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?

Simon sent me this link.

I’m feeling pretty grumpy, which is pretty much the exact opposite of the way I’d like to be feeling around bedtime on Christmas. I blame the Marquis Theater in Easton.

I think this is one of those things that won’t be so horrible once I get down to it, but I’m putting it off because from the outside it looks obnoxious.

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.