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.

Today, I helped Brian move. Gloria and I slept in until around 0730. I relaxed a little and played some Mario vs DK. Gloria made me an egg and toast, which was a nice start. Around 0900, she gave me a lift to Brian’s, and soon I was movin’ stuff. I was surprised at how much stuff there was to move. Brian had promised that all the little stuff would be moved, and this was almost entirely true. Mostly, we moved beds, shelving units, tables, and desks. There were just a lot! In fact, every time I thought we were done, it was revealed that more stuff was somewhere else. After the house’s two floors were empty, someone told us that there was stuff over the garage. When that was done, there was stuff in the basement. Once the last big load was loaded into the truck, Cindy (Brian’s wife) showed up with some pizza and beer, and I ate too much. Once that load was unlaoded at Brian’s new place, I came home. I was just beat and filthy and needed to be done.

I have a huge archive of spam. I’m actually a little surprised, now, to see it’s about 450 megs. Today, I got a piece of spam with this incredible subject:

Today was pseudo-productive, like the rest of the week. I got a lot of concepts fleshed out, but no code written. I’m hoping that Friday I can get those concepts approved so that when I’m back from my exile I can really get to work. At the moment, just about all of our new business systems, save finance, are my responsibility. I plan, soon, to become drunk with a very moderate amount of power!

I fly out, Saturday, for my second exile of the year. I feel like it’s really crept up on me. Tomorrow I’ll be helping Brian move, but that shouldn’t take all day. After that, I’m hoping Gloria and I can chill out and do something fun and just be cool. Friday I’m working again, and then Saturday is mostly free until my flight. I’m flying out around 2100, so we don’t need to leave until the evening. If all goes well, I’ll sleep on the plane as much as possible and slip right into BST.

I’m always pleased to see people post their little twenty-line hacks on use.perl, following lines like, “I wanted to do X, but it was annoying to do manually, so I wrote this.” It’s really weird that I do that less and less as I become more of a coder and less of an admin. (Really, that change is pretty complete by now.) So, I’m trying to get back into the habit of writing little time-savers.