journal for 2004-01-02
so this is the new year
Well, I don’t feel any different. (If you do not recognize this couplet, go buy Transatlanticism by Death Cab for Cutie.)
I’m all packed for my trip to Cardiff. I don’t have a phone, though, and I couldn’t procure one at work. Trevor suggested that I try to meet one of our engineers in Jersey on the way to Newark tomorrow. I may try this. I am not enthused about the idea.
Tomorrow Gloria will drive me over to the airport. I’ll fly from Newark to London. In London, I’ll take two trains, finally ending up at Cardiff. Then I’ll take a cab to my hotel. I expect to leave home around 15:00 or 16:00 on Saturday and get to my hotel room on Sunday around noon. I am not full of excitement; I think the trip will be lousy. I am going to try to take it easy, anyway. I promised my nephew Keegan, who loves trains, that I’d get a few train pictures for him. That’ll be one thing to do, anyway.
perl problems
I was working on my rewrite of jGal while in Florida. I got all the framework stuff done to turn a list of files into an object tree. Now I’ve realized that I’ve got some big obstacles to turning that object tree back into the kind of HTML that I want. I’m hoping that I can just give child objects a link to their parents, but that will mean that I can’t have images appear in more than one area of the tree. Maybe I’ll look at doing something with caller. I need to write a quick sketch of how it all works and then ask someone to look at it. I think I’m too close to the problem.
At least it gives me a reason to stop and write some of the missing POD. Unfortunately, in the meantime, I have a crapload of images to put in galleries, and I still don’t have nested directories forming nice galleries. I really don’t want to keep doing that by hand.
I looked at some other people’s gallery software, but nothing is what I want. Someone on #perl remarked (correctly) that everyone must write his own image gallery software. Why can’t there also be the good common one that everyone uses after that? Everyone writes his own template system, but then there are a few stock ones. I haven’t found a stock gallery system I like, yet. Spider Eyes looks interesting, though. I might give it another look. I just don’t really want to write XML. Maybe if I use it for a while and like it, I’ll find that it’s easy to YAMLize it. Or maybe some kind soul will point me at something else good.
presents
I don’t feel like cataloging my presents, just yet. I will note, though, that my Timbuk2 bag arrived today, way ahead of schedule. I was looking at the tracking information on Wednesday, and it had an estimated delivery date of January 7th. Today, because I’m obsessive, I checked again, and it said it was out for delivery! It was signed for by our receptionist around nine o’clock, and I stopped by the office around lunchtime.
Unfortunately, she’d locked it in the supply room and gone home. I didn’t have a key, and the guy with a key was out to lunch. This wasn’t a big deal, though, since I just asked him to get the package out for me. I picked it up after my lunch.
It definitely needs a few weeks of breaking in, but it’s nice. I think it’ll be an excellent replacement for my bookbag… and writing that reminds me that I wanted to switch to my replacement wallet. I’ll shut up now and go do that.