We watched Mononoke hime last night; big fun, but trying to watch it without subtitles was a mistake, since there's a lot of old Japanese in there. It's sort of like a Japanese "Lord Of The Rings", but with very obvious environmentalist subtexts. I see why people criticise Miyazaki for moralizing.
Today, I had a blind panic as I thought I was teaching an introductory course tomorrow, but it doesn't start for a couple of weeks. Instead, I'm banging my head against the brick wall that is AxKit. I love AxKit, it's a very helpful tool. Except when you have two machines configured identically and they behave differently, it's difficult to work out if the problem is in Apache, mod_perl, AxKit, XML, XSP, your stylesheets, your Apache config, libxml, libxslt, XML::LibXML, XML::LibXSLT, or indeed, somewhere completely different. Complex systems are great, if you happen to have no problems with them, ever.
And then there's this book thing. We're in the last week before submitting the finished manuscript, so it's headless chicken mode. I've steaming through the reviewers' comments (we've had some wonderfully pedantic reviewers, which is just what you need for a technical book) and need to read over the book twice more before it goes off to publication. Oh, and then there's the small matter of the chapter that's only half-finished. We'll make it. We always do.
