Auckland Zoo is one of those Reggae Zoos you hear so much about. The general public doesn’t often get to see a Reggae Zoo in full operation, but yesterday they had a special evening event so that we could all see how the animals groove to irie roots riddims. You haven’t truly skanked until you’ve skanked with a spider monkey.

Music was provided by Katchafire. Stephen tells me they recently supported the Wailers, and managed to completely upstage them. This should be a warning to all musicians: it is embarrassing enough to be outdone by your support act, but even worse if said support act is named after one of your albums. Tthey spent most of yesterday evening playing Wailers covers, although it might be that they were not trying to rub it in, but just going with what people seemed to want.

The whole thing was to raise money to bring the zoo a mate for Nisha. “Tiger Love is all good”, as one of the singers put it. And the turnout was all good too, so I’m sure they are amassing a considerable dowry. They have several more mellow Zoo musical events coming soon, and I highly recommend them.

Tonight I totally kicked the bottoms of organisation charts. If you draw an organisation chart on the tablet computer with the little pen and press a button, the computer can now read it and tell you who’s the boss of who.

I am not very interested in organisation charts in and of themselves, but the point is to demonstrate that the software has the potential to interpret lots of kinds of drawings, and my supervisor thought organisation charts would be a good thing to have as an example. For, you know, business people to look at. If you speak to business people in the language of organisation charts, they will know that the software is marketable. I’m not sure at what point universities started caring about whether things are marketable, but apparently this is what we’re supposed to do now.

Due to this evening’s organisation chart bottom-kicking, however, I have gained some extra time. And I intend to devote this extra time to making the program recognise drawings of proper abstract network graphs with nodes and vertices instead of management hierarchies. After all, it does say Computer Science Department above the door I come through every morning. And organisation charts just aren’t computer science.

Nonsense Robot: A 24-Minute Comic

Some mean-spirited control freak has apparently decided that he has the right to put my name on the roster to work a couple of night shifts, with no authority whatsoever except that he was me a few weeks ago. He might have at least have informed me about it.