Today was Jay’s last day here. He finished his Math::Calculator implementation on Thursday, so I gave him something simpler. I asked him to reimplement one of my first-ever Perl programs, an Esperanto dictionary. It just took some text file I’d found (or maybe generated) of Esperanto and English words. Every line is one Esperanto word and an English meaning for it, tab-delimited. I wrote a little interactive lookup tool with regexps and a decent interface in about 55 lines. Jay didn’t do too much worse, which was nice to see. He had a few fewer features, but it was fine.

Ok, I’ll seriously try to lay off the guinea pig news after this update! Snoozer and Wookie seem pretty happy. We took them out for a joint game of “sit on Rik’s chest,” and Wookie won. They both seem happy to let us reach into the cage and pet them, although they still run for the pipes when we walk into view.

Gloria and I had been worrying about how to find a playmate for Snoozer. Snoozer seemed pretty despondent. She just hung out in her pipe and if she came out at all it was while we weren’t looking.

The CPAN mirror on my laptop now has an index that starts like this:

	File:       02packages.details.txt
	Description:Package names found in directory $CPAN/authors/id/
	Columns:    package name, version, path
	Intended-For: Automated fetch routines, namespace documentation.
	Written-By: CPAN::Mini
	Line-Count: 28162
	Last-Updated: Tue Mar8 03:08:06 2005

Yesterday, we went to the movie theater to see Million Dollar Baby. It was a really good movie. Clint Eastwood is The Best. Unforunately, the other moviegoers were sorely lacking in manners. The woman beside us was, it seemed, instant messaging someone on her phone. It was making keypad beeps and glowing a bright blue. The guy behind us kept tapping his feet to some unheard syncopation. A few people kept explaining scenes to each other. (“He said he likes PIE!!”) I really wanted to be polite and ask these people to behave, but I felt that if I did, and they said no, I would be unable to restrain myself from smacking them around.

Yesterday, I made some comments about liking American Express. Later that afternoon, sky mentioned that he, too, liked them and that he’d gotten the impression that many camelfolk are fans. We started talking about the various programs that AmEx offers and discussing what differs between UK and US service.

I really like American Express. I see people posting their “AMEX SUX” pages, but I don’t get it. They’ve never done anything but treat me right. Sure, they make a mistake here or there, but they’re just fine by me.

At work, I’m finally actually making progress on “attaching stuff to stuff.” The initial manifestation of this is “attaching special instructions (like Word documents) to shipping specs.” I had wanted to use CGI::Uploader, but it’s too screwed up for me at the moment. Its tests are welded to ImageMagick or GD or something, and they’re writting in a way that isn’t immediately clear to me, so I can’t easily pry them apart. It reminds me of the way CGI::Application has HTML::Template welded to it. The big annoyance for me is that there is no PPM for it, so it’s a pain to install at work.

I was really sick of dealing with Mac OS’s default perl install, which is just weird enough to be a big pain in my butt. I installed from source, which was fine, but it meant I had to install a lot of modules again. (I was not interested in adding /Library to @INC; I have an irrational fear of what would happen.) Now that I have SOAP::Lite installed, my blogging script will crosspost to use.perl again, and I think I will start writing more regularly again.

As is too often the case, I feel uninspired to get things done. I really want to stop being a lump, but I sit and try to work, and I just don’t want to. I can’t feel like I have anything to contribute to my own projects, and I feel like if I try to just work through it I will become horribly depressed.