Sunday 19 October 1997
This night Wende and I drove out to my dad's house to say HI to him and my brother Fred, who has been in from Las Cruces, New Mexico, pursuing a Masters degree in Engineering or something crazy like that.
Fred and I have fun playing together. When asked to go get ice, we went to the store and got a five pound block of ice. "We followed the letter of the law, but not the spirit," Fred would say later.
We took turns WACKing it with a framing hammer to break it up into pieces that would fit into drinking glasses.
Fred described to me how information is stored on a compact disc. Pretty interesting stuff, with all the data correction stuff stored on the CD. The end result: Have you noticed that your CDs will play fine on one player and then skip like crazy on another? "This CD worked perfectly yesterday!" The player you played it on yesterday has a processor that can better calculate the correct information, given that there's a scratch on the CD. Fred said the difference in price in CD players often simply indicates how good of an error correcting algorithm it uses.
Fred and I stayed up talking until like 12:30 Monday morning.