"The day they cut the football budget in this state, that will be the end of Western civilization as we know it!"
News ·Friday May 9, 2003 (link)
Yes, that was probably my absolute favourite quote from Mr. Holland's Opus, which I saw for the first time this dreary Friday evening1; it characterizes much of the US quite well. It was a dreary day, too; first I have to listen to some hick in the next cube mooning over his insignificant other, grrr, everyone was irritating me today, which statistically means it was probably me. Everyone has an off day once in a while. Also had some issues with the production web server which didn't help, and our local ``init'' script failed us yet again.
So, let's see, what has happened since; it's been a while since I last wrote. My friend John Barham from back home visited last weekend; he arrived Friday the 2nd, around 1800, on his motorcycle (nice red Honda). We went to Corky's for supper, and went to see X-men 2 that night, and I finally broke down and went to Graceland on Saturday. No flash was permitted within the mansion, nor even my tripod (for $16.95 I ought to be able to bring in studio lights...), but I cranked up the effective ISO (film speed) setting to 1600 and got some good photos. When we returned we swam in the Registry pool (and I tried to practice jumping rope when I got out, and met a fifth grade neighbour who greeted me from his balcony), ate at the mall food court, went to church in the morning, and he left for Florida after lunch. Speaking of which, Hilton is sending me to YAPC::NA::2003 in mid-June; it's in Boca Raton, perl to the rafters, and I get to see Florida (never been, so I'm going up a couple of days early).
As for pH, I think I'm going to need to start in C, building it as an Apache module. All scripting languages suck (yes, even Perl, probably because I can see Perl6 on the [admittedly distant] horizon, wish Ruby was more mature, and wish Python2 wasn't so anal retentively programmer-hostile), and I think I can build a useful framework with C. If I do need more, I'll just add code - I won't fall into the trap of allowing an accumulation of cruft to form itself into an embedded language.
[1] Of course, Ghandi would take issue with the assumptions present in the quote; when asked what he thought about Western civilization, he said, "I think it would be a good idea."
[2] Yes, I tried Python, syntactic whitespace (which I actually appreciate now, since it makes code shorter - no wasteful closing }, or, even worse, Pascal-like end statement) and all, and it's not so bad, but its module set isn't nearly so complete as Perl's, and it sacrifices (non-programmer) readability for power.
