well, I've finally succeeded.
It used to be as soon as we got in the car, my daughter (21 months) would ask for Raffi (no link on purpose). If you have children of that age, you know that asking is more like "Raffi? Raffi? Raffi? Raffi? Raffi?" ad nauseam. I really don't know how that happened, since her musical tastes in life started out so beautifully with Miles Davis. Nevertheless, there's only so much Raffi one can stomach in a lifetime, and I met my limit a few months ago, so I decided it was time to move her ahead.
Of all the groups I cherish, I figured that the one that would appeal to someone of her age the most would be one of my favorites, The Squirrel Nut Zippers. They have banjos, trumpets, clarinets, play dixieland and new-orleans jazz, and even appeared on Sesame Street. Well, I figured right. Now it's "Zippers? Zippers? Zippers?" much to my delight. She even says "More?" after each track.
*sigh of relief*
Speaking of kids, I was flipping through a children's toy catalogue and came upon Oh, Yuck! The Encyclopedia of Everything Nasty. Now that's something I wish I had as a kid :)
On the geek side of things, I went and saw Abigail give a talk on regular expressions last night at the local Philadelphia Perl Mongers meeting. The talk was interesting at the end, but elementary for the most part. One of the cool things I did learn last night was from Mark Dominus: the regular expression debugger backend he wrote for ActiveState still doesn't have a free front-end (though you can purchase a front-end from ActiveState). So, if you want to win the hearts and minds of Perl developers everywhere, consider writing one.
In final news, WebReference.com is spotlighting Chapter 4 from our book, which I hope helps spread the word somewhat. As an author, the hardest part of the whole process is turning out to be the wait between when the book is available and when it actually starts becoming useful to people. I've gotten a few (very few) emails from various people saying "Wow, this is great. Thanks!" and none saying that we wasted our (rather invaluable) time, which I guess is a good thing. It just feels like the book has vanished into the aether as quickly as it came, which kinda saddens me - I was hoping it would spark a new interest in the technology, make it more accessible, and (in the end) validate the great work that everyone has been doing in mod_perl over the years...
