In The Children of Hurin Christopher Tolkien has edited various J.R.R. Tolkien manuscripts into a book length version of this tragic story, the longest of the 'Lost Tales' that comprise the history proceeding's The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. It's beautifully illustrated by Alan Lee.

This book recounts the lives and deaths of Hurin's children who are cursed by Morgoth, the first Dark Lord, to punish Hurin for his steadfast defiance. It is chiefly about Hurin's son Turin, who while the greatest warrior of his time, finds that his success always turns to ashes. I enjoyed it, though it's heavy going with a pervasive sense of doom. Recommended for Tolkien and adventure fantasy fans.

We drove to Breckenridge on Friday for the Memorial Day weekend. We saw rain and snow on the way, but sunshine upon arrival. We stayed at the Allaire Timbers Inn, a very pleasant Bed & Breakfast in a log house. It's on the South edge of town, but within walking distance of many shops and restaurants.

It snowed off and on, enough to enjoy, but not be a problem. I had a touch of the flu on Saturday, but still I managed to have a good time. Other than walking and stretching, I took a break from exercise. I caught up on some reading.

The electric sail is a space propulsion concept similar to a solar sail, but using positively charged wires to repel the solar wind. Such an electric sail should be easier to control than a solar. Hopefully, they'll get funding for a proof-of-concept mission.

After seeing a number of references to Performance Menu on the CrossFit web site, I checked it out and liked what I saw. It's an electronic magazine rather like the CrossFit Journal and shares a site with Catalyst Athletics. The CA WOD is more consistently strength focused than the standard CrossFit WOD, with an Olympic lifting workout and a metcon each training day. This aligns better with my Highland Games training.

I've begun logging my workouts on the Catalyst Athletics forum. I'm doing a Starting Strength progression now, but may switch to the CA WOD at some point.

There's an interesting thread on comp.lang.apl on the viability of APL started by Morten Kromberg of Dyalog APL. There's been some doom and gloom on the news group about APL's future. Morton pointed out that, while some of the mainframe APL applications and associated consulting opportunities have gone away, APL is still a highly productive language for solving problems, and that Dyalog and the other commercial APL vendors are doing fine.

Array Programming Languages provide good abstractions for exploring novel problem spaces, making attractive for entrepreneurial efforts where multiple prototypes must be constructed and evaluated in short order.

PyPy computational performance continues to improve. When I/O performance catches up all the standard library modules are available, it'll be a viable alternative to CPython. It's now worth considering where a lot of custom low level code would have to be written in C to give a CPython application needed performance.