Last night, I “finished” the single player campaign in Halo 2. Why the scare quotes, you ask? It’s not because I wasn’t playing Legendary (I was playing Normal). It’s that Halo 2 didn’t have a very satisfying ending. I heard no end of complaining about this in the internets, so I was pretty well prepared.

We wanted to send out a “Seasons Greetings” mail to our customers. I asked why we couldn’t just use Office’s mail merge feature, and it turned out that we wanted a custom “from” for each recipient, so that every customer would get the email from his sales rep. This requirement was later dropped, at which point I realized that Outlook doesn’t mail merge for email. You can only mail merge if you’re going to print, fold, and post your snail mail. Ugh!

cold and so windy
the windows don’t keep it out
i wrap in pink fleece

Subject: Religious-Like Footage of Hollywood Actresses

Refactoring code is the best. By making a promise to myself to refactor (mercilessly), I can get my code written quickly, It isn’t beautiful, but it works. I get to write lots of code. Then, when it works, I get to go back /and write it again/! Not only that, but I get to make it better. Then, because it’s better, I can use it to do more things, which I code quickly, and then get to re-code.

hit snooze, nine minutes
there is snow, ice, the office
let me stay in bed

old friends are gone now
they don’t answer my email
a cold dry morning

I don’t understand my own modus operandi, but here it is:

1. identify a problem
2. produce simplest easy solution
3. totally ignore solution for X duration
4. get around to trying it

Well, I knew I’d forgotten to tell Number::Tolerant to require 5.6, which it wants. (I like warnings and our, and I’m willing to require 5.6 for them. It’s old!) Now I realize it needs 5.8, too, due to this weird bug:

I really couldn’t stomach the idea of working on the shipping system today, so I opened up the old bug list and looked around. One that caught my eye was a stupid little bug in the CGI form parser for part of our requirements system. It was having trouble turning a field in the form “FLOAT - FLOAT” into a tolerance – with Number::Tolerant, that is.