Wake up. Get dressed and such. Check e-mail. Nothing interesting.

Ok, gather belongings, head out door. Open car. Observe lack of passenger side window.

Hmm. I'm pretty sure I had a passenger window yesterday. Along with a GPS unit, a few CDs, and change for tollbooths and such. And I'm darn sure I didn't have broken glass all over the floor of my car.

Call insurance. They say so sorry, but won't meet your deductible, we can't help you.

Call police. Dispatcher sends dumb rock in uniform over. Rock asks me for make, model, and serial number of everything. Attempt to explain that I know the title of the CDs, but not the manufacturer, and that CDs don't have a model or serial number. Rock insists that he needs model and serial number for the report.

Go to car wash place, vacuum glass out. Guy stops by, asking me if he can wash my car for me. I point out the glass and such. Guy still insists he can do a really good job.

Stop by Loafers for a sandwich. Clyde and Jen (?) entertain me and cheer me up. Much appreciated.

Call repair shops. Get quotes. Glass place says they can't help me until Monday. But but... ok. Monday's fine.

I don't get it.

autoconf is supposed to make platform incompatibilities go away (well, at least on Unix-ish systems). That is, if a program uses autoconf to build itself, I should never have to hand-edit a file, nor should I see crap like:

In file included from ../../boost/boost/format.hpp:55,
                 from ../../src/BoostFormat.h:9,
                 from formulamacro.C:43:
../../boost/boost/format/parsing.hpp: In member function `void 
   boost::basic_format::parse(const std::basic_string   std::allocator<_CharT> >&)':
../../boost/boost/format/parsing.hpp:359: use of `string' is ambiguous
../../src/LString.h:35:   first declared as `typedef class lyxstring string' 
   here
/opt/tools/gcc-3.2.1/include/c++/3.2.1/bits/stringfwd.h:60:   also declared as 
   `typedef struct std::basic_string, 
   std::allocator > std::string' here

Why must software suck so badly?

Shiny new icon. Yes, saw Sen to Chihiro no kamikakushi, a.k.a. Spirited Away, this weekend.

Spent my free time this extended weekend doing something entirely too geeky: developing a punchcard-programmed language. Except, well, nobody these days has a punchcard reader, so you put the card on a scanner and it reads the picture file.

The language runs on a Turing VM. Yes, that's right. You get a paper tape (initialised to all zeros or another state dictated by -- you guessed it -- more punchcards). Each instruction reads the value under the "head," and performs an action based on whether the value read was a one or a zero. Each action writes a zero or one, shifts the head left or right, and jumps to a new instruction.

I've even given it a 50's-esque flavour by outputting cryptic errors. E40 means card not found. E41 means card could not be read. And so on. (I'd output messages in EBCDIC rather than ASCII, but that may be going a bit too far...)

You can see the punchcards here (Acrobat format).

IT upgraded the Cadence installation I was working from this morning, costing me a bit of work. Even worse, the new install won't run, but they don't consider this a terribly high priority.

So, yeah. I can't get any work done for now. On the bright side, they're essentially paying me to surf the web.

Hrm. Maybe I'll go water the plants outside...

We're getting a house! So weird. But so cool!

A good way to really piss me off is to go behind my back on something. As happened today at work.