I work from home on Mondays. I find it’s a good way to avoid having people barge in on me while I’m trying to get in the zone. At work, my office is, I think, one of the nicest in the building, as far as atmosphere goes. I have a nice lamp, a good arrangement of furniture, and good music. People stop in to ask me questions and give me information I need, and I really do enjoy the fact that my office seems to make them feel at ease.

Wow. The city is under water. If you’re really interested, you can find some good before and after shots. It is really, really, crazy. I live in a river valley, but I’ve never seen flooding anywhere near this severe – and all from one night’s rain!

When we had our state inspection on the car, it was determined that our front struts were shot and needed to be replaced. This was an unwelcome expense, but there wasn’t anything to do but pay it. So we did! They mechanics said we ought to have the alignment checked, so today Gloria and I stopped in to the Sears Auto Center where we’d had an alignment about a month ago. They advised us that it would be about two and a half hours, so we walked well up MacArthur Road to look at a sporting goods store. When we got back, we did a good bit of sitting around, and finally about three hours after our arrival, we were told that they wanted to replace both front tires. All this was going to cost no money, but it took plenty of time. We walked over to Boston Market and had a very tasty little dinner before heading back to Sears. It was difficult to get our salesperson’s attention, so I finally looked at the stack of tickets, saw that ours was done, and told pointed one of the on-duty clerks at it. Everyone there was polite, but they don’t understand how to provide good service, I think.

I have spoken with people who seem really smart about how to hire, and also the opposite. Names have been changed…

…but first: an updated on my Apple Care.

My PowerBook, AirPort, and iPod are working fine. Gloria’s iBook and iPod mini are fine, too. So are our iSights. We have spent thousands on Apple hardware and hundreds on software. We are loyal customers. Why does Apple want to alienate us?

I’ve been running the “Prime Number Shitting Bear” at work.

	http://members.surfeu.fi/kklaine/primebear.html

Last week, I got TT2, CGI::Application, Class::DBI, and Number::Tolerant all engaging in wonderful harmony. It turned out, by the way, that I didn’t need any kind of magic trigger to catch strings and convert them before they hit the database. It’s more like this: my class has some fields that are inflated into tolerance objects. I can assign tolerances to them, and their stringification is stored to the database. When Class::DBI finds that stringification, it knows how to turn it back into an object. The beauty is that I can just assign a stringification directly. When I access it, I get the “inflated” version back. I had thought I needed to inflate it before assigning, but I was wrong. All I needed to to, to preserve my sanity, was to put a constraint on the column that only tolerances, valid strings, and undef were allowed to be set.

I’ve gotta say: it was a good day!

Andy and Bill suggested a few books in their “getting a great job” talk, and I picked up two of them last week: “The Brand You 50” and “Ask the Headhunter.” They’re full of good advice, but I wouldn’t really suggest either of them, especially if you can get your hands on the slides from the talk or, better, can witness the talk itself. It condenses all of the useful information in the books (and more) into one sitting.