journal for 2002-06-04
campus trolley
Boston University, my alma mater, is mainly located along Commonwealth Avenue in Boston. On Comm Ave, between the College of Arts and Sciences and the Sargent School of Health, there is a little kiosk called Campus Trolley. Campus Trolley sells falafel, hummus, tabbouleh, hot dogs, and other Lebanese favorites.
The place was (nearly) always manned by this old, presumably Lebanese guy. He had a low, rough voice, and would greet regulars with “How are you, my friend?” That place was great. I ate there all the time; it was near most of my classes and most of the labs at which I worked. A falafal roll-up and a can of soda was about $4.25, and sometime’s there’d be baklava to round it out to five bucks.
I’ve found myself wondering, this morning, what ever happened to that guy. He wasn’t old enough to be on death’s door, but he might have retired by now. I can only hope that, like Joe Ricci the Local Pizza Guy, he will never die.
programming
Hoping to finally start doing some good XML programming with Perl, I sat down last night to try to write RSS output for Debug. Unfortunately, RSS is so simple and XML::RSS so good that it only took me about half an hour and one hundred fifty lines of Perl. It works, anyway, so if I ever write an RSS aggregator, I can look at a summary of my own diary every morning. Until then, the RSS feed is available here, but unless you’re an RSS parser, you probably won’t find it very interesting.
dr. bloodmoney
This morning, I finished the first of the PKD books I picked up: Dr. Bloodmoney. It was great, actually, and probably one of Dick’s best books. I’ll probably put off reading the rest, for a while. I’d like to finish reading McLuhan, read some more Holmes, and maybe finish off a few books that I’ve been working on for a very long time. (I still haven’t finished The Magic Mountain. Pathetic!)