Bit of an odd day. It's been a long week preparing for a demo (which I still don't know the results of dammit) in Seattle. As a result everyone is a bit tired and I slept in this morning (the immense quantity of Sushi ingested last night may have contributed to that).

The weather's a bit murky outside and I haven't felt inspired to do anything strenuous today. Instead I've spent the day arbing around. I've put in a little time on spot (if I told you your life would be forfeit). It's coming along slowly at the moment, mostly as a result of the past few weeks of madness, but also because I'm simultaneously trying to get up to speed with ANTLR.

I've also done a little reading. Against a dark background (Iain Banks) has been a pretty enjoyable read so far, which is surprising given how unimpressed I've been with other books by this author. To cement my reputation as a nerd I've gotten most of the way through the O'Reilly Learning the bash shell. We have a significant collection of O'Reilly books at the office (one of the perks of working for Amazon). This is candy-store territory for me and I've been chewing through them as quickly as time has allowed for. This one is aimed at a somewhat more novice breed of user but even so I've learned a few new tricks. The general programmability of shells is one of the things that I enjoy about a Unix environment. I also hadn't realised just how much Perl ripped off from Bourne Shell scripting.

And I hauled out a heap of old CDs with collections of MP3s on them. My last laptop slowly ran out of space (and Otto killed my desktop a few years back so I went without a personal machine for some time) and as a result my "online" MP3 collection has slowly been whittled down to the bare essentials. This prompted a bout of nostalgic listening ("crap, I'd forgotten all about that"). A lot of this music has followed me around for the past 5 years (and no doubt will follow me to my grave). It's weird how strong my associations between memories and music are (Ben mentioned something similar applies to him and smells). Just listening to a given song puts me right back in the moment most strongly associated with it. For fun, here's a list of weird musical associations I'm carrying around:

• No Need To Argue (the entire album) is Doom and Doom 2. I'd received the cassette (cassette!) as a birthday or Christmas gift , I forget which, and at the same time gotten hooked (or possibly rehooked) on Doom. There was just enough time between levels to flip the cassette over when it was done and so I must have listened to it a thousand times.
• Queen's Greatest Hits is Turbo Pascal. I think at the time (ooh, about 15 years ago) I was playing with a little text based racing game.
• 12 Inches Of Snow, as embarrassing as it may be to admit that it even featured in my chequered musical history, brings back memories of the Mandelbrot Set . I spent far too much time during high school generating fractals and trying to automate zooming in on "interesting" features after being introduced to fractals via FractInt and James Gleick's Chaos.
• One of the Billy Joel albums (I have no idea which one), featuring songs like Honesty, Piano Man and Just the way you are, will always remind me of a holiday with my mother in Sabie (in what used to be the Eastern Transvaal). She had the album with her and it featured often enough so that it's irrevocably associated with that holiday. I remember a three legged brown and white Jack Russell and his (four legged) black and white friend adopting us for the week we were there.
• Tracy Chapman's Why and Fast Car remind me of the house we lived in in Elise road in Randburg with Gerald, my Mother's boyfriend in the years leading up to her death.
.

It's a funny life.