All hallows' eve

My thanks to Barbara & Markus (WANOLJ, AFAIK) for their Hallowe'en party last night. For once, I was not massively late - I went straight there after watching the Tooting Bec fireworks display - and wasn't the last one to arrive, by a long chalk! Greetings to pmcmurray, munquie, cuboidursinoid & anybody else whose LJ handles I don't know.

nolley, alas, was too cold-ridden to attend, which is also why I wasn't able to make it to tobesv & hawkida's bash in Peterboro'. Sorry, folks. This also meant no bike show at the NEC & no chance to see the_major. :-(

Nor did I make it to beermat's housemate's do in Woking, due to the siren call of being able to get home again afterwards.

I cycled back from Waltham Forest to Mitcham at about 3:30 in the morning - or 2:30 in old money. The AA route planner makes that about 17.5 miles. It felt like it. It took 2 hours & I had to stop for breathers twice, which is most unlike me - once on the steps of Keepier Wharf in Limehouse, where I used to live, 10y ago, and once on the hill in Clapham. Mind, that is the longest ride I've attemped in a month, since I fell off and injured my hands. Still, not good - I can't even remember the last time before last nightthis morning when I've had to have a toke on my Ventolin inhaler. Not a good sign. More exercise needed, Proven!

High quality geekery

I enjoyed a splendidly spoddish chat with SquareBear & some others last night.

Really well-informed geeks are lamentably rare these days. Far too many young 'uns only know Windows or, maybe, if you're lucky, Windows and Linux. Throw in a bit of BSD and MacOS and that covers 95% or more of under-30s nerddom, I reckon. Only the Olde Phartes now tend to remember 8-bit machines, minicomputers, big iron and machines where a byte wasn't 8 bits or a multiple thereof.

So it is with delight that I have stumbled upon a set of interesting, well-written and informative essays from a writer new to me - InformIt's Dave Chisnall. As it happened, I started with his latest, The Future of CPUs: What's After Multi-Core?, which is eerily close to a piece I've had in development for some time now. Thankfully I note that I'm going in some slightly different directions to him. I may still be able to sell it!

But I've been working my way through his pieces for a while now. Pretty good stuff & even the odd embedded gag. We like. Go read. The tiny foetus only graduated in 2003, too! Gah! Kids of today... Don't know they're born... [Cont'd p94. - Ed.]

EDIT: name was misspelt. Oops!

Question: jet lag

Despite doing more international travel than most people, what with spending a large part of my childhood in Africa and dating someone in another country & so on, I have never really experienced the phenomenon called "jetlag".

Is it a common one? Have many of you guys felt it? Why, how, when, where? What was it like?

There is a reason for this question, which will become apparent soon...