Home again

Home again home again, clippedy clop. Back from 10 days in New York and Scranton, PA. NYC to spend time with Arthur Whitney and talk to K and Q programmers for Vector; Scranton to spend time with Paul Mansour and start writing MailTrain 2.0.

Expert frisbee-ers Devon, Lisa & Meia McCormick, Bob Armstrong and Kate Ronan joined me for my annual Midsummer Night Picnic, this year small but perfectly formed in the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. I’ll have pictures posted here shortly. Notably missing: Doug Yeager, whom I got a few hours with before he flew to Latvia for a movie project.

Discoveries this trip: renting a small midtown apartment from Fred & Vladia Kunzmann cost less than a hotel and was hugely more comfortable. Eating at the Colonial Café on Houston; at the Café Gitane on Mott St and at Le Bateau d’Îvre on E 51st St. Summer comfort in elegant Indian shirts from Kinnu on Spring St.

Thanks to Devon for pointing me at Strand Books at 12th and Broadway: 18 miles of used books. Scouring NY bookstores netted me a Neil Gaiman novel and poetry collections from Marilyn Hacker and Maxine Kumin. But even stores with good collections, like St Marks (9th St & 3rd Ave) carry nothing by Robert Bringhurst or Carl Rakosi, and little enough by August Kleinzahler.

Also got to visit Vera Zachariassen, centre manager of the Suhn Ki Energy Center in New York; Chun Do Sun Bup as was. She had encouraging news; I must block out time to write “Cooking for the Dead”.

MailTrain 2 is off to a strong start after talks with Paul. It has a pure object-oriented design, is simpler, lighter and more flexible than MT 1 and I expect to have it ready for the release of Dyalog APL Version 11 at the October conference in Denmark. I shall write more about this in the Vector Forum.