She reads Nabokov, she thinks Ibsen's better than Shakespeare, and she's beautiful. She met my daughters, and my immediate family, last weekend, and she wasn't overwhelmed, or didn't seem to be. She's kept me so happy and busy for the last month that I've hardly had time to write anything here; she'll read this and no doubt let me know what she thinks about it. I've taken ages to blog about her because I'm pretty glib and offhand when I blog about my personal life: but that style doesn't really suit the way I feel about her.

When I imagine my trip in October, I feel like I'm already missing her.

I'm spending two weeks in England, Scotland and Ireland at the start of October. Booked my flight this morning.

My first overseas trip - I've been telling people that so often that I've almost stopped being embarrassed about it - but the really exciting part is I get to see my friend's new baby, who was born in Glasgow about a month ago.

Some people have been saying that the lj outage the other week was not really caused by a power failure at all, but by me remembering that I had a blog, and that I ought to update it, and thinking about it for a little while; it seems that even that is too much happiness for livejournal. But they were making stuff up.

To add to the themed list:

swim-two-birds
unthank
chorazina
chavignolles
theleme
summerisle
triste-le-roy

The last one I got today - my first dual-header. summerisle is my laptop.

...and is posting about it on their blogs. Mine's nearly gone but it was a refreshingly old fashioned head cold: none of this modern "gastric flu" business, it just crawled up into my sinuses and throat and robbed me of the will to do anything but lie around for three days.

Luckily, I have recently discovered the reason why I don't like television shows about doctors: it's because the aren't Scrubs. My sister lent me the DVDs of the first series, and it was perfect at-home-sick viewing.

INT. TRAIN AT SYDENHAM STATION - DAY.

An OLD MAN WITH GINGER POMPADOUR descends the stairs from the upper level.

ME: (thinks) What an impressive pompadour.

THE POMPADOUR: Impressive? Sonny, I'm older than you.

This morning I had to dive into some code I didn't write to try to figure out why it was [boring technical details of the actual error omitted but it was broken, ok?].

You might have heard the term "code smell" - this code doesn't smell, it stinks. It stinks of many things, chiefly convoluted OO design with about thirteen too many layers of abstraction, and hideous brittleness, and dog poo.

I don't know how programmers can merrily write this stuff and not noticed the stench. Imagine a furniture designer building a chair. The chair has big spikes coming out of the seat. If you sit on it from the right side, it is very uncomfortable. If you sit on it from the left, not only do you get spiked, but the whole chair collapses under you, and a flag comes out of the chair on a spring. The message on the flag says "that was your fault, try again."

The designer would probably notice that there was something wrong with the chair well before any actual users got to try it out, but for some reason (actually I have a pretty good idea of what the reasons are but don't stop me, I'm being rhetorical) programmers will happily release code that is the exact equivalent of the unspeakable chair.

I didn't even realise until I was reading the Herald. I don't think I've forgotten a Bloomsday since 1988. Either my mind is going or I'm growing out of being such a booknerd.

Even more odd, two nights ago I was making notes for a Ulysses Cheat Sheet, along the lines of my old Cremaster Cycle Cheat Sheet - basically, what chapters you can afford to skip - I think it's a great shame that people treat Ulysses as an all-or-nothing proposition. And the 16th of June thing didn't even occur to me.

1) The fashion industry has decided that this winter, the ladies will be wearing a wide variety of hats, and that these hats will range from "dead cute" to "downright adorable". I had no idea that I could enjoy hats so much. Well played, fashion industry. Well played, ladies.

2) Middle aged guys: shaving it all off is no longer a realistic approach to a receding hairline. You're making me feel cold, and besides which you all look like shmoos.

I have ripped my parents' old vinyl copy of The Daly-Wilson Big Band featuring Marcia Hines. It is awesome, despite the racist liner notes. Impossible to get on CD, apparently.

Also, I solved Araucaria's cryptic in this week's Guardian Weekly. !!

Actually, I have a reasonable excuse for this: food poisoning. All better now.