Mostly Harmless

Tired: I had high hopes, or at least hopes, of getting to sleep before 2 a.m. last night. It would have been the first time that’s happened in many days… no such luck. Maybe tonight — although I do find it entertaining how the days run together when I stay at work all night. Thursday didn’t feel like Thursday. Friday, unfortunately, didn’t feel like Friday. Yet Saturday and Sunday felt suspiciously like weekdays because of the “still doing work stuff” stuff.

But I did get some spiffy Perl code written.

It’s not just that it exceeds the functionality of a much longer C++ program. It’s not just that it is a joy to gaze rapturously upon the code — which is actually “pretty” despite no attempts at making it so. It’s not just that the pretty code is elegant as well. (Or that it’s Perl and not C++.)

Nay.

It is spiffy because it spares me from many hours of tedium. I spent most of Friday manually tweaking clipping paths in PostScript on a stack of documents that would make a lesser man weep. By Saturday night, armed with my new code, I had eliminated all of the manual editing and “busy work.” Yesterday I was even automating the automated parts with some aliases — now I can drag a file into the work directory, type “dave”, and get two updated PDFs in 3 seconds. That removes all the pain from the process. What took hours to do on Friday now takes only seconds. Scalability. It’s what’s for dinner.

Not re-tired: What with all the programming fun being had (with requisite movie breaks) I once again didn’t get around to putting the Summer tires on the car over the weekend. This morning I am, however, going to go ahead with the ceremonial Changing of the Floor Mats anyway — which is supposed to coincide with the tire-swap. Protocol be dammed!