Today has been a weird day, full of all kinds of stuff.

In the last few episodes I’ve seen travel into the past to stop an alien plot (see also DS9 in the 60’s and TNG in 1849). There was an alternate future that undid itself by the end of the episode (see also innumerable episodes of TNG), and a few others. Now we’re back to social commentary: a group of religious zealots intent on eliminating the heretics on their homeworld (“they think the world took one day longer to create than we do”) sieze control of Enterprise by setting up a group of suicide bombers around the ship. Meanwhile, Phlox and Archer learn of dissent in the ranks when one of the women in the group wants to have a space abortion.

When I work on code, I nearly always replace UNIVERSAL::isa and UNIVERSAL::can with block-eval of a method call instead. This lets objects that overload isa or can work properly, and still avoids program death when the invocant is an invalid invocant.

We had an electrician out last week, and we’ve gotten just about all of our electrical work done. We still have our crappy old front porch light, as the one we got wasn’t going to be a suitable replacement. We found another one to use, but I haven’t picked it up yet. Instead, we got some more smoke detectors, a fire extinguisher for the kitchen, and a new doorknob. I really like the knobs we picked; we’re planning to use them in all the interior doors. They’re brushed nickel, lever-style knobs. (There are photos on Flickr.)

Every once in a while I hear about how good Enterprise got by the end. I watched the first season a year or two ago, and it was so-so, but had some pretty good episodes. I’m working through the second season, now, and it’s consistently mediocre. It’s also got the most bizarre sexual overtones. In the episode I’m watching now, Stigma, there are two plots. In one, it turns out that T’Pol was mind meld raped by a Vulcan gay and has contracted Vulcan brain AIDS. Vulcan doctors are out to end her career, so Archer and T’Pol go have a Philadelphia-style trial where the gay judge doctor stands up and says, “I am a Vulcan gay!” Well, actually he says something like, “I am a member of that minority which practices a different form of intimacy, due to either birth or genetics; it isn’t clear.”

I use Sub::Exporter a good bit. It makes my life easier by letting me generate nice, simple mixins. I think I just had a good idea for typing even less.

This week, I bought a Canon Elura 100. I figure that once we’ve got a screaming baby, we’ll want to take lots of video, so that when we have a screaming teenager, we can embarass him or her in front of his friends. When I unpacked the camera (which is absolutely tiny), I found lots of little scraps of paper. There was a registration card; a leaflet suggesting, in eleven different languages, that only Canon accessories should be used; a pamphlet explaining how to install the Windows-based video software; a blue-on-white page explaining, in fourteen different languages, how to clean the tape heads; and a 366 page manual, containing 133 pages in each of three languages.

Sometimes, I see a bad review of a module on the CPAN, and I wonder why it wasn’t filed as a bug report instead. For example, I recently saw this review of the popular and indispensable Time::Local. The reviewer makes three points:

Holy cow!

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.