Watched Episode I: The Phantom Menace on tape. The special effects were good, but the movie SUCKED! George Lucas has certainly turned to the dark side, I'm sure of it. I delayed watching TPM for a long time because everyone else told me it was bad, but I had no idea just how truly bad it was. Somehow I feel that The Star Wars Christmas Special had to have been better than this.

Finance::Quote
Got heaps of coding done over the weekend. Still needs a lot of polish before the next release, but we're certainly getting there. Haven't heard back from Jon about The Perl Journal article I'm supposed to be writing yet. Will send him another letter about it.

Finance::Quote
Made a tiny branch for Finance::Quote 0.18, GnuCash edition. F::Q was originally part of GnuCash, and a few months ago I branched it off into its own development. I still roll the changes back into the GnuCash tree, but they require minor changes here and there. It's amazing how the words "feature freeze" can get me to start hacking code again. :)

Rockclimbing and Hackey-sack
Ian injured his arm playing hackey-sack. I don't know how that's possible, considering that you don't even use your arms in hackey-sack, but Ian did it nonetheless. As such, he dropped out of climbing this week. :(

Perl
Makes simple jobs easy, makes hard jobs possible. My goodness, I really do love perl sometimes. Just simple things like being able to throw around references to anonymous functions can really make a man's day.

Work
Spent an entire day on things political. I really didn't join this company to spend my days arguing politics, I actually joined it to code. Unfortunately the culture, values, and many other reasons why I joined have been eroded. Dan is coming back on Monday, and while I'm sure he'll be able to fix some problems, he won't be able to fix all of them.

I'm working on plans should the conditions at Schoolsnet become unworkable, and how to try and stop the decline before that happens. I don't really want to leave -- I love the people here and what's left of the culture, but at the same time I don't want to be working for some corporate juggernaut.

Dave reminded me that GnuCash is going into a feature freeze on Sunday, so it looks like Saturday I'll be coding and rolling.

Unfortunately the latest GnuCash from the CVS tree seems to have a couple of bugs that are making double-entry impossible. Since double-entry is the best thing since sliced accountants, I might have to return to the previous version for a little while.

Food
Jacinta's liver cleansing diet is doing wonders... I arrive home each night to a well planned and almost prepared meal. Jacinta's even doing the dishes for me so that she has things to cook with. I wonder when she'll realise that if she's doing the cooking then I guess I should be doing the cleaning... I hope she doesn't, because I hate cleaning. Maybe I can convince Gwen to do the cleaning instead?

TPJ
Received an e-mail from Jon Orwant asking if I'd be interested in writing an article for The Perl Journal about Finance::Quote. I tried to send a more intelligent reply than just "Hell Yeah!", which was my initial response.

Bugs
Damn hisenbugs resurrecting themselves. Unfortunately finding bugs that only occur "infrequently, and for no good reason" is a very tricky process.

Gardening
Compost heap is full. A year's worth of hard work has turned foodscraps and garden waste into a huge amount of beautiful vermicast (worm poo). The effects of this stuff is impressive, but my supply outstrips my demand at my current property (tiny back-yard).

I'd love to move somewhere with more space, but I don't want to go from rented property to rented property. This probably means I should start looking at houses again, and maybe re-evaluating my financial situation since Gwen is living with us now. Mind you, I have no idea how long Gwen will be staying, so any calculations I make should err strongly on the side of caution (then again, they always do).