It’s hard to explain what’s so good about Bret Easton Ellis’s books. On one hand, their themes are obvious and extremely blunt. On the other, the execution is subtle and sublime. I’ve read three of his books: American Psycho, Less than Zero, and now Rules of Attraction, in that order. In all of them, though less so in American Psycho, the characters lead pointless lives, revellilng in excess and hedonism. Their lives are so excessive as to be hard to believe, but the exposition of it is so dry that it’s as if nothing is occuring, despite the ongoing orgy of sex, drugs, and (sometimes) murder. Then, in the last few pages, there is – well, not a moment of enlightenment. A character may experience a passing thought, just the shadow of introspection, and the utter meaninglessness of his life is made more apparent than ever, and it’s a crushing force brought to bear on the reader.

The CPAN testers are, in general, a crew of kind-hearted people who perform a valuable service for module authors. They run tests for all kinds of modules – even ones that the tester just doesn’t care about. How else would we ever know that XML::Fudge::WithPeanuts doesn’t work on OpenVMS/3.2-cray?

Well, actually, I don’t plan to switch. I don’t think I have any real need to, although I guess I’ll find out if someday my client starts complaining that I’m able to see or create or modify some file that came in through WebDAV.

I noticed a while ago that the CPAN’s feed had stopped uploading. Most of my ability to write useful code hinges on the fact that I know the CPAN’s contents pretty well, and keep up to date on it. The loss of this feed did not bode well for me.

I just had the weirdest experience.

It had to happen eventually, didn’t it?

While preparing some information on the books I’m going to suggest for our reading club, I looked up Youth in Revolt and saw this across the top of the page:

Last night I was up late doing some preparation for a game today. I wanted to listen to some music while I worked, but I couldn’t get my damn Samba share to mount. It would wait and wait and wait. After ten minutes or so, I’d get a message that was pointless, as most Samba errors tend to be, at least on Mac OS. It was something like, “You can’t mount this share because stuff isn’t working.”

According to the latest TiVo News emailling, “we are targeting mid-2006 for Mac support for TivoToGo(TM)!)” This will make me very happy, and make me feel much better about not building a MythTV. I hope they hit that target. It may make bus rides less boring, even though it will give me a way to avoid reading.

I started using “rjbs” as my identifier everywhere a few years ago. It was a very good idea, and I should have started using it years earlier. I’ve given a fairly detailed history of other usernames I used in the past elsewhere. I’ll move that history to my wiki at some point, I guess. I just got to thinking about “rjbs” and other actually-related-to-my-name names on Thanksgiving, when talking with my Uncle Richard.