Well, Martha has now been out in the atmosphere for a bit longer than half her life. She’s got four teeth out, and I’m pretty sure she’s working on two more. She’s back in a “I’m not really very interested in standing” phase, but I still think she’s going to start walking pretty soon. It’s hard to say whether she means anything specific when she says “dadadadda” or “mamamamama,” but it can still be cute – it’s certainly cuter than when she’s saying, “WAAAAAAUGH!”

Today, Rafael Garcia-Suarez and the Perl 5 Porters released perl 5.10. This is totally fantastic. Perl 5.10 contains a whole lot of great new features, from small but helpful changes to error messages to new ways to scope variables and, well, all kinds of other stuff. I gave a talk about 5.10’s new features at PPW, and I look forward to getting to start using some of these features in production code ASAP.

I am getting pretty darned sick of CPAN Ratings. They can be quite useful: I can see what modules people like or don’t like, and I can get an idea of why people like or don’t like my modules.

RCN has been hassling me with automated phone calls to set up a new account password. If I don’t do that, apparently, I will never be allowed to discuss my account with them again. I don’t get it, but I just called in to set up my password.

I mumbled something about Email::Folder hating me, today, but I was too busy to explain, and I promised that I’d write down my annoyances later. I’d love to fix these problems soon, but for now it’s easier to just grumble about them, and it will make me feel better.

Leopard’s ultra-easy screen sharing has made it a breeze to help my mom with her new Mac. Today I used it for some more fun. I created my first working Yahoo! pipe, a merging of my MJ photos and Gloria’s. Then I connected to my mom’s computer with Leopard’s excellent VNC client and subscribed her Mail.app to my new pipe feed. I ran TextEdit and put a note on her desktop about what I’d done.

For a long time, my parents have been held hostage by AOL. AOL, for ages, made it nearly impossible to use any tool other than their mega-integrated awful front end to The Internet. Even once they set up IMAP, you were stuck with their Favorites and Address Book. This was a big deal for my dad, who has a gigantic contact list. I’ve been heckling him to use Apple’s Address Book for ages, but he couldn’t get out.

I’ve been using OmniFocus since pretty early on in the private beta. It started out pretty good and has gotten very, very good. For years, I have said that nothing is as effective as index cards. OmniFocus replaced my index cards a few months ago.

Email is tough. It’s very, very complicated, which is a big problem, because from the outside it seems so simple: it’s like some headers and then a body or two, right? I try to advise people that Mail::Message is not as crazy as everyone implies, but people really like to use something really, really simple, and it leads to problems – one of which is trying to figure out where the ideal distinction between “just enough” and “too much” is.

I’ve been running Leopard for just over a week, and it’s a really mixed bag. My memory is that Tiger and Panther were only annoying because they failed to fix things I wanted fixed. Leopard has broken quite a bunch of stuff, and I afraid that some of it just isn’t going to get fixed.