Seriously, if I ever go 48 hours without seeing a global notice on freenode IRC, I think I will fall over in disbelief.

Actually, I’m sure Bugzilla is better than some things. I wrote a ticket tracker at IQE. I think most small business programmers write a ticket system at some point. Mine was sort of complicated, in a good way. If the code hadn’t sucked, I’d release it. I think I’d like to get really good with RT instead, though.

Last night, the phrase “dharma initiative” appeared on Lost. I immediately whoised and googled it, and found nothing interesting. There were a lot of links to Hindu sites.

In preparing to run a role-playing campaign or two, I’ve been reviewing a lot of old games that I used to enjoy. I’ve subjected myself to a lot of really lousy material, but it’s been mostly enjoyable. In fact, half the time it’s the extremely lousiness that makes it so much fun. (It is baffling to consider the likelihood that there exist people who actually like Rifts as it was written.)

I had two weird dreams last night, capped off by a dream in which I was wondering what those two dreams meant.

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.”