January diary

Our Twelfth Night party invitations this year encouraged our guests to bring music and instruments, and we did manage some songs before declaring the Christmas holiday complete.

Hats off to Manuela Antoniu for not only completing her long-awaited PhD thesis, but getting a medal for it as well.

I started work on the Dyalog programmers’ cookbook, before getting drafted into the run-up to the release of Version 12. This release has implications for the future of the language potentially as important as Version 11, which introduced native support for class-instance relations. For Version 12 moves the language into Unicode, and ends the ‘problematic’ status of the symbols for the APL primitives. These are now handled through IMEs just as any other non-Roman script such as Arabic or Japanese is. Dan Baronet surfed the sofa while we chased down bugs in the Version 12 betas.

Neighbour Anne Elton invited us to meet other neighbours over drinks at her place, from which I left early to meet the local LibDems at the Heath Library.

Couchsurfers Jurate & Felix made their long-heralded visit from Lithuania. Otaku Masaru Hoki made it after an unpredictable journey hitch-hiking down from Scotland. He has been 1½ years on the road from Japan, travelling overland via the Silk Road, and paying close attention to avoidable expenses.

At last I was in town for a meeting of the Camden NO2ID campaign group, and we then spent a Saturday afternoon handing out leaflets in Islington.

In search of the local To the RSA on 21 Jan to watch Dave Gorman’s film America Unchained of his attempt to drive across the United States without doing business with any national chains, and to hear him talk about it.

A small Burns Supper on 25 Jan with friends, haggis, hot whisky toddy and some poems and toasts.

To Sadlers Wells on 27 Jan to watch the sampler programme, inspiring despite its condescending and jive-speaking compère.

A meeting in Conway Hall at which people took the NO2ID pledge followed by a quick scamper to a packed Club Zigana in Old Bailey to hear Fanfare Ciocărlia.

With neighbours on 30 Jan to the Heath & Hampstead Society’s photo awards.