It’s really annoying to realise how long my book reader project has been going for, and how long I’ve let it sit when it could have been out there. I started working on it in 2000, and then left it for 6 months, then fiddled with it a couple of times during 2001, then forgot about it again. Meanwhile people are writing articles about the future of electronic literature and all that, bunches of different readers become available for desktops and handhelds, and still I let my reader collect dust. Still I have not seen another reader that lets you read plain text files as "nice books" (there was one that used IE and flash and did a one-off conversion to HTML, but I dont think it’s really the same).

During the time I should have been working on it, instead I used valuable time creating a toy scripting language (JujuScript), and foolishly revisited George, my 3D space sim, which should really be declared off-limits as [for an individual programmer] such a large project is a black hole sucking time away but never approaching completion. I also created Jujusoft Edit, which is not such a bad thing, since I think it is maturing into a jolly nice text editor. As it happens Edit was born out of a need for an in-house syntax hilighting editor for a JujuScript IDE, which never really materialized, since it really wasn’t necessary. And for that matter JujuScript emerged from a need to provide an embedded scripting language for George, which also never actually happened. So perhaps the moral of this story is that sometimes good things (JujuEdit ) can emerge from disorder.

…Or maybe I’m just trying to justify my appalling lack of self-discipline.

Speaking of stupid priorities, I could have been fixing up the configuration settings in Reader instead of writing these paragraphs. I must dedicate tomorrow to Reader.