Astute readers will have noticed that there are new entries in my LiveJournal under the name “isaacfreeman”. I said there wouldn’t be, but there are. And I said for people to add “isaac_blog” to their LiveJournal friends list instead. And now I’m taking it back. What a mercurial fellow I am.

I’ve installed a new Movable Type plugin that will send my posts directly to “isaacfreeman” instead of indirectly to “isaac_blog”. If you’ve got both of them in your friends list, I recommend that you remove “isaac_blog”. There’s no point in seeing all my messages twice, and if you post comments to “isaacfreeman” I’m more likely to see them.

Thanks to Jason for getting the necessary Perl modules installed to make this happen.

I’m enjoying my computer science course very much indeed.

It’s not like a conventional course with lectures and labs and people telling you stuff. It’s a modern self-paced course with learning modules and activities tailored to the individual learner.

For “course”, read “textbook”. For “modules”, read “chapters”. For “self-paced”, read “tutor doesn’t try to teach too much”. In other words, it’s pretty much ideal. The textbook is excellent and engaging, and I’m learning exactly what I wanted to learn.

People from Pennsylvania call you “sir” a lot. And when they disagree with something you say, they always try to find some aspect of it they do agree with and say “I most certainly agree that X, but…”

It’s true. I’ve heard it twice.

You don’t hear a lot about China’s cautious movement towards democracy. Which is probably the way China’s reformers want it, if they’re trying to chart a course towards democracy that will actually work. The less noise about Western-style “multi-party democracy” and the more actual elections, the better.

Left hand makes an L.

Right hand makes an R.

It seems I am now the foremost Isaac Freeman on the web, in the sense that this site comes at the top of a Google search for my name.

Granted, Isaac isn’t a common personal name like Muhammad, and Freeman isn’t a common family name like Chang. But strangely enough, Isaac Freeman is a much more common name than Muhammad Chang.

There’s a famous gospel singer named Isaac Freeman who’s rather good, but he’s coming second. That hardly seems fair. He’s had the name longer than I have.

My favourite part of a barbecue is when you start cooking dinner, everybody finds themselves a job to do, and a spontaneous Barbecue Community emerges. This is the way of my people: if you wish to truly honour your guests, allow them to behave as if they belong in your home. Having a meal made for you is one thing, taking part in the preparation better.

Thanks to everyone who came yesterday.

School is over for the year.

Today saw the beginning of my Java programming course at university, which should see me through the summer. It’s a very small group, tutored by a guy called Marcus Liddle. Basically, we’ve been given all the course notes for a couple of stage one courses and encouraged to go to it.

Apart from Tim and me, the rest of the group are not teachers. Or perhaps I should say that in this course designed for regular people, Tim and I are the only teachers. This probably means that we are going to be the ones asking the questions and providing the non-verbal cues that let the tutor know he has told us something and we have received it. Because we both know that staring blankly isn’t the way to go.

Now we need to get special cards to let us into the building at convenient times. And figure out what order to read and do all the stuff for reading and doing.

My play demands facts. Cold facts. Hard facts. Little facts.

Without wanting to spoil the exciting climax for my readers, one of the scenes requires one character to bombard other characters with a lengthy barrage of truth, and for it I require a wide and apparently random selection of facts. To give the flavour for this impending collaborative exercise and/or dereliction of authorial responsibility, here are a few I have so far:

Hummingbirds can fly backwards!
Pope Pius XI reigned from 1846 to 1878!
A dragonfly has a lifespan of 24 hours!
There are 336 dimples on a golf ball!
Canopus is one hundred and ten light years away!
French Guiana has many severe thunderstorms!

They’re the sort of facts you might get in a children’s encyclopaedia. I need more. Many more. So if you know any facts, I’d be much obliged to hear them. They need to be true, from a wide variety of disciplines, not too complicated, and not too interesting in their own right.

I’ll have to see whether we can acknowledge the suppliers of facts in the programme.