28th of April, 2003 POST·MERIDIEM 04:26

My Dad’s duffel coat (which I’ve been wearing for most of a month; I don’t know of any places that will do alterations/sewing in Dublin, so I left the yuppie overcoat in Wexford for my mother to leave in to the place she goes for this sort of thing—the buttons had almost all come off. I go home next weekend, and she’s got it dry cleaned, and divil a thought of leaving it in to Sewing Woman. Appreciate the intention, Mum, but ...) smells really bad if it gets caught in the rain, so I’ve Not Been A Pleasant Person To Sit Beside for most of today. Eugh.

Looks like I’m not going to be able to play with Matrix and get its load average up to 88 for more than three minutes; sure that’s only 44 per processor, Ruaidhrí. And we’ve got the RAM for it :-) . (Cf. XFree86’s bug 72; I need to test my patch for portability, and Mr. de Paor suggested a cron job, which is fair enough.) I still think the machine would be usable with a load average of 88; I’ve played MP3s and edited happily on my laptop with one of 60, and that’s a single processor with only 512MB RAM. Okay, it’s a significantly faster processor.

Funkatronic blogs; http://​6thinternational.​blogspot.​com/​ , http://​pedantry.​blogspot.​com/​ , http://​www.​polyglut.​net/​.​ And, again, as almost always, something brilliant from http://​muxway.​org/​ , http://​www.​mindspring.​com/​~blackhart/​ , or the entire archive of the Unix-Haters mailing list. (N.B. I like Unix; I think it’s instructive to see smart people criticize it, though.)

I bought my first DVDs (for me—I got someone a present before) Saturday, a two-for-the-price-of-one deal from Blanchardstown Centre HMV, with the proceeds of my “Love the Customer” award (Kneel Before My Being-Polite-To-French-People 5k1||z)). First one was the film of MASH, far better and darker than its small screen counterpart (he decreed); I watched that yesterday afternoon, and it’s schweet. The other one was The Beatle’s Hard Day’s Night; I haven’t yet seen it, but I’ve already got some slight misgivings about it; I fear I’m not sufficiently (i.e. at all) a 1960s female teenager to appreciate it properly.

Potential areas for self-improvement; watch some more recent films, decrease the incidence of parataxis in that first paragraph, limit the frequency of “sure” as an expletive interjection and the phrase “divil a bit” to one of either per entry. Comments? Mail me, kehoea, arobas^[1] parhasard punkt^[2] net.

[1] http://​chr.​amet.​chez.​tiscali.​fr/​miods3.​htm , search for “arobas.”

[2] German, and random Slavic languages for “dot.”