Our break room at work had some yummy baked goods today: a giant cookie, some doughnuts and a cake that read “Thank you Engineers of Lockheed Martin”. Our site manager sent an email that mentioned National Engineers Week and thanked us for our contributions and support. w00t! So to all my fellow software engineers out there: Happy Engineers Week!

I decided to troubleshoot my dead Linux box last night. It booted up right away! It lives! I stayed up late installing over 200 updated files. So far it seems to be running well. I plan to continue to watch it and replace it sometime in the near future.

When my mail software came back online, I caught up on my email and realized I missed a memorial service for my best friend’s mother this past weekend. Words fail to describe how terrible I feel. He drove to my home town to pay respects when my father passed away last year. He’s probably disappointed; I’m a bad friend right now. I’ll give him a call tonight to try to make amends. I’ll see if he wants to go out for drinks and will make a generous donation to a charity in his mother’s name.

UPDATE: I took my friend out for drinks. We had a great time. I’m going to give a donation to the American Cancer Society.

Here is my planned book list for 2007 in no particular order.

• The Game: Penetrating the Secret Society of Pickup Artists – Neil Strauss
• Softwar: An Intimate Portrait of Larry Ellison and Oracle – Matthew Symonds
• Canada’s Secret Commandos: The unauthorized story of Joint Task Force Two – David Pugliese
• The Language Instinct: How the Mind Creates Language – Steven Pinker
• Casino Royale – Ian Fleming
• Friday – Robert A. Heinlein
• From a Buick 8 – Stephen King
• Rendezvous with Rama – Arthur C. Clarke
• The Great Divorce – C. S. Lewis
• Jack: Straight from the Gut – Jack Welch

Of course, I have a series of Harry Potter and Middle Earth books I’d like to read as well.

Shamelessly ripped from my brother Kevin and in time for Halloween is the creepy quiz, Serial Killer or Computer Language Inventor?. I scored a 4 out of 10!

Noam Chomsky is not a genius. Further proof? A crackpot dictator promoted one of his books on the floor of the United Nations.

Read Steven Pinker’s The Language Instinct instead. He makes the case that language is an instinct breed into humans after years of evolution. This contradicts Chomsky’s assertion that language is innate and the same for all humans where differences in languages are accounted for by tweaks to a small set of parameters.

I tend to subscribe to Pinker’s theory. Also, reading Pinker won’t make you puke.