I made some remarks like this on #perl recently: Every time I make a new Kwiki, I dislike it because it has no features. Then I install a few plugins, and I like it a little, because it’s nearly what I need. Then I decide to write a few plugins to add the last few features I want, and I hate Kwiki because I realize that I need to deal with some part of plugin writing that isn’t documented, even on the Kwiki Kwiki. Finally, I get things working and I love Kwiki because I have conquered it. The thing is, I want to love it because writing plugins is so easy, not because it’s an ordeal that I can survive.

Gloria and I slept in, today. More accurately, I slept in, and when she got back from working the four to eight a.m. shift at the gym, Gloria got back in bed with me while I finished out my one to ten shift in bed. She made waffles, I packed, and we went to Mass. (This morning’s Mass was sort of disjointed. I think we should try for the 10:30 next week. It is the Cadillac of Masses.)

I think canonical stupid playground expansion of Adidas was “all day I dream about sex,” but I remember one particularly stupid variant I heard when I was in elementary school: “all day in dad’s apartment, sexing.” Sexing? The only time I’ve heard that word used is when talking about identifying the gender of an animal – namely a guinea pig.

What a day! Work was super busy, in part for reasons unknown and in part because Dieter is out of town, so if something breaks there is a big amount of learning required. It’s something like: find what broke, learn how it should work, learn how it’s supposed to be fixed, learn why that doesn’t work, then learn how to actually fix it. Looking back on the day, from the eleventh hour, it sort of looks like it was fun. I remember, though, that earlier today I was feeling really frustrated.

Podcasting is sort of an interesting idea, I guess, but there aren’t any podcasts I feel really interested in hearing. The only thing I regularly listen to is NPR. Right now, NPR has RSS feeds. Each feed headline leads to a web page that summarizes the article and has a link to a Real Media or WMP audio stream.

At Pobox, I met this guy Thomas Thurman. One day Dieter gave me a link to a funny little page on his site, where I saw a Gnusto link in his sidebar. Gnusto is a few things. First and foremost, it’s a spell in the Zork universe; it makes things glow. Beyond that, it’s a Mozilla extension that lets you play Infocom (Z-Machine) games in your browser. I never really used Gnusto; I’d tried the first few releases, which were very, very experimental, and went back to Frotz. Still, it was neat.

I meant to write this yesterday, and to write something more interesting today. Maybe I’ll catch up tomorrow.

I’m setting up a little cross-program data validation. Program A does a little validation of some data which it will pass to Program B, which wants to be very strict. Since I don’t really care about the data, even once it’s in Program B, I’m trying to make Program B relax a little bit.

This entry has nothing to do with the fact that the button on my boxers is too small for the buttonhole and should be replaced.

Tonight, at the fireworks, a kid sat next to me on the wall by Town Hall. He was about nine, and his mother was with him. Shortly before the fireworks began, he asked, “Why do we celebrate the fourth of July?”