The Today programe reported this morning that "scientists" have found -#

Fri, 21 Dec 2001 14:32:39 +0000

The Today programe reported this morning that "scientists" have found - or possibly just invented, I'm not sure - SSSAD, or Sub-Syndromic Seasonal Affective Disorder. Which is to say, there is now a label for people who feel a bit low in winter but not low enough to actually reasonably claim there's something wrong with them - in which case they would actually (be|have) SAD. Great news!

It was an incentive to get out of bed, anyway. That and the prospect of Desert Island Discs

Saw LoTR on Wednesday - didn't everyone? I've only read the book once, and that was a couple of years ago, so I can't comment on the fidelity of the film. I will say: pro: they left out the poetry; con: some of the falling masonry in Moria landed in completely implausible ways - it acted like it was made from polystyrene foam. The rest of it - well, go and see it yourself and make your own mind up. I enjoyed it.

The problem - or indeed, the opportunity - with buying CDs for Christmas is that I find other CDs that I want. So, I seem to have ended up with another Billy Bragg (Don't Try This At Home) and simian (chemistry is what we are).

SBCL hacking is going to take a hiatus over Christmas. Presently I still have exactly the same problems as I had on Wednesday, but I'm closer to finding out what causes the DEFINE-STORAGE-BASE one: it attempts to call a structure slot accessor out-of-line at that point. These are implemented as closures over the structure instance, and there appears to be something wrong with our closure calling strategy. The magic 'jump to a Function object' trick depends in part on the second word in a Function being a relative branch to the actual code (an offset of #x18 bytes to skip the header) - which is the case for all normal functions but seems not to be for closures; instead they have a relative branch with offset 0. So, loop: see loop.

We're living in a North Sea Bubble
We're trying to spend our way out of trouble

You keep buying these things but you don't need them
But as long as you're comfortable it feels like freedom