So, after purchasing a regear kit, realizing that I can open up the gearbox after all, shaving off the fill ports on the inside of the gearbox (bad design), and remembering where I put that bottle of gear oil, my Shay finally runs. I put it on the club's layout and it only stalled occasionally. I think the PWM inherent in runing an analog loco on a DCC track actually helped the running.

I also took a few pictures of it pulling a bi-level enclosed autorack, you know, just 'cause. Of course, I took them on film, so it'll be another three years before I finish up this roll, and then several weeks before I actually bring it to a developer, and then who knows when I'll get it to a scanner.

I like using MH even though some "features" of it are weird and/or somewhat tarded. It's just crazy, and I've really started getting into it. Anyway several Frank Chu sightings this week prompted me to write a script that allows me to post messages to the <a href="http://tastytronic.net/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/rocket-society">Rocket Society</a> quickly.

<a href="http://zork.net/~sam/chu-sighting">chu-sighting</a>

There's a new transcript of an RMS LISP talk up on gnu.org. Some choice tidbits:

on TECO:

Actually, there were some rather sophisticated facilities; I think that Lisp got its unwind-protect facility from TECO.

on EMACS LISP features:

I implemented Common Lisp once on the Lisp machine, and I'm not all that happy with it. One thing I don't like terribly much is keyword arguments. They don't seem quite Lispy to me; I'll do it sometimes but I minimize the times when I do that.