I intended to spend the day wandering around the Stanford campus, and so made a beeline for the Herbert Hoover Memorial Building that dominates the middle of the campus, and promises a good view of the area.
My Lonely Planet promised me the Rodin Sculpture Garden was worth a visit, and indeed it was. I was somewhat confused (in my naiveté) to find that the works had been created in the nineteenth century, but these particular casts were done in the 1980s, and so while I didn't expect the sculptures to be originals, I also didn't expect to have my notion of originality challenged in this way.
I had to find the infamous William Gates III Information Sciences building while I was here. It's pretty bland, much like you'd expect. I had some lunch at the Bytes Café in the Allen Centre for Integrated Systems (CIS).
Headed to the central library after lunch to try to read my email. The Stanford library computers are ancient and run some antiquated version of Netscape on Windows 95 or thereabouts. I managed to find a signed version of the Mindterm SSH applet which can connect to arbitrary machines using the cruddy JVM built into Netscape.
I also did some hacking on Koen's old Typed Logical Variables; I wanted to see if using a type-level recursion operator would allow me to get away with just a single, generic variable constructor (rather than one for each type, fudged over with a type class). The short answer is that it is, although I'd need to do a lot more work to complete it. Drop me a line if you're interested, it's quite simple in the end.
For dinner we took a look along the main drag of Mountain View but ended up coming back to Passage to India on El Camino Réal, a big fat road connecting the southern bay towns. We hung out there, chatting away, until it closed and then headed back to Rains.
