Today, I was thinking about my long-delayed plan to reimplement the Easterbrooks’ “Catholic Calendar” page, and I got to thinking I should start with the easy bit, the daily Bible readings. I make a little WWW::Mechanize script to TokeParse the daily readings at usccb.org. Their HTML isn’t really super-semantic, though, and I already see some future dates where they do odd things, and while I can handle the special cases, I thought I might as well ask them to be more standardized.

At work, I’m trying to be busy and productive, but it’s hard for a few reasons. I know I can’t finish the current project, so I’m trying to deal with some edge cases, but mostly to write documentation. I’ve written a number of documents for my theoretical successor describing at a glance the state of various projects. Now I’m trying to find all the weird little things I tend to take care of now and then and document those. I’ve called on the staff to let me know what weird things I do, but response so far as been so-so. (I was reminded of a few weird things, though, so that was good.) I’m not too worried, since I imagine that things I forget may end up becoming consulting visits.

Doctor Girlfriend died today at exactly one o’clock.

My job has provided me with a phone for the past few years. It’s sort of a piece of crap. It’s a Motorola i90c, one of the Nextel PTT phones. It’s gigantic and has a really lousy set of features, like most of the Nextel phones. It has a lousy calendar and lousy memopad. It has a stupid Java environment and a stupid little set of network services.

About a week ago, I gave up all hope that our baby guinea pig was a girl. We named him Doctor Girlfriend, anyway.

Jen and Frank’s wedding was really nice. It was on a warm, super-windy beach in Pensacola. The ceremony was really short, but pleasant, fun, and relaxed. The groomsmen all wore Hawaiian shirts and the bridesmaids were all barefoot. It was nice.

Well, after about four and a half years, I am leaving IQE. That’s a pretty impressive stint, I think, for a job I started as a temp. I was hired to make Excel charts, and I ended up sticking around to write a lot of Perl. I had a lot of good time and a lot of bad times, but finally I just needed to get out of there. I think my enthusiasm was gradually ground down to a point from which I’m not sure it could’ve recovered, and I feel that’s it’s better for me to go, now, than to try and stay.

written: 2005-04-22 18:19

Today, the Church got a new pope. I’m waiting to see how it goes. I’m all for orthodoxy, but I know there’s a lot of grumbling over the supression of free thought over the last twenty years. (Or, as the Church calls it, “heresy.”)

Once I had proven that my laptop would boot and basically run, I ejected the DVD that I’d managed to cram through the misaligned loading slot. It had a tiny crack in it, which I’m sure it got from being jammed in and pried out. This was madness! I wasn’t going to go for a year with a disc-breaking optical drive!