It's been a damn dodgy past week or so. It started out pretty badly--Random, my dog, threw up some pennies. This wouldn't be a hugely bad thing (she'd eaten pennies before. And no, I don't know why) but back in the '90s sometime the US Mint decided that all-copper pennies were too expensive to produce, so they went to copper-clad zinc.
Now, copper by itself is fine unless you happen to be a sheep (A penny or two is enough copper to kill a sheep. Dunno why--just one of those things) but zinc is terribly toxic. Two pennies is enough to kill your average child if they're left to run all the way through. The copper cladding is eaten away by the stomach acids, and then the zinc comes out. That tends to lead to hemolytic anemia and possibly pancreatitis, neither of which are at all good.
So, it was off to the vet as soon as we knew, and a $1200 vet bill (which is still growing) to find out that she'd eaten nearly a dollar's worth of change (including some nickels and dimes).
After that, Karen and I had a blowup over the weekend. Things have been teetering on the brink for a while, and we'd more or less set the beginning of June for the make it or break it decision. Well, I'd made the mistake of putting Trick on the NetFlix rental list. Never rent and watch romantic comedies when things are going less than well.
Monday actually turned out well. I went out for a walk in the evening, and met someone. We talked for hours, and it made a lot of things clearer. That was good.
Wednesday Karen and I talked a bunch, and we've mostly worked things out. No idea where it'll go, or if we'll work, but at least things will go somewhere.
Then yesterday... The vet called. Blood zinc levels of 16.4 (no, I don't know the units) for Random. This is not good. Normal's 2.5, toxic levels are 4.4, the last time she made it to 7.6 but was still OK after treatment.
I knew you could mess around with templates and stylesheets, and MT's base style is, while quite nice, not what I wanted. Unfortunately I just haven't been up to figuring out what needed to be done to change it. Through a nice coincidence, I came across MT's alternate style page. I think I like this one better than the default, so I'll keep it.
At least until I fiddle again. :)
Found this font while wandering around the net. A clone of the font used in the US editions of the Harry Potter books. Should make my kids happy. :)
Just got back from seeing Star Wars 2 this afternoon. We'd some "get in free" tickets for the kids and decided a matinee show would be better than an evening show for crowd reasons. Glad we did, as it only set us back $10 for the four of us.
We were lucky enough to see it in a digital theatre, and it showed. The print was crisp, vibrant, and defect free. (Though I noticed some color fringing around the white subtitles in spots) The effects, sets, and matte work all warranted the treatment--the movie is just gorgeous.
Pity, unfortunately, that the script and some of the cast sucked so badly. (And the bad acting might as much been an issue of bad directing as anything else) I'm glad it was cheap, and unless the kids want to, I don't think I'll bother seeing the next one.
It's been really hectic, and I've a huge number of things to do, between finishing the Parrot design, doing Perl Foundation fundraising, some private work to fill in the income cracks, and working on the book. Up until recently, I've been thrashing. A lot.
I think, though, I've finally figured out how to handle things. The secret is making a list, and knowing when to stop. The list was easy. Stopping, though, was much harder.
While I've not seen it yet (though I want to), Mr. Cranky has made sure that I'll never look at Spider-man the same again.
It's now officially time to announce the start of my summer Perl Foundation fundraising tour. Starting mid-June and going through August, I'm going to be out on the road doing fundraising events. Those include:
If your group, organization, or company is interested in having me speak or teach classes, send me mail at dan@sidhe.org.
A list of classes and talks is available at the presentation page, but the quick list includes:
Classes
Beginning Perl 5
Writing perl 5 modules in C
Cocoa Perl
Talks
What's new in Perl 6
A Parrot Overview
Parrot in-depth
I can do other talks if people are interested, with enough notice.
There's a huge amount of stuff to be done with Parrot, a lot of it blocking on me, which is damned annoying. extensions need subs, which need symbol tables, which need hashes, which need (sort of) an updated vtable PDD. Gah.
Since folks are starting to come, I might as well point them in interesting directions. A friend of mine does art, and has three issues of a self-published comic out. Head over to Vogelein and look. (There should be an umlaut in there somewhere. If someone finds it, mail it back, it's lost)
Looks like its time to clean up my main web pages here. They're horribly (like four or six years) out of date, and I need to get 'em cleaned up. Get the training schedule, class list, appearance calendar, CV, and consulting info up there at least.
One of the things I've been finding is that I've got a huge amount of stuff to do, so much that I spend a lot of time thrashing, and more time doing other things because I've wasted so much effort thrashing around. (And unfortunately the things easily at hand, like web browsing, aren't really that recreational)
Music sometimes helps, but it depends on the music. Stuff with words is generally not good--I spend too much thought listening. Silence isn't that great, as there's not enough to keep focused on. Things like the KLF's Chill Out are cool, but a little too relaxed to be good.
At the moment, I'm finding Vivaldi's working nicely. The Four Seasons are going on the speakers now.
Well, I figured it was about time I got around to installing some sort of blogging thingie. It seems to be The Thing To Do and, while I have a 'professional' blog over on my part of the YAS website, it just doesn't seem appropriate to use that for anything other than professional things.
There's a journal over on use.perl.org as well, but that doesn't seem quite right to use either. Hence, this thing. We'll see how it goes.