use Perl

So, I've finished ex**s for the year. I've got a month of relaxing before I start working for The Man.

I saw Nelson Goerner and the BBC Philharmonic play the Rach 3 recently, which was wonderful. I'm going to miss having piano access (the University has a lovely grand piano in one of the lecture theatres) over the Summer.

What to do with the next month? Two things:

• Get better at chess - I'm out of practice. Hopefully FICS will get me back in shape. I'd also like to try and research some midgames in the Modern; I've been playing (and winning, thankfully) with it lately, and my books don't cover many of the lines, though I've more on the way. Amazon is my co-pilot.
• Hack teh Regexps@$!! - I'd also like to sit alone in a dark room for a few days and come out with named backreferences for regexps for the perl5 re engine, as Python has - viz. /(?P<word>\b\w+)\s+(?P=word)/ and repeated words; Robin talked about these recently and made a lot of sense.

Congrats, of course, to Jarkko et al for 5.8.0-RC1. In other news, this cartoon (entirely worksafe) made me giggle.