My linguistics course contains lots of really interesting material but unfortunately has really boring assignments. The last assignment was so awful that I considered giving up the course as I didn’t want to spend my spare time on something I wasn’t enjoying. To help with the tedium I decided to find something to do with the new knowledge that actually interests me.

I have been reading about collocates – words that are typically grouped together such as “law and order” and “fish and chips”. What interests me is the introduction of new collocates. I read a study by Fairclough who had analysed 53 speeches given by Tony Blair. The word “new” occurred 609 times and the most frequent collocates were “new labour” and “new deal”.

I am also interested in the Perl community, how it is perceived and how it perceives itself. If I analyse the blogs of various members of the community what are the collocates of “Perl” going to be? Some are going to be obvious – “Perl community”, “Perl 6″ – but what unexpected ones will I find? And what has changed in the last few years? What did we talk about in the past that is no longer important to us and what is the latest thing to be linked with Perl?

At today’s TLUG meeting Jim Maricondo gave a talk about writing applications for the iRex iLiad. He brought two with him as well as a two of Fujitsu’s FLIPea prototypes of the first colour e-paper reader.

I was surprised by how good the iLiad looks and did think, when looking at one page of text, that I could read books using one of these. It weighs a lot less than the book I am currently reading and since it doesn’t have a back-light it seemed that it wouldn’t be tiring on my eyes. But then I changed the page. The refresh that takes place involves the screen being made completely black, then white, and then the text appears. It looks like it flickers and given that I read quickly it would be refreshing maybe twice or three times a minute – which would be really annoying.

It has given me hope that there will be a way in the future for me to replace paper books. In Japan my books are getting damp and I don’t have the room I used to have to store these. I also find it difficult to carry them when I am travelling and it would be great to have a light-weight way to carry the text of multiple books.

The FLIPea was certainly interesting to look at but is in no way useful for reading something like a book as the refresh takes 15 seconds when you change page. It’s also surprisingly hard to read, as the contrast isn’t particularly good inside. But it is supposed to look really good in natural sunlight and I imagine that it will be used to display adverts and pictures to begin with and not pages of text.