journal for 2002-06-25
work
Well, it looks like work is probably not going to fund my trip to Open Source 2002, which is essentially a death sentence for that trip. That’s OK, although it’s pretty disappointing. I didn’t have high hopes for my chances until my boss seemed pretty willing to pitch it to his [new] boss. I found out that the chances looked grim just after I had started to consider what tutorials I wanted to see. C’est la vie!
programming
At least work today was less sickening than work Monday. The Cheap Hackish Solution That I Built Against My Own Wishes has been throwing up all over the place, mostly because it’s Cheap and Hacking. I spent a lot of last week and this week babysitting it, which was pretty frustrating and demeaning. How am I ever going to be recognized as a good programmer when I’m being made most visible as a spreadsheet coordinator? Ugh!
Today, I managed to release one of my projects, meaning that I should be able to get out of doing any further work on it until a new spec is written. While I’d like to see a better spec to implement, I doubt it will happen any time soon. I also started playing with tie in Perl, which I am finding to be amazingly amazing. I’ve been tying everything to everything else, to my great amusement. My first successful use of tie can be found here for your perusal.
I also did a little work to make Debug markup (mdxiML)a little more like the markup for Cobalt.
books
I picked up XML-RPC (the jellyfish book), too, and it looks good. I might put off reading it until after I finish my re-reading of some of the Damian’s Object-Oriented Perl. The Damian is truly a Wise One.
I ordered the jellyfish book through my friendly neighborhood bookstore. I’ve been trying to transition away from Giant Soulless On-Line Retailers, especially Amazon. Unfortunately, ordering books with the Moravian Book Shop is like pulling teeth. I never imagined I could use their store without ordering, as their selection – especially technical books—is awful. I’ll have to see if the Lehigh book store is any better. They used to have a good selection of O’Reilly books, if nothing else. If they have that and can order other books easily, that might be alright. Of course, they’re just B&N, who also have shown me their share of stupidity.
If only libraries sold books. That would be a good setup.
my afterburner, circa august 2005
Well, I put down my deposit on an afterburner installation, hoping that I could have it done and returned in time for my birthday. Well, I finally got a receipt, and it tells me that I’m order number 290. Like a butcher counter, they have a little notice on their site saying who they’re serving. For the next two weeks, it looks like they’e on 40-80. Their notice said that I should expect to wait until early August. (To be fair, they meant 2002, not 2005.)
etc etc etc
We rented a small pile of movies this weekend. (Four.) So far, we’ve watched three: The Majestic, Orange County, and Metropolis.
Majestic was alright, but pretty predictable and not very exciting. It was interesting to see such a (yes, I’ll say it) Capra-esque movie made so recently, but I’ve already seen actual Capra movies. Why would I want to see another one, and this time without Jimmy Stewart? Orange County was too MTV, and had so many glaring and annoying plot holes that it was hard to concentrate on the important stuff, like Harold Ramis on E. Metropolis was, like a lot of anime, very interesting without being very good. It had its moments, but the clash between the set pieces and the characters was too distracting, and not in a good way. I kept feeling like the CGI guys and the ‘toon guys never really sat down to talk about things.
We haven’t watched Monster’s Ball yet, but I’m hoping that after all those Oscar nominations, it won’t suck.