Yesterday afternoon, I saw that my Newegg order would be “shipping soon.” I hoped I’d see my drives before Friday. This morning, I saw that it had shipped. Not only that, but it had shipped from Edison, New Jersey, and was already out for delivery to my apartment.

I’ve got nothing much to report: life continues on, and is pretty much unexciting and acceptable.

Today, I got an email from Tom, my replacement at IQE. He’d found himself needing a new kind of tolerance for Number::Tolerant. I originally wrote Number::Tolerant for IQE’s characterization system, and I really enjoyed working on it. Once I left, though, I didn’t have much reason to work on it.

Rubric has had a CLI since forever. It has basically been a bunch of crappy little scripts that did one or two things each, badly, with lousy command line processing. I really want to fix this, since one of the biggest complaints I get is that it’s too hard for muggles to install Rubric. I’d like to eliminate any need for people who have no clue to ask for help installing things.

I usually carry a little 40GB LaCie “Porsche” drive with me. I keep some random stuff on it, mostly movies that I got from Netflix and want to have on a lower power-consumption format to watch on the bus.

For Christmas, I received a $25 gift certificate from BN.com. I used $23 of it to buy Ratchet and Clank: Up Your Arsenal. This left me with two dollars of credit with Barnes and Noble.

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.)