Aaah it’s Christmas you see?
So here’s Christmas. Got presents. Laptop case (designed especially for the 12″ Powerbook and very nice indeed), a gorgeous hand-painted teapot and cup from Deborah (painted by Deborah’s very own hand) which is perfect for a cup of green tea for one, even if everyone else thinks the tea looks like urine. I don’t care - it tastes considerably nicer. Uncle Geoffrey gave me a ten pound note in a cardboard box. He seems to find such things amusing. Nana provided a CD of classical music devoted to the subject of cats, which is really rather nice.
Oh, and Mum and Dad provided the BBC Radio dramatisation of Phillip Pullman’s ‘His Dark Materials’ trilogy, on 6 CDs. Have listened to some, and it’s excellently done.
Dad was a little bit surprised to receive a DVD player from Mum. He clearly wasn’t expecting that — but then Mum wasn’t expecting the lovely silver necklace which he bought for her, especially not after he bought her a very impressive (and expensive) pair of boots a few weeks ago.
Christmas dinner saw the table groaning with food, most of which actually got eaten — probably because only half of the turkey was carved. A huge beast, it has to be the best turkey we’ve ever had. Rectory Farm Shop on the A10 just outside Milton, Cambridge is clearly the place to go for your Christmas turkey. It’s not the cheapest, but it’s worth the extra investment, especially at a time of year when the cook will be most upset by a dry, flavourless bird, and expectations are running so high.
The Christmas pudding was stupendous as well.
Having so many people around does get a bit wearing though. Kevin had one of those logic puzzle things based on a street of people with certain known facts… didn’t fancy figuring it out in my head so I attempted to write a Prolog program to solve it for me. Somewhere along the way I seem to have forgotten most of my Prolog, so things didn’t go particularly well and I couldn’t get it to infer any but the most obvious of things about the problem space. I suspect I didn’t provide the system with enough information, and since it’s clearly a constraint problem over symbolic finite domains, I don’t think GNU Prolog is particularly well-equipped to handle it.
Although having said that, I see no real reason why I shouldn’t be able to solve it in Prolog — I’m just not a good enough Prolog programmer to pull it off. Also tried it in Haskell, attempting to take inspiration from the way Dr. Graham Hutton solved the Countdown numbers game, but the situation’s a bit different and I haven’t quite got the hang of that yet. Might try again today though, as I’m sure people have attempted constraint programming in Haskell at some point. If they haven’t, somebody should.
It tastes considerably nicer than normal tea or than urine? If the latter, how do you know?
Comment by Michael Nolan — Sunday, 28th December 2003 @ 23:32
I’d much rather have a nice normal cup of tea, but if it’s plain green tea you like, I do enjoy 1) plain green tea, 2) plain green tea with burnt rice, which I will explain in a bit if you haven’t had that, and 3) jasmine or green tea with jasmine.
Burnt rice– is what you get when you put a small pan on a hot stove and heat up a cup of rice until it pops, like popcorn. A pinch in a cup, or a spoonful in a pot of green tea, gives it a rather distinctive flavour. Yummy.
Comment by iliana — Thursday, 1st January 2004 @ 21:32
Mike: I don’t want to get into that discussion with you, I think I’d regret the outcome.
Ili: nice to see you here! green tea with burnt rice sounds interesting, I shall have to give it a try some time.
Comment by MaW — Thursday, 1st January 2004 @ 21:46
I’ve had Japanese tea with rice before now. It’s very nice.
Comment by Richard — Monday, 5th January 2004 @ 23:21