Today, at work, I got an email from someone in Britain, a Karli Gunn, looking for relatives in the states. I caught them on AIM, and we chatted for awhile. It was interesting, but I don't think they're by any means a close relative, and surprisingly, I know more about Clan Gunn than they did... We talked about politics, and a few other things, briefly, and then I got back to work. One thing that I didn't find out was if Karli is a female or male name -- it's certainly not a name that I've heard before, to my memory.

I've been recieving an absolutely incredible amount of spam recently, with at least half of it being mostly a rather large attached PIF. I'm imagining this is a work of some virus passing around the internet... too lazy to research it. Fortunately, with about 6 lines in my filters, I've blocked about 900 messages over the last 3 days. I've been meaning to upgrade psmail though.. I want to make the filters smarter and faster, redo the GUI version or maybe do a curses version, and perhaps add MIME support. I'd like to model the interface after PINE..

After work today, I went to Coffee Tree, and from 17:55 to 23:40, learned mod_perl and rewrote POUND into a module that works under it. Overall, it was a wonderful experience -- there was a lot of code duplicated between the seperate CGIs, and also, once all the code to manipulate the database was in one place, it wasn't too hard to add some new features. There's also some (not presently hooked up to anything) code to implement custom colour schemes. On the downside, either the documentation for mod_perl really sucks, or I really suck at reading documentation.. or maybe the documentation set in RedHat 9.1beta1 is incomplete. I didn't find the $r->uri() method documented anywhere in there. I'll probably make the changes live tomorrow. After I do that, google will be able to index everything. Huzzah.

Yesterday, I noticed, during a lab meeting, that one of the screensavers in the xscreensaver package, barcode, is definitely not appropriate for public display. It has some words in it that came up on my screen, that compelled me quickly to disable that particular module. Sometime, I'll grab the source (the words are compiled into the binary .. *sigh*) and make a somewhat less offensive version. Not that I would mind if I didn't have my laptop at work/school .. Fortunately, I don't think anyone else saw. It was a fun meeting -- Anya, someone from my group at CMU, gave a summary of a conference she went to, and some of the talks sounded really interesting. I'm probably going to see if I can grab some of the papers and see if I can wrap my brain around them. And that's a nice segue into another topic.. I've been thinking about the situation at work.. and I've realized that I'm really kind of jealous of a lot of the people in the program here. I think it'd be really cool to go on all the neat, math-geeky conferences that they're all perpetually going on, both because they're interesting, and because I think that a lot of people at work would probably be cool to hang out with. I don't think I really can be a part of that ... I'm not really 'one of them'. Our group is mostly grad students, and everyone but me and one other person is doing really advanced cool stuff with math, and that other person has an advanced math degree anyhow. I mean, sure, to toot my own horn a bit, I'm a really really good programmer, learning new things quickly and well, and I have the habits and interest in making maintainable code. I can massage the hell out of data in Perl, and have a skill set that doesn't overlap with anyone else in the lab.. but I still feel left out.... like a minor character in a novel. It probably does say a lot about me, or where I work, that I care so much. And even now, I'm realizing that my plan to sneak through most of grad school as a non-degree student means that I'm missing out on the grad student experience. This always seems to happen to me -- I find alternate ways through life for things, ways that seem better, but I miss out on experiencing a lot of the things that I wish I could experience.. What am I to do with these conflicting desires to forge my own path, and to belong... I always feel like the simpler paths in life are there, beckoning me, and if I wern't so *me*, I could make different decisions and be more happy...

On that topic, I'm a bit nervous about classes starting next monday. I need to make sure that the first PUSH meeting happens, and that we can get more people. I'm also worried about workload.. Will I really be able to manage 40 hours work plus two classes? Zets? PUSH? Will I have any time left? I've updated my online schedule... and it's scary. Mondays, when I'll want to try to lump as much of the make-up time from work as possible, are not going to be at all fun.. If that old rule of thumb for an hour out of class for every hour in holds, then I'm in for a 56 hour workweek.

Unrelated: Banning bums?