I had some time to kill at the airport, so I came up with a couple of new t-shirt designs. I made the text for some of them customizable. The pun is on all the people who try to reinvent Lisp. I pretended it was a spelling error when questioned by someone attractive at a party: "It's Lips, really." It worked for me.

I'm still waiting for Carl Shapiro to grant me permission to publish my ILC05 recordings. I still owe him a complete list of the talks I recorded. Here's an incomplete list of talks I recorded:

• Beyond Lisp by John McCarthy
• The Legacy of Lisp by Henry Baker
• A Framework for Maintaining the Coherence of a Running Lisp by Drew McDermot
• How to Make Lisp More Special by Pascal Costanza
• English as a Macro Language and Programming Environment for Lisp by Henry Lieberman
• Conscientious Software by Richard Gabriel
• The (Re)Birth of the Knowledge Operating System by Jeff Shrager
• Correctness by Construction is in your future by James McDonald

I grew up in Africa (Liberia) and that might explain why after all these years I find Hernando de Soto's book The Mystery of Capital so engrossing. His Institute for Liberty and Democracy (ILD) researches and implements reforms of legal property systems. Over the past 18 years the have moved hundreds of thousands of businesses and real estate holdings from the underground economy into the economy mainstream.

Here are some good examples for broken property systems:

• In Egypt the procedure to gain access to desert land for construction purposes and to register these property rights takes 6 - 14 years (77 steps).
• In Haiti the procedure to obtain a sales contract following the five-year lease contract takes 111 steps or approximately 4112 days

The cool people at Spreadshirt.com today offered to convert the bitmap John McCarthy image to vector paths. I've put two new t-shirt designs online. With the new vector format we can now do "flock" and "flex" print of the McCarthy head. That's much nicer and more durable than the digital print. The example shirt shown here ist metallic silver on a white t-shirt. Now that should make heads turn at the next party!

If you have any suggestions for other colors or textiles, please let me know.