I've been very busy while accomplishing very little. The job thinger is still in limbo, first and foremost. Hmmmm. Moving on.
A week ago, on a whim, I thought I'd see if I could manage to make a ASCII-art scrolling track/artist/album type display for the mp3 player I plan to write. It started well and went very quickly, but then I got bogged down in the fiddly bits of making the display animate properly, and ended up staring at it for 4 days without doing anything worthwhile. But during that time I did realize some problems with my initial approach, which made things go rather swimmingly when I sat down on Friday to make it go. Go it did, so yesterday I cleaned it up and isolated the logic into a module, which was released on the CPAN as Acme::Curses::Marquee. With that out of the way, and use of mpg321's remote mode, implementation of a non-sucky console mode mp3 player should be nearly trivial once I figure out how it should behave.
Olive's manual is nearly complete. Once it is, I want to try to hunt down the first-list-entry-link bug and fix it, then release b8.
Moving on...Literally years ago I wrote a little story in the mode of a childrens' picturebook, but the project fell by the wayside because I can't draw at all and I didn't know any people who could (much less would) do the illustrations for me. A few months ago a friend volunteered to help out, but her life has rather taken off on its own, so she hasn't had time, and I never bothered her about it. This week, taking a gamble on a somewhat renewed acquaintance, I asked someone else if they'd be willing to give it a shot. She was agreeable, but had some other things to finish up before she could get started. I was overjoyed; after about 5 years of languishing, what's another few months?
When I told another friend about this, she got all excited and asked if she could be in on the project as well. It turns out that she's been hiding her art-light under a bushel for quite a while and wanted a chance to get back into things. Long story short, now I have two illustrators and may actually do the original long version of the project, instead of just the one story. So awesome.
Next up: movies. In a nutshell, don't watch any of these unless you wish to induce vomiting -- Prom Night II, Hot Water (AKA Junior), or Rape Squad. At least Hot Water features the sizable naked breasts of Suzanne DeLaurentiis, who would go on to produce Rocky V and Mannequin 2.
U-541 is predictable. So predictable that it's nearly a pastiche of submarine movies, but it's really quite good if you watch it right after Rape Squad.
Tougher Than Leather is laughably bad; if only the whole movie had been Jam-master Jay foolin' with the Beastie Boys and Run pretending not to like the receptionist chick. Rick Rubin should be killed for his role in the film as well as his roles in producing the film. Dave Mustaine sucks.
No Retreat, No Surrender is the best movie I've ever seen where Jean-Claude Van Damme plays a Russian karate champ who is part of a faceless corporation's evil ploy to win amateur karate titles on the west coast of the US, but is foiled by a teenager in too-tight jeans who is trained by the ghost of Bruce Lee.
That is all for today.
