John and I got to the bus station at about ten after five, as usual. Strangely, though, there was no bus waiting for us. We waiting anxiously for five minutes, and then really started to worry. There was a young woman who’d been waiting when we arrived, and she said she’d been there for about five minutes. Nobody else seemed queued up for the bus, which was pretty weird. Another regular showed up after a little bit, and we tried to figure out what was going on.

John C. and I were talking, for a few months, about getting a new rackmount and colocating it somewhere. That didn’t happen, but he did find a really great deal on a nice virtual server package, from Aktiom

I am trying to produce a SAX-based parser for Apple Property List documents. It’s been a frustrating, educational experience. BDFOY has a module, Mac::PropertyList, but it’s not what I want. First of all, it can’t just produce a simple Perl datastructure from a deep plist. That’s fine: I could just patch it to do so, and it would only take a few lines. The bigger concern is that it does its parsing with regular expressions, and takes more than twelve hours to turn my iTunes Music Library file into an object. I’m not sure how much more than twelve hours, because I gave up, at that point; I didn’t want my CPU pegged while I was on the bus back to work.

Gloria’s sister (and her immediate family) gave me, for Christmas, a gift certificate to Barnes and Noble. I didn’t really want to buy any books because (a) I had a lot of books to read already and (b) their prices sort of suck. I decided to pick up a video game, because video game prices are still pretty fixed. I got Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal, which is the third in the series. (Recently, a new Ratchet game was released, but it’s not a Ratchet and Clank game, and it’s different in format, so I still think the first three are a trilogy.)

I got up at 5:15 this morning so I could get in to work on the 6:30 bus. When I got to the terminal, I tried to purchase a new ten trip book of tickets. The clerk, however, didn’t understand how they worked.

I sort of meant to do this before the year started, but I’m not going to feel bad about that. None of my resolutions are so urgent that they couldn’t be disregarded for a few days worth of vacation time, anyway.

Yesterday, Gloria and I went out for a bonus Saturday morning and did our usual Saturday things, taking advantage of my day off. We went to Billy’s, where I got a burger. We went to the Hedgehog, where I got some granola ice cream, and we went to Alan’s, where I didn’t get anything, but Gloria got a cup of tea.

…the bread mix that Gloria picked up, to make our favorite bread-from-a-box, did not have a yeast packet in it. Damnit!

Among my Christmas presents were a few bike tools. The packages said they were from Santa, but I think my mom actually wrote that – the handwriting looked a lot like hers. Those tools were all Park tools: an FR-5 freewheel tool, a BBT-2 bottom bracket tool, and a CWP-6 crank puller. I was pretty excited to finally have a couple of tools, and a few days later I decided to see how much I remembered from class.

Very late in 2004, I made a list of things to do in 2005. Basically, my new year’s resolutions. Let’s review, shall we?