Kathy and I had a lot of fun with the videoke thing this evening. We tried Tragedy among other old songs. It was kinda funny seeing how we knew a lot of the old songs but few of the new ones. I felt slightly guilty about not taking Jerome's call but reason that I rarely get to bond with my sister like that.

By the way, I'm typing this in dasher. I think Eric will be very glad to see it tomorrow. He was absent today because of a headache and missed all his classes. I think I rather missed chatting with him. In terms of funky research, that is.

I received coke's card and quickly wrote him two limericks. It was nice hearing from him. I've been remiss in terms of friendship — I haven't met Martin in ages!

Status report: Research

Gesture-based input on Linux is still haphazard, and I haven't found anything particularly taking advantage of <nop>FingerWorks or allowing easy cross-application scripting. Fake per-application keypresses seem to be the best bet, but I can't quite get Xgesture to compile yet - let me just grab the libXtst-dev package. I think that might be the best way to approach it. I've gotten quite used to rotate-CW to close a browser window and foursfingers to scroll; now all I need is a next-tab without closing, and I'll be all set for funky gesture navigation. I really just want to blog with a gesture, though. I wonder how that can be done.

Bringing candies for the midterms was a big hit, with one student explicitly mentioning this as a Very Good idea. I think some people think better when they're eating; I know I like munching on something while I program. That said, I'm seeing a disturbing number of careless mistakes. Fortunately this is an irregular course, so at this point I can help people decide whether they really want to get into computer science - knowing the exactness and discipline that will be required of them - but still... I think I should've started with the reading exercises earlier.

Some way or another, we'll manage.