead and installed it anyway. shaterri was kind enough to loan me his data disks. So I became root (administrator), typed emerge doom3 (emerge is gentoo's source-driven package manager, but it'll install binaries if there's no source available), and waited. Ten minutes later, the install was done.

As is recommended, I have a separate account for games. So, after installing, I logged out as "elf", logged back in as "gamer", called up the run command dialog, and typed in doom3.

And was promptly never heard from again.

Everything you've read about Doom 3 is true. The graphics are amazing. The gameplay is fabulous. The trick of using the game engine itself to do introductions by dialoguing with people, seen in Half Life, is everywhere here as well. The sound is spot on. There isn't a single missing detail. And under Linux the performance was mind-bogglingly good. There were no stutters, no frame drops, nothing problematic at all about the game. ID got Linux gameplay just right.

Half Life 2 promises a more "cinematic" game experience, a grittier and more real-life rendering. It had better be, or it's never going to be able to compete with Doom 3.

Now all I have to figure out is: where on Mars do they keep the freakin' duct tape‽

I'm Blind!

I'm typing this barely able to see and relying on the spell checker later to get any spelling errors. My eyeballs are dialated to Hell and back and I'm wearing sunglasses because the light spilling into my eyes is just brutalizing. I've just been to the optometrist's office because I'm experiencing intermittent eye pain and have started to have trouble focusing on items close in.

My eyes are very healthy, like the rest of me. The muscles in my eyes don't get enough of a workout from sitting at a computer all day, so basically my instructions are to sit further away from the workstation and try to look outside the window once in a while, focusing on things at different distances, every twenty minutes or so. Oh, and get a better pair of sunglasess. If I'm having trouble focussing close in late at night, there's a prescription I can get in a couple of months if just changing the erognomics doesn't help.

As a writer, that's not hard. I touch type, frequently with my eyes closed, like I'm typing this. As a programmer, it's just impossible to not focus for long periods of time. I'm going to have to figure out something.

First tendonitis in my typing hands, now computer-related presbyopia. Great. Just freakin' great.