I liked Damian Conway’s book Perl Best Practices. It had a lot of sound advice that can help a programmer or programming group decide on a set of house rules. For those who aren’t interested in making a lot of decisions, it can even be used as a pre-built set of standards (although a few of its suggestions, generally those involving modules releaed by Damian for the book, are untenable).

Yesterday, I called Double Click, my friendly local repair place, and I said, “Um, what’s the deal with my MacBook? Where is it?” The guy said, “Oh. I just left you a message: it’s here!” I was hoping that would be the case. I left my phone at home, so I got to spend much of the day fantasizing about what kind of awesome voicemails I would have: I’d have won the lottery, my laptop would be in. Heck, maybe just my brother would be visiting. Anything!

Well, I’m in the back seat of Walt’s car, and I’m tired. We’re in central Pennsylvania, cruising east toward the Lehigh Valley. I think the workshop went very well, both as a whole and as far as my participation. I’m definitely looking forward to PPW 2008.

I’m at the Pittsburgh Perl Workshop this weekend, giving a few talks and listening to a few others. I’ll write more about that later. Here’s the coolest thing I think I’ve learned so far.

Sorry, I mean “PERL tutorial.” I guess there are so many of these that it’s like shooting fish in a barrel, but I found yet another one today while looking for some JavaScript docs. Seriously, why isn’t there a really good installable JS reference yet?

So, it’s funny that I ended up with a phone that can’t iSync, because this morning as I was walking to work, I was thinking about what I want in a cell phone. I wasn’t sure about everything I want, but I knew that the first thing on the list was iSync. “If it can’t use iSync,” I thought, “it’s out of the running.”

I mis-read the iSync supported devices page. Oops. My Samsung SGH-D807 is not a supported phone, meaning that I can’t easily keep it in sync with my Mac’s calendar and address book. It’s fairly easy to delete all the contacts on my phone, then import all the vCards from my Address Book. I would go so far, in fact, as to say that I don’t mind the hassle. iSync was nicer, but it’s something I only do once in a while.

I still have no phone. Well, that’s not true. I have a really neat-looking phone that I can’t use yet. T-Mobile assured me that I could go get a new SIM from a place about a mile away, in town. When I called that store today, though, they told me that I’d have to go to a T-Mobile corporate store, not a “satellite” store. In other words, six miles, to Whitehall, through traffic. Forget that!

Yesterday, we headed downtown and watched the parade for Celtic Classic. It was okay, but I was disappointed by my high school’s lackluster regimentation. A scoop of maple walnut ice cream dulled the pain.

Today, I hit the road with my Franklin CDU-680 from 3gstore.com. As the bus left Bethlehem, I wasn’t exactly thrilled. Sure, I was online and staying online, but I was only getting about 80kbps, only about twice what I got on GPRS. As we got to Quakertown, I started to quit apps, thinking I’d reboot for… well, because I was desperate. Around then, though, ping times dropped from about 700ms to about 100ms, bandwidth increased tenfold, and things got to be what I wanted. I stayed online all the way to Philly, with great speeds.