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All things bright and beautiful

Pause to remember the terrible morning forty years ago today, when a hundred and sixteen children, and twenty-eight adults, were buried alive as they sat in their classrooms in Aberfan on the last day before the holidays, by tons of coalmining waste, through the neglect of a corporation and a government which didn't care what happened to them because they were not rich and not English.

Today I have washed up, and swept some floors, and played with FUSA a bit. There is a bug in my new code which apparently causes all idle callbacks not to be called after starting a new user: this is a problem because it means you can't create any more new users, since communication with GDM is via callback. Full analysis will have to wait until Monday and the train, but in the interests of science I disabled all communication with GDM (and wrote stubs to supply its replies) and the problem occurs anyway.

I have decided that my favourite BPAL scent is Dorian, and I might wear it more often than I do. It smells of sugar biscuits, which is no bad thing.

Riordon was given a card with $20 in it as a present from someone for her birthday. She went to the shop and bought herself a bucket of something called K'Nex with it (it's like Meccano). Out of this she has made a number of things, including a fish, a necklace, and a ferris wheel. Also, this morning I went shopping with Fin and we bought material for Rio's Halloween costume. She is going to be a bluejay.

My Welsh is still at that irritating stage where you understand about 60% of random text, which is enough to let you know what's going on but not enough to give a translation. I need to read lots of text and learn vocab from it. I think the BBC's "vocab" button on their sites might help with this. I really should write a Firefox extension which looks up the word you select in a Welsh dictionary.