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.

I don’t recall where I saw the recommendation, but someone or something had strongly suggested that I read “We” by Yevgeny Zamyatin. I put it on my wish list, Gloria gave it to me for my birthday, and I read it last week. It was good, although I’m not sure what to make of it, in the end.

A few months ago, I wrote a crossword puzzle library for reading “Across&Down” format .puz files. It’s fine, and the features I wanted to add to the library really don’t matter too much to using it.

Earlier today, I wrote about a problem I’d seen reported via CPAN testers. A test was failing on Cygwin, probably because of Cygwin being weird. As expected, I was able to talk to one of the intrepid CPAN smokebot operators, ask for help, and get the problem resolved very quickly.

This test report has been making me scratch my chin. It boils down to something like this:

I used to keep a lot of personal stuff in ~/svn, like my RPG notes, dotfiles for various apps, and some of the stupid little things I stick in ~/bin. I converted that to git about a month ago, and it went just fine. A little later, John and I decided we’d switch svn.codesimply.com to git, and I ran into an annoying problem.

I’ve been hearing such awesome things about Selenium for so long that I finally decided I had to get into the game. It helped that we had some code that seemed like it would greatly benefit from testing with Selenium Remote Control.

I found this in my ~/www directory, and I thought I’d file it somewhere that I’m more likely to find it when needed, like in Rubric. This is a little out of date, as I’d probably use something more versatile than lynx, and I’d probably be using a custom-generated mailcap. That said, this is still useful information.

As I continue to putter about (mostly in my head as I walk to and from the bus) on the fantasty RPG that I plan to run in 2009 or so, I’ve been trying to decide what set of mechanics to use. I had initially thought I’d use Dungeons and Dragons (the “d20 system”) with a highly modified magic system. I was intrigued, though, by True20. It’s a d20-derived system that attempts to simplify a lot of mechanics. There are three basic classes. The only die you ever need is a single d20. It replaces D&D’s bookloads of spells with a small catalog of powers, which is likely to be great for what I want to do.

Mastering Perl is a toolbox full of very sharp tools. I can imagine myself presenting it to a junior co-worker, very somberly informing him, “It is time.”