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.

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?”