Visitors to my apartment may be astounded to learn that there are no longer any CDs, DVDs, or video games piled on the floor. Gloria has long been saying that we needed to get them into shelves, and I finally got around to taking her advice. I ordered three “Atlantic Oskar Multimedia Storage System” units from racksandstands.com, and we’ve installed the first two.

Turn a phone number into a regex by replacing numbers with classes of its letters. The number 2 becomes [ABC]. Zero and one become space. Concatenate these together and grep the dictionary for matching words.

At the LUG meeting on Tuesday, I saw that Brian R. was using the Google bar in Firefox. It’s 2005 and people are still using the Google bar! The guy giving the presentation had the default Google widget still on his address bar. Why is that damn thing still there?

Last night I finished reading Don’t Think of an Elephant. I did not enjoy it.

I’m a little worried about knave. When he’s sitting on a flat surface (the desk, the floor, my lap) everything is fine. When I rotate it so the base is not parallel with the floor, it makes a noise. I mentioned this before, but now I know what the noise reminds me of: the sound that hair clippers make when they get jammed. It’s also interesting that this noise only occurs while I’m turning the machine. If I hold it at a 45 degree angle with the floor, and keep it still, it’s quiet, but if I constantly turn it side to side, the noise persists.

Gloria is off to a kickboxing workshop today, and I’m left to my own devices. I puttered around for a while, getting nothing much done, except for a backup. Note to self: burn backup to image, then image to disk. This reduces the risk of coastering a DVD. Finally, I let myself turn on the dreaded TV to provide background stimulus. With MAS*H playing in the background, I started to get work done. I feel sort of like Robert De Niro in Awakenings; I really just want to get to the window to look out, but I can’d do it without the pattern on the floor. (This analogy makes more sense in my head than on disk, I think.)

I really like Ruby. Working with it is just so much fun! I wrote my checkbook balancer in it, and everything else I do is pretty much just messing around because it’s fun. I need to find something more practical to do, but it’s usually easier for me to use Perl instead.

staring at my screen
I try to care
but accomplish nothing

The human race has produced many motion pictures. Many of them have been labelled as classics. I have seen many of these classics. Quite a few of them have irritated me. I will name a few.

the sound of a train
traveling through
the phone line