Sometimes, I get caught up in the metaphor, and I start to imagine my software in terms of its convenient abstraction. I picture my Template Toolkit sitting on my workbench and I wonder where I the stencil for drawing an undef. I create a Socket and get visions of other programs plugging into a small opening in mine. I wonder whether Perl::Squish will someday collect the juices squeezed out of my code.

My PowerBook’s original power brick died. Well, actually, the bit where the cable met the laptop-end power plug fell apart. I got a replacement, and that one did, too.

Recently, Jennifer asked me whether I’d seen that TiVo had Connect Four. I said I hadn’t, and thought that was really weird. A few days later, I went digging around and found it; it’s actually called Skull and Crossbones, probably for some stupid copyright reason. I wasn’t really interested in Connect Four, but there were some other things I liked: SameGame, a podcast reader, traffic and weather reports, and probably some other things I can’t think of now. There was also a game called Wordsmith, which was listed with Scrabble piece as its icon.

We got a phone bill about a week ago, and it listed a $10 charge for Blinko. What’s Blinko? Who knows! Google suggested that it’s some sort of scam, which seemed likely. Gloria said she’d received some sort of opt-out SMS from them, and replied to opt out. I checked their web site, and they look like one of those wretched little “we send garbage crap to your phone for too much money!” operations.

I keep getting questions about what the hell I’m doing, so I’m going to try and answer them here.

Saturday was Andy’s annual wine tasting party, at his eternally in-progress house. We picked up a French blend that I hadn’t tried before and headed over at about 19:30, and found the place pretty packed already. By the end of the night, his house was positively jam-packed with people – at least on the first floor. The second floor never got particularly busy, even though it had plenty of room, some seating, and a nice warm fire.

ALL ABOUT MARKUP

Someone complained, looking at the beta version of some new reports, that the “when” field was too precise. They didn’t need “17 days and 6 hours ago,” “17 days ago” would do. I was doing this with Sean Burke’s Time::Duration, wrapped by my own Time::Duration::Object, which just turns a number of seconds into an object with methods based on the functions provided by Time::Duration. It’s been a very useful module, but I never noticed that it had a major bug.

For a long, long time, I have thought, “It will be way cool to have better text-to-html in Rubric!” I really wanted a decent markup system for doing this, and I didn’t want to make any decisions. Decisions are hard. Instead, I punted: “I’ll figure it out later!”

I had a weird, bad dream. On my way home, I saw a couple of mentally disabled people jogging. One of them fell down and I heard a shot. Later, I was called in to talk to the police. It turned out that they had been carrying a gun and accidentally shot someone – or so everyone thought, including Dick Cheney and his bodyguard, who were there. For some reason.