Sitting in an internet cafe in Melbourne - no idea why as I have access at home! Perhaps I like the feel of other people around me while I am working. Well, not exactly working! I had a good look at the Chinese character etymology website 'zhongwen.com' today, started trying to read 'tao te ching'. I studied Chinese for four years at high school, but I don't remember very much of it - but that site has inspired me to pick it up again. Anyone who needs a convincing proof of the merits of hypertext should check it out - it's the most link-enabled site I've ever seen! I'll buy the book version, to ease my conscience, because I'm definitely going to try to obtain a personal mirror of this 'zhongwen' site.

I'm reading a book 'Practical Internet Groupware' from O'Reilly - it focuses on how the NNTP service can be used for collaboration. I've yet to really get into usenet, I need to find a 'visual programming research' newsgroup, as that's my main obsession for the last ten years or so.

I'm working on a system that applies a network model, i.e. interacting entities that 'select' on their 'sockets' from the application level right down to the low-level arithmetic / operator level. I want to integrate the logic/constraint programming paradigms with a visual representation (somewhat like petri-nets) and object- oriented ideas. It sounds like a buzz-word fest, but I'm starting to really get somewhere lately. Perl/Tk is helping, because I'm too lazy to prototype something as complex as this in C!

Anyone got any magic remedies for depression? It's a bit of a problem I have from time to time, I'd appreciate a non- pharmacological solution if you know of one. Internet as psychologist - I'd like to see that...

I skipped work today, and went to the botanical gardens in Melbourne instead, with my mother, who also skipped her work. (She does voluntary phone counselling for mental illness sufferers and carers.) It's a lovely place to go, if you're ever in Melbourne - and it's free to get in and out. We looked at all the statues of British monarchs (and I learned a little bit of history), and checked out the trees that they had planted, or patted in, on visits to the gardens. It's hard to imagine that the huge oak towering over us was a sapling in 1901, and that the Duke or Duchess of Somewhere was planting it with no idea how big it would be in 2000.

I love you guys, if you're crazy enough to read my diary...!