diary at Telent Netowrks

Stand back world, I am going to buy a proper guitar#

Sun, 20 Jan 2002 20:35:30 +0000

Stand back world, I am going to buy a proper guitar. Went to the guitar shop (caution: web site consists entirely of a flash object and isn't actually all that useful anyway) on Friday, played for half an hour with a suitable slab of wood. Red, round at one end, pointy at the other, bits of wire running from one end to the other. (More precisely: made by Tokai, looks like a 1950s Strat). That was fun. This week I go back and hand over actual money.

On Saturday I went to see the Oxford University Museum of Natural History and the Pitt Rivers Museum with Simon and Judith (who subsequently found this diary and has advised me that she will be annoyed if she can't find any references to her in it. Google being what it is, I don't usually like mentioning names of people with no net presence, but on re-reading this I find that I have already anyway, so there).

The Pitt Rivers Museum is definitely recommended if you're in Oxford. It retains the original layout that it had in Victorian times - exhibits are sorted by type or purpose rather than by region or period - the display cases are crowded, and a lot of the exhibits are really pretty random. All with neat little hand-written tags describing what they are, where they came from, who donated them, etc. Usually museums give me that sinking "too much information; I am not going to remember anything I've seen here" feeling, but the Pitt Rivers is great because there is just so much on display that nobody could be expected to remember anything. Liberating, yes

Dinner at Judith's: conversation, cheese, leek, ham, conversation, chicken, rice, veggies, wine, conversation, cheese, conversation, chocolate, coffee. I don't eat much (actually, I don't say much either when there are other people carrying the conversation) but I do enjoy a good dinner. Right.

Then back here to stare at SBCL again. After tracing through more type system innards than I really wanted to know about, I see that it all hinges on a call to (%instance-ref structure (dsd-index dsd)) which of course we all know has been broken for months. Having realised that, went to bed at 5am ish.

Spent most of today idly speculating about designing my own accounts software, as GnuCash has a slew of features I don't need and is missing a bunch of others (support for VAT; hooks into my invoicing system; a real database for the data so I can have more confidence that it'll still be there in six years). It looks like a Simple Matter Of Programming: a real sql database to keep the splits in, and some handy functions using usql for posting transactions. Stopped before I actually got as far as writing code, though, and applied Christophe's %instance-ref fix for the SPARC to see if the PPC can work the same way. Rebuilding now to see what effect it has.