Last weekend and this one, that is. I was watching We Were Soldiers this evening, but stopped as it made me so angry and sad, and deepened my profound … (words fail me) for George Bush and Tony Blair (to a lesser extent for mostly being just a poodle rather than a breathtakingly incompetent, arrogant, combat-dodging and ignorant (again, words fail me)). Stupid, stupid, dangerous man. Frothing at the mouth slightly less, but possibly boring more people, I came across a brain-bending but interesting initiative to do with very high level computer languages. There has been a long history of looking for silver bullets to solve the computing problem, and all candidates get over-hyped and then fade back to being at best generally good but no panacea: formal specification, objects, objects with multiple inheritance, aspects, agile programming and now this.
Anyway, that doesn’t have much to do with our weekends – sorry. Last weekend, Katy was ill and everyone was tired from Melrose, but I took the biggest 3 on the pre-arranged visit to the local mosque where one of the families in the local HomeEd group goes. It was pitched more at the adults than the children, so the adults found it interesting and the children got a bit fidgety. But there was craft and food at the end, and a nice man wrote people’s names in Arabic (by trying to re-create the sounds of their names using Arabic letters). It was very interesting see what marks corresponded to what letter – K’s name had lots of ink for the consonants and hardly any (just some dots) for the rest. We were too late to stay for henna tattoos which was a shame, but we then had to zoom home, pick up Katy and A, then zoom back for a birthday ceilidh.
The birthday boy was 10/40 (born on 29th Feb), and we all had an excellent time (some photos on Flickr). The children were up v. late, enjoyed the dancing (although Katy and K making an arch to go over the other dancers in their set was interesting!) A was strapped to Katy or me, and when I spun L she would often lift her feet up and fly for a bit.
Sunday was dual purpose: Mother’s Day and L’s birthday. The children gave Katy some flowers and I tried to keep them out of her hair with only limited success. L unwrapped presents and enjoyed being a bigger girl. Her birthday tea was brought to us by the colour pink – the cake had been cooked in a bowl and then turned into the skirt of a dress for a doll. L and J had a go at doing the icing (more photos).
Errr… this weekend. So far it has been unpacking from Melrose 😳 and the first swim en famille since E’s pool party an embarrassingly long time ago. Now we’ve splashed out on a year’s family membership of the local leisure centre we’re hopefully going to be doing this more often. L and A glided about on floats and did Humpty Dumpty with me, K did his outboard motor impression with his float and J was initially v. annoying with his refusal to do anything but Katy’s patience won the day. I also did a bit of maths and English with the boys to catch up with stuff not done earlier in the week and to give Katy a bit of peace (she hasn’t properly thrown off various lurgies for a while): J was surprisingly un-grumpy about it all which was great, and did some tessellation and then some work on pronouns.
It brought back my M.Phil. a bit, and I managed to limit myself to a single sentence about it rather than boring him to tears: how would you get a computer to work out what a pronoun referred to? (It turns out that large passages of text, like this rambling waffle, can follow a pattern of nested blocks e.g. with digressions then returning to what you were talking about previously – often marked by saying things like “anyway”. If you keep track of what is being talked about in each block it makes it a lot easier and more accurate. I expect Beardie will be cringing at all this – sorry, it was a long time ago and I’m rather rusty.)
We also squeezed in some shopping (“just loo roll” turned into quite a lot more), and got photos for the boys as K needs a new proper passport and they both need photos for their Kentwell passports and our leaving till after the last minute means we’ll have to bring photos to the open day next weekend. It’s going to be 1588 again this year (it was 1588 when I did it the only time pre-children, which was a hoot, although how a real present-day war going on will change things I don’t know).
Tomorrow will be our old church and meeting up with K’s godmother, then catching up with more jobs I expect.
This amused:
Higher level languages encourage particular styles, but unsophisticated or stubborn programmers often defeat the best styles (“one can write COBOL in any languageâ€)
Having now spent two years disentangling java written by ppl originally from a 4gl background with no cross training in object orientation and oh yes, it shows.