It's my birthday. I'm in a temporary apartment in Mountain View. I was supposed to go home to San Diego and play poker with my wife and my friends, but I had to work today (and tomorrow).

I'm listening to Booker T & The M.G.s doing a cover of Day Tripper. I'm mostly through the last half of a bottle of 2001 Clos Du Bois Cabernet. I was writing a Python script for work, but now I'm cleaning a Star Model BM. I have a brace of fish sticks in the oven. Woo-woo.

Tracy and the poker crew just called in for B-day wishes, and that was awfully nice. I wish I was there with my wife and friends. I hope I didn't sound totally nonsensical on the phone, but my head has sort of been drawn inwards all night on this script I've been trying to write -- which has languished in the face of uneeded gun-cleaning.

No new work for me tonight I think.

Everyone seemed to completely miss my point, so the original post is gone. I was simply wondering if I had made the right decision from a cutural standpoint, not a technical one. I was wondering if I'll fit in or not, or whether I was out of my league.

That's what I was trying to say. My fault for being bored enough to write a novel.

About a year ago, someone submitted my Henry Earl Stats Page to Fark. Someone submitted it again last night.

Server's still holding up well. Check this out:

That's a true Farking right there. We're at about 60,000 visits in the last 22 hours. Kinda cool to watch it happening.

In other news, Henry Earl now has his own Firefox extension, thanks to a guy named Nick from TotalFark. He wrote it up a few months ago, but couldn't get a hold of me. I've been meaning to write a Henry extension for a while now. In fact, that's how the RSS feed came about. I was going to have my extension get data from that, and give out XML to aggregators at the same time. But work and such got in the way, and I never got very far on that project. So big thanks to Nick for hacking it up for us!

For no real reason at all, Tracy and I watched Raiders of the Lost Ark last night during dinner. And also for no real reason at all, I remarked, "Indiana Jones had some really cool boots. I've always wanted a pair..." Did you ever notice Indy's boots? I did. I have a thing for practical footwear, and have always liked plain leather boots, sans space-age materials. Just... boots. Indy had good boots, and so I noticed.

Now thanks to the wonders of the Internets, finding the company that made Indy's boots is about as easy as falling off a log. An added bonus? They aren't props. They're real, working, high-quality boots.

Another bonus is that Alden has a store in San Francisco. And I'm going to be living near San Francisco. That means I can actually drive up there and try a pair on if I want, and see if they'll fit my dual-sized, strangely shaped feet. (I can never buy footwear via mail-order or through the Web, since I'll never know if they'll fit comfortably. Hasn't stopped me from trying, though...)

Yeah, they're a little on the pricey side, but my dad always said "Never buy cheap boots". And father knows best, right?

Part of my job involves once-weekly dealings with a website which requires user interaction every so often -- usually between 5 and 30 minutes. Overall, these weekly dealings can take anywhere between 6 hours and two days. As you can imagine, it's hard to get much of anything done when you're constantly having to stop whatever it is you're working on at nearly-random intervals and interact in a very exacting, meticulous way for 10-20 minutes at a crack.

So in my "down time" -- that lull between responsiveness -- I've been trying to get some stuff done which doesn't require long periods of thought. That's another way of saying "I browse the web while I wait for a slow website to respond". However, I've been browsing tech web sites and tutorials and so forth, looking for good stuff I can soak up in 10 to 30 minute sessions.

Another part of my (future) job will involve writing a lot of software in Python. So today I spent some time looking for a "Python for Perl Programmers" sort of site. I was trying to compile a list of things that I can do (like use exceptions) and can't do (like use the autoincrement operator) in Python.

During one such browsing session I came upon the one true definitive comparison between Python and Perl. And I pretty much had to stop working for the day right then and there.

Good tattoo material here:

Of course now that HST is dead I'm not so sure. It's either that or the Boba Fett Mandalorian shoulder thing. But since George Lucas started butt-raping my childhood memories, that Boba Fett thing is likely out as well. Good thing it wasn't tattooed on my arm, eh? I'd have to get Lucas to come back a couple years later and digitally re-enhance it for me.

Bah... there aren't any good tattoo ideas. Not that I really want one, even. Just saying, is all...

I've written about that thing called 10x10 before. There's this guy named Jonathan, and he's got this site which takes images that are timely and presents them in a certain cool way that lets you "see" what's going on in the world. You look and get a "feel" for what's happening, rather than just read about it. It's actually a pretty cool idea. Novel, certainly. And worth a look.

Where it concerns me is the guy running it, Jonathan, tries in vain to spam-proof his email address by spelling it out as jjh at number27 dot org. And so I get a lot of his mis-addressed mail at my domain 27.org. It's kind of annoying, but can also be somewhat amusing.

Normally, I don't even bother to read the mail that should have gone to him; I just delete it like the spam that it is. (I've asked that he spam-proof his email in a way that is technically viable as well as 27.org-friendly, but those requests fell on deaf ears.) I do have a bounceback in place that explains the situation in small words. So the Illiterati will eventually reach Jonathan. My concession to Net Karma. Yeah, I'm a softy.

Anyway, I was in the process of deleting one particular email, because I thought it had come though my normal spam filters. But for some reason, I opened it (probably to make sure that it wasn't addressed to me). I just about died laughing.

Here's the mail I got (personally-identifying information has been changed to protect the dimwitted). My translation is in the small blue font in between the lines of the original email.