A new year, and another new attempt at keeping a diary! This is going to be a year of change for me. Most importantly, I'm getting married this autumn -- very exciting, but probably means I need to start some more serious planning soon. Also...
Geek stuff: ...in the dying hours of 2003, I finally gave in and ordered an Apple laptop. This has been a long and fairly difficult decision. On the positive side, Apple have a very attractive (technically as well as cosmetically) OS, and seem to be one of the few companies interested in making laptops which officially support any flavor of Unix. But I do have a few reservations about switching back to a part-proprietary OS. Anyway, it's going to be a few weeks before the machine actually arrives. In the mean time, I'm looking at software issues, and especially the various versions of Mozilla available for OSX.
Science: I'm going back to work tommorow, and feel invigorated by the Christmas break -- lots of new ideas to try. My plan for the next few months is to apply independent component analysis to genome data. The big question is what does `mixing' mean when you're talking about text? Right now, I'm just looking at word frequencies (which seem to be working pretty well on some toy examples), but I think this is going to take me further in the direction of language modelling. Should be interesting!