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.”

I was very, very excited to receive Super Paper Mario for my birthday. I’ve been a big fan of the series (of Mario RPGs) since the first Paper Mario, and the gimmicks in Super Paper Mario looked really clever.

I was doing some maintenance on E’Mail::Acme, today. It was failing tests on perl 5.6.2, and it turned out that I had found a number of weird changes in behavior between 5.6 and 5.8, most of which will never affect well-behaved programmers. Here are some of them.

Since roughly forever ago, I’ve meant to give String::Truncate the ability to try to truncate a string at word boundary. Done! That is, instead of turning “This is your brain on drugs.” into “This is your br…” it can now return “This is your…”.

I thought I’d posted these already, but it was brought to my attention that I only sent them to the YAPC list.

It’s pretty rare that my three siblings and I all get together in one place at one time. Even the last few Christmases haven’t been very successful reunions. Strangely enough, though, everyone was in town this weekend. Steve was down for a friend’s wedding, Heide and Pete were in town just to visit, and Carmita lives here now. We all went to Kip and Carmita’s for some food from the grill, some beer from the fridge, and some strife from the kids. The kids numbered six: Martha, Martha’s cousins Jacob, Anika, and Matthias, and Steve’s girlfriend Connie’s kids Peter and Francesca. There was some pushing, yelling, and fighting amongst the kids (except for Martha and Matthias), but for the most part everything was just fine.

Email::Simple is, I think, a pretty popular module. Quite a few other Perl software distributions require it or its subclass Email::MIME. I think its popularity is due in no small part to the very simple interface it provides. There’s no need to remember that sometimes you need the “bodyhandle” method and that sometimes you need “open.” There’s no need to keep track of encodings or parts or much of anything. It’s just a header and a body and that’s about it.

I stopped by the local gun (and coin and antique) store on Thursday and asked them to see if they could acquire a Yugo SKS for me. They said it might be a pain, as recent “scares” have created a rush, not to mention “the Democrats getting back in power.” This is funny both because it was said out loud and because it is probably true. Ha ha only depressing.

A few months ago, Dieter and I played around a bit with git. He used it more than I did, but we both agreed that it was way cool. It came up again at YAPC, and I gave it another look. It’s come a long way in those few months! The need for a friendlier user-oriented command apart from git is basically gone, and the tools for interoperation with other VCS finally exist and seem to work well.

I acquired a license to Acqualia’s “Soulver” application from a MacZOT bundle a few months ago. The idea is that you can do math in “plain English.” As any programmer can predict, this is a total joke.