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Year View| Summary| Highlights| Month View| Friday 13 February 2004 (Day View)

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13.02.2004 – Friday 13 February – Earwigs and Acronyms

• I’ve spent a quiet day mostly in my van online. It’s about as relaxing as possible now. No one is here – even Mum is down south at the moment, which means I have to cook my own food, but also means I can just relax without having to consider anyone else.
  Graeme from the Big Shed phoned up and I said I’d go do some more on their website on Wednesday, as I need to pick up Mum then as well.

Night

• While cooking dinner, I saw an earwig sort of thing. A very large earwig sort of thing, to be precise – it would be longer than eight inches. They’re not particularly rare – I’ve seen this one, or one similar, several times in the kitchen, but something about it tonight gave me the creeps. When bugs and things are so large that they begin to do animal types of stuff – making footstep noises like that huge spider Ric and I saw, or scuttling noises like this earwig thing, for example, they give me the creeps. Speaking of that spider, it was bigger than the biggest ever recorded spider – so I wish I could see another one when I had my camera with me.

4:47am

• Well, it’s somewhat early. I didn’t mean to stay up this late. I’ve been trying to figure out a way to automatically get lovely acronym tags into my journal. It sounds simple – I have a file with a list of acronyms, and another file with my journal data. I use XSLT to transform the journal data into whatever format I happen to need at the time – in this case XHTML. Surely it would be simple to incorporate something that finds any acronyms and replaces them with the appropriate acronym tag, but no... it isn’t simple – either that or I’m stupid. It seems that I’d have to check every single word in my journal against every acronym in the acronyms list, one by one. That doesn’t sound very efficient to me. I thought about ways of checking blocks of text for occurrences of any acronym and only parsing individual words if there’s an acronym present and various other schemes to increase the efficiency, but I couldn’t really think of a way I’d be happy with or that I could get to work nicely, so I signed up for the XSL mailing list again, and asked them. I wish they used a newsgroup, mailing lists suck.
  I then got chatting for a while and now it’s nearly light outside! I’m glad I don’t need to get up early.

Valentine’s Day

• Hallmark’s website is still down, so I still can’t send any Valentine’s Day e-cards, which is roughly equivalent to the end of the world as we know it – or perhaps not, maybe it’s the thought that counts, ha. Besides, Valentine’s Day sucks – another silly excuse for commercialism. I guess it’s not actually Valentine’s Day yet anyway, seeing as it’s about five o’clock in the morning. I wonder how it all works with time zones and stuff. They confuse me.

5:32am

• I am so tired. Hallmark is still down. The first insane birds are beginning to sing – they need counselling. I am going to bed. I probably need counselling too, but then again, I don’t eat worms.

Comment by DM – Tuesday 17 February 2004, 1:52 AM

  I guess this would be a good time to learn about some advanced search algorithms if you could be bothered. I was thinking about how to do something along similar lines today, as well (checking ip addresses visiting a site against a list of stored ips).