progress, virtue, and the classics
Today, work was less crisis-oriented than it had been. I spoke with Duan, who thinks that the current crisis at the UK plant may have been worked around sufficietly well for now. (Note to self: write up options summary tomorrow anyway.) Trevor thinks he found and eliminated the cause of the server crashes; I’m guessing this was a success since I made it past 1900 without any phone calls. I started getting some of the databases moved from one server to another, which is not something I’m excited about doing, but so far so good.
Trevor cancelled his TiVo subscription, and I got it transferred over. Its settings screen still displays his name for it, but it’s responding to my remote scheduling requests, so I’m not too worried.
Simon showed #perl a mockup of an Expose-like feature for Desktop Manager from the author’s blog, and the idea trail lead back to Virtue, another OS X desktop manager that uses a lot of ideas from both Desktop Manager and QuickSilver. I’m sort of torn on using it, because it has a lot of nice new things and is missing a lot of small important things.
I can change the wallpaper on virts, but it’s slow. I can change the background color by overlaying a new color (with alpha channel), but it covers my GeekTool output, so I can’t use an opaque color. I can use a watermark image, but I can’t center it. I can assign keys to lots of things, but not ot “move this desktop left or right.” I’m hoping the author will at least stop storing things in “~/Virtual Desktops” in the next release!
Gloria made some tasty soup for dinner, and we watched some things TiVo had picked up: a documentary on Suzanne Vega which was interesting, but old and short; a documentary on “what is federalism?” which was interesting, but basic. We also watched two Netflix movies that have been just sitting here for a while: Mutiny on the Bounty and The Wild Bunch. They’re part of my “see all the AFI Top 100” project.
Mutiny on the Bounty was pretty darn good. I was pleasantly surprised. I like Clark Gable. The Wild Bunch did not please me. After I had to turn the DVD over, I gave up and put it away. Ugh. I didn’t like it, it didn’t catch my interest at all, and I felt like I was wasting my time on it.
I got a little work done on Rubric today, mostly fixing stupid little bugs and tweaking templates. I also wrote a little script to make it easy to post notes to my Rubric with Vim. It only works locally, though; I need to either get syncing working or get it working via LWP. The latter seems much easier.
Tomorrow will be full: lots of work at work, lots of TiVo to watch, and maybe even some personal code to write.
Oh! And I’ll try to start my Thursday by talking about a fun little timeline chart that I’m trying to trick Excel into generating.