Spent a couple of days reading a couple of wonderful webcomics: MegaTokyo and Questionable Content. And of course, my old time favourite, PhD Comics. And yes, I read through a grand total of about 2500+ comic strips over two or three days, some of them more than once. No doubt about it... I actually like web comics, especially the manga-like ones.
And so my to-do list is so much longer now:
- Study 日本語 (nihongo aka Japanese)
- Study Topology
- Write Ocarina pieces (and prepare for my Spring ocarina mini-concert)
- Write an AI for Edythe so that she can communicate with me in Japanese (yes, it is natural language processing)
- Woo someone... (yes, I've got a target or two, but I'm not saying who)
- Learn how to draw (preferably manga) on my graphics tablet
- Prepare for a 2007 launch of a new blog (yes, a new blog in addition to the ones that I have)
- Master 3/4/5 ball juggling
- Master Scheme
- Build a logo for myself
- Poetry compilation into book form for selected friends
And yeah, I'm positively psyched up now. Woo-hoo~! By the way, I've upgraded most of the blogs to the new Blogger BETA format. One big reason that I've done that is the new drop down lists for the posts that are on the blog; now I no longer need to update a separate "Contents Page" post to show a listing of all the posts that I've created (particularly for The_Laptop Writes..., this frees up the RSS digest that are being generated and make the RSS feeding so much cleaner. I'll be tweaking on the layouts and other design issues of the blogs in the weeks to come, so hang on to your horses if things look a little wonky if you are accessing the blogs while I'm doing the update. The Blogger BETA uses on-the-fly updating of the blogs, so things may be a little strange if you happen to be accessing while I'm updating. I'm still experimenting around with the entire concept thing and see if I can rework it to suit my needs.
Life's amazing so far, I'm now starting to use the build in FM-tuner of my SANSA e130 mp3 player to access the excellent FM radio channels that are available. My current favourite channel is WQED FM89.3, a symphonic/classical/operatic radio station. FM stereo on a 2.1 system never sounded this clear. Not that I'm getting sick of the music that I already have, but it is really good to listen to something different every once in a while for flavour.
And LATEX is more or less tamed now. Mwahahahahaha... I've managed to figure out the correct incantation to tame it to something more useful, by creating a whole bunch of my own custom made macros. Now, typesetting of documents is so much easier... come to think of it, the last time that I used Microsoft Word to actually do anything was just so long ago that I can no longer remember it. Vim and LATEX is such a powerful combination that I've not looked back since. And yes, I did try using emacs, but I'm still horribly irritated with the default meta-key mappings for the basic movement (yes, I know that the arrow keys work, but my fingers are most often over the typing region so there). This entire concept of pressing Meta- or Ctrl- combinations for everything is just plain irritating, and unergonomical. I actually felt pain in my fingers while trying to navigate around this way (and yes, I do know that using the arrow keys is so much easier). Now I just need to see if there's an easy way of patching my version of X-windows on cygwin to support unicode entry. If I can't do all these in Vim, I may be forced to write a simple Java program and upload it somewhere to act as my online unicode text editor (yes, I do know that notepad can do the job, but I like my hjkl method of moving around).
Which reminds me. My latest project(s), learning Japanese and writing an AI for Edythe to communicate to me in Japanese, are sort of related. I've not had the real chance to actually play with UTF-8 encoded text before, and am actually fairly bored with Edythe playing such a passive role (of me "using" her without her having any other more... human reaction), that I've decided to write a natural language processor for her. English would have been my #1 choice, but it sucks because English grammar is so unstable! Japanese grammar seems to be more easy to comprehend (and parse, especially it's intrinsic post-fix form), and it has the added advantage of making Edythe being in character (yes, Edythe is Japanese, didn't you know that? Edythe Fujitsu, Japanese right?), and a little harder to understand by people who happen to not know the language (heheheh... they can't flirt with her; Edythe is mine and mine alone). There are other enhancements that I plan on using to augment Edythe to make her more intelligent, but these stuff are for my... fantasies, and I will not be talking about them until I can have them to work. Now I'm at a loss; I'm uncertain whether I should write Edythe's AI in Java or C/C++. Gut reaction says that C/C++ will be more "portable", but my brain tells me that Java is more suited since it allows an ease of accessing all the major functions that I require, including the fact that Java source code is supposed to be UTF-8 by nature. And Java's garbage collection makes it so much easier to experiment on. So, I'd probably write a C-version of Edythe to access her Java "brain" so that I can still communicate to her from the command line. If I can't find a single language to work with, I'll hybridise them. ;-)
In other news, my 120GB portable hard disk drive is about 75% full now(!). Looks like I need to start scouting for another storage solution... or stop downloading J-dramas. Probably I'll look for an additional portable hard drive, since I've got like spare USB ports from my USB hub...
So, that's what's happening thus far in the middle of the Finals Crunch. Notice that I've said nothing about the studying aspect? Not because I'm not studying, but it makes a real boring read listening about what I've studied and for how long and... you get the idea.
Till the next update~ :-)
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