I’ll be brief, since it’s quite late, here.

In late 2002, when hanging out with Matt and Rahm, Cardiff co-workers, I was told that Stella Artois messes you up faster than other beers, and for know clear reason. This is so true. I’ve had two pints tonight, and I feel like I’ve had four bourbons.

I have survived Monday. It is now Tuesday, just barely. I’m not really tired enough to sleep, yet, but I will be soon. I’ve been watching Total Recall, which is really a much better movie the first time than the fifteenth. It’s amusing how someone can be so traumatized by (mild) lack of pressure that his eyes bug out, but seconds later feel just fine. He doesn’t even have bloodshot eyes. That’s my kind of planetary trauma!

I had been using an application called BirthdayCal.app to keep a calendar in iCal updated with the birthdays in my Address Book. I figured this would be a nice application to replace in my attempt to make more non-Free software obsolete. (I know, I know, as long as it requires iCal…)

I forgot how long the days can be, here! Morning twilight begins at 0415 and evening twilight ends at 2205. In Bethlehem it’s 0500 to 2100. I was sitting outside waiting for Godfrey last night, and it was still bright enough to read comfortably. This morning I woke up and saw that it was nearly full daylight. Scrambling to read the clock, I found it was 0500. (I did manage to get back to sleep, thankfully.)

I’m at work, in the UK office. I am the only IT person here. I’m the only IT person in either office: it’s Memorial Day in the states and the spring bank holiday here. There are non-IT people here, but none of the people I need to talk to. I’m trying to do work things, but it’s so hard to concentrate. If I was in the US, I’d be asleep. Later, I’d be eating something suitably Memorial Day-a-licious, like corn and hot dogs. And I’d be hanging out with Gloria, relaxing on the sofa, possibly watching Farscape or Good Eats or something.

I got in around 1300 or so, after two hours of fitful sleep on the train. My room isn’t in the usual hallway. I’m two stories up, just over the hotel’s flagpole. I can open the window and watch the Welsh dragon blow in the breeze, if, for some reason, I feel the need. The room is smaller than usual, but it’s big enough to hold my things and give me a place to sleep. So.

I’m on the 11:00 train to Swansea (via Newport, my stop). The trip here was no worse than usual, I guess.

Why does this work: <pre> tell application “iCal”

  tell last calendar

      make new event at end with properties {summary:"foo"}

    end tell

I did a bunch of AppleScripting today, making me both like and dislike AppleScript more than ever. It reminds me of OLE and VBA in a lot of ways. The fact that so much stuff is scriptable is great. The underlying models are often not awful, and it’s easy to do easy stuff. The problem isn’t (always) the object models, but the language. Just like VBA, AppleScript sucks. I think it sucks differently, but it sucks nonetheless. It makes it easy to dismiss scripting of applications, in fact, which is sad.