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Yesterday was not the best of days. I had to take the boy to the doctor with a sore throat, which took all morning. When we got back it turned out the dog had diarrhea in the living room, so that had to be cleaned up.

I'm sorry to mention that, because I know that basically no one wants to hear about Dog Diarrhea, but there you are. Mr. Brown was back in town, and Mr. Clean came to the rescue.

Later on, I spilled a glass of cherry soda all over the dining room table while preparing it for a painting project, and then we ran out of black paint in the middle of the project, effectively ending it for the time being. When I took the dog on one of her many outings, she noticed a dead songbird lying on the ground, which I was glad she did not eat.

I had planned to look at the WuShu school in the neighborhood, which looks like the real thing, but the day did not turn out as planned.

At least I had a chance to read chapter 4 of Agile Software Development By Alistair Cockburn., and found, as with other chapters, that it was worth the purchase price of the book.

I would like to clarify visiting the Reagan Presidential Library. Reagan's remark about ketchup being nourishing was even more idiotic than his assertion that trees cause smog; I would have preferred to visit the library of a Democratic President. But I'm in Los Angeles, far from Little Rock or Atlanta.

The Clinton Library , under construction in Little Rock Arkansas isn't open yet, and the Jimmy Carter Library and Museum is open every day, but it's too far from Los Angeles for a weekend visit.

There was one thing that puzzled me about the Reagan Library. Actually, there were a lot of things, but one in particular stood out. A shoulder patch depicting The Road Runner and Wiley Coyote was attached to a certificate presenting "This Patch Reluctantly Carried to the Moon on Apollo 14" .... "to Governor Ronald Reagan".

On the patch, The Road Runner is planting an American flag on the crescent moon, and Wiley Coyote is gazing at him from orbit. In the middle of the patch below them is the rising Earth, no doubt the target that Wiley C. will hit when he plummets the more than 200 thousand miles to the little dust puff in the middle of the desert that always marks his impact point.

The bottom of the patch carries the names of the three crew members, and the top of the patch says, simply and inspiringly, "BEEP BEEP!".

There has to be a story there, don't you think?

There's a Chinese martial arts school just two blocks from my house. I walked by last night with the dog and saw black-clad forms flitting quickly across the sunken floor of a very large space. Someone was in the window, standing on one leg, her other foot raised high in the air.

A young man with a close-cropped haircut sat behind a desk in the large lobby. Behind him was a computer with a martial-arts movie screen-saver. The same image was in evidence in another corner of the building.

In the alley, a simple black and white gate opened onto a large outdoor garden. An outbuilding in the far corner housed a yoga squad on the floor, bent over their right knees in what looked to be a very difficult and possibly harmful posture.

The dog and I walked on.

Later as we crossed the street, a woman careened around the corner. Letting her pass, I knocked twice on the right rear window of her old Volvo. Helloo_oo_oo! Pedestrian!

What is that guy in the orange vest doing up on the billboard, working hard on a Saturday night? Is it a political act, or is it legit?

It looks like it might be a billboard advertising Tide, but since he's still up there plastering on sheets of orange and yellow, with some writing on it, I don't know what it is. I'll go get the binoculars and get back to you.

This is happening as we speak, in the night.

"When fruit punch decides to punch back" is all it says. How disappointing can you get?.

Today we said goodbye to the Christmas tree. For the first time in years, we didn't get our tree at the last minute. In case you're wondering, Christmas eve is the last minute to get a tree. We donned protective gloves (once again the blue plastic wrappers from the NY Times came in handy) and, each taking an end of the tree, carried it up the street to the Christmas tree recycling center, where it now sits, waiting to be picked up and... recycled?

After we took out the tree, my thoughts turned back to software, and I had a brainstorm. Why not configure Eclipse to edit this file, and run RubyJournal directly? So that's exactly what I did.

The built-in editor doesn't have word wrap, but neither does any other editor I have on this computer. And Eclipse has a place to configure a button so you can run batch files, just by pressing a button!. This is exactly what the Still River Shell did for DOS, about 20 years ago, but Eclipse is free, so I guess we've made progress.

After seeing reference on several blog sites to a map of some part of blogspace where once I clicked on the map I was surprised to see that I recognized someone's name: Joe Crawford. Joe used to post to the webmonster list, and it's great to see that he's still active and writing. Hi, Joe! pools=XML, Blog, Ruby