Normally, I take the 17:15 bus from Philadelphia, and it gets me to Bethlehem around 19:10. On Fridays, traffic is worse, and its arrival is closer to 19:30. I’m writing this at 18:50, and we’ve just now gotten off the streets of downtown Philadelphia. We spent about ninety minutes sitting on Walnut Street, doing nothing. A cab driver insisted that the bus hit him, but couldn’t show much or any damage. Despite this, and despite exchanging insurance information, he was not going to let us go. He demanded that we wait for his insurance agent. The bus driver was livid and the other passengers exasperated. I was just disappointed that I’d be getting home in time for nearly no time with Martha before she starts heading to bed.

I had really wanted to use the Kate syntax stuff, because it’s pure Perl, but after I had it working, I decided that its Perl syntax highlighting wasn’t good enough, and I wanted Vim’s. So, I did what I had wanted to avoid and used Text::VimColor. I worked out some bugs, learned a lot about RTF, and added nice little things like proper option parsing.

I was pretty sure I was going to buy iWork ‘08 before it was announced. Every version of Keynote has had a few improvements that made it worth having, even though I only produce two or three slideshows a year. Keynote 4 adds a feature I’ve often wanted: the ability to make an object on a slide move around. I’ve wanted to use this for code samples: I’d create a text box with code in it, then put a rectangle on top of it, translucent and one line high, and have that move from one important line to the next.

First, let me say up front that I have not finished Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. I did what I have done many times before: I got to the last boss. I fought the last boss to the last phase, came very close to winning, and died. Then I was too frustrated to continue and turned off the game system, meaning that it’ll take me at least twenty minutes to make another attempt – you can’t save once you’re in the final section, you see.

With this, Parallel’s Coherence mode might be useful.

No, I’m not getting wasted. That’s not my bag.

I’ve now logged just about exactly one hour of gameplay on Metroid Prime 3. It looks really good. I’m still getting used to the controls, so I won’t comment on those. The first thing that really bugged me, though, is the NPCs. In the first few minutes, Samus docks her ship with a Galactic Federation warship and makes her way to the bridge. On her way, she can talk to members of the crew. A few said, “Aren’t you Samus Aran? It’s an honor to meet you.” Awesome. More of them, however, said things like, “I can’t be bothered with you, I’m busy” or, “this job requires my full concentration.”

MIME::Lite is, in my opinion, the worst of the popular email object modules. It’s buggy, has a lousy interface, and just does awful things. I’d go so far as to say that the number one mistake I see in new email modules is a reliance on MIME::Lite instead of Mail::Message or Email::MIME.

A few weeks ago, I found Open Flash Chart and put it in my list of things to look at. It’s pretty slick-looking. What I found, though, is that the helper libraries are sort of wretchedly interfaced. Basically, they all output data files that the flash plugin uses to build charts.

I’d stopped (or at least drastically reduced) my video game playing after Martha was born until around my birthday. I got a bunch of new games, then, and I’ve been playing a lot more. I already wrote about Super Paper Mario, which started out fantastic and then fizzled.