journal for 2003-02-27
morning
Trevor called me this morning to let me know that when I got in, I’d find our VPN to the UK down. A reboot fixed it, but AFAIK we never determined the cause. Personally, I am not too troubled by this.
After that crisis was resolved, I went over to Rite-Aid to refresh the Strategic Mountain Dew Reserve, and found that their candy was on Crazy Sale. I mean, crazy. Big, eight ounce chocolate bars were 0.77 USD. Multipacks of Twix, Reese Sticks, and peanut butter cups were 0.77 USD. It was insane. I saved myself by reading the labels. Most of these packages had about a kilocalorie of candy in them. In my best night at the gym, I had burned about 400 calories. The thought of needing two and a half hours of exercise to work off 0.77 USD worth of candy is sobering, and I think it will help me persevere in the future when tempted to eat crap. Gloria rightly suggested, today, that Saturday ice cream should, for most occasions, be enough.
I settled for two peanut butter cups. It cost a quarter.
afternoon
I got some more work done on one of the more important but (so far) less interesting applications; I think that with a little more polish it will start to graduate to the realm of interestingness. (Interestingocity?) To reward myself, I spent about an hour on my Apache installation. Everything runs well as a cgi-script. The majority of each project’s code runs well under ModPerl::PerlRun. ModPerl::Registry makes just about everything fail.
The problem is that rather than spend a lot of time designing a very good API, I forced to code to act as if it had a good API by doing some serious symbol table voodoo. While it’s not exactly true, it’s fairly accurate to say that I was importing variables from the main package into used packages. I don’t really think it was so bad, but I’ll admit that it’s not ideal design, especially if I want to conform to the law of least surprise. Someday, my replacement could think, “What the hell is going on in here?”
I spent some time pondering how to rewrite the API, and I made some quick attempts at hackish solutions. Nothing worked quite right, so I think I’ll take a good long look at it and ponder.
evening
Gloria gave me a lift home, enabling me to save my energy for the gym. I think it worked. Sticking to one machine, and one on which I could read, probably helped, too. I did twenty miles on the LifeCycle, which equates to about 400 calories, if I recall correctly. That’s probably about what’s in two peanut butter cups and a can of Dew. Doh!
While I did my cycling, Gloria tried out one of the classes they offer: Power Yoga. She really liked it, which makes me happy, too. I was worried, because she’d said that looking into the classes was like looking through the fence at Auschwitz. (I may be paraphrasing.) Anyway, she dug it.
I feel really energized after working out, which is good. Now I need to start putting that energy to good use!