9:35. Well, mother and sis safely arrived and now safely off to aunt's house to sleep. Hopefully they'll make it down to the South Bay without getting lost. Had somewhat of a trying day; missed their flight and had to wait three hours for another, then took longer than expected getting a rental car; got way slowed down by traffic, so that by the time they got to my place, it was 4 p.m. (7 their time). Poor babies. And when we finally went out for dinner, the first place we missed the exit for (actually, we were on a highway, 580, that doesn't *have* a Broadway exit, which I hadn't realized), and so we rerouted to go to The Blue Nile for Ethiopian (which my mom was dubious about but agreed to try), and when we finally got there, it turned out to be closed on Mondays. LUCKILY, there was this place a block south (Telegraph, not so many blocks north of Ashby) called the Village, a collection of shops, mostly restaurants, so we went and poked around there. One of the places in it I'd mentioned here before, I think -- New Delhi; too oily. But Sharmi (my youngest sis) had very fond memories of Korean food and there was a place there called Korean BBQ, which would have looked dubious if it weren't for the large numbers of Koreans eating there (and the menu that only bothered to translate half of the dishes), and which turned out to be really very good. Esp. the seafood. In any case, a tiring day, but it was nice seeing them again (and my mom brought enough curry to feed me for a month; I had to freeze some of it). I have a couple make-up classes tomorrow, so they're going to sightsee on their own, but I'll rejoin them either tomorrow night or Wednesday.
The other small but exciting thing is that while talking to Kevin last night, I mentioned again that I'd wanted him to write me a little UNIX program to randomize my .sig file. This is mostly 'cause David complains when I leave the same one up for months at a time, but also because I do have many .sigs and it would be nice to cycle through them regularly. Well, he said that he could write me something later in the week that would go into the directory periodically (say weekly, or whatever) and randomly copy one of my sigs into my .signature file. He also said that there was a quick and dirty fix if I wanted to do it myself and if I didn't mind it just changing every time I logged out. I'm not going to bore you with the details (which mostly involved a loop of mv commands and a little step outside the loop) -- the exciting part is that he explained it over the phone, and I understood it, and when I wrote it up and sent it to him to check before implementing, he only had to remind me to include the full path name, and I did and I tried it and it worked. :-) Okay, and I know all you programmers out there are wondering why in the world I'm excited about this, since I did it all using commands I already knew -- in fact, pretty much using *one* command I already knew, but nonetheless it pleased me, and made me think once more that I'd probably *like* programming and maybe I ought to learn C after all...)
It certainly would take care of the student loan dilemma.
Anyway, enough babbling, my dears. Off to bed, and I hope your week has started out well.
David returns today!