Recently, I’ve been trying to help do my part to prevent needless memory consumption. Today, at work, Dieter and I were talking about ways to reduce Email::Simple’s significant memory consumption. Here’s an example: I created an eight megabyte email (50 lines of headers, 10,000 of body) and wrote a program that slurps it and makes a new Email::Simple, giving a crude (ps-based) memory check as it goes.

I had thought that I’d just pre-order a Wii from Amazon and not worry about it. Then they failed to ever inform me of any pre-order periods, which filled up quickly and didn’t include me. The local video game places only took pre-orders if you’d agree to buy a pile of games. When the weekend came, I figured I’d be willing to wait a few hours in line, but not overnight.

Today, the weather was crap. It was extremely windy and rainy. In the afternoon, I started to hear a weird noise coming from outside, like the kind of fake thunder you make by shaking a sheet of aluminum. It turns out that the flashing from around the third floor roof came loose and was shaking around like crazy, barely dangling off the house. Just as we came back from the grocery, it came off and fell to the ground. There are now a few pieces of aluminum sitting on my rear porch.

I’m trying to get rid of a lot of the crap that’s crufting up my office. Today I went through my old college papers and threw out nearly all of them. On a handout from a hermeneutics class, “From Notes Made in 1970-1971” (I assume it’s Derrida), I saw the following marginalia from Young Self:

One of the Coding Monkeys pointed this site’s sample program out to me as a way to temporarily NAT map a port on my Airport to my laptop. I just run “portmap -a 6942” and I get that port for a while, which means I can host a SubEtha session. Awesome!

I finally got off my butt and took photos of our house and put them up on Flickr.

Gloria and I are watching King Kong. During a scene in which a giant ape is fighting three Tyrannosaurus Rex, she asked, “Could this movie be any more boring?”

I’ve heard a lot about Perl::Critic, and it has always sounded neat. Chris Dolan gave a talk about it at YAPC, and I decided I should give it a go. I didn’t get around to it until this week. I went through and installed a perl-critic.t in all my distributions, then started testing them. Nearly all the violations it found were in a few groups.

Shortly after getting back from Florida, I started to get a little sore throat. This quickly blossomed into a seriously sore throat and two swollen, bloodshot eyes. I usually avoid doctor visits when I think I can wait it out, but I was having a really hard time sleeping, eating, and talking, so Gloria gave me a lift to the weird little EmergiCareClinic or whatever it’s called. The name and concept remind me of something I’d expect in a cyberpunk novel, but I guess that’s just because I don’t know anything about how normal people get medical care.

Hooray for being home! Gloria and I had a number of good experiences on our trip to Florida, but it’s always nice to get home. Some people (mostly those who don’t know me very well) laugh when I say that I’m a boring homebody, but it’s really true. Since we returned home, Gloria and I have enjoyed lounging around the house, watching the TiVo backlog, and cuddling with our guinea pigs.