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 In fact, I know some of them are: John as a newer version of the firmware and can reprogram a number of the buttons that I can’t.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.

From what I can tell, the MacBook does dual channel RAM. It comes with two 256 meg sticks. I wanted more RAM, and I started shopping for it with the assumption, “Apple overcharges for RAM.” This has been true since the dawn of time, from what I know, so it seemed safe.

Previously, I had wondered whether I could cope if the new iBook replacement phased out the twelve-inch PowerBook. I made a list of my requirements:

I really loafed today – that is, after a really annoying bit of network trouble with a colo this morning. Once that was done with, I just played a lot of Sly 3 and poked at some code. When Gloria got back, we went downtown for ice cream, and Barbara had my favorite flavor, peppermint stick. It was awesome. We walked around downtown for a little while and looked at the arts and crafts market that was set up on Main Street, then headed home. At home, we watched a lot of Food Network; they were running a number of back-to-back shows about pies. A number of the pies looked extremely delicious.

I got an email from Tom about a problem he was having with Number::Tolerant. That reminded me to have a look at releasing the trivial changes I had sitting in my repository. While doing that, tab completion reminded me of Number::Nary, so I went and had a look at it. In 0.05, I’d removed a secret feature that I’d written into 0.04. It was very badly done in 0.04, as I recall, but I re-added it correctly, and that makes me happy.

I’m watching a documentary about the creation of new weapons systems. It’s always interesting to see the technology, but I’m always made somewhat uncomfortable by the fact that the machinery is designed to take human life. Many of the military personnel they talk to use euphemisms which, I imagine, are drilled into them to depersonalize battlefield killing. (I’m really just guessing at that.) They say, for example, that they will “deactivate an enemy installation” (by raining shrapnel into a foxhole).