05:36:05 Friday January 09 2004 I had another productive day today. Went to work and got quite a bit accomplished before Rick (my office mate) got me involved in a discussion of weird science. First this wondrous machine was presented to me. Of course it is a free energy machine and thus very very unlikely to work. David (my boss) wants to build one. When I agreed Rick was shocked. He said "You, the ultimate skeptic, want to build one of these things?" I said "Of course. Being a skeptic means that you have to try things that you don't believe will work. If you just dismiss things because the current theory says they won't work then you aren't an empiricist. You are just accepting all that theory on blind faith." Rick finally admitted that all this weirdness had come about because in his usual perusal of the engineering library's new books section he had discovered The Hunt for Zero Point by Nick Cook (apparently an editor for Jane's Defense Weekly). Before I knew it we were talking about Edgar Cayce (who was probably a fake) and lifters (which do work). All in all a strange afternoon. The major accomplishment once I got home was recovering the genealogy stuff from my father's old IBM AT. It is all there, which is a small miracle in and of itself. However, all the data is stored in this bizarre format for this old program called Family Ties. The guy who wrote it wants about 50 USD for a registration key in order to use his conversion utility. It converts it to the GEDCOM format which has to be the only standard file format written by a religion. So right now I am weighing the benefits of: Writing my own open source conversion utility Writing down the few dozen entries by hand and inputing them into an open source genealogy program Cracking the conversion program with my debugger and my hex editor All of these will result in a a file I can use. They are probably in order of morality and reverse order of time consumption. <sigh> Sara is back in town and as a result my house is more than full. They are all more than welcome in my house. It is just that every so often I need to hide from humans for a few hours in order to recharge my mental batteries. I have found myself staying in when large groups of people go out in order to find those few hours.