Praise wine when it is drunk, ice when it is crossed, ...

and a contract once the cheque's in the bank - but I have finished writing the fruit-fly distorter; should be presenting it to the customer tomorrow or Friday.

I have bought plane tickets to Belgium (the train was no quicker and cost rather more), and booked a place in a central-Brussels youth hostel for FOSDEM 2006 the weekend after next.

This Friday evening I go to see The Libertine with mobbsy, beckyc and all; tomorrow, my cousin is coming to visit.

These should give you some idea of the exciting tenor of my days; and until I find myself another contract, I won't even have the joy that writing 1200 lines of computational geometry and image processing code in Java and ImageJ Macro Language, neither of which I could write a fortnight ago, plus three pages of descriptive prose has brought to me this last fortnight.

On the other hand, if you have any fruit fly embryos you want orthogonalised ...