Childhood dream fulfilled
Like many other eight year olds, I was caught up in the Ghostbusters craze some twenty years ago. I watched the movie so often I knew most of the script. As a fledgling roleplayer I had the Ghostbusters RPG. As an imaginative child I would procure many household items (vacuum cleaners, turntables, radios, hairdryers) for conversion into ghostbusting equipment, which (much to my parents chagrin) usually involved them being disassembled and the electronics coated in cooking oil to shield against ghosts.

I also had the Ghostbusters computer game, for the Commodore 64. It was a good game for its era, although its primary selling points were the song lyrics on the title screen, and two voice-synthesized phrases: Ghostbusters! and It slimed me!.

Despite hours of play of the Ghostbusters computer game, I never managed to complete it. The last scene involved sneaking two ghostbusters past the marshmallow man, and I could only ever get a single one past. I had heard tales of friends of friends who had done it, but nobody I had actually met in the flesh.

Yesterday, on a whim, I grabbed a copy of Ghostbusters for my emulator and tried my luck again. As fate would have it, I got past the marshmallow man on the very first game, with the very first two ghostbusters. My childhood dream was fulfilled.

Unfortunately, like many games of its era, the end-scene for the Ghostbusters C-64 game was rather uninspiring. A brief and unexciting animation, followed by some written text which amounts to a little more than Congratulations, you have won. Regardless of the poor ending, I still feel superior over my peers for having seen it.

Breakfast dreams shattered
Awoke rather early today in preparation for a long trip across town to visit an irregular client. With some excitement I realised that I woke early enough to allow me to comfortably make my favourite breakfast: soft-boiled eggs with soldiers and espresso coffee.

Unfortunately, we were out of bread, so this dream never came to fruition. In hindsight I probably could have walked to the corner store and picked up some bread rather than writing a journal entry about things I thought were cool when I was eight, and what I was planning to have for breakfast.

Photos of The Damian
As part of our Perl Training Australia's advertising campaign we're looking at adding pictures of our trainers to both the website and a number of our advertising materials. Since we have a number of courses to be conducted by Dr Damian Conway early next year (bookings are open), Jacinta politely asked Damian for an appropriate photo. To quote from the e-mail that ensued:

Awake too early
I woke up this morning before most of the cron jobs on the servers I maintain. That's much too early for my liking. I've had a busy week, and a busy day and weekend ahead. Unfortunately that leaves me with little time to write in my journal.

At least the training centre where I'm teaching today has half-decent coffee.

On an unrelated topic, there's now a Table of Contents of all my journal entries, which extends way back before I started using the system on use.perl.

Just looking at the advertisements
Normally when people purchase a magazine, they do so for the content. Ads usually get glanced at, and sometimes will invoke a reaction from the reader, but they're rarely the reason to purchase the magazine in the first place.

Yesterday I was working with Jacinta on an advertisement for Perl Training Australia. Neither of us are marketing geeks or have great graphical design skills, so we decided to see how other people advertise. We went through a number of magazines that we had received recently, and just looked at the ads.

It was only afterwards that we realised that despite spending considerable time examining those magazines, neithre of us had actually read any real content. "That was a magazine on business banking? Are the articles any good?"; "I don't know. I didn't read them either."

I believe that our final, full-page, colour advertisement looks acceptably swish. It will be appearing in next month's Builder magazine.

Lemonade III
In order to use the (literally) buckets of lemons that are dropping from our tree, we've started Lemonade III. We've learnt from our earlier attempts, and expect the final product to be quite drinkable.

Unfortunately, the yeast seems to be having trouble starting. We're using a champagne yeast, and it may be having problems with the pH of the solution, which is quite acidic with all that lemon juice. We've given it a kick today (a cup of warm active yeast and sugar), but if it still doesn't take after a few days we may need to change yeasts entirely.