I ride Carl R. Bieber, Inc. twice a day, three days a week. Not all of the busses are in perfect condition, and sometimes a seat is broken. This morning, the seat in which I sat had a broken recliner handle. Even if I didn’t touch it, any pressure on my seat back would cause it to recline. For a while, I tried to remain upright. When that got difficult, as I worked, I moved to the aisle seat. There was a guy behind me, and there was no reason to make him try to cope with my arbitrary back and forth movements.

I thought it would a nice relaxing way to start my Sunday! I’d play some Disgaea, level up a few items, maybe even beat whatever level it was that I’d stopped playing on.

On #perl today, Jesse was asking about a module to convert binary data into a string using only explicitly permitted characters. This was a problem I encountered a year or two ago when trying to use MD5 sums as worksheet names in Excel. Excel has some weird subset of Latin-1 as valid characters in worksheet names. Unfortunately, when I went to pull up the code, I found that the only revision I took with me from IQE was missing most of that code (which I had replaced with something simpler).

My brother came over tonight. He said, “I’ll bring some beer.” I wasn’t really in need of beer or anything, but I figured we’d get some chips, drink some beer, and play some Nintendo. When he got here, he had about six cans of Coors Light. In my family, it is pretty well accepted that Coors Light is not beer.

I am feeling pretty full of beef satay and rice noodles. Today we went to lunch in celebration of Louis’s birthday, and it was good. A few weeks ago, Louis said (of my Thai red curry) something like, “I can’t imagine food much hotter than this.” We sort of gaped at him, and I think we have established as an ongoing objective, “make Louis eat spicier food.”

There are a few things I disagree with in PBP, but I’m just going to name the one that is current causing me the most inconvenience because I can’t just ignore the rule.

[ About a year ago, I wrote this to put “in escrow” until some future time. I meant to post it pretty soon after writing it, but I lost track of it. I stumbled across it recently while restoring some files from a backup. ]

Last time on “rjbs hates email software,” I was hating on Mail.app, which (as you may recall) sucks. I still use mutt for most of my email needs, but sometimes I (sort of) need to use a client with HTML support, for work. Lately, Mail.app doesn’t even start up anymore. (I probably need to go into ~/Library and delete things. Ugh.) Without sucky Mail.app, I’ve been using sucky Thunderbird.

Today was the third meeting of the book club at work. I was absent for the first meeting, and the second was a few weeks ago, for The Professor and the Madman. Today’s book was Murakami’s The Wild Sheep Chase. It was alright, but I didn’t feel like it was anything special. Murakami seems to be a very good writer, but a sort of uninteresting author. It’s an exaggeration, but not a huge one, to say that his books are like Lynch movies: well put together material that doesn’t really come together in the end. I think I was clearer at the meeting, actually: he connects a lot of the dots, but the particular set of dots that he chose to leave unconnected was really bizarre. He left unanswered the questions that seemed most unrelated, and which therefore seemed worth raising only to then give answers that would relate them to the book’s main themes.

On Friday, John came by Pobox North (my apartment) for most of the afternoon while he car was at the shop. We got gyros (at the awesome semiannual Greek Food Festival) and worked on our own projects. After work, Gloria took us to get his car. John and I headed for beers and dinner while Gloria headed home for dinner and to prepare for work. Just as we were passing my parents’ neighborhood, my brother called to tell us that he was in town, at my parents’ house, and locked out. We stopped by, helped him get his things inside, and headed over to Stahley’s for dinner. I think we had a pretty good time. Three dozen clams, twenty hot wings, a pizza, and three pitchers of beer: forty-five dollars. Even better, Steve treated!