A lot of stuff seems to be happening now.

sleep and dreams

I had my sleep study a couple of weeks ago. My sleep disorder is considerably more of a mystery now than it was before - I was convinced that it was sleep apnea based on the fact that I've been observed by at least two people stopping breathing in the middle of the night. The study confirmed that my sleep is abnormal, but didn't pick up any actual apnea. It may be that the disappearance of the apnea is because of the ~13 pounds of weight loss, but that's not clear.

What the study did show is that the cycling between the different stages is awry. On the night of the study, I had no REM sleep at all. Normally, you'll have several segments of REM sleep during the night. I know that lack of REM isn't my problem, because I do remember my dreams quite frequently. Often my dreams are very detailed, as if they took at least an hour of wall clock.

My dreams of last night are typical in this regard - they were of a court trial for intellectual property infringement against a large multinational company. The dream itself was an entirely unrealistic portrayal of a trial, with the judge cracking jokes all the time, people speaking when they felt like it, and a general lack of focus on the legal issues of the case. When I was awakened by the phone, the second of three witnesses at my wedding was speaking, correcting various overstatements of the first witness (who claimed that there were thousands of guests, among other things). The dream was full of odd details such as this.

I made a small speech which I can remember almost verbatim: "Your honor, I'm not asking for any special treatment because I'm a good boy. I'm asking to be paid for the violations of the intellectual property. The law says what companies can and cannot do with a patent, and I'm fully confident that my lawyers and your honor will arrive at this legal truth." Written down like this, it looks silly, but in the dream it was quite a speech, and was greeted with applause by the people in the courtroom when I sat down.

It's not hard to see where the subject of this dream came from. Obviously, when you're preparing for potential legal action, you have to be careful about what you say, especially in public. That said, I think it would be enormous fun to have to defend my dreams in a trial.

camera

dirtyrat: From the sound of your post, I'd suggest you take a look at medium format cameras. I have a Koni Rapid Omega 100 that I bought for about $200 used, and it's been both fun and an excellent tool to take pictures with excellent image quality. The downsides are, of course, that you will pay more for film, and there are many fewer options for getting the film developed, but it's a totally different world than consumer or "prosumer" 35mm cameras.

kepler

I put in a bid for a used Gateway Connected Touch Pad on ebay last night. In addition, if anyone has a friend who has one, an ls -laR of the system flash card (cramfs included), along with information about the date the unit was shipped, would be greatly appreciated. I'm not expecting much response from this - friends don't let friends use AOL. My brother got on for a while because it was bundled with his Dell computer, but saw the light a couple of months later and switched to real Internet. According to him, the AOL slogan should be "You've got... goodbye".

ghostscript

We just had staff meetings, which were good. We got a lot of things resolved that I thought might be contentious. Among them, I have the green light to develop Fitz (the bastard son of Libart and the Ghostscript graphics library) under GPL. You'll see more design documents and so on soon - I'm feeling more than a bit lagged right now. Among other things, I need to get the 6.51 GNU release out the door, which means updating to the newest versions of hpijs and Omni.

thesis

In other news, I might have a chunk of time become available to finish my thesis. This would be enormously satisfying to me, so I really hope it works out.

mod_virgule

neale and crackmonkey continue to make cool new patches, and are also in the process of getting access to Gnome CVS so that the thing will be developed like a real free software project instead of my personal toy. This is good. Of course, reviewing the patches is one of the things I'm lagged on. I'll get to it soon, I promise!

Did you know that you can close tags in Advogato with </> syntax? It's valid SGML that never found its way into HTML or XML (even though I believe Microsoft pushed for the latter), but I implemented anyway in the mod_virgule HTML massaging code. I personally find it quite convenient.

b2b

The whole family ran the Bay to Breakers this weekend (as did a good chunk of the Ghostscript team from Artifex). Our time was 2:58:12, which is pretty good considering we were pushing a stroller, and I was holding Max for much of the time.