journal for 2002-10-25

perl and apple pie

Today was pretty busy, at work. I did a lot of general reworking of some existing code, and talked to a lot of people who need a lot of changes to a lot of different pieces. Also, someone told me that they’re going to start writing a new database, so I’m going to have my first opportunity to try and manage the development of someone else’s code at this place. The project in question is something that I’d wanted to start writing on my own, anyway, so this could go either way.

I spent an hour or two giving more pointers to this guy, who has become one of the two major non-IT developer people. One of them is working in VBA, but this guy took the high road of Perl, mostly for the same reason I did: Perl is fun to use and will be a nice tool to have in my kit. VBA is a language of last resort. I got to explain qr{}’s, database indices, Win32::OLE, and some other fun stuff.

I need to stop coasting and start writing code that pushes my limits, again. It’s the only way I ever learn anything.

Gloria and I had dinner at Cracker Barrel. Their food is not the height of culinary art, but it’s just damn good. I had chicken and dumplings and green beans and other country victuals. After dinner, we split a piece of apple crisp, which was really good. I’m going to invent a dessert that’s, like, the brown sugary crumbly stuff that goes on apple crisp, drenched in the syrupy apple stuff that the apples are in, in the pie. No baked apple pieces will be in it. Maybe I’d serve it with cold, sliced apple. Mmm.

I really like that crumbly stuff.

Written on October 25, 2002