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.

It’s Valentine’s Day! That’s all I have to say about it so far. Tonight, Gloria and I are going to go to Ichiban for sushi, and I am looking forward to it, especially after today.

Gloria and I went to the 10:30 Mass this morning. It was full to the gills with little children. If the little children to adult ratio had been any higher, I would have suspected that I was among a bunch of Catholics! It was hard to hear a lot of what was said over the dull roar of crying and muttering. The homily was clear, at least. It was also fairly good, I thought. It got bonus points for including the word “obeisance.”

I upgraded to Mac OS 10.3.8 last night, and this morning things kept not working or showing up funny in iTerm. Then I realized that caps lock was no longer acting like control. The upgrade has broken uControl, presumably with new scrollwheel code. Richard Clamp posted a fix on the mailing list, but it didn’t help me.

I meant to get to bed just after ten last night, but I was up late writing my last entry and talking to my aunt about iPods. I was tired, but once I bed I still couldn’t get to sleep. This morning, I woke up around five and dozed on and off until almost six. I got up, got clean, and headed to Mass. Today is the Day of Ashes, which seems like a really good time to really start trying to be better at meeting my obligaitons.

Work today was OK. My ur-boss is in town, and I sat with him and went over The Big Project. He seemed impressed and enthused, which was good for my morale, I think.

I worked today, mostly from home. I popped by the office to pick up some fastnachts. Here in the Lehigh Valley, there’s a fair amount of Pennsylvania Dutch influence. The Pennsylvania Dutch are German-descended, not Dutch, and instead of Carnival or Mardi Gras, we have Faschnacht Day. Before Ash Wednesday, we eat donuts. Gloria and I had ours today. They were good – nice and plain.