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!

Last night, my laptop starting making its weird noises again. This morning, they had gone from “weird,” past “awful,” right to “unholy.” It was like there was a duck or bicycle horn inside my computer, making noise that I didn’t think a hard drive could make.

Sometimes, a transaction shows up in my online bank statement that I can’t identify. This is nearly always because it shows up as an address instead of a business name. Most credit charges show up by name, but debit charges sometimes just say “1234 Street Drive.”

I really, really like DBD::SQLite, but I wish it didn’t have such irritating little quirks. I’m not sure how much of the problem is SQLite and how much is DBD::SQLite, but it drives me batty. Here’s today’s example:

This morning, I stumbled out of bed and to my laptop, only to find the machine asleep. It wouldn’t wake, which told me that the battery was nearly empty. It was still plugged in, but the plug light was off. I unplugged and replugged it a few times, but nothing helped. I used Gloria’s brick for a while and just before leaving home gave it another go. This time, it worked.

Gloria had a long yoga teacher training class, today, so we went to the 07:30 Mass. There were fewer screaming kids than at most 10:30 masses, but the two who were there really made up for the difference. The Kyrie and Gloria were recited, which was nice, but they weren’t sung. Neither, in fact, was the Psalm, which I thought was a loss. Maybe the 9:00 mass will be a compromise: a sung Kyrie and Gloria and Psalm, but a few more babies.

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.