Watty says:

I want to blog stuff; I do: it's just that I have this life...

So - this weekend I:

Finally finished a book - but haven't quite got round to reviewing it yet. Read almost all of another one ( the Murakami - he's just so damn readable); got splinters from gardening (must buy gloves); refused to worry about things I should at least pay attention to; read the paper; didn't use the PC - Friday nights don't count, right? - except for playing Myst III with Cameron - he doesn't understand it very well, but he thinks it's great...

Actually, scrub that last - I did spend a long time on the PC on Friday night - plotting something to send to Néa (which I didn't finish) and getting the speech recognition software to work. Wow, that's scary. In my mind, speech recognition and production is stuck in 1984, when I last encountered it academically - John Laver, as I recall, was leaving the Linguistics department to set up an AI project aimed at speech recognition and so on - I still have this part of me which does not believe it's actually possible. And yet, there I was on Friday night, talking to my copy of Word, and there were my words (mostly) appearing in front of me... It can cope with basic commands and everything. I am deeply impressed. I might even accept that the technology has, in fact, moved on...

Oh, and we've been watching The West Wing on Sunday nights - it's now the only TV I watch during the week (except if the footy's on) - being Luddites, we are restricted to the terrestrial version, so we're only at the beginning of Season 2, but I have to say that it's significantly better quality than anything else around. And didn't we just love old leftie Martin Sheen grandstanding at the end?. Ah, well, must go and tinker with the code on this page do some work...