For a very long time, I had a small number of images that I used as my desktop. Most of them were symmetrical, easy to ignore, and blue. They were easy on the eye, provided enough contrast for my desktop icons, and didn’t distract or irritate me. Too often, I see people running with elaborate landscapes as their background, or family photos, or women wearing bikinis, or other busy, distracting images. The even crazier thing is people who do that and use transparent terminals.

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!”