Rockclimbing
It didn't happen for me. My cold stuck with me over night, and the infection gave me precious little sleep. Jacinta was nice enough to make a trip to the chemist this morning for some cold and flu medication. I'm feeling okay now, but I'm well aware of the codine that's blocking the pain.

I was very much looking forward to rockclimbing, as I haven't been in a while. Ian starts at SchoolsNet next week, so I should be able to drag him to the VicRanges a couple of nights to make up.

GnuCash/Quote.pm
My finances have never been better documented, and I now feel I have a better understanding of why accountants seem so very sad when money goes missing without reason.

Have added OO-methods into Quote.pm to provide a nicer interface. I've also made an effort to tidy up the documentation, although there's still a bit of work to go. I've applied for space on SourceForge to develop the project and keep track of its bugs and foibles.

Geek Musings
Last night Jacinta asked me if I could remember the first time I had heard Shakespeare. After a moment's reflection I realised that I could indeed remember. The quote was `To be, or not to be...' (the whole passage), and I was young enough to be in primary school.

What makes the experience peculiar is that the quote was read to me by a voice synthesizer called SAM for the Commodore-64. SAM bolstered the C-64 BASIC command set with a function called SAY, that took a phonetic string and spoke it. SAM did a surprisingly good job, and I ended up memorising the entire passage from having the SAM repeat it to me many times.

It dawned upon me that I've been a geek for a very long time, much longer than I would have normally thought. I remember at least two English assignments that I completed by writing code. Once I wrote a driver for my C-64 printer to allow it to print Dwarven runes from J.R.R. Tolkein's Lord of the Rings. The second instance I did a rough port of a space-faring board-game (the name of which now escapes me) for my `Communications Project'.

By my estimations I've been a geek since I was eight years old, when I was given my first computer and actively participated in a role-playing club I helped start at Primary School. I'm glad we had such a forward-thinking principal back at Williamstown North -- he thought grade three kids playing Dungeons and Dragons was superb, and made sure we had a place at lunchtimes to run the games. This was at a time when current affairs shows were trying to show links between RPGs and suicides.