I was born on 5 May, 1977, so today is my 31st Birthday. peachuk has already congratulated me on her blog (with a nice cartoon), and other people have already congratulated me on IRC and IM. Someone I know also wrote me something on Facebook, which I tend to dislike. Next time, an Email or an IM will do, but thanks.

I felt a bit depressed towards my birthday, but today I'm feeling great. Today was productive for me as I worked on an XML grammar for Unix-like fortune cookies. I learned RELAX NG in the process (and can recommend it) and made some progress, but it's still not ready for prime time.

I also chatted on the IRC a lot, and spent a lot of time explaining the essence of Perl 5's references to someone who only knew Unix Shell and very minimal Python. I remember I had problems with C pointers back after I learnt BASIC, which didn't really have them, and still remember that I only truly understood references in Perl after learning some Java (and possibly also after reading SICP).

So I geeked out today. :-) For other events that had occured today see the Wikipedia.

Cheers! -- the 31-years old, Shlomi.