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?”

On Saturday Gloria, Phil, Walt, Geoff, and I met up at Waffle House around eight o’clock and had some breakfast. Afterward, the men headed up toward Canada, and Gloria headed back to keep the home fires burning.

Gloria, John C., and I just saw Land of the Dead. It was good.

yellow bulldozer
hides behind the toolshed
like a smiling child