Today, 2014-02-20, I learned that my friend Jim Weirich died yesterday. No word yet on the cause of death, except for a pseudonymous rumor on Hacker News that he died of a heart attack, which is quite plausible. If I remember correctly, Jim was the guy who guided me through understanding the applicative-order Y combinator during the previous millennium, and who has also given me one of the nicest compliments I've ever received. I suppose this is an example of that saying: they won't remember what you said, and they won't remember what you did, but they will remember how you made them feel; because I'm not even sure about the Y combinator thing.
I don't know how to describe the loss to the world that is Jim's death. He worked on code that was useful to millions of people, shared his knowledge, and was always willing to mentor people; but, also, and maybe more importantly, he was one of the least assholish people I know. A militant atheist mutual friend of ours complained to me once that Jim was a fundamentalist Christian, which could be true for all I know; I never asked him, and he never brought it up. In many ways, he was a paragon of loving your neighbor as yourself.
I don't remember when the last time I talked to Jim was. It's probably public on Twitter.
Today I didn't get much done at work. A little bit, but not enough. Tomorrow I go in early, which might help or might hurt.
Jim was 57, about 20 years older than I am. Every year now for several years, some of my friends have died. They say that your risk of death per year increases by about tenfold every ten years, and if that's true, it's also true of your group of friends, if they continue to have the same age distribution relative to you. So in my 20s this rarely happened, and now it's happening once or twice a year. I guess that means that when I'm 47, I can expect one of my friends to die every month, unless I start hanging out with a younger crowd.
I've just arrived home from work at about 21:30. Stace had messaged me a few hours earlier to let me know power was out at the house. As I approached home on my bicycle, I noticed that several blocks of buildings and streetlights were dark.
I had been hoping power would be back on, because I was looking forward to answering a sweet email someone had sent me earlier today, and I didn't bring a copy of it with me. And I was hoping perhaps to work on a search-engine project for my chapter in an upcoming book, and it turns out I don't have the current version of the code with me on this netbook.
The upstairs neighbor is peeing, a sound that always makes me nervous when I hear it in my bedroom.
My bedroom is beginning to smell of exhaust from poorly maintained gasoline engines, probably from neighbors who have turned on their generators.
I went to work today by bicycle for the first time in a while. My rear tire had gone flat, so I pumped it up; but after a few blocks, the seam on the inner tube split and it went totally flat again. After I wandered around for a while (forgetting the bike map I have in my backpack, which showed two bike shops within a few blocks) I found a bike shop and got a new inner tube for $70 (US$6.50). I'd've bought an extra one to carry as a spare, but I didn't have the cash on me.
On the way home, it went flat again, but more slowly, so I was able to make it home by pumping it up. I guess I need to see if I have a puncture and patch it by this weekend.
Last night, Stace, her dad, and I went over to a friend's house, who showed us his new video game. Although he told me the name several times, I can't remember it now. It's a guitar trainer that analyzes the analog signal from your electric guitar to teach you to play the chords and riffs of popular rock songs, including tricks like pitch bending. "Look, Stace!" I said. "This is the future of education!" She was unimpressed. (My track record at predicting the futures of things is not that great.)
Oh! Power's back on!