Winter Solstice - It's my understanding that today at 7:42 A.M. EST will be the moment of the 2004 winter solstice. That's roughly when the bus picks the girls up out in front of our house. It came in with a bang as yesterday we started with early temperatures in the 30's but by the early morning hours today our area hit -2°F. At that point does the house really even need a thermostat? Can't it just run the furnace continuously? Even by southern NH standards, that was a cold night. We usually don't see that until winter is further along. <insert standard joke about global warming here>
Gifts - I wanted to say a big Thank You to all the relatives who've recently sent gifts by mail for the kids -- packages from Alyssa & Bev, Chris & Katie, Mom & Dad. We also been getting nice Christmas cards. Being way out here, it's nice to see all the pictures. I should also mentioned we got an extremely generous card from G&G Tessoriero that will pay for next summer's trip to Chicago and California. With the lack of vacation last summer, it'll be two years since my last visit. I can't get over how much people change in that time. Little Kyle now has the build of Turbo Timbo. The McWherter boys are young men. Cassidy is starting to look like a young lady.
Will - Back when my job transitioned from one owner to another, we were downsized just enough to let go my good friend, Will. Most of us thought it didn't make much sense, but often times these things don't. Last week a coworker decided to make a major life change and move to Texas. (Wanna buy his snowblower on eBay?) We had Will in yesterday to discuss the role and scope of the position. It looks like we should have an offer letter before the Christmas break and have him back on board full time by January 3rd. At times it can be hard not to be bitter about the shortsighted decisions made by bean counters.
Perl - I did accomplish one silly goal in perl last week. I spent a little time and wrote a script to generate "Twinkle twinkle little star" as a MIDI file for the piano. I put the file on a floppy and let the piano play it. It worked. It was pretty impractical compared to just sitting at the piano and having it record the MIDI sequence directly -- at least half an hour to transcribe something that can be recorded at the piano in a few minutes. I consider it one of those "because you can" kind of experiments.
Netflix - Last night however I revisited a more useful Perl project I had attempted a few months back: writing a script to grab our current Netflix DVD rentals. There used to be a module for this weblogging software (MovableType) but when I last tried it, it failed. Netflix uses a lot of what are known as "cookies" to track your web session and preferences. I counted at least half a dozen when I checked last night. If your script can't properly supply and handle them, the Netflix server won't display the proper HTML so that you can find out what is checked out and in your rental queue. This time I used a different Perl approach using the unix program called wget for assistance and was successful. I just need about half an hour to get it integrated onto the right sidebar of the homepage.