Le Cercle Français: Meets every other Wednesday evening in the vicinity of Wayland, Massachusetts (USA) for conversation in French. French Word-A-Day: Expand your vocabulary by following this lively blog, written by Kristin Espinasse. L'Ecole des Trois Ponts: In September, 2004, Margie and I studied French for a week at the Ecole des Trois Ponts near Roanne, France. French in Acton: My wife Margie studies French with Mme. Cynthia Edelman, director of French in Acton, which provides individual and group French instruction in Acton, Massachusetts (USA).

Many moons ago, I attended Camp Robinson Crusoe in Sturbridge, Massachusetts. About forty years later, in 1999, a reunion was held at Camp Taconic in the Berkshires (Camp Robinson Crusoe no longer exists). Click the logo to the left, or click here, to see old camp photos, photos from the reunion, read some stories about my experiences at the camp, and to find out what's happening on the camp land now. Did a course I taught make Robinson Crusoe the world's first "Computer Camp"?

Want to become an idiot-savant? Given a date, learn to compute the day of the week in your head.

Sudoku!    

Like many people these days, I'm having fun solving Sudoku puzzles. But while I like logic puzzles, I don't like to do mechanical work that could be easily automated. So I wrote an Excel spreadsheet that automatically propagates constraints in a Sudoku puzzle. It also helps you spot rows, columns, and boxes in which a particular number could only appear in one position.

Or click on this link for some of my notes and musings on Sudoku. You can also link to the spreadsheet download page from there.

Where do I work? Nowhere. I retired from Kronos Incorporated, in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, at the end of October, 2003, having worked there for twenty four and a half years. Click on their logo at the left to go to their web site. Starting in 1979, I collected misspellings of their name.     Click here to see the complete list. I worked on the Y2K problem at Kronos.     Take a look at the Year 2000 Emergency Kit that I kept in my office. Click here to read a humorous speech that I gave in 1999 on the subject of the upcoming Y2K.

	As a barcode, it conveys almost 60% more information than Code 39, and 40% more information than Interleaved 2 of 5.
	As a self-clocking serial data code, it is 33% denser than Manchester Encoding or Phase Encoding.

The town of Wayland, Massachusetts has fewer than 14,000 inhabitants, but it has two residents named "Lawrence Krakauer". Not only that, but we're both MIT graduates working in the computer industry! Actually, he's the local guy, having grown up in Weston, Massachusetts, an adjacent town. I'm an import, having grown up in Great Neck, New York, 330 Km (200 miles) away. It's purely a coincidence. We are not related, and we finally met for the first time after the Wayland Town Meeting in April 2002. I looked around for a photographer to record our historic meeting, but couldn't find one.

        

Alpha Watch '08 During the Presidential primaries of 2008, my sister Alice, who has a Ph.D. in psychology, noted that biologically, "We're wired to follow an alpha -- one who's virile, charismatic, and confidence-inspiring." She posted a web page on this subject (with her alpha ranking of the candidates). Click on the picture, or this link: Alpha Watch '08 . Alice also designed and built Margret's web page at http://MargretKrakauer.com/, and Peter Jeswald's at http://peterjeswald.com.

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