use Perl

I was watching a little of tonight's TCU-Tulane football game, and heard the announcer say "Tulane running back Mewelde Moore was named the Conference USA preseason offensive player-of-the-year".

How the hell can someone be named player of the year before he's played a single game? According to this press release, C-USA picked an entire preseason all-conference team, both offense and defense..

Don't football people have anything better to do during the offseason?

I was reading sf writer Ted Chiang's 1991 short story "Understand" today when I came across this uncanny description of perl 6:

I know my mind in terms of a language more expressive than any I'd previously imagined. Like God creating order from chaos with an utterance, I make myself anew with this language. It is meta-self-descriptive and self-editing; not only can it describe thought, it can describe and modify its own operations as well, at all levels. What Gödel would have given to see this language, where modifying a statement causes the entire grammar to be adjusted.

Starbucks is buying Seattle's Best Coffee and Torrefazione.

Linux kernel hacker Paul "Rusty" Russell claims that his keynote speech at this year's Ottawa Linux Symposium will include "the revelation of the 4th principal virtue of a great programmer.".

Overheard during today's debate on the Appropriations Bill for Fiscal Year 2003:

"Mr. Speaker, normally when I speak before this body, I use the podium. Today the legislation we're debating is larger than the podium, so I'm using that, instead."

-- Rep. Martin Frost, D-Texas

My sister bought an SUV today.

Today the Philadelphia Daily News ran one of those "What ever happened to...?" articles about former local sports stars. One of the folks profiled was Bruce Lefkowitz, who was the center on the Penn basketball team when I was an undergrad there.

Here's what Lefko's been up to since he graduated:

Married 14 years to Coco Vanderslice (Fairleigh Dickinson '85), sister of Villanova '83 teammates Courtney and Stephanie (now Gaitley), former Saint Joseph's women's coach now at Long Island University...Has 6-year-old quadruplets and 4-year-old twins...Executive vice president of advertising sales for Fox Cable...Spent 5 years with Discovery Communications and 7 years with Turner Broadcasting.

About those kids: "I just hope they [quads Trent James, Kyle Anne, Jenna Lynne, Coby Tyde; twin girls Brady and Kendall] look like their mother and play like their father, although Coco reminds me she was the four-year captain and scholarship athlete in the family."

Might be time to start laying off those fertility drugs...

So I'm at my local coffee shop this morning, and the barrista says to his assistant, "So I've got this great idea -- resample classical music and add a dance beat!"

"Oh", I say, "you mean like 'Hooked On Classic'?"

"What's that?"

Kids nowadays...

I am a graduate of one of the United States' oldest and most prestigious universities. It has produced Nobel laureates, Wall Street tychoons, Pulitzer prize winners, Olympic champions, governors, senators, supreme court justices, and distinguished scholars in dozens of fields.

So then why is it, whenever I wear my University of Pennsylvania sweatshirt outside of the immediate Philadelphia area, someone inevitably comes up to me and asks "Hey, are you from Pennsylvania? My cousin lives in Bethlehem!"

So I'm testing a bunch of web pages using Skud's excellent WWW::Automate module, and I thought it wasn't handling radio buttons correctly. Turns out the module is working fine, but the system is taking several minutes to update the database after hitting submit!

It's great fun -- go to the page, hit the radio button, click submit. It says it's saved, but reload the page and it's still at the old setting. But come back in a minute or two and then it's fine.

Sigh.

Time to add some nice long sleeps to my test script...