I started my summer school program today.  Yeah – I know it’s Saturday – but so what.  I turned off my email (eek) and settled into an hour of Brian Harvey’s Computer Science Logo Style.

I’d already read the first two chapters (Exploration and Procedures) so after downloading Berkeley Logo 5.4 I fiddled around with some of the examples that I was struggling to parse without playing around with them, such as:

print word word last “awful first butfirst “computer first [go to the store, please.]

Chapter 3 was descriptively titled “Variables.”  I took a little detour as I figured out how to change my editor to notepad2.exe (seteditor “n.exe after I renamed notepad2 to n and put it in the ucblogo director – DOS path hell, ugh – boy what an emotional victory to get that working.)

Well – my hour is up.  Boy – that went fast.  Time to go running.  Bye.

Ah – today was delightful.  I love the first day of a month, especially if it’s the day after the end of a quarter.  Amy and I have a standing date on the first day of every month (“life dinner”) where we get together and reflect on the previous month.  Tonight, we chowed down on sushi at Alibi (the one sushi place in Homer – buried at the back of a smoky bar) with our friend Nancy who is visiting for a few days.

Throughout the day (and at the end of the day yesterday) I got updates from a number of my companies about how they closed out the quarter for sales and on the top line.  Several ended up nicely ahead of plan, most were close to plan (we are talking about early stage companies, so close is fine), and a few had a disappointing quarter.  Overall, Q205 looks like it was a solid business quarter for young private tech companies (at least mine).

I consumed book two of the daily Homer bookathon – Jim Cramer’s Real Money.  Cramer cracks me up on those rare occasions that I stumble upon him on TV (usually at a health club somewhere) and I liked his last book.  This one wasn’t so good.  Several people have recommended Slavomir Rawicz’s The Long Walk – that’s up next (and – by the look of it – will probably take more than a day).

FeedBurner held a hackathon last week and created seven new features.  I think the idea of a one day coding jamfests is great – classic “web 2.0” stuff where you can quickly put small features immediately into production.  If you are one of the 50,156 FeedBurner publishers (as of 7/1/05), you now have a manual ping page, feed geotagging, title/description modification, “feedmedic” validator, Javascript circulation ticker, Image enclosures (gif/jpeg/png), and a Mac OS Dashboard Widget for tracking stats.  Nothing heavy – just fun and cool.

I love three day weekends – lots of time to think, reflect, read, run, and chill.  Enjoy the long summer nights, wherever you are.

Scott Moody sent this article about The Martun restaurant in Kaohsiung as an add-on to my post about the best toilets in this world.  Even I found this a little hard to swallow.