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On 16 December 2000, a young @dra1 stepped out on to the stage of St Martin-in-the-Fields making what would be the first of many performances of Johann Sebastian Bach’s great Mass in B minor. On 16 November last year, just under 25 years later, a slightly greyer @dra27 stepped out on the stage of King’s Hall at Newcastle University for what, for now at least2, would be his last performance of this great work3. As I write this in the 9 hour window of unemployment between finishing at the University of Cambridge and Tarides and commuting down to 2½ Devonshire Square to start at Jane Street, it’s a new year and a change of course. the “27” wouldn’t be allocated until the next October ↩ never say never… ↩ I’ve never recorded the work, although I recorded Ach, bleibe doch from Himmelfahrtsoratorium BWV 11 with Musik Podium Stuttgart ten years ago, which is one of the source arias for the famous Agnus Dei of the mass ↩

Someone was kind enough a few weeks ago to comment on Hacker News that “Opam on Windows is a masterpiece of engineering”. There’s certainly a lot which has to go on under the hood to create what I believe is the necessary baseline experience. Unfortunately, it doesn’t always work out.

While comfort-watching the indomitable Joan Hickson as Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple in The Body in the Library, it occurred to me that Miss Marple would have been a formidable debugger. Since returning from holiday one, two, three weeks ago, I’ve been mostly straightening out and finalising the final Relocatable OCaml PR. A frustrating task, because I know these things will take weeks and have little to show for at the end, so one spends the entire time feeling it should be finished by now. It’s just about there, when this little testsuite failure popped up: