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SomethingI can't conclude this segment without acknowledging that I just heard the news of a knife attack on George Harrison and his wife Olivia. At one time the music of the Beatles meant more to me than it does to most people.[24] And so as I run tomorrow, I will be running in hopes that George and Olivia experience a rapid recovery and are able to put the trauma behind them quickly and to get on with their lives. [24] For the curious, a memoir I wrote on this, entitled The Beatles and Me (about me, not the Beatles, none of whom I have ever met), is on my Web site. The URL is http://www.eecs.umich.edu/~lnewton/music/beatmem.html The company I work for is digging in for the Y2K turnover. At end of business today, things will be shutting down tightly. It's possible, even likely, that my connectivity to the Internet, which I get exclusively through either work or the ISDN line at home that my company supplies me, will be inactive, perhaps until as late as January 4. Accordingly, this may be the last installment of RTtM I will be able to send out until that time. I'm sorry that I'll have to leave readers hanging in suspense over how it all goes. But when I return, the report, along with concluding analysis and the final words to this journal, will doubtless appear in a series of posts over several days, not all at once. One of the perks of being a professional musician is that at the end of your day's work, your customers applaud, cheer, and sometimes even stand on their seats and scream their approval. What a rush this is when it happens! It hardly ever happens to software engineers. Like engineers, people who write (notice how carefully I avoided calling myself a ``writer'') do their work in relative anonymity and isolation, and sometimes have little way of knowing whether their output is being received positively. Therefore, I want to thank all the people who have taken the trouble to email me over the past several months, and especially the last two or three days, to say kind things about RTtM, and to wish me success in the race tomorrow. Whatever happens, I know I have already succeeded. Permit me to share with you in conclusion this, one of my favorite quotes: All that your hand finds to do, do with your very power, for there is no work nor devising nor knowledge nor wisdom in [the grave], the place to which you are going.---Ecclesiastes 9:10 |