Dear Log,
An absolutely fetid day. It was dank, overcast, and cold all day; I didn't sleep well last night; and I was subjected to simultaneous and unrelated kibbitzy harangues from every direction about how Pod::Simple doesn't quite achieve the ideal of telepathic convenience that some were quite hoping for.
My well-wishers have advised me that disembowelling the critics is the best way to achieve a sense of contentment among the survivors. But I am magnanimous, so I demur.
In an effort to find something more productive to do than taking questions from the peanut gallery (most of them starting with "What about..." and "Can't you just..." and "I haven't read perlpodspec, but..."), I went off and tried to jumpstart a wee system (using that awful Pod::Simple!) to help O'Reilly with the task of accepting text from authors in Pod. Unfortunately, MSWord is part of that system I was trying to piece together, and I should have been able to foresee that "I'll do something productive" and "MSWord" are phrases that cannot be happily brought near eachother. In cases where something ends up actually getting done, it is invariably feasable only with appalling hacks and workarounds. It leaves me longing for the high-tech futuristic world of WordPerfect 5.1.
In other news, I've been trying to articulate an approach to applied semantics that doesn't have the drawbacks of the conduit metaphor or of the "it means whatever I interpret it to mean" approach. Of course, I'm doing this on a dare -- some artist friends of mine put me up to this. I think I might end up blowing their mind with some kinda rap that shares the best features of "What do you think the artist thought you'd think he thought it would mean?" and "Why should it matter what you think it means anyway? MORBO WILL DESTROY YOU!"
