I enjoyed steve martin's shopgirl this weekend. It's a pretty short book so it only took me a few hours to read. The humor is very subtle, an undertone to the intense character studies Martin puts forward. I felt the plot was a bit thin but it didn't end how I thought it would, which was good.

Also, I read chunks out of Steven Levy's book on how the Macintosh changed how we think about computers and Donald Knuth's new "Things a Computer Scientist Rarely Talks About", a collection of 6 of his lectures at MIT regarding religion and abstract (and applied) computer science.

Hacked together a quick version of Whisper in E that works for single-party inter-vat instant messaging. I guess theoretically that means it works for multiple parties but you would have no idea who you're getting a message from or would be getting the messages you're sending out. I should make a checklist of things that need to be complete before I can feel comfortable tagging it as a 0.10. I'm not going to release any code until: 1) my code isn't in updoc format, 2) I have an efficient pet-name translator [I'm using cut-and-paste right now, which is terrible], 3) I get a basic UI around it [there is a basic JTree with clickable nodes leading to JEditorPane's written in E that you can't see yet] Maybe I'll post screen shots this coming weekend. Whisper is only a weekend project right now, and therefore only sees about 10 hours of coding time per week. Still, that 10 hours has been pretty productive sofar.

My lambda post inspired some fun discussions between zooko, tony kimball, and myself. I learned lambda before I learned 'lambda', so my understanding of lambda isn't tainted by the imposed constraint of the function needing to be dynamically bound, which is how most programmers who use the lamda keyword think of it. I guess if I had been hacking heavily in non-C-birthed languages I would have subconsciously assumed it had to be dynamic. I think the Arc paper talks a bit about how the lambda keyword isn't accurate

I have been couchless since March, when the cheap futon I bought in SF fell apart so I fixed that yesterday, fulfilling my patriotic duty to the economy and my ass, which is tired of the lawn furniture.

I woke up at 6:30 this morning, saw the fog, and decided that I didn't particularly want to be fully awake when the sun came out. I wasn't.