Ok, the publicity in the title is not publicity for me, and that might be a good thing.
About a week ago, someone showed up in #rubric and had a lot of problems getting Rubric installed and running on his Fedora box. I gave what help I could, and eventually he got everything up and running. He even pointed out a bug I'd introduced in 0.06, and which I've since gotten fixed in 0.07_02. (He's also made me wonder whether I need to review the minimum required version for a few prereqs.)
Then I found out that this guy, Steve Mallett was going to run a public Rubric. Neat; there aren't many of those, and even those that exist are sort of niche, like the Rubric backend to Wikalong. He's calling it de.lirio.us, a name calculated to make you immediately think, "So, it's like delicious?"
I wrote Rubric mostly to add some features I wanted (both "real" features like notes and "value" features like ownership of my own database). I also wrote it for some friends to use to bookmark their corporate intranets. It'll be interesting to see how it fares as a real social network, but I've never really been interested in large-scale social networking, and I'm glad to be relatively uninvolved with the project. It's already raising some hackles on the delicious mailing list. (At least it's brought one or two minor bugs to light, and made me want to change one or two small implementation details.)
Once I get my new laptop hard drive, I'll probably get some more work done on that!
Today I had the day off. Good Friday isn't usually a holiday for US employers, so it was a nice surprise (when I found out, months ago), and I wish I'd paid more attention to the church newsletter and gone to the three o'clock service, where all the cool stuff happens. Instead, we went to the 19:00 stations and were fairly lost, having no guidebook. Oops! Next year, at three o'clock!
At three o'clock we were at Billy's, eating a late lunch and early dinner, in the form of breakfast food. We both had super omelettes, toast, and home fries. I had some grits, too. We were pretty hungry, having had muffins for breakfast and then nothing else. Muffins are the usual treat when we go grocery shopping together, and they were good. (But Wegman's muffins aren't as good as Giant's.)
In between groceries and lunch, we took Wookie back to the vet for a follow-up on her ears. They're a lot better, but still not entirely free of infection. Ugh! Seven more days of piggie torture. She's really sick of it, and we're not to thrilled with it, either. Also, the vet confirmed that which we'd already known: Wookie is totally pregnant. We're hoping she'll have her babies sooner rather than later, since we're going to Florida for a few days in April. We have a few names picked out in case we keep some.
Finally, I got my copy of Higher-Order Perl. As of page 41, it's still really good.
Getting it was sort of an ordeal. I ordered it through Moravian's web store months ago. They called me a few times to say, "This book won't be out for a while. Are you sure you want to order it?" I tried to explain that I knew it was going to be a while, but that no matter what, I'd want it. I even said, "Look, once it's shipping, I'll call you and let you know and you can make sure you get it for me then." They called again after that, though. I guess they're just not well-prepared for this kind of pre-order.
Yesterday, I called them and said, "Right, so the book I've wanted is now shipping. I know people who have received it already, and I want to make sure that you'll be getting it soon."
The woman told me that their distributor still said it wasn't due until May, and when I told her it was already out, she shrugged. Well, I can't say whether she really shrugged, because this was on the phone, but I bet she was shrugging when she said whatever it was that she said.
I told her, "I can wait a week or two, if that's all it will take. I want to give you money. Will you be able to get it in a week or two?" She didn't really seem to know whether that would happen, and told me that, while she hated to say it, I should get it from wherever I'd seen it.
I ordered it from Amazon. I got an Amazon Prime membership and paid the extra $4 to have it sent overnight. It arrived just as we were leaving for the vet. When I related this story to Dominus, he remarked that Moravian had lost the opportunity to get the book from Amazon and sell it to me at a $25 profit. Instead, they sent me away and I saved the $25 myself. Not only that, but I took the opportunity to get a Prime membership, so now I'm more likely to get things from Amazon again in the future.
I send an email to the manager of the Moravian Book Shop, and I hope they respond, assuring me that they'll try to make future pre-orders more painless. After all, I wanted something very simple: "Whenever this book comes out, I want you to get a copy and tell me. I will come in and pay you for it."
Oh well. I'm just glad to finally have the book.
