1 GSec; Why I’m not a samurai

Some­time in the last few months I turned one bil­lion sec­onds old. I think the cake requires tiny blue LEDs rather than can­dles. Don’t want to burn down the house…


I went to judo tonight, but nobody showed up. Not a huge sur­prise — it’s sum­mer, and there are a cou­ple of our mem­bers at the Legion camp at the Peace Gar­dens. Sat there and read the intro to Ideals of the Samu­rai. I’m going to have to bor­row it some night, but I should find out who owns it — if it’s the dojo’s copy, I don’t have a prob­lem tak­ing it home and read­ing it, but if it belongs to one of the mem­bers, I’d like to ask per­mis­sion before bor­row­ing it.

I skimmed part of the Twen­ty-One Pre­cepts of Hojo Soun. I think I’d have made a lousy samu­rai. He rec­om­mends going to bed no lat­er than eight at night (since thieves usu­al­ly come between the hours of mid­night and two AM — if you’ve been a‑bed since 8PM, you’ll be awake and aware enough to deal with them) and get­ting up at 4AM. Mind you, some of that is so that you can give the oth­er ser­vants their instruc­tions by 6AM, and have time to do your work so that the mas­ter will see you as a good ser­vant. Remem­ber, every­one, the samu­rai were ser­vants to their daimyo.

But still. The only times I remem­ber see­ing 4AM were com­ing at it from the mid­night side, not the get­ting-up-ear­ly side. Ye gads.


Get­ting down to the end of my PHP project. Gad, I love object-ori­ent­ed pro­gram­ming! Cod­ed up a DB-read page in ten min­utes from scratch, and it worked the first time. Nice. (Grant­ed, the page that adds the data to the DB took longer, but most of the debug­gery was stu­pid errors on my part, typos and the like.)