Today I finished a bunch of work that significantly improved the test suite of our billing system. It all sprang from two of my favorite things coming together: adding more print statements and Test::Routine.

Sometime during the Red Moon, 937

Year 28 of the 7th Imperator, 20th of Declarations

Sometime during the Red Moon, 937

Year 28 of the 7th Imperator, 13th of Declarations

I listen to music on my iPhone all the time. I ride a bus about twelve hours a week, much of which is spent with Spotify or iPod or something else keeping my ears entertained. I also use it for phone calls or, more often, voice commanded web searches. I’d been using my iPhone headset for this, but it’s not very durable, and gets tangled up in other stuff.

Last week, Gloria, Martha, and I took our first official family vacation. It was great!

I’ve ended up with a bunch of new books recently. Gloria gave me quite a nice stack of them for my birthday. Her parents gave me an Amazon gift certificate which was used mostly for books. Some kind anonymous person gave me a copy of Red Alert, which I’d wanted to read. Many of the books have been pretty light reading, so I’ve gotten through a few already. It’s been very pleasant! Mostly I get my reading done when Martha is playing at the park, or while I’m walking through town, or waiting for the bus, or while I brush my teeth. I actually didn’t get much reading done at OSCON. I was busy, and during the trip home, I was trying to sleep!

This year was my eighth OSCON, all but one of which were in Portland. Portland is a fantastic place, and I would not be stretching things to say that I go to OSCON first for Portland and second for the conference. The conference was very good, though. This was also the second or third time that OSCON has meant that I was away from home for my birthday, and Gloria made sure that I would not miss out on enjoying my birthday. It ended up being a really good week on many fronts.

It’s that time again! The Perl Foundation has issued the Q3 2012 call for grant proposals, and you’ve got a few weeks to apply for one. Here are some things I’d like to see people do. Obviously, when you apply for a grant, you need to convince the grants committee that you’ve got a great chance of getting the work done, and done on time. “On time” probably means “pretty quickly” for these tasks.