Good weather in Hong Kong

Shockingly good weather today; I woke up with the sunlight streaming in, and then hurt my head by trying to read Anathem. It's been on my bookshelf for over a year without me getting round to it, partly because of Neal Stephenson's technique, which is to make every book he writes longer than the previous one. And since I made the mistake of buying the hardback edition (so I could get it earlier - and then spend more time not reading it) I fear doing terrible injuries to my spine when I pick it up.

After all, almost ten years ago I put my back out reading Mary Gentle's Ash - and though it was a thousand pages, it was only a paperback. Hence my reluctance to start on Anathem.


So now my bookshelves are bendy. And they were the finest quality fibreboard that Ikea could supply. Oh well.

Literature-related furniture disasters aside, the day went well. We took a walk to Tea & Herb in Tin Hau for breakfast (muesli for my girlfriend, a fry up for me) which would have been nice if the mushrooms hadn't been manufactured from rubber.

Then we slinked back to the flat and I spent a couple of hours struggling with perl as I continued to build my automatic-language-generation-a-tron. After several hours of thumping my head against the wall, finding examples to do almost everything apart from what I wanted, we went outside to fry in the sun instead.

On reflection, thumping your head against the wall isn't the best way to learn regular expressions. Maybe I should have bought a book or something. Although I have a prodigiously toughened forehead as a result of this.

Still, when I returned to the flat in the afternoon and spent a bit more time reading documentation, a light went on above my head and things began to fall into place. My fake language generator now feels oh-so-close. We'll have to see tomorrow if I'm woefully overestimating the ease of the final results...