Daily Post - Thursday

I don't know what they put into Lemsips but it's good stuff.

Last night I finally got around to watching Accion Mutante. I'd wanted to see it for ages, without really knowing much more about it than the title, and hence stuck it on my Lovefilm list. It's a very strange film. It starts out like a Spanish language version of 2000AD with ugly mutant terrorists waging an incompetent war against the beautiful people and being smacked down by fascist police with big batons and bigger shoulder pads, then it gets weirder. A botched kidnapping of a beautiful heiress from a wedding party that makes 'Rocky Horror' look staid is followed by increasing bizarre plot twists ending up in a spectacularly bloody shootout in a bar on a mining planet where just about everybody dies or gets blown up or loses various body parts. Er, and that's it. Good fun.

Anyhoo, I watched that and then had a Lemsip just before going to bed for what turned out to be a reasonable night's sleep but a vivid set of fever dreams. Strange underground caves with cats and books, flooded rivers, Collins and Herring performing in an amateur talent show for children in a youth hostel, Mitch Benn playing football with a flaming ball of rags and an ill advised camping trip in the rain at 11:00 o'clock at night. Or something.

I enjoyed writing my TMA answer about Turing Tests and ELIZA, mainly because I found a link to the original Weizenbaum article written in 1966 which detailed the procedural nature of parsing language and responding in a pseudo-intelligent manner. Fascinating stuff and it links in nicely with the sort of things that Hoffstatder was saying about language symbology in 'Godel, Escher, Bach'. Harvard referencing is a necessary evil though, and it took me ages to work out how to quote and reference a journal posted on a website. I could do with some sort of macro for Open Office to prompt for the details needed and then mong them into the correct format.

The meeting at work today was very interesting, with more details of the role that I'll be taking on. It's quite open ended, but in a nutshell I'll be taking on product consultancy for our web software, involving looking at what the other divisions are doing (and nicking their best ideas *coff*), documenting what we've got at a technical and user level and ultimately planning strategic development for the product as a whole. Potentially interesting, and also potentially a minefield, but fun nonetheless. It will also get me out of the office on occasions as well, which will make a change.