My dad asked me what he could bring me from Canada. After a couple of days I told him "a Saturday edition of The Globe and Mail". The Globe isn't even that great a paper... I think I just have such good memories associated with the Saturday edition. When Maeve and Matt and I lived in Toronto it would be there every Saturday morning, and I'd sit on the futon and drink Second Cup coffee (that I would buy for Maeve and myself- she'd put it in a mug but I would just drink from the styrofoam) and read the paper.

It's probably not even that I *like* the Globe that much. I like lazy Saturday mornings and I like the ritual of the whole thing... hmmm... maybe I do like the Globe that much. Heather Mallick is the closest I have to a Toronto-sized-hero.

I know that one of the things that is purely-England for me here is Saturday/Sunday mornings is getting the paper (Guardian on Saturdays and the Observer and the Sunday Times on Sunday) and drinking PG Tips tea (I'm bringing home 160 bags if I can get it through customs!).

Anyway, dad brought me a fresh Saturday edition and it made me very happy.

I'm back from Amsterdam and still very very busy. Last night Dad and Carole arrived in Oxford and we got quite pissed on multiple bottles of white wine. It's great having them here. Kind of weird because Dad=Canada but I'm here and it's just very out of context.

Bleh. Lots happening... Some notes:

- Kristin and Kristin came to vist for two nights. We went to a house party of a workmate on Friday and all the guys at the office were impressed with the "fit blond birds". We also did many flaming zambuccas.

- Saturday went to a rugby game in Cardiff (Wales). It was great fun.

- On the way back from Cardiff on Sunday we went to Bath. Very cool touristy place... there were these street performers doing acrobatics and flips and stuff and the crowd was very into it, cheering etc. Then they rip off there shirts (ha ha funny). THEN they rip off there pants and continued the performance g-strings doing the same flips etc. Jenn said that our favourite unicyclist in London had also gone x-rated... I guess everyone needs an edge?

- Yes, Matt has come to visit. We went to the Hip show last night and another tonight. Then Amsterdam early tomorrow morning.

- My Dad's visiting next week. He and Carole are arriving on Saturday. They should be sure to bring umbrellas!

HAPPY BIRTHDAY JENN!!

Works been kind of exciting the last couple of days... I've felt positively John-Cormie-ish.

Pathan2, which I'll talk more about at alpha-time (hopefully in December) implements XPath2. If you look the the XPath 2.0 spec you'll see that there's a lot of talk about the static context and the evaluation context. Basically we know that '5 + "hello"' will fail before we actually attempt to evaluate this expression (although this is an example of static type checking which is not needed for conformance). I'm actually ensuring that 'nataliesCool()' will throw a static error *if* it hasn't been defined by the user (which you actually can't do in XPath but that you can do with languages like XQuery). It gets more complex with variables.

I was feeling kind of unmotivated about the whole task because *the code works*. All static analysis really does is make fail-cases faster (John correct me if I'm wrong). But Gareth gave me a talk about how XMeta (DecisionSoft's actual product) will use static analysis to verify expressions before sending anything to the XMeta server which is *actually* very exciting.

Everything I've learned I learned in CS241.

Our Jamaican housemate has a "girlfriend" who lives in Jamaica. Only she visits every weekend... from Jamaica. She's actually a flight attendant which must work out well when you're in a long distance "relationship" (quotes = he says they're together until something better comes along...). He's also obsessive-compulsive (he makes the Maeve's and Anne's of the past seem like slobs). This is a great quality in a non-judgemental housemate who physically can't NOT clean a sink full of dishes.

We got tickets to go and see the new Harry Potter movie Thursday after work. I've heard that everyone in Waterloo is going except for Matt and Robyn. ha.

This weekend was great. Last night Jenn and I talked about how we weren't going to have as much time to explore London as we need. Next weekend we're going to Cardiff, the next Amsterdam. The next, my dad and Carole are coming to visit although I think we might spend the weekend in London and then I have only 2 more weekends (plus a likely-hungover Saturday).

Anyway I went to London on Saturday by myself. First I went to the Tate Britain and the National Portrait Gallery. They're both in Leicester Square. As I was heading to the gallery I passed the tkts booth (like the one in Times Square in New York). In the back of my mind I was kind of planning on checking on the Michael Moore show... I'd clipped an ad from the paper. They weren't selling tix for that and I realized that I really really wanted to go. So I locked myself in a payphone and called the venue. I only had X change that the payphone would accept. And the phone displayed how many pence I had left... So I and the guy on the other end of the phone speed-talked the whole ticket buying process and we were done just as the phone clicked (him: "Two tickets?". me: "No, just one.". him: "I'm sorry..." me: "it's alright", later in the conversation: "Is it Miss Gordon? Mrs. Gordon?" me: "It's Ms. Gordon...")

Anyway I was now seeing Michael Moore which I was thrilled about. The galleries in London are free (FRREEEE all the time). So I didn't feel any "guilt" when I passed by all of the portraits of the Tudors, Windsors etc. in the National Portrait Gallery... It was a great gallery... The Tate Britain was fantastic too. I only saw 1/5 of it so I have to go back.

So M.M. was "playing" at the Roundhouse which was near Campden Town Market. I headed there not knowing anything about it. The neighbourhood blew me away. There were these huge open air markets with stores and stalls, only it was all punks and ravers. I turned a corner and there was this storefront with dry ice streaming out and these 7-foot go-go dancers. Was it a bar? Was it a store? There was live music and mood music... I walked around drinking mulled wine at dusk and was very content. I'm sorry that Maeve's not visiting on her way to Spain because that's the first place we'd go.

Michael Moore was very cool. Has anyone *not* seen 'The Big One'?? Matt and I rented it back in the day and it was unbelievable. It was funny, I cried, it is an outstanding movie... That said I actually dislike TV Nation and The Awful Truth. (I recently bought 'Stupid White Men' and it's worse than I expected... except for the first chapter. Don't buy/read the book, just read the first chapter in the bookstore. It's a timeline of the Bush/Gore election and is enthralling.)

It also seems like everyone has seen his new film 'Bowling for Columbine' which is opening here in a week. (Other movies that just opened are Mr. Deeds and Changing Lanes... I've never heard of this "Ring" movie you all talk about).

This article made me proud to be a Canadian.

"Some Canadians, born abroad while their parents were travelling or residing temporarily in a country, may have no real connection whatsoever to the country of their birth. Others, although born in Canada, may have a strong attachment to their country of ethnic origin," he wrote.

"...While inclusion of place of birth on Canadian passports therefore serves no readily apparent or defensible purpose, recent events have shown that this practice can have negative and unfair consequences for individuals,"

Sunday when I woke up in the afternoon I knew that I'd be up late so I went to Borders to buy a book. They don't have any 20% off sales here but they do have '3 Books for the price of 2'. Ten minutes to closing I searched out Donna Tartt's first book A Secret History. It had the "3 for 2" sticker so I was *forced* to buy two more books. So I grabbed the new Michael Moore book and the new Nick Hornby.

I didn't have a very productive day. It's pitch black out. I guess I'll walk home and maybe read a book :).

It was sunny today. I hadn't seen the sun since Italy (5 days ago). It was raining when we got off the plane and drizzled until today. It was possibly sunny yesterday but I didn't see it. I slept in until 2:30pm (more about that...) Since the time change, it's pitch black by 5pm and dusky around 4. So on Sunday after I had a cup of tea and read a little bit of the paper, I left to do some errands and it was TWILIGHT!!

Why did I sleep until Sunday?? Well, on Saturday night for the first time we did it up in London. We took the Oxford-tube, met some friends of friends in a pub and then went to a club... only it wasn't a club, it was kind of warehousey and we were totally overdressed. Overall it was pretty cool.

Gareth, Jenn and I left to find somewhere more appropriate for our outfits. We found a club near Trafalger Square and danced until 4. I was home by 6:30am which for me is very impressive. We started the night with a double Red Bull and vodka (Red Bull is so disgusting you can't even taste the vodka), which might have helped.

I'm embarrassed to say how expensive the night was... Let's just say that it made Love (£4.50/drink) seem incredibly cheap. Instead I could have bought a *really* nice pair of shoes... like a pair of Blahniks.

Yesterday Jenn and I attempted to dress up for Hallowe'en. While sitting in the airport (bloody bored) we decided to come to work "hungover".

We wore our pajamas. I brought a pillow and Jenn brought an empty bottle of wine. No one really got that we were "dressed up". Not dressing up like a witch or something like it is kind of unknown here.

The girl who sits beside me said that the only reason she knew about "Trick-or-Treating" as we know it, is from E.T.

We usually go out to lunch to a pub Walter Mittey's for lunch on Fridays. The thing about Walter Mittey's is that they have no consistency whatsoever. You could order chips 3 weeks in a row and get those ridge-ey oven chips one week, wedges the next and potatoes the next... I guess last week the guys got burgers and they received the smallest patties ever and a lecture from the waitress about 'knowing what they ordered'. So Sean and Francis decided that we'd all go to the Pizza Hut buffet lunch today.

So we did. There were a lot of fat people there. (Am I allowed to say that...?) And teenage boys.