So I’ve been busy for the last two months with work. In what little spare time I’ve had I’ve been helping Jamie set up the website for her new Pottery studio. You should check it out and watch as things change and grow there. Hopefully she’ll even start blogging soon.
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- Due to complaints from the mother.
I love lists for some reason, the Top 50 Books You Must Read stuff, the 1000 Places to See Before You Die … all of it. I have a Todo List at HiveMinder, I have my recently played list at Last.fm, I have a list of recent messages at Identi.ca … just now I stumbled across a blog post that was talking about top 5 commands …
“Why the hell are these people singing at me?”
So just as I had given Orlando radio up for totally lost and a desolate wasteland that only had the (aging) Sunday Night Vinyl, I sat down this morning and discovered ]this. A full 2 hour alt-country show on the radio, this cements my love of WTKS on the weekends (now if only it were a commercial free). I’m only sad that the Saturday Night show put on by Dan Stone is no longer with us.
So this weekend Jamie and I spent two days at the FEPA (Florida Educator Parent Association) Annual convention. We are planning on trying to home school Katie for a year, and to see what comes of that. The highlight of the show was the science booth where the lady was blowing stuff up. (Aurora Lipper is officially one of the world’s coolest people.)
All in all it was a good but tiring two days spent with some of the most religious people on the planet. Apparently 90% of the home school population in Florida is very Christian.
brian d. foy was asking for information about “Why People Are Passionate About Perl” for his keynote.
The person who introduced me to Perl showed me that…
Nobody actually introduced me to Perl. I found it on my own. In 1996 when you had finished learning HTML and CSS and wanted to have a job in the industry Perl was pretty much the best choice because most of the web apps back then were written in it. Things have changed, but Perl was my first serious attempt at learning a programming language.
I first starting using Perl to…
Find a job that didn’t suck. I succeeded but it took a while.
I kept using Perl because…
Well I didn’t. I went to VB and then to Pascal cause that’s what the Computer Science department was taught in, but I came back to Perl because I wanted to do web development. The biggest reason I came back to Perl was a job where the project was being ported from Cold Fusion to Java, and I was hired to install WebSphere on the target platform. The platform used Perl for all of the configuration managment. After 3 days of trying to get Websphere installed, I asked if I could try porting ot mod_perl, after a week I had more done than they’d had done in Java and the rest was history.
I can’t stop thinking about Perl…
Because after 10 years it is the way I think about programming. Perl has warped the way I think so that I naturally think the way it flows. This has improved a bit since I discovered Moose. I think that I can better express my ideas to others because of the new found clarity, but the fact remains that I still think first in Perl and then translate to whatever else I’m writing.
I’m still using Perl because…
Happily I’m paid to write Perl for a living. I’ve worked damn hard to make sure that continues to be true because I hate working in a place where I can’t give my full effort.
I get other people to use Perl by…
JFDI. Write code, release it, tell others about it. You can’t force people to something just because you love it. You can only show them how enthusiastic it has made you, and show them how it solves your problems. Hopefully they catch on, or at least stay out of your way.
I also program in … and …, but I like Perl better since…
I’ve worked in Java, PHP, VB (ASP and Straight VB), Pascal, etc. I like Perl because it (mostly) lets me express the idea or algorithm rather than forcing the idea or algorithm to express the language. The hardest part of re-learing Java after having worked in Perl for several years was realizing that you had do to things the way Java decided, not the way that they most naturally were expressed. With ASP and PHP the fact was I constantly felt I had to write around holes in the language.
Note I’ve started a new diet and (hopefully) exercise regime and I’m gonna try to force myself to record progress here.
Weight: Unknown (forgot to weigh myself) Size: Unknown (forgot to measure myself, but I’m still fitting into (and over) my 34” pants)
Breakfast: 3 eggs (2 whites 1 whole). 1/2 Medium Onion
Lunch: Sautéed Roast Beef Onions Mushrooms