Sunday, Nov 16
Dear Log,
There was a Haida community shindig at the Lodge last night. REAL BUTTER FROSTING ON THE CAKE. These folks are for real.
I'm passing my copious TV-less Internet-less time by trying to finish up Pod::Simple::HTML, so that Pod::Html can finally be put out to pasture (i.e., shot in the head and thrown into a plague pit). I also read all of Mostly Harmless, started A Frolic of His Own, and watched Made with Spanish subtitles. Much better translation than Swingers. Thru careful study of the subtitles in Made, I think I've figured out when to use "carajo" and when to use "jodido".
Sunday, Nov 16
Dear Log, After hours of my working on Pod::Simple::HTML, it properly converts L<...>'s in single-file mode. Granted, I haven't actually added much in the way of new behavior yet -- I've mostly just been adding massive amounts of framework for making batch-conversion mode work happily. And I haven't yet really started on the core of the batch-conversion mode logic. That's the big headache that I've been avoiding for over a year now, but now just about everything else is done. Tomorrow.
Clever incidental idea of the day: making Perldoc work happily as a CGI. Should be simple, just a matter of forcing some options to be off for security reasons, and forcing HTML to be the output format. And, of course, agressive input-parameter checking. Work to be done: find places in Perldoc where it does things like exit()ing at the drop of a hat, blabbing to STDERR, etc. Luckily the code is still vaguely familiar to me from when I reworked perldoc into Pod::Perldoc, in very much an Abby Normal / Doktor Fronkenshteen kinda way. And I needn't worry about dies/warns/etc that happen only for options I wouldn't allow in CGI mode -- no need to pass worry about invalid parameters passed to -n (nroff replacer) or -F (filespec) or the like, because I'm not allowing them.
I've been reading more Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr. stuff, from Project Gutenberg. It's great fun. I've also been reading some Walt Whitman, and am much less impressed. Where Emily Dickenson used language about as deliberately archaic as Whitman's, it supports her poems, but smears his. His poems' titles are better than their content -- always a bad sign. And he writes like his pants are too tight.
I've also been reading more of Gaddis's A Frolic of his Own. The presence of characters who are yowling ligitious twats is all part of the satire, of course; but since I know many such people already, and since they (the real-life ones) are self-evidently idiots, satirizing that kind of person is sort of gilding the lily.
Odd fact about Haida: same word for "yesterday" as for "tomorrow". I presume its actual meaning is generally apparent from the tense on the verbs in the sentence.
Seen in the local paper today: Sea cucumbers are harvested here (netted? trapped? vacuumed up? lured by offers of cheap wine?) by the tons, and sent to East Asia. People eat them there. Voluntarily. Hentai as cuisine, cuisine as hentai.
