Walking Journal: 9 miles, thunderstorm, etc.

I walked at least 4 miles today. I’m not sure if I got too far over that, though, because a thunderstorm came through and killed the power before I could look at the exact amount on the treadmill. The last time I looked it was 4, so I’ll count it as that.

Thunderstorm

I was excited when I first saw the clouds rolling in, because we haven’t gotten a good rain for months now, and our lawn (as I mentioned in my last entry) is getting pretty brown.

However, when lightning started striking across the street from me, I started to get a little worried. That, and the fact that my wall-mounted monitor was swaying back and forth. Fun fact: speakers make a nice crackly noise when lighting strikes close by.

I don’t think I’d seen lightning strike before. It was quite a sight to see. A bright flash, then a sort of green glow and a halo of sparks that drifted slowly away from the strike point. And it happened in the same place, three times in a row, a few minutes in between. “Never strikes the same place twice” my ass!

After the storm had passed, we went outside to see how bad the damage was. Our South and street facing section of fence had been blown over into our yard, all of the fence posts simply snapped off. It takes a pretty strong wind to break a healthy 4x4, I think. We also lost the corrugated plastic roofing over half our back patio, and worst of all, the planter box with my ginger plants in it got blown over! Three out of four of the plants seem to be okay, but one of them got snapped off at the base of the stalk. We also found some roofing shingles in the back yard, so we’ll probably need to take a look at the roof when it’s light outside.

We were lucky compared to some neighbors. One guy down the street got a huge tree (somewhere around 3 feet in diameter) through the roof of his station wagon, and partway through his PT Cruiser (it hit the station wagon first, so that took the brunt of the damage). He seemed in relatively good spirits despite the damage, telling us that he was going to convert the station wagon into some sort of el Camino-type thing by cutting the damaged back half of the roof off. Perhaps all the beer he and his friend were drinking was helping him to stay in a good mood about it.

500 languages slowdown

I’ve been very busy with work and personal projects recently, and so I haven’t had much time for the 500 programming language project. I started learning about Nu, a lispy, interpreted, object-oriented language built in objective-c. I got the interpreter compiled and working on my 64-bit Ubuntu machine, which took more work than I would have liked due to the fact that most of the development of Nu takes place on Macs. Anyway, there’s a webserver for Nu, called Nunja and a Nu markdown processor, so I was thinking I’d write a simple blog engine as my Nu program. Nu is looking like a really interesting programming language so far, so it might be one I come back and spend some more time on.

But as I was saying, I haven’t had as much free time lately, so the posts have slowed down. Don’t let that fool you, though. I haven’t given up on the challenge, I’ve just accepted that it might be a while before I can be pumping out 5 languages a week. And it might, in fact, take me more than the 2 years I was originally thinking (dreaming) that it would take.