I released 0.08 of Rubric the other day, which had quite a few improvements over 0.06. There weren’t any really major changes, but the little changes added up to, in my opinion, a greatly improved user experience.

A few months ago, Dann had bet me that in two weeks I’d be able to pick up Resident Evil 4 for twenty bucks at Game Crazy. I challenged him to put his money where his mouth was, and he took me up. On April 2nd, I went over to Game Crazy and that found the only used copy was about $40. I picked it up, and on Tuesday I’ll get my winnings. In the meantime, I’ve been playing a good amount of Resident Evil. I think I’ve put in about five hours in the last week, and it’s been pretty darn enjoyable.

Why does MS introduce peripherals that are well-designed, and then make them less so? Their Natural keyboards used to have normal inverted-T style arrow keys. Now they have some sort of insane cross configuration. There, they took the standard and ditched it for something dumb. I guess that’s par for the course.

My daily accomplishments form lets me keep track of how I spend my time each day. When I realize I’ve utterly wasted a block of time, or can’t account for it just ten minutes later, I color it in black. Today, I had an hour and three quarters of lost time, which is just awful.

I keep seeing people post links to Rubric, but they post the link to version v0.06_02 or something. It’s frustrating, because I imagine newbies downloading an old, broken version and going nuts.

Well, I originally meant to use Rubric as a place to keep notes as well as bookmarks, and then I decided it would be a decent journal system, too. I didn’t actually use it for that, though, because it didn’t seem worth it. With a few Bryar annoyances and Bryar looking to be somewhat abandoned, I figured it was time to move.

I’ve got to say, it was a good day. I got to work and, after finishing my yogurt, I flipped through the bug reports and feature requests on de.lirio.us and put them on my to do list. There’s a user named era who has really been cranking them out. I ended up with fourteen line items for Rubric and felt somewhat intimidated by the fact that my to do list was half-full at eight in the morning.

Today started with two guinea pigs in our apartment, and ended with three. The new baby is tiny and cute and awesome. We don’t know yet whether it’s a girl or a boy. We’re hoping for another girl.

I’ve made some revisions to the paperwork I use to try to organize my day. I figure other people might find it useful, although the chances of that are probably slim. If you want nice simple todo/done forms, suitable for clipboards (full or half sized), they’re in my hacks dump.

First, a question. When I run this code:

use Data::Dumper;
use PadWalker qw(peek_my);
{
my $lex = "HELLO";
sub pad {
    my $l = shift;
    warn Dumper(peek_my($l));
    print "While you're here, I'll print my enclosed scalar: $lex\n";
}
}
pad(0);