journal for 2003-12-16
bread
I made some bread this weekend. My first loaf was OK, but fell and was a little dense for me. I think the second one was much better, and I ate too much of it already. I am torn between really enjoying bread and knowing that it’s really not a great thing to eat all the time.
Andy and I, in discussions of bread and sausage, decided that I’ll have to try making sausage bread. I was sort of hoping this would turn out to be a wholly original idea, even though it seemed so awesome that someone must have done it. Indeed, there are a pile of recipes for it, including some for bread machines. Maybe I’ll try one of those, and maybe I’ll try to invent my own anyway. Or maybe both.
elf
We saw Elf on Sunday. It was alright, but Will Farrel really bugs me. I think my problem is just that he has no subtlety. He has no nuance. Everything he does is big and ham-fisted and telegraphed. Last night I was reminded how good Jeff Bridges was in Seabiscuit; mostly, I liked the very simple expressions that he had on his face. Farrel seems to have one expression for each of the major mood groups, and they’re all really obvious.
Oh well. Bob Newhart was just fine.
We saw the movie with Katie and Jerome. It was good to get out and do stuff; we were afraid that we’d be stuck at home because of the snow and sleet. Instead, we went to Nawab and had some tasty Indian food, went to Frank’s and looked for tree toppers, saw Elf, and then played some games at home. Oh, and had fresh cookies. Cookies are totally awesome when coming right out of the oven. Yup.
We played Mario Kart, and I decided that either the races are just way better than the battle mode, or battle mode is no good for team driving. Someone (PA?) had gone on and on about how great battle mode is, but it just didn’t amaze me. We also played a round of Mario Party 5, which was good. Jeez, though, I wish they’d cut down on the animations! Using a capsule shouldn’t take 30 seconds while I watch the mushroom appear, spin, shine, wiggle, shrink, and then enter my status indicator.
programming
I got some more encouragement on Games::Nintendo::Mario, which was as pleasant as it was amusing. I’m still trying to get Games::Board ready first, though. I want to have something out there that’s at least slightly useful. I did a good bit of Games::Board coding after work yesterday, and I may have a basic release by the end of the week.
On #perl yesterday, someone his their code and was reporting segfaults. This sort of blew my mind, so I tried it myself, and it was fine. He said he’d installed one of the modules from apt, so I asked him to install it from CPAN. It still failed. Finally, he said, “One second, recompiling it” and I realized he was perlcc’ing it. Talk about leaving out relevant information! I almost with perlcc wasn’t distributed with the core. Too many beginners think it’s the right thing to use for (a) basic use or (b) obscuring of code. Heh.