And… it’s the daily update.

Life: I was so tired after work last night that I fell asleep in the guest room at about nine o’clock. I still feel rather tired– I don’t know whether sleeping on my own for once meant that I slept more deeply– but I do remember my dreams, which I normally never do. Perhaps that’s a good sign in general, but I did have to put up with their being nightmares. First I dreamed about having to sit an important exam, and even though I’d studied hard I still knew nothing about the subject. It was pretty horrible, and I was very relieved when I woke, but then I fell asleep and dreamed about being in England and journeying down to see my parents. The journey was disastrous, and then when I got there, instead of being pleased to see me they were angry I’d been away for so long as though they’d been expecting me back after school and I hadn’t returned for six years.

It’s autumn here. I love the autumn, but I’ve been sneezing all day. I resolve to buy honey from a local farmer (I know of one) and eat it every morning in the hope that that will build immunity.

Sis was having a yard sale at her house; nearby, my habit of walking around streets reading bumper stickers uncovered a Stalin quote on a parked car, which is certainly a first. At the yard sale, I found a community singing songbook from the thirties– Wikipedia doesn’t seem to have an entry on community singing, but it was a fashion back then to get your whole town together in a big hall, and then sing “D’ye ken John Peel” or something. The war pretty much killed it off. Rio sold some of her old things and made $11, so we went to the shops and she spent it on badges and bracelets and so on. She also found herself a backpack with some skulls on it and some purple hairdye, again. Purple really suits her.

Links: I really and truly want to live in a world where all resumes look like this and all workplaces are worthy of them.

I think this is rather wonderful– Penguin (the publisher) has started a dating website, but they tell you about it in an advertisement printed at the end of the book, so you can go to their site and find soulmates who want to stay up late at night in a coffee shop staring into your eyes and slowly stirring their coffee while they discuss characterisation in Doctor Zhivago or foreshadowing in Ivan Denisovich.

A poster of (pencil-drawn) cats who look like all the regenerations of the Doctor.

Hearing about this WiTricity malarkey is rather annoying me, and do you know why? I wanted to investigate the idea for my A-level Physics coursework back in ’92, and was told I couldn’t because it was “just science fiction”. Okay, I was an A-level student and they are postdocs at MIT and fifteen years forward in time, but I wanted to write a report on whether it was possible, and if it wasn’t, why not. You know Tesla himself said it was a possibility. I think it would have bumped me up at least a letter grade :(

Nargery: I have been writing a program in Python, and today I learned that “for” loops do not introduce a new scope, so if you make a closure inside a for loop, you can’t bind to the control variable. But if your lambda function has a formal parameter which is initialised to the value of the control variable, that works just fine. Thanks to the #python folks for helping me there. Did you know that?

I need to talk to some of the GTK people about whether they think GTK taking over theming/frame drawing from Metacity is a good plan for 2.28. Is gtk-list the place to do that?