OK, I must admit I do get a kick out of Steve Yegge and his opinionated posts. His latest and greatest is a diatribe against software engineers who don't understand compilers. I do agree with him that engineers who don't understand how compilers (or interpreters) work, really don't understand how computers work.

His description of real life PhDs and their description of compilers is shocking.. I'll have to ask a similar question in my next set of interviews.

Finally, the unusual drizzly weather in Northern California the past few months seems to have truly disappeared for good. Two beautiful days here meant it was time to drive around in the convertible with the top down, without worrying about freezing our arses off, nor getting soaked from above.

We took a spin up to Palo Alto, to walk around downtown on Sunday afternoon and visit some of the open homes for general amusement. There was an 1897 built 6700 sq. foot house on the corner of University Ave - only $4,995,000. Then a couple of $3,495,000 houses on Hamilton and Forest - they were only 3200 sq. feet.

Zheng asked me how much she thought we could afford, and let's just say, it wasn't even close to half of that.

Meanwhile, the cats seem to have realised it's summer and are now learning to soak in the dying rays of sunshine in the late afternoon, wherever that may be. See the accompanying picture of Yin-Yin crawling up onto the bookshelf to ensure she didn't miss out before twilight crept upon us.

On the way from Lijiang to Zhongdian in China's Yunnan province, the road rises from about 2000m up to 3300m (11,000 feet of altitude). This is the start of the Tibetan plateau.

We breezed over the top of a hill and found ourselves looking at green, wide grasslands being stolled by yaks. On the side of the road, a troupe of Tibetans in their native dress hustling tourists for photos. These two urchins offered a photo for 1 yuan (12.5 cents). After taking the photo, we went to give them the 1 yuan, and the girl on the left insouciantly remarked (in Mandarin) "That's 1 yuan each".

Well ok, they got their 1 yuan each, and I got this amusing picture.

Ran across this amusing online test to determine your computer geekiness factor.

Here's my score.