I've said it before: ruby is cool. Last time, all I knew about it was what you can learn in a one-hour introductory presentation; since, I have read a fair amount of the canonical reference on ruby, the pragmatic programmer's guide, and have done some things in ruby, such as, e.g., an LDIF file parser and some code to convert a file with |-separated values to SQL-commands. Pretty cool stuff, although nothing groundbreaking (yet).

Object oriented programming is very natural to me; and ruby is like the summum of object orientation, including the nice features of other OO languages (and only the nice features), and adding some of its own. I talked about it to one of my teachers from college, who was very much into object orientation too, and he seemed interested.

On the personal front, we celebrated my birthday last saturday evening in the way we always do, with mom preparing an excellent meal and me getting presents afterwards. Only one present this time, but an excellent one: a wristwatch. Not just any watch, mind you: a Festina one, from one of their registered model collections. This means that they know I own this watch, and should I ever lose it and it gets found, I'll get a call. Only bit is that it's a wee bit too large for my wrist right now, so it's a bit uncomfortable; I'll have to go by the shop to get it adjusted. It's closed on mondays, though, so that'll have to wait. After the meal and receiving my present, my brother and I went to a snooker bar a few blocks away which had its opening night (well, technically, it was its reopening night, but since it's got other owners and was basically rebuilt, that's just a technical detail which I'll readily dismiss) and played two frames. We both suck at it, but since he won the first frame and I won the second, we both had a lot of fun. Might do that again.