frances and I just bought a small TV/VCR with which to pursue our mutual love of crass anime and high quality older films. lucky for us, suspect video carries lots of both. we're hoping this device will not lead to more actual broadcast TV watching, as we both lost sizable chunks of our childhood to that. so far we're seen keiko kamen and dead reckoning (bogart, 1947). going for joan or arc (bergman, 1948) tonight.

miscellaneous link-dropping: highly satisfied with the recent ghc 5.00.1 release. anyone who's held back from haskell for a while would do well to try it. It now includes a mixed-mode compiler/interpreter with dep chasing and an interactive mode not unlike hugs, only you get access to nice optimized copies of hslibs. It's a 5-minute fix to get emacs hooked up to it, then you have a nice ":reload" function at your fingertips. also pleased with unison, which does what you thought rsync was going to do when you first got it. counterbalance the amusingly pragmatic nature of dumbcode with some positive evidence that not all free software consists of broken instant messaging clients in python: boost, atlas, R, maxima and openDX. finally, was tuning nasty code with some nice profiling tools recently, worth pointing out: cacheprof, functioncheck, perfAPI, and jprof

obTechnicalPhilosophy: there is a delicate balance necessary between sticking with the things you know and can rely on, and exploring things which have the potential to be better. assuming that one or another of these strategies is the one true way is silly.