30th of January, 2003 POST·MERIDIEM 03:33

So, yeah, back taking calls, mostly in English—yup, it makes it more boring. Signed up for the Goethe Institute beginners’ course^[1], starting up next Monday at 6pm. I’m sure the fact that I paid €315 for one term will make me work that bit harder; you can only claim the tax relief after you take an exam, and the GIIN don’t offer exams until the Zertifikat Deutsch after three years.

As a result, and taken together with rent being due, I’m officially in a concentrate-on-non-money-related-pastimes period. Which means reading Dave’s Flann O’Brien books, and rereading-because-it’s-hard the Design and Implementation of 4.4BSD. It’s hard to get the willpower together for this latter, but I’ll keep it up. I’m thinking of the time I read perlre(1) seven times in a row, and ‘got’ regular expressions forever after :-) .

What else ... again, TV, schweet, speakers, schweet, nerd housemates, schweet. Although I really have to cut down on the egregious linguistics ѕhіt—I think it’s freaking them out.

[1] http://​www.​goethe.​de/​gr/​dub/​enskurse.​htm

21st of January, 2003 ANTE·MERIDIEM 11:59

I’m subscribed to the Old Irish List^[1], and some of the gems that get posted to it are of the order of http://​www.​isos.​dcu.​ie/​tcd/​tcd_ms_1339/​jpgs/​125.​jpg , which gives an impression of how cool those manuscripts look. (And are, of course.) I’m lurking, purely, because I haven’t the background in this area, or the literature to post anything constructive. Obviously.

I see Apple are on the point of releasing an officially supported version of XFree86 for Mac OS X^[2] (remember, to eliminate confusion, that last X is pronounced “ten” Mr. Flood). Maybe now someone will get around to writing backend code that will load Mac format TrueType and Type 1 fonts from disk. The current situation is farcical; you need a Windows copy of some of the finer fonts out there, originally developed for the Macintosh, if you are to use them in X11 on your Mac.

What else ... in a fit of stupidity, I managed to lose my wallet. Between the last time I had it and realizing it was gone I was only in three places, yet I still haven’t managed to find it. Crap.

[1] http://​listserv.​heanet.​ie/​old-irish-l.​html

[2] http://​www.​apple.​com/​macosx/​x11/​

13th of January, 2003 POST·MERIDIEM 01:04

Whee, I’m moving house again, and this place has n teen computer speakers in the place (where n  is a natural number in the range {0,9}). Plus a big television. Just around the corner whence I was heretofore (dying adverbs ahoy!), and cheaper, too.

4th of January, 2003 ANTE·MERIDIEM 12:26

Happy New Year, world. And, Mr. McCormack is an impeccable host, as always.