The family has a new puppy, a 4-month old Rat Terrier who just survived an 8 hour flight from San Jose with a layover in Houston. You know, I bet they let HER bring water on the airplane. When I try to do that, I'm the object of scorn for TSA agents on both sides of the metal detector.

Gizmo included for scale. The puppy is a rascal, not timid at all.

More puppy-blogging later, I'm sure.

• Holding one's nose, then breathing through it. Dreamers will be able to breath through your nose, even though it is pinched shut.
  


• Read some text, look away, and read it again, or to look at your watch and remember the time, then look away and look back. Observers have found that, in a dream, the text or time will often have changed.


• Flipping a light switch or looking into a mirror. Light switches rarely work properly in dreams, and reflections from a mirror often appear to be blurred, distorted or incorrect.

I've been coding quite a bit with Javascript lately and one of my favorite features is the ability to quickly create a closure to encapsulate the state of groups of variables. Here's a quick way to save the states of any number of values for a lexically-scoped block of code in C++. Personally, I would skip to the example at this point.

... Code exploded the formating. I'll post it again later...

Also, since this relies on storing pointers I'm not sure how I would accomplish something similar in C#. I understand that .NET 3.0 supports anonymous closures; they would be a much better option than what I've done here.

Tuesday nights are $1 burger nights at the Buffalo American Legion. After a one especially brutal Arena Football game we convalesced in the dim, smoky legion hall and a tradition developed.

Burgers, $1. Pitchers, $7. All the Buffalo second-hand ambiance: free. Did I mention the burgers are tasty?

Tonight was a special Tuesday since there was a meat raffle as dinner entertainment. Now, I don't know how common these contests are outside of the midwest but up until tonight I had never participated in one. Tickets are $1. An old man spins a wheel and loudly announces the winner.

Friends of ours won first. They drew number 17 of 30 from the ticket plate and the wheel hit 17. (Odds of this happening are 1/30.) Matt picked the 2.5 pound package of pork miscellany -- ham, bacon, sausage.

After some cajoling, Krista entered the next round. She drew 17 from the plate; independent odds of this number matching Matt's are 1/30. To our disbelief, the wheel hit 17 again. We drove off with two-pack of strip steak and potatoes.

Total odds of these independent events: 1/30 (win the draw) * 1/30 (second win) * 1/30 (draw matching numbers) = 1/27,000. Quite the burger Tuesday! (Would someone please check my math?)

A friend's recent artistic endeavor inspired me to rummage up some old pieces of my own. These are all from at least 5 years ago and to my recollection have never occupied this space before. They were all done with Lightwave and a small dose of Photoshop.

Got this image in anonymously in the mail tonight.. I'll try to explain later!

Trees and golfers were visible out the starboard side passengers' windows as the 767 hurtled toward the threshold at 180 knots, 30-50 knots faster than normal. The RAT [auxiliary power] didn't supply "juice" to the 767's flaps or slats so the landing was going to be hot. Pearson didn't recover from the slip until the very last moment. A passenger reportedly said "Christ, I can almost see what clubs they are using." Copilot Quintal suspected Pearson hadn't seen the guardrail and the multitude of people and cars down the runway. But at this point it was too late to say anything. A glider only gets one chance at a landing,and they were committed.

If you zoom out, you can see some more instances of this slightly bewildering effect. They did a very good job blending everything but the perspective.

In a historic break with the past, Poland's newly elected government threw open its top secret Warsaw Pact military archives - including a 1979 map revealing the Soviet bloc's vision of a seven-day atomic holocaust between Nato and Warsaw Pact forces.

About two million Polish civilians would die in such a war, and the country would be all but wiped off the face of the Earth, he said. On the map, western Europe lay beneath a chilling overlay of large red mushroom clouds: Warsaw Pact nuclear strikes, using giant warheads to compensate for their relative lack of precision.