Today is the anti-penultimate day of the holiday in France, and I'm thinking back to our arrival. La Garde is about 30 minutes drive from Angers, so I hailed a taxi outside the station and we were off! The driver didn't recognize the address, but no matter, I directed him from Google maps. We arrived, he dropped us off and drove away and I looked around for the gite. It was 22:00, and with mounting panic I realized we were in the wrong place. I told Claire not to panic, not realizing that it was I that was panicking, and that she was perfectly calm. Jung would have called it projection. There followed a period of confusion. I phoned for another taxi but my French was so bad that I was unsure whether I'd successfully done so. We waited for ages, but of course the taxi turned up and we made it.

The first book I read was A Hero of Our Time, with a Byronic anti-hero (the title is sardonic I think). On the other hand, he wasn't that bad. It's probably that in the time it was written it stood in contrast to the idealised characters that had always been portrayed.

A few days into the holiday and we were walking from La Garde to Coutures by a roundabout route and we used a track that wasn't on Openstreetmap. It is now. I hadn't used Openstreetmap for ages, and was pleasantly surprised at how the editor had improved.

The reason for my trip to France was to take a photo of the electricity meter at Château de Montsabert for Giles at work.

Château de Montsabert

Electricity Meter at Montsabert

I'm a fan of the Ion data serialization format, and for various reasons I wanted to write a parser for it. So I started working on it while in France, and I finished it yesterday. It's called Pionic. Ion is like JSON, but has support for timestamp and decimal data types, and more besides.

I've just finished reading Jung's Modern Man in Search of a Soul, and he talks a lot about dreams, and how they are a way to access the unconscious mind. I don't really have dreams, but after starting to read the book I frequently had dreams. In my latest dream I was the science advisor to President Barack Obama and I was terrified that he'd ask me what the atomic number of nitrogen was, and I wouldn't be able to tell him confidently.