I have restored all my previous blog entries. I couldn't be bothered to think of a way to restore the post times, but I got the dates out of the path and used hardcodedates.py to overrride the timestamps. If this floods planets, I'm sorry.

(But so does PyBlosxom for using file timestamps.)

I spend (and have spent) a lot of time thinking. I also spent a lot of time reading. Every so often I reach conclusions... sometimes I remember them, sometimes not. A lot of them just got incorporated into my general world-view, I suppose. A long time ago it was thoughts about philosophy... these days I suppose it's mainly psychology. I've been thinking a lot about cognitive dissonance - I think there have been differences between where I am and how I think of myself. People tend to act to reduce dissonance; it is a motivator, which I find very interesting - for a given task, it does not seem to fit neatly into either intrinsic or extrinsic motivation - it comes from how we feel about ourselves, not the task itself.

I used to have a pile of paper, with notes/letters/junk going back several years. Piles like this have been sitting around in various corners of my room for as long as I remember. Now it's filed away - all in square-cut beige folders with labels on, in alphabetical order in a metal box. (Most of it got recycled.) I'm not sure what this means. Is "organization" an end in itself, or a means to an end? And what end?

Paul Battley discovered that the proceedings of the European Parliament are recorded in the speaker's original language. Awesome, I can get some language practice in. To provide context for the following excerpt, Ashley Mote was formerly a UKIP MEP, but got kicked out of the party after a conviction for benefit fraud. Ashley Mote (NI ). - Mr President, over the last five years I have watched in horror the EU's endless scandalous institutionalised looting of taxpayers' money. I watched in horror an already overcrowded UK deluged by hundreds and thousands of uninvited foreign workers who arrive for their benefit and claim our welfare. I watched in close-up a legislative system that permits anonymous bureaucrats to generate so-called law without any regard for the damage they do to the British economy and its businesses. I watched in close-up - ...

I've been experimenting with the python bindings to libnotify - the interface to the cross-platform notification daemon. The API is quite simple (although there's more when you start adding buttons and things to the notifications): import pynotify import sys if not pynotify.init("Test Notification"): sys.exit(1) n = pynotify.Notification("Test", "testing") if not n.show(): print "Failed to send notification" Then I put these notifications into a simple XMPP bot, so that I could send it Jabber messages and they would get displayed as a notice. ...

My brother visited last weekend, which was nice. For those who don't know Michael, he's like a younger, more stylish version of myself. He's started a blog, and it is instantly younger and more stylish than mine. It would be even better if he replaced the Wordpress example text. :) On Sunday I cooked roast chicken, which was a first. Not just chicken though - M&S chicken, with M&S vegetables and M&S roast potatoes. Bought with an M&S staff discount.

I got distracted from cookery by a minor health issue in April, so didn't meet my original target. Still, I managed four recipes, which is better than none; and I've managed to improve my omelette technique to the point where it is actually semicircular rather than sausage-shaped when it rolls onto the plate. So let's reschedule for ten by the end of May. It's odd, I don't feel too worried by this melanoma; for one thing, the chances of dying seem relatively small, now that it's been found. I have suffered from depression for one reason or another over the last ten years, and got over that; cancer just pales into insignificance. It's prompted some thinking about who I am, and where I'm going, but I was prone to that sort of thing already. ...

On Wednesday I was told that a mole that was removed from my left forearm about a month ago was in fact a melanoma. Melanoma is a form of skin cancer - a relatively uncommon and dangerous type, but fortunately curable if picked up sufficiently early. I don't have all the details yet; but the impression I get is that my mole didn't look like the classic pictures on the internet - neither my GP nor the dermatologist instantly recognised it as malignant. I need to have a wider border of tissue removed from my arm, now that it has been diagnosed, which is mildly annoying after having spent a month healing slowly. ...

I wanted to improve my night life, so I joined the Rugby & District Astronomical Society. This evening there was a talk on Norman Lockyer by Mike Frost - a topic of particular interest to me, because our computer naming scheme at work involves famous historical figures from Rugby.