My two youngest sisters came to work with me today. Oxygen arranged a fun, educational program for most of the day for them. The two hours they spent with me, though, was evidence that computer programming is not much of a spectator’s sport.

I tried to keep things interesting by explaining how we were trying to figure out the right PL-SQL syntax to use a cursor in Oracle stored procedure so that Microsoft’s .NET data provider for Oracle would be able to deal with the result set using a DataReader… Umm, yeah. Or… maybe you’d like to play cards with this Advertising.com schwag I got when they were pitching us?

So the girls played cards while I got a little work done. Then we left work early, had dinner at Spice, and then went to see Thwak! on Broadway. As the linked review says, Thwak! is the theatrical equivalent of sweet breakfast cereal, but for that, it’s very well done.

It’s really great to spend time with Monica and Isabella and give them a taste of urban living.

As evidence that this is a blog and I’m aware of the rest of that world, here are my thoughts on the *SS discussions: (1) CSS is a huge boon to web development, design and writing, regardless of what Dave Winer says. (2) RSS is a great way to keep tabs on your favorite sites, and doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t click through to revel in the painstaking design of these sites, regardless of what Jeffrey Zeldman says.

Finally, I was horrified by the awful school shooting in Pennsylvania today. Perhaps I’m being naive, but it defies my imagination to understand the psychology behind this. Is it just a fact of life that some teenage boys, given access to guns, will use them at their schools?