I’m playing Mass Effect now. It’s pretty good, although I’m starting to find it a bit tedious, mostly because I keep having to repeat the same bits. This is especially frustrating when I have several dialog options that look very similar but end up coming out of my mouth with very different tones of voice.

It’s bugged me that iTunes makes it hard to listen to things as albums. Sure, it has shuffle-by-album, but smart playlists are all per-track.

My Xbox 360 came with LEGO Indiana Jones and Kung Fu Panda. I haven’t tried Kung Fu Panda, but I finished the story mode of Indiana Jones. It was pretty good, although nearly the entire Last Crusade scenario was incredibly annoying. The LEGO games from Tt have a lot going for them, but they also have a lot of flaws that just don’t seem to be getting fixed. They have awful cameras, terrible jumping predictability, horrible partner AI, and the vehicle chapters tend to kind of suck. Despite all that, I’d probably give it a B-. Like I said, the LEGO games have a lot going for them.

A while ago, I did a bit of work applying patches to MIME::Lite. It’s the most widely depended upon of the dists I maintain, and one of the oldest, with the most RT tickets. I also don’t really like it very much, so it doesn’t get as much work as I’d like to give it.

I noticed, recently, that I had enough Amex rewards points to get an Xbox 360. I thought about it for a while and then decided to go for it. As is my habit when ordering something, I obsessively checked the status of my order every few hours, and it kept sitting at “submitted.” I figured it could take quite a while, since I was buying with points.

Some time ago I wrote that I had moved my D&D wiki to TiddlyWiki. This has worked pretty well, although I’ve mostly given up storing YAML in my TiddlyWiki – mostly because I didn’t end up using the tools that used it all that much. Maybe next time.

We’ve been unhappy with the performance of some code, recently. I was pretty sure I knew where the problem was, but I thought I’d run NYTProf just to see how things looked. I’m running an older NYTprof, so it’s not 100% clear that my SQL-level optimization is what I need to do – but it’s the right thing to do anyway. Anyway, I figured I might see something sort of interesting, but I never expected this:

As suggested, I have run the code such that a dist’s mere appearance on the CPAN is not counted. In other words: code exists if it is used. If not, it is ignored entirely. It ends up not having much effect.

For a while, I’ve been keeping track of the total usage of my code on the CPAN. It helps me see what people have found useful, and lets me decide how scared to be of introducing back-incompat changes. Sometimes people talk about the sort of catastrophe that can occur if a highly-required module is broken. For example, over 11,000 dists require the code in Getopt-Long. If it broke badly and people installed the new code, it would be a nightmare.

As is our tradition, Gloria and I watched a bunch of horror movies this October. Here’s a quick recap: