I’m often amused by the fact that my catch phrase at work seems to be, “You know what else I hate?” I don’t think of myself as a big complainer, but I guess I do more than my fair share of it around the office, although I think it’s mostly non-work-related complaining. I mumble under my breath about the latest episode of Lost, or the way that T-Mobile organizes their automated phone menus, or the fact that Bugzilla is completely insane. (Okay, that last one is work-related.)

Every time I see a package variable used for configuration, I wince and shake my fist. Despite this, I have a number of modules that use globally-defined plugins. Some of these are usually not a big deal, because the modules are almost always going to be used in programs with one object of the class. Module::Starter and Mail::Audit fall into this group. (I don’t really think this is a good excuse, but it’s a reasonable explanation.)

I actually did have some bad dreams a few days ago, but I can’t remember what made them so bad. I remember being told that I needed a haircut, but that’s about it – and I doubt that was especially traumautic.

Sometime during the past year I got a few things working on my Mac that really made my life simpler: offlineimap, mutt, and postfix. offlineimap is a Python program for syncing an IMAP store to a set of Maildirs. It works bidirectionally and its installer is simple and just works. (Configuration was a little weird, but even that is very simple.) mutt is my MUA of choice, and its installation is even simpler.

This weekend, a few of the friends I’ve made through work came to Bethlehem to see whether the ice cream joints that I’d raved about were really all that. I’ll say more about that later; the short version is: of course they were. While they were here, I pointed out the route I take to get to the bus and answered some questions about how long it took me to get to and from the office. Usually, it’s a twenty or thirty minute walk to the bus, then a two hour bus ride, then a five minute walk. Those numbers can fluctuate a little, but not much. Someone asked why I’d want to cope with such a big commute, and I explained that my new job was better. This led to the question, “Well, how much better?”

I recently bought a used Nokia 6620. For the most part, it’s been a decent phone. I can use it to make calls, get online, and play Frozen Bubble. It’s had a few quirks, though, which seem to affect my battery life. Also, I can’t reassign all of the buttons on it. I think these problems are caused by my ancient firmware. In fact, I know some of them are: John as a newer version of the firmware and can reprogram a number of the buttons that I can’t.

I am taking over Mail::DeliverStatus::BounceParser development for some of our internal uses of it, and I want to make it better. The first thing I need to do is clean up some of the code so that I can read it. Once that’s done, though, I’ll need to start writing new tests! Most of the tests for this module will work like this: given a bounce that a human has already analyzed and described, make sure that BounceParser comes to the same conclusions.

Not the memory in my brain, mind you. That’s pretty lousy. The RAM that I ordered last week arrived yesterday while I was at work. The price difference between various vendors was so great that I’d been concerned that things wouldn’t work out. Everything is just fine, now.

To page up in iTerm, I hit shift-pageup. To go to the previous tab in Firefox, I hit control-pageup. There is no dedicated pageup key on Apple laptops. Instead, you hit Fn and the up arrow. I have found, on this keyboard, that I must depress the keys in the following order: modifier, fn, key. Shift-fn-up will page up. Fn-shift-up will not. This is really distracting, as it effectively makes one chord into a few tied and partially chorded strokes. Argh, nothing should work this way!

I won’t get into the details of how I waited in agony all weekend, refreshing FedEx’s page to see whether my MacBook had gotten any closer to Bethlehem, or how I sat in the bathtub on Monday morning, straining to hear the sounds of delivery men coming into the entryway. In the end, I got my laptop basically on time. It showed up on Monday, shortly before I had to leave for work. I was so excited to get it that the FedEx guy and his trainee looked a little amused – but that’s how I get when I get a new toy. I took some photos as I unwrapped everything, which was fun: opening Apple hardware is always like opening a present, largely because of the well-designed packaging.