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Last few days
Mar. 11th, 2003 12:38 amSaturday: lay in bed reading for much of the day, then went to Simes' party; slightly unusual premise (to me anyway), but definitely fun. :) After looking around at the toys and chatting for a while I ended up sitting upstairs with Fi and Christi and others watching the Hitch-Hiker's TV series, which takes me back. Of course we all knew the jokes in advance, but DNA's stuff is still a work of genius even on the nth viewing.
I spent most of Sunday over with my sister and brother-in-law. They're not exactly happy (obviously), but seem to be coping about as well as could be expected, and Finn (first child) provides a good reason to keep up a daily routine and so on. Resolution: make more of an effort to see them more often from now on.
Then finished "Paradise Lost", which means that I can now read something else for a change. :) It's very good, though. And, as![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
simont observed, afterwards your brain is ten syllables wide ...
Monday: failed to do much apart from fixing an amusing bug in our Tomcat integration. If you're ever unfortunate enough to have to implement AJP 1.3, know in advance that it sucks - the protocol is practically designed to encourage mistakes in implementation, and has no specification other than one admirably reverse-engineered from mod_jk. If you accidentally send a chunk of POST data when the servlet runner isn't expecting it, it interprets the most significant byte of the chunk length as a special action code instead, which has about a 1 in 32 chance of happening to be the one that tells Tomcat to shut itself down. DIE DIE DIE.
Anyway, I headed off to pizza and post-pizza, where we ended up having the old private versus state education argument (which I don't really entirely understand because I was brought up in Northern Ireland which had plenty to worry about with secondary versus grammar and Protestant versus Catholic without having another division as well ...) and digressing off withantinomy, Owen, and Ian into the different ways our minds represent thoughts internally - abstract concepts, verbal streams, semi-visual/spatial diagrammatic representations, full photographic ideas or memories, and so on. That was genuinely fascinating, but I decided to go home fairly early in the hope that I can get some sleep tonight, as the next couple of days are going to be busy.
The funeral is in London on Thursday, so I'll take a day off work and drive down. I'm glad it's going to be before I leave for America on Friday morning; it would've been awful to have missed it.
I spent most of Sunday over with my sister and brother-in-law. They're not exactly happy (obviously), but seem to be coping about as well as could be expected, and Finn (first child) provides a good reason to keep up a daily routine and so on. Resolution: make more of an effort to see them more often from now on.
Then finished "Paradise Lost", which means that I can now read something else for a change. :) It's very good, though. And, as
simont observed, afterwards your brain is ten syllables wide ...Monday: failed to do much apart from fixing an amusing bug in our Tomcat integration. If you're ever unfortunate enough to have to implement AJP 1.3, know in advance that it sucks - the protocol is practically designed to encourage mistakes in implementation, and has no specification other than one admirably reverse-engineered from mod_jk. If you accidentally send a chunk of POST data when the servlet runner isn't expecting it, it interprets the most significant byte of the chunk length as a special action code instead, which has about a 1 in 32 chance of happening to be the one that tells Tomcat to shut itself down. DIE DIE DIE.
Anyway, I headed off to pizza and post-pizza, where we ended up having the old private versus state education argument (which I don't really entirely understand because I was brought up in Northern Ireland which had plenty to worry about with secondary versus grammar and Protestant versus Catholic without having another division as well ...) and digressing off with
antinomy, Owen, and Ian into the different ways our minds represent thoughts internally - abstract concepts, verbal streams, semi-visual/spatial diagrammatic representations, full photographic ideas or memories, and so on. That was genuinely fascinating, but I decided to go home fairly early in the hope that I can get some sleep tonight, as the next couple of days are going to be busy.The funeral is in London on Thursday, so I'll take a day off work and drive down. I'm glad it's going to be before I leave for America on Friday morning; it would've been awful to have missed it.