Because he was visited by the Grim Reaper instead of Santa Claus - he was one of the greats and even though his music was long past it's prime he'll be missed.

Keep it funky.

That's the 3rd tremor in as many days, all from the Hayward fault just north of the Caldecott tunnel, first one I was on Bart so the first I knew was when the train stopped at Lake Merrit for 10 minutes while they checked the tracks. No damage, but, last night a water main on our street was out so we had no water for the night, we had plenty of drinking water, I broke out some of our emergency supplies. Last night we had another one while I was playing video games, and this morning another one woke us out of bed (at 9:20 am - we really got a good sleep!).

So, lets hope these are all reducing the stress on the fault bit by bit and not precursors to something bigger.

It's now running 2 hours fast, so I got up early and still thought I was late. The sun still hasn't risen.

I found an old receipt from 11/23/02 - some vinyl I picked up at Amoeba while I was still the 'resident DJ' at an Sibin - what did I buy?

David Holmes & The Free Association
Botchit Breaks volume 4 parts 1 and 2
Westbam - Beatbox Rocker (including the BLIM / Freq Nasty remix)
King Unique - Sugarhigh

All of these were on vinyl, and they all got played out at least once, the Botchit Breaks compilation became one of those things I kept in my bag so that I always had some reliable breaks tuneage close to hand.

I think the reason the reciept hung around so long was because there's a phone number scrawled on the back.

I rarely spend time cracking sudoku puzzles, but while giving Skye breakfast ths morning I foud one in the paper in front of me. The hardest part of the solution was Skye sitting there saying 'no, no, no' whenever I wrote a number down, and her habit of trying to read out the numbers in the grid. I think she can recognise that a certain shape is a number but has no way to map the shape to the real number just yet, so she was just randomly saying numbers 'two, three, nine, one, five' which would derail my train of thought.

Jan seems to be a dedicated sudoku cracker, maybe I should send Skye along to help him.

She's also sick sadly, still running a little bit of a fever and hanging onto me right now, so the real celebration is going to be on Saturday today all she wants is her dad. She's also graduated to sleeping in a regular bed and surprised us all on Saturday morning when she woke up, got out of bed, opened the door to her room and played by herself for a while. The door opening skills are still spotty though and shes more likely to get bored and start crying rather than open the door.

Orion finally managed to figure out how to 'crawl' forwards, dragging himself towards an apple which had cuaght his eye, it's a big not-step.

After a lot of drooling and chewing on random things Orion has finally got his first tooth!

I talked about this idea a while ago and always meant to post it here, but with the failed search and rescue for James Kim it seems relevant to the news. He had a cell phone with him, but as you can imagine, in such remote locations you'd be lucky to have service, never mind the triangulation and positioning technology that would make locating someone easy.

But you could easily fly a cell antennae on a search aircraft, I mean you can fit microcell base stations into a couple of suitcases now so creating a rig that could fly on a plane, work across different cell protocols and networks and get good directional fixes wouldn't be a huge engineering challenge. Indeed there are serious suggestions that ground based antennaes will be superceded by aircraft or airships flying loops around a city. So, for search and rescue this could be a huge advantage, assuming they can get a search up and running before the cellphone's battery runs out.

Of course, such a system would need the blessing of the phone companies who'd have to deal with S&R using their frequencies.