February 13, 2013
Ash Wednesday
Yawn! Good morning and welcome to Lent!
It was a rare morning. I got out the driveway a smidge before Claire! To be fair she had a windshield to defrost (no car cover on overnight...). I went to St. Patricks for the Ash Wednesday Mass. One might say I "got my ash to Mass" this morning.
I head down to the office, offering up a set of Glorious Mysteries for Michelle's continuing good health and then listened to the conclusion of The Scarlet Letter. Such great writing. I didn't appreciate it as much as a high school junior. I will say this about it: so called “Catholic guilt” has nothin' on “Puritan guilt”. «grin»
"Evil 1.0.0 Released" Fear not though! Using Emacs Evil is not "a near occasion of sin". ;-]
Who-hoo! We (meaning Qualcomm) are among the first to be certified OpenGL-ES 3.0 conformant. (related link) It's the graphics standard for mobile environments. Years ago our Adeno 200 series GPUs were also the first to be conformant to the ES 2.0 standard.
7 Things Democrats Would Have Freaked Out About If Bush Had Done Them. Afghanistan, drones, Pakistan, torture, Guantanamo, … yup, that's change we can believe in.
“Don’t come to me with ‘theories’. It is our lives that have to convert those high ideals each day into ordinary, heroic, fruitful reality.” — Furrow, St. Josemaria
“Even within North America, abortion appeals to some because it does, in fact, disproportionately reduce the offspring of certain racial minorities.” source
Neal Stephenson's techno-thriller “Reamde” is still a bestseller at Audible? (Audible.com best seller link) There's 38 hours of my life I want back!
It's been a busy afternoon. Because of some high ranking visitors from San Diego, at lunch time we did some discussions about plans for the upcoming Adreno 500 series of GPUs. Later in the afternoon at 4 o'clock we had another planning meeting with San Diego. I left that a smidge early because of tonight's obligations.
My commute home was the first time I tried my weekend hack of using high quality text-to-speech voice synthesis on a book. While it's not as natural as a good narrator, it was good enough. I listened to a few chapters of Venerable Fulton Sheen's ‘Life of Christ” along the commute north. He had so many insights!
I went straight to tonight's Step and strength interval class at Golds Gym. And like clockwork, since we had a bunch of snow, the gym is showing signs of the roof leaking again. A portion of the fitness studio was blocked off because of drips, making for some crowded exercise classes.
After the workout it was time for RCIA at St. Patricks. I gave my last exegesis for several weeks. The structure of the classes changes now that the candidates are in the ‘home stretch’. And for the second time today, I received ashes. Why not? They got washed off when I was at Golds.
When I got home I learned some cool news: Timothy was the only one at Milford Elementary/Heron Pond (grades 3 thru 5) to receive a perfect score on the NECAP test in the math section.
The girls just returned from a jazz concert at their high school. As I do a little followup item from tonight's RCIA, I can hear them still downstairs getting in a little Just Dance before they head to bed… Good night all!
“Even now, says the LORD,
return to me with your whole heart,
with fasting, and weeping, and mourning;
Rend your hearts, not your garments,
and return to the LORD, your God.” — Joel 2