Dysmey Post Archive > Pages for 2001 > Early October 2001 Edition
The goldenrod is fading, but replacing them are the red, gold and earth colors of the trees, which proclaim the arrival of the fall. The harvest of corn, soybeans and tomatoes is underway, and the air has become cooler.
I am currently on vacation this week. I just returned from a day at Purdue University, where among other things I have gone shopping for books, mostly Japanese-themed.
I really need the vacation because the last week has been hectic at work, mainly because of the Nimda virus and our reactive approach to it. Thankfully only one department was effected, and we have successfully purged the virus from our network.
Good has come from this: We now have up-to-date antivirus protection on all workstations, and the means to update virus definitions from our network.
I also had to do a lot of traveling to the Warsaw area, either by myself or with one of my coworkers. I can expect mucho dinero this week, but the work has worn me out mentally.
My vacation started with Museum Days, my home town's annual festival. This is when I eat my obligatory carnival food, an elephant ear—a deep-fried crepe smeared with butter and sprinkled with sugar and cinnamon. This is also when I watch the parade go by my house; regrettably it was not all that much this year.
I also joined Madre and my sister Tina in a walk looking at the 'rods' in that separate part of the festival, the James Dean Run. The rods are cars from the 1920's through 1960's, most enhanced for speed (and noise). A couple of them were so 'enhanced' as to be undrivable (a car with fur on the inside of the hood cover?!).
Also at the Run were booths where two actors from the film American Graphitti were signing autographs. One of the was Candy Clark, who was a model and film actress during the 1970's. She still works, I have found, but not in anything memorable (she played Buffy's mother in the original Buffy film with Kristy Swanson).
During the parade I saw someone in the crowd with looked like Caitlin Clarke. Mind you, I doubt Ms. Clarke would wear something as tacky as a black skirt and jacket with pink stockings; besides, in her new job, where would she find the time to come to a festival in a town she'd never heard of?
The merger of HostPro and Interland is now complete, and my new virtual web service provider is now Interland. This is the third virtual server company I've had since I got mine. (It could be worse: I'm on my seventh ISP now since I first set up Internet access back in 1992.) HostPro users can switch to a comparable Interland service free of charge through October 14, but right now I can't afford the new service.
At long last I am learning Perl, one of the most common computer languages on the Internet. It and PHP have an intertwined history, so learning it should not be difficult.
I am also learning Ruby, another Internet language. In Ruby everything is an object, a black-box component whose properties and methods are available to the user but not its inner workings. Otherwise it is somewhat like Icon, a language I used to use a lot back in the early 1990's.
Yet Ruby is hard to work with so far because it's so new there is no book to study yet (the O'Reilly book on it is not due until November), and the on-line manuals are either too simple or too hugh. Even if I succeed in learning it, I can use it only on my local server: again, it's so new it is not available on my virtual hosting site.