After fiddling with Set::String for a while, I got bored and happened to notice a book my girlfriend had laying around called Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom. It's about a guy (Mitch) who gets in touch with his former Sociology professor, Morrie, who is dying of Lou Gehrig's Disease.
Insightful, if depressing. Fortunately, I think I already knew (and follow) most of the lessons he offers.
There's one part that really rang true. Morrie says,
"Devote yourself to loving others, devote yourself to your community around you, and devote yourself to creating something that gives you purpose and meaning".I think that, in my case, "my community" refers to the Perl Community (and soon Ruby). My goal is to create something truly extraordinary (or at least, extrordinarily useful) for the Perl community.
It also made me glad of something I did recently. When I was at Florida State still having delusions of becoming a History professor, there was a visiting professor from Berkely. He's a nice, funny and smart old guy and it was for his class that I wrote the one truly good paper I ever wrote in grad school, as I had noticed something in Ovid's Metamorphosis that no one had ever noticed before. He loved it and called it a "true research paper".
A couple months ago I decided to look him up. I figured that if I wasn't going to do anything with my paper (which I had kept the last seven years), I should give it to someone and let them glean some ideas from it for their own publishing career if they wanted. After bit of wading through Berkely's somewhat cryptic website, I found him and sent him an email, asking if he would like a copy of the paper. He was glad to hear from me, and agreed.
It was nice to hear that he was interested in a copy of my paper. It was even nicer at how pleasantly surprised he was to hear from one of his old students. :)
