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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Sunday 4 January 2004 (Day View)

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04.01.2004 – Sunday 4 January – Nude in the Flow

Midday

• I awoke, and spent the evening online, chatting, procrastinating, emailing, “surfing the net”, and so on and so forth.

Evening

• I walked out to the halfway spot, which was cold as it was a bit late, but I forced myself into the water, he-man style. I’d been relaxing and thinking about ice bergs for a while, so decided I aught to get out before I froze to death, so stood up, turned around, and saw two people sitting on some rocks – not facing my way, fortunately. Had I known who they were, I’d simply have got out, dressed, and left, but I had no idea who they were and didn’t want to embarrass them – or me, so I lay in the water, closed my eyes, and pretended it wasn’t cold. After a while, I got used to it and it seemed warmer. There’s that many bubbles in the water it’s pretty much air, and as I just lay there, plummeted by the water falling and rushing around me – I realised I could no longer tell what was air or water, whether my arm or leg was under water or not. It’s very peaceful in a funny sort of way, and I quite enjoyed it for a bit, until I began to get sore from the water pounding against me, which is quite strong, but gladly, just before it became uncomfortable, they left and I was able to get out and walk home.

Night

• I’d thought on my walk, how I should add the capability to my online journal, of representing linefeeds (or carriage returns). It sounded like a simple idea, but like many simple ideas, wasn’t as easy in practice as it sounded. After a few failed ideas, and a search through Google, I ended up having to use a recursive XSL parser, just to replace carriage returns with line breaks. That’s the problem with XSL, it’s so hard to do deceptively simple things – it took me ages to work out how to count words and truncate a paragraph, for example, and Meunchian grouping still boggles my mind, it’s like recursion without the recurs.
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  Oh, and now that I have a fancy journal that supports linefeeds, I shall use them!
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  
  He he.

Comment by keight – Monday 5 January 2004, 10:52 PM

  you forgot to mention your awesome chat in hashmaths

Comment by Ned – Tuesday 6 January 2004, 1:36 PM

  Oh yes, I went to #maths, a channel on Austnet, and left in disgust after being informed that engineers are scientists, as part of an argument on why the Information Technology degree is somehow worse than any engineering degrees.

Comment by DM – Thursday 8 January 2004, 1:34 AM

  Ah, I guess this linefeed stuff would explain that exclamation of yours I somehow recall seeing in #bits.
  
  I wonder if comments like them, too.