I spent most of the daytime within the office, again today. It's hard to concentrate on the daily job before visiting a foreign country, especially when I haven't yet finished the preparation for the trip.

It was hard to leave home this morning because my son's summer vacation started from today. Although he also went to the school, all he was going to do in there were reading books in the air-conditioned library, swimming in the cool water pool, and playing with his friends. On the other hand, I had to attend a meeting, which made my stomach sour. This week I must be half-minded to most of my daily jobs, until I finally come through the presentation at Portland next week.

I think I somehow managed to finish my first draft of the presentation for TUG 2014, thanks to my wife for bringing our son and daughter outside during these two days. This time I'm going to use reveal.js for my presentation, instead of Beamer. I could convert the HTML5 slides to Beamer (and to PDF), whenever I need it.

We went to the violin shop to buy our son's third violin. He finally got the one with 1/4 size. For me who cannot play any string instruments, it's almost magic he managed to play the new one even though he had never used that bigger size one. We then popped in the book store near there. I felt that it'd been ages since we last spent such a typical holiday together.

After dinner, we watched the fireworks show being held in sight of our house. There was shower at that time though, I think it ended up washing out dust in the air and made the fireworks rather brilliant.

For these days, in the office, it always takes me a lot of time before getting down to it. I know it has nothing to do with people who I've been working with on the same projects, but to do with someone whose productivity I doubt about. At least, they should not threaten my scarce motivation towards the stupid busy-work.

I started reading "Speed of Dark" by Elizabeth Moon. It's a really fascinating narrative and I was literally forgetting the time while reading its first quarter. Funnily enough, the way the protagonist thinks when he speaks with others reminds me of my own mind-boggling feelings at speaking in English. Learning foreign languages might as well be a kind of challenge as hard as people with autism speaking in their native tongue. Indeed, I'm always frustrating not to be able to put my thought well in English. Lack of fluency makes me upset. Unlike autism, of course, my problem could be improved through sheer effort. That's a big difference. Nevertheless, for instance, when I read his baffling emotion against English idioms like "You can say that again", I cannot help but yelling "You can say that again!" too.

I heard that Starbucks's cool lime refresher will be available from the day after tomorrow! I've missed it for a year.

The typhoon passed away during the midnight and it was so hot when I went to the noodle shop for lunch. A bowl of hot noodle was enough for me to recharge and I could concentrate on coding in the afternoon. Now I think I can convert a variety of source data for books into the epub format with less manual work!

These days I often eat Okinawa food at lunch, because I found a nice restaurant near the office. They offer daily special of the week and I've already tasted most of them. Today I could eat the one which I'd missed the other day. There's only one I haven't yet tasted.

Before the dinner I went to the morning-glory festival at Iriya with my son. It's held on the street in Ueno and was super crowded with people visiting to buy a pot of morning-glory. My son got a nosebleed probably caused by those crowing people.

It's already past midnight though, I just came home from the office. I've been writing codes all the day and finally it's becoming usable stuff.

Tonight I went to the dentist directly from the office. No cavity, but for the monthly checkup. I usually went to the dentist with my family, and on the way home we enjoy eating dinner at the noodle shop across the street. But today I went alone because of the bad weather and the bad health of our daughter. I knew that my son was looking forward to eating ramen as always, so I called him and asked to come out after the dental care. Eating ramen just with him is pretty nice sometimes.

Finally I started to write a code to create EPUB myself. It's not too complicated but is bothered. I swear people who say that EPUB could be a master format for every books will regret. I'm still in doubt that HTML becomes a central format for every books. At least, it will take years and years finding the most efficient and sustainable way of creating books in digital media. Chances are that then books themselves are getting really old-fashioned and all the information are going to be spread through the Web. It's not a matter of me though. What concerns me now is arranging the stuff in one's mind in a tree form and representing it as a book form.

I'm looking around for the simplest way to transform a XML tree into EPUB. There are lots of tools claiming to accept quite a few input-formats. But most of them have less flexibility in defining user specified ways of transformations of the document tree. What I actually need is a programming language rather than a style sheet. So I've kept on trying to formulate the most straightforward way of transforming a given document tree into EPUB. I used to take advantage of Scheme with its representation of XML, which is called SXML. Now I prefer Haskell and its library HXT. Honestly, both are relatively less popular tools to tackle with XML data, but I think they are more powerful and sophisticated approach at least for programming-minded guys.

The number of entries I wrote during June was only fifteen! Shame on me, because nobody would call it diary if I was writing it every two days. But allow me to explain. Our kids have gotten a fever in turn, and we could hardly live a regular life for these days. They are gradually recovering though, we have been utterly fatigued.