15 April, 2010

Productive? Not so much.

I *really* enjoyed the peace and quiet yesterday plus, of course, it's always nice to work where I can look out at the sunshine (or rain, depending) and not have to walk away from my desk to do it. Someday ... someday I will again have an office with a window. Until then it is nice to be able to work from home from time to time and I always try to arrange it for a day when Mr. M is going to be out. When he's around I spend too much time trying to block out the sound of him. Anyway, after helping the chair's assistant with her image problems, which I guess I'm going to have to deal with next week, I took Tink for a walk in the sunshine and then buckled down to work on my quizzes.

I've spent the better part of 2 weeks re-vamping these ancient quizzes, re-purposing the CGI scripts and re-designing the look and I finally got it down. Well, there is one more thing I'd like to do but I'm not that good at Perl scripting and I am having a heck of a time figuring out how to include style tags in the output, or put the output into a table, so I've had to put that idea by the wayside so I could get the major portion of the project done. I got organized, moved all my files over to my laptop and got down to the tedious work of re-writing all of the scripts, one by one. Each quiz comprises one cgi script and four html pages. This is a fairly time consuming operation and, to make a long story short, after doing a few hours I thought it prudent to test my work (ya think?) and what do you think I found? Go on, guess. ............ If you guessed they didn't run, bingo! Arughghghgh!! I am 99% sure that it's because of the program I was using to edit the CGI files. My guess it that it's putting invisible characters into the scripts. So it's back to page one this morning. But I am going to test as I go rather than assuming each one is working as the previous.

Tuesday my run wasn't as good as I was hoping it would be. My guess is it's because I had forgotten my inhaler, which my doctor told me to use before I exercise. I noticed that I was wheezing a bit and I wasn't breathing as easily as I had done on the previous Thursday. Allergy season is hitting very early this year and the combination of what I did to my lungs this winter and that made my run a little tougher. I have high hopes for a good run today. I've got to sign up for that April 25 race this afternoon.

With my nice quiet evening I made some good progress on the sleeves. Oh but I love that cashmere yarn!! One thing though -- it is rather delicate. I have to be careful not to pull it to hard. I broke a strand last night. I have about 20 more rows to go and then it's stockinette for the remainder of the sleeves, which I am looking forward to. And I must say, this latest audio book I am listening to is SO riveting! I really do need to pay closer attention. I had to tink back twice yesterday evening because I had not paid enough attention. Timothy Dalton is the one reading this book, "Christine Falls". It's set in Dublin in the early '50s. He is miles better than the narrator of that Flashman book. I am going to delete that. I know I'll never want to listen to him again.

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