Awake

... since about 4am. I lay in bed for about an hour, hoping to get back to sleep, then gave up. I had been having an odd dream, interweaving Liszt's Etudes transcendante and something I read on a blog before sleeping; but the prime cause was probably indigestion. Too much beer (which for me means one-and-a-half glasses) and a big cheesy-garlicky dinner in the courtyard of the Viertelesschlotzer, watching the swallows turning and turning in the widening gyre. Venus was visible as I walked home in the cool of the evening.

The sun reached the rooftops across the street at around 5:40 this morning, and is now quite high. Dawn is already noticeably later than in midsummer. The sun is actually shining the width of the apartment at present: in at the kitchen window, through the door, across the hallway, through the office/living room door and along the southern (office) bookshelf, almost to my desk by the windows. Update: it's actually shining on Alberich's screen. Amazing.

G and U are in Bavaria today for the fortnightly State of the Nation Building Site conference, so I have today and tomorrow off - meaning doing other work on other projects, for instance the Hobbyist documentation. I was gratified and amused by the response when I wrote about this two weeks ago: four readers offered comments on their preferences. This is four responses more than we had from people who actually used the software! We shall offer both versions, the HTML is intended as a supplement to the PDF. For those who prefer paper: I looked into getting the manual printed via Books on Demand after seeing the system running at the Frankfurter Buchmesse a few years back. BoD publishing is quite amazing, you send them two PDFs (cover and contents) and they send you back properly-bound paperback books (optionally complete with barcode and ISBN number) in two weeks, for a handful of Euros per copy. We decided against this because paper is intractible: I can update the PDF help system by mailing you a newer version, but a book is outdated before it is set to paper. The database is still developing and changing so fast that it would be foolish to print more than five copies at a time, and not even BoD can offer that at a sensible price.

[Updated at 11:27] I'm definitely suffering from lack of sleep. On re-reading a mail message I wrote earlier this morning, I noticed that what I had intended as a gentle compliment might also be read as a mortal insult. Oops. You know who you are: I'm very sorry. Maybe I should have a little nap before making any further mistakes?