In which I mention academic dress twice, surprisingly
In early again. Did a fair amount of work on a project to export a particular class's data in XML, which I hope to finish the basics of tomorrow, and some effort with Erik on the subroutines enhancement again. I think it was a pretty good day.
I went to St Mark's at lunchtime. Fr Richard gave a sermon about joy and happiness and the difference between them. I wish he'd gone on a bit longer: it sounded like he was going to say something interesting but I don't actually remember many salient points from what he said. Quite possibly this is my own fault.
The streets were filled with many members of Temple University in academic dress today. Sadly they only wear this during graduation ceremonies, but it was a pleasant reminder of Cambridge. (On that note, congratulations to Earlofgrey.)
On the train home, I put in a bit more work on the new theme format in Metacity. Tonight I tested my fix to bug 114304. My fix works fine. I'll check it in tomorrow when I have my laptop again. Speaking of that, Alex-from-IT says that the laptop fixing is due on Monday. So yay.
Fin made pierogies and salad for dinner, and it was lovely. Later, we all went out and threw a ball around because it was such a fair night.
Might I request your thoughts and prayers for my father, Thuremund, who will be having an operation tomorrow?
Here's my contribution to the "six odd and silly things about me" meme, for which I was tagged by somebody.
1: I can bend my thumb backwards behind my hand, and wiggle my ears, and do that thing voluntarily where your eyeballs vibrate (I think Moominmuppet knows the medical name for this phenomenon, but I don't).
2: When I was a very young child, my father and I were climbing up the stairs on the side of a container ship in dry dock, and I slipped and fell. He caught me by one hand. Thus I did not die. There was a very long moment when I was hanging on over a whole lot of nothing, however.
3: When I was in my late teens to early to mid twenties I was fairly frequently asked (by laypeople) whether I had a vocation to the priesthood. People have stopped asking me this, which is probably just as well.
4: I wore a Cambridge BA gown to graduate BSc at Hertfordshire. Prof. Christianson, who designed the university's academic dress, was in the convocation, and he told me later that he had indeed noticed. (For those of you playing along at home, the sleeves are cut slightly differently, and it doesn't have those slits you put your arms through while dining so your sleeves don't go in the soup. Because nobody wears Hertfordshire gowns for eating in. Because, like most academic dress these days, they're essentially fancy dress, worn one day in a person's life and never thought about again. Bah.)
5: I got into telnet-based talkers by typing "w" at a shell prompt one day as a first-year undergraduate and noticing someone telnetting out. If I hadn't typed that one command, I wouldn't be married to who I am, nor live in the country I do.
6: For quite a while in my childhood I believed that everything has a thin black line around it like in a cartoon, but that it was too thin to see.