Sorry for the gap - I've been working on a really cool pattern recognition program based on Vector Quantization.  More about this when I have time.

Whenever I'm away from blogging there is an interesting race which takes place between the unread entries in SharpReader (my RSS aggregator) and the junk mail filtered by Matador.  Currently Matador is winning 444 to 395.  And that's after only two days.  Whew.

My biggest accomplishment in the past few days was splicing a USB cable back together.  My cat Reggie takes an extraordinary interest in any wires or strings hanging about.  We have blinds on all the windows in the house, and are forever restringing them because Reggie bites through the cords.  More annoying than that is when he bites through the electrical wires of walkman headphones (I've gotten really good at splicing them together; there are two concentric wires involved...) and ethernet cables (I've gotten really good at splicing them together; there are four parallel wires involved...).  Anyway last week he bit through Alex's USB mouse wire.  This is the big leagues of splicing - we're talking a shielded wire with five tiny concentric wires inside it (four signals plus ground).  Anyway I spliced it and it works!  Yippee.  Made me feel like taking up fly-tying, except that I don't fish...