No curly quotes tonight, I’m tweaking to a bizarre degree, adjusting each for the relative strengths of each language’s regex engine. Of course once I run the benchmarks I could find that it doesn’t matter, but we’ll see. The more I learn about regular expressions the more I love Perl :).

I think this weather is getting me down, I just don’t feel like going out tonight. No Kaveh Kanes, no House of Pies, no girls, no car, no laptop, blah. The sky is bleak, colorless, moist, and utterly motionless. I want it to rain, brighten, darken, or do something! I think it’s time for a brisk walk.

After a long and extremely coincidental series of events, Alex, Jaime, and I decide to go to head to House of Pies (my third time in four days) for some dinner. When I’m almost there I get a call from Alex saying that the restaurant is closed until eight because of pesticides, and that they’re going to hang at the Border’s across the street. (I think it’s interesting that, knowing of why the restaurant was closed, we didn’t decide to go anywhere else.) Anyway, I’m thinking that would be a good way to kill the time, but I hate going to book stores because I either leave feeling unfulfilled or with a significantly lighter wallet. So I resolved not to buy anything and walked in.

I browsed around the store, picked up a few things, put them back. I wandered through the music section, seeing what’s new and noticing how outrageous the prices were. In fact, everything was just fine until I stumbled into the computer section. I was able to keep up my jaded no-spend attitude for a little while. “Look at these lame PHP books. Hah! The only ones worth having I already have. I can’t believe I was worried about coming in this place.” Then my eyes began to wander, and I spotted an Apache 2.0 book, just big enough to be juicy. I opened it up and immediately browsed to the mod_negotiation section, since that’s the module I know the most about and I use it as a benchmark for Apache books, which is the same thing I do with Caesar salad and restaurants. (House of Pies has no Caesar salad! Why do I go there so much?) The book had one of the most comprehensive overviews of the module that I’ve seen, and covered some of the differences between the 1.3 and 2.0 versions. However, it wasn’t good enough to overcome my resolution, so it went back to the shelf. However the thought dawned on me that I needed something to do for the next half hour, so I spotted an O’Reilly title I’ve had my eye on called Mastering Regular Expressions.

I’ll cut the suspense, and admit that I bought it. It’s an amazing book; the first two chapters I read really changed the way I think about things in general, a paradigm shift. I’m hoping to finish the whole thing this week and redo all my regex code with what I learn. The good news is that in rang up $5 cheaper at the register than the sticker said, so I’m not complaining.

The point is, however, I lost. The people at Border’s have my type so well figured out that they know I can’t leave without buying something. All those comfy chairs everywhere are really traps in disguise, hoping to lure you in to being caught up in a book. What I really want to do is go into a bookstore, and read an entire book, start to finish. I don’t care if it takes me a week, I want to go in every day, pick up the same book, and finish it. That would really stick it to the man, the book man. Will it ever happen? We’ll see. Has anyone had a similar experience?

This looks like it’s going to be a very busy week, at least in terms of business work. Lot’s of things to catch up with, and lots of projects to finish up. I have a couple of scripts to add to the scripts section, including a nice form mailer, curly quotes for b2, a syntax highlighter, and some other odds and ends. I’ve always been a bit paranoid about releasing code publically, because I always wonder if there’s a way to do it better, and I can’t imagine anything quite as embarassing as releasing something with an obvious bug or something. Sometimes this is for the better I think, for example the mail script is about a third of the size that the first version was, and more functional, but it’s also over a year old! Anyway watch this channel for some fun stuff this month. Any requests?

I’m a little behind, so I’d like to point out two very interesting articles over at Mark Pilgrim’s weblog. First he has a nice summary of the change to Google’s ranking algorithm. There are links to all the threads and articles I’ve seen around the web; it seems Mark has an uncanny ability to find relevant links quickly. I do not agree however that this is the “beginning of the end” for Google, it’s just an adjustment phase; they’re still committed to having the very best search results possible, and they’re merely responding to an obvious and well-known exploitation of their previous system. If relevancy is temporarily suffering, just them a little time.

Mark’s History of the Tilde also piqued my typographical interest. One of my Human Situation professors remarked the other day that the Greek alphabet wasn’t even finalized until several years into their war with the Spartans, meaning that at the beginning of what would be a thirty-year war, they still found time to debate and codify a standard of writing. He then asked what new characters were in the western alphabet lately. The first thought in my mind was the euro, but that was a little too obvious. A examination of my keyboard yielded three characters—~, @, and *—that I can’t really see a use for before the time of computers. I’m going to look into it.

I had the biggest scare on the way to Psychology this morning: as I was driving on 610 South when I saw a police officer sitting on the side of the road. And it wasn’t just any cop car, it was one of the Camaros. So I naturally checked my speed, and then went on my merry way. Next thing I know, I see the cop whip out of the shoulder in the rear view mirror and head straight towards me. His lights were blinking and I was panicking and . . . he pulled over the person behind me. In hindsight it was actually pretty interesting to watch it happen, almost like something from a nature show. It was a lot like the lions that you see jump out of the grass and pick off a zebra from the pack.

Had a wonderful time tonight at Market Square Grill with a number of new people who I hadn’t met in person before. The guest of honor, Jish, was an extremely nice guy. I think he really enjoyed his visit, because everything is bigger in Texas. It was wonderful meeting everyone, such colorful personalities, and I’m definitely going to make it out to the next event. In attendance were (Kathy’s list helped me out here) Katie, Mike, Jish, Elaine, Chuck, Ted, Robert, Hanna, David, Kathy, Christine, and Kymberlie.

The pictures from tonight are now online. I’ve also gotten around to putting up the entire morning shoot from the Sights Unseen series. I also added some photos from 9-27 with some interesting ones in the downtown area that Sarah took. Actually she didn’t take all of them, just the good ones.