Smoking
I have an interesting dilemma at work. Our new support person, Kathryn, is an unsuccessful ex-smoker. She gave up for a while, but she's now buying and smoking cigarettes again. Since she wants to give up, I'd like to help Kathryn beat her habit. Unfortunately, it's hard to argue with complete and utter unthinking physical addiction, and nicotine addiction is about as strong as it gets.

I've never smoked, I've never had the desire, and I don't intend to start. I have had a family member die a painful and protracted death from a smoking related illness, and I don't think that experience is something I will ever forget. I can't think of very many worse ways to die.

I'm not an anti-smoking zealot, but if someone wants to give up, then I'm seriously very happy to help them. My dilemma is that I don't know how. I've tried taking Kathryn's cigarettes, but she just buys more. I've even offered to trade her cigarettes for lollies and sugary things (Kathryn has a sweet-tooth). Alas, no luck so far.

Bughunting
Sam managed to find the REAL bug-of-doom that I had spent so long looking for. It ended up that our daemon had opened a couple of unix-domain sockets before forking, and the children inherited and used the open file descriptors. Due to the nature of the code this was okay during quiet periods, but caused huge problems during load. Sam was presented with the Bugfinder's Beer and everyone is happy. Good work Sam!

Diplomacy
Very interesting turn. It seemed that everyone lied to everyone, and a very messy turn was had by all. What fun! I'm looking forward to see how it all turns out.

Finance::Quote
I'm very thankful to Jacinta for her work. She's spent a lot of time cleaning up code, making sure things are consistant, and reviewing my hacker's guide and other documentation.

I'm playing with Debianising Finance::Quote, although it will probably be a while before I get the proper hang of it. I've got some examples to work by, so I'm using them.

Cartooning
I'm once again walking the fine line and have restarted my cartoons.

Movies
Watched LG-5: City in Space, a 3D movie at the IMAX theatre. The special effects were good, but the plot wasn't great.

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.

Today
Today is coding day. I'll be spending it working on Finance::Quote and making it do all the spiffy things I want it to.

CVS
I'm always amazed in interviews when people tell me that in their previous jobs they didn't use a revision control system. I can't imagine doing any sort of serious coding without CVS. If I were any better friends with CVS then I'd probably be sleeping with 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.