Morning in Wales

Stereotypically I've been woken by sheep baaing at around 5am every morning this week - except this morning. I don't know whether the morning rain has kept the sheep quiet, or I've just become so used to the dawn chorus that I now sleep through it.

I do know that sitting in the kitchen, watching very fine rain fall between the trees, bright sunshine picking it out like mist, with the hills in the background behind it, is rather beautiful.

Photos to follow when I have decent internet again.

Interesting Links for 04-07-2013

• The Recomputation Manifesto
  (tags: computers academia )
• Some details on the Sandman story that I never thought I'd see. Rather looking forward to this.
  Now, what's going on with Miracleman?
  (tags: sandman comics NeilGaiman )
• Could this be the most annoying form of advertising ever invented?
  Seriously. I don't generally approve of vandalism, but I would start carrying wire-cutters.
  (tags: advertising )
• There was a pile of green-card applications waiting for DOMA to die, and now they're going through!
  (tags: law immigration marriage usa lgbt )
• A succint explanation for why (most) women wear makeup.
  (tags: society makeup )
• Julie and I will instituting this new system for dealing with spiders.
  (tags: spiders funny )
• This comic makes me want to play Dwarf Fortress.
  I just need to finish off my fifteen other projects first...
  (tags: games comic )
• Image comics go DRM free. I'll be handing them a bunch of money when I have bandwidth again...
  (tags: drm comics )
• WIPO copyright change means that blind people will be allowed to convert ebooks into a format they can read.
  (tags: books blindness copyright )
• Internal and External Iterators. (A distinction I hadn't encountered before.)
  (tags: computers programming )

41 questions about me!

Thanks to widgetfox for posting this one. I haven't done one of these in years.

1. Do you like having your picture taken?
Yes, although I tend to grin at the camera far too much. I preferred it when I was thinner though, I'm not very happy with my current weight.

2. If you could go anywhere in the world where would you go and why?

I've wanted to visit Canada for ages. And I'd like to visit New York. The latter for a visit would be fine, but I get the feeling that Canada would be somewhere I'd want to stay for several months, or even long-term.

3. Have you ever done crossword puzzles?

Not for a very long time. I did once, for a few weeks, and managed to twist my brain into the right shape for answering them. But I don't get much out of solving puzzles unless there's either a social element to it (i.e. board games) or I'm producing something (i.e. programming).

4. Pick up the closest book and write a sentence at random from it.

A Jack program is a sequence of tokens separated by an arbitrary amount of white space and comments, which are ignored. Tokens can be symbols, reserved words, constants, and identifiers, as listed in figure 9.5

- from "The Elements of Computing Systems", which starts off with logic gates, and then builds various logic modules, a processor, an assembler, a VM, a compiler, and finally an OS. I'm reading through the whole thing and finding it fascinating. I may even do the various projects at some point, if I can find the time.

It's the companion book of NAND to Tetris, a CS course which you can find here. If you want to _really_ understand computers then I recommend it.

5. Do the same with a lyric from either a cd or the radio.

I haven't listened to the radio outside of my parents putting on the news in about 25 years. And the CDs haven't been unboxed since I last moved. So I took a leaf out of widgetfox's book and hit "shuffle" on Spotify and picked the first track with lyrics:

You're so hot, teasing me
So you're blue but I can't take a chance on a chick like you

( Aaaaand 36 more. )