It's terribly depressing to walk outside at 6:15 after working for half the day, to find it dark as midnight. Not that night is a bad thing, but when you've hardly been awake six hours, and when you asked the beautiful fall day for a raincheck, promising you'd return to bask in the chilly breeze for at least a quick stroll later on, you can't help but feel that you've burned the day away.
At the moment I'm still harboring vivid images of the theater production I saw tonight, Anton Chekov's Three Sisters. A writer with a terribly ominous view of life, Chekov portrays day-to-day life as tragic lonliness, pointlessness, emptyness. The closing scene of the play has the three sisters in a painful embrace, one lamenting "if only we knew why." A powerful production, all in all.
Did some frustrating Perl hacking today, wrestling with annoying but ultimately neccesary taintedness checks. One part of my script had the equivalent of the following:
if(is_tainted($a) || is_tainted($b)) {
print "One of the input values was tainted";
}
$c = $a || $b;
if(is_tainted($c)) {
print "Output value is tainted";
}
and for some reason, though neither $a nor $b were tainted, $c would be. Annoying as
hell, and I can't reproduce it in smaller programs. So I ultimately worked around it.
One final note: I think I'm going to give up on trying to be funny around here. Judging from the reps on my "funny" nodes, I'm about as entertaining as George W. Bush.