Snothing

I seem to be living on the only part of the south coast without snow. It's still bloody cold, forecast to last another week.

My brother and Debbie stayed for the evening and night, before leaving this morning, for two hours of mutual carsickness back to Redhill. Other families eat leftover christmas dinner till the new year - no chance of that with us five.

Note in passing that i'm feeling stuffed, bloated, weak, heavy and unhealthy. In a word, polluted.

Exactly what prompted my brother to suddenly shack up with a young woman after two decades of zero interest in relationships, I don't know. But he did, and I like his choice - she's funny, smart, unpretentious and politically switched on.
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I'm looking at C++ again. It's been 12 years since I officially left the world of computer programming, and I'm still confused by details of pointers and object orientation, but it doesn't look like it would be too difficult to program a simulation of a vibrating sonic membrane - a drumhead.

Samples of real drums are the next best thing to actually having the real drums, unless the real thing can be modelled to vary in ways that samples can't match.

The physics of drumskins isn't that different from the physics of resonating boards in stringed instruments, so an algorothm for one should be adaptable for the other.
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Paul T has no one to be christmassy with this year, so I'm off to cycle through the freezing air for a plate of pasta and detailed accounts of how no one else is talking to him.
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UPDATE: I don't think you're supposed to collapse after ten minutes riding a bike. I didn't lose consciousness - just got the dizzyness, blurred vision and a strong desire to lie down on the pavement and not get up again for an hour.

In the event, we managed to walk to Paul's place, and I lay on his nice warm floor for an hour.

It's 1345 the next day, and I'm not feeling fully recovered. I think the problem is transmission of oxygen from the lungs to the bloodstream, as opposed to lung capacity or muscle strength.