My walk was the walk of a human child, but my heart was a tree.

I made this in Inkscape for Wikipedia's page on cadency:

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In other words, the left column is the symbols added to the coats of arms of sons in the English and Canadian traditions and the right is the symbols added to the coats of daughters in the Canadian tradition. I made the numbers red to keep the number of colours down. If anyone has any design suggestions I'd like to hear them.

A fact not widely known: the crossed axes in my family's arms:



are a reference to the arms of George Shum, who was my father's father's mother's father's father's father: Azure on a saltire argent fimbriated gules two tilting-spears in saltire or, headed proper. Crest — A cock reguardant proper collared or, from the collar a buglehorn pendent gold. (In other words, two gold spears in an X-shaped cross on a silver X-shaped cross with a red border, with a blue background.) Of course we have no right at all to George Shum's arms since they're English arms and we descend from him through a woman-- though in Canada the rules are more egalitarian and permit inheritance of designs through the female line-- but it seemed worthwhile to commemorate him in the design.

Today Sharon asked us to come out to the diner for breakfast and dinner, and in between we generally hung around and tidied the house a bit, and not much else happened. I tried to do a full jhbuild again, but like a lot of people ran into this problem. I didn't do any metacity hacking because it's the weekend, but I'm trying to figure out what needs doing next. I don't really understand much about the way X deals with alpha channels, so I should read up on that, I suppose. I'll divide up what's remaining into what I can do and what I'll need to learn more about.

I forgot to mention that on Friday I was walking through the little streets near Broad Street and came upon a crowd of kids, about twelve to fourteen years old, doing an amazing skipping game with a clothes-line turned back on itself. One kid was holding both ends and another kid was holding the middle, and they were spinning it around very fast so that it looked like an oscilloscope trace; another kid was doing a sort of super-skipping in the middle between the two ropes and not falling down. I stopped to watch, and one of them invited me to try, but I declined since I know from experience that tarmac in the face is unpleasant.

Random other news: The North Carolina senate asked for, and got, a coat of arms from the College of Arms in London. Here's a picture of it. I think it's rather pleasing, and the heralds could teach a lot of people a lot about how to design a good flag.