I just threw myself out

Well, not literally, but I just set out for recycling old books that weigh more than I do. (This is the aftermath of last Sunday's attic purge.) Nothing with any real value --- twenty-year-old manuals from my HP-28S calculator and from Emacs, ten-year-old Microsoft Visual C++ manuals, a bunch of old TUGboats (I kept the two issues that had my articles in them) and Amiga magazines, etc.

But over the course of the last two decades, those books entered, shaped, and left my life. I've spared the truly important stuff --- my old Games magazines, my original Turbo Pascal manual, my first 8086/8088 book --- and there are another few boxes of books that we don't need anymore but that someone else might want to read (duplicate beat-up copies of varoius SF books, for instance) that we'll catalog and either offer for free online or just drop off at the Newton Book Swap.

But it's a sad thing to rip up old books from their Spiro bindings and leave them at the curb, even when I know it's the right thing to do.

I just threw myself out

Well, not literally, but I just set out for recycling old books that weigh more than I do. (This is the aftermath of last Sunday's attic purge.) Nothing with any real value --- twenty-year-old manuals from my HP-28S calculator and from Emacs, ten-year-old Microsoft Visual C++ manuals, a bunch of old TUGboats (I kept the two issues that had my articles in them) and Amiga magazines, etc.

But over the course of the last two decades, those books entered, shaped, and left my life. I've spared the truly important stuff --- my old Games magazines, my original Turbo Pascal manual, my first 8086/8088 book --- and there are another few boxes of books that we don't need anymore but that someone else might want to read (duplicate beat-up copies of varoius SF books, for instance) that we'll catalog and either offer for free online or just drop off at the Newton Book Swap.

But it's a sad thing to rip up old books from their Spiro bindings and leave them at the curb, even when I know it's the right thing to do.

"Welcome to the World"

Not my best puzzle ever, but a quickie to congratulate friends of ours on the arrival of... well... you'll have to solve it to find out. (Edited to clear up any misconception, so to speak.)

"Welcome to the World"

Not my best puzzle ever, but a quickie to congratulate friends of ours on the arrival of... well... you'll have to solve it to find out. (Edited to clear up any misconception, so to speak.)