Tuesday 02 April 2013 The Forest Road Reader, No 12

Dyed hair in dreadlocks? How is that even possible. Or at least maintainable.

Oh, for a decent breakfast place somewhere on any reasonable route between Euston and the Oxo Tower. There are uncountable Prets and Caffè Neros and Eats and all the rest and they're fine but I'm talking breakfast, not a bun and a pot of yogurt. While I'm not mad for dairy, who doesn't love buns? (Apart from, possibly, coeliacs, diabetics, and others with a legitimate bun-based grievance.) But not for breakfast. At least, not the kind of breakfast you really fancy after you've been up two and half hours and it's still only seven o'clock. Brizzle-based micro-chain Boston Tea Party recently opened up in the middle of Birmingham and their breakfast is fantastic - roast potatoes, tomato and basil scrambled eggs, lovely mushroom. I'm not looking for that almost ne plus ultra level of breakfast magnificence (although obviously I'd be delighted to find it) I'm just looking for decent in a place that's open before eight. If you know of such, well, I'd bite your arm off.

Another woman with stars tattooed along her hairline. Is that a thing? Wait, not stars. Tiny paw prints.

Knowing that I had to get up at quarter to stupid this morning, I should have been tucked up in bed. Instead I lay awake sniggering to Mark Thomas' remarkable story about his Dad and opera.

It's to take away not to go.

C++ lambdas are the business. Hopefully, one sunny day when I'm suddenly independently wealthy (or, less cheerfully, unemployed for an extended period) I'd like to rework big chunks of my Arabica XML toolkit to take lambdas rather than class instances. Custom XPath functions, for instance, would be much simpler to implement, because you could do away with all the base class stuff and template parameters unless you actually needed it. I'd undoubtedly get a lot of mileage out of auto too. Indeed, I'd probably benefit from pretty much everything on this slightly hyperbolic list of ten C++11 features that you should get your head round.

Writing something in Google Drive. Keep doing emacs keystrokes by mistake. Hilarity ensues.

We were talking about hagfish over the weekend, although I can't remember why. Something about keeping shaking one up in a bucket to get it to generate slime.

Been feeding neighbours' cat while they're on holiday. Lovely people, generous, kind, great kids, pleasing cat. Happy to do it. How can they stand not having the clock on the cooker set?

Apologies, slightly tetchy today.

The school Easter newletter is 26 pages of solid text. Fortunately it comes as a PDF, so you can just search for your son's name and ignore all the rest.

Touch Me I'm Sick

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Tagged london, and c++

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