A lazy morning...

The alarm hailed me at 5 am this morning. A look out the window confirmed another cloudy sky. I went back to sleep until about 8.

Breakfast was french roast coffee, orange juice, and pancakes. I did the coffee, Tropicana supplied the o.j., and Lee made the pancakes.

Lee and I just got through talking about what we can do to more effectively run the store. As a result, I think I will finish the "gastro" job (as I have come to call it, since it concerns gastroenteritis) and then spend the rest of the day implementing an application I've been jawing about for the longest time. It will involve, basically, an ASCII database driven by a Perl script.

I'm jazzed...

Cheers...

Where'd it go?

Finishing and polishing the "gastro" translation took until shortly after 1 pm. At that point, I began massaging the Word file that Drew and I had developed, which contains information on present and former customers and their boxes. The end result was a flat ASCII database where each line includes a field for physical location, box number, customer name(s), status (current or not), and paid-through date.

Then I wrote a Perl script that would:

• display information associated with a box, or
  
• show a list of vacant boxes, or
  
• allow logging of forwarding charges, or
  
• allow logging of box rent payments

At this point, all of these activities are conveyed using command-line arguments. Ultimately, it would be good to encapsulate all of this inside of a "real" database (e.g., MySQL), but at the very least, the script should be tweaked to work as a CGI script in conjunction with a page of HTML.

I then spent some time cleaning the office, and processing some photos I've taken recently. Here's one of Huntur, taken on Easter:

And another, of Lee and Huntur, taken this morning:

I love being a grandpa.
* * *Viewing the night sky using my old Distant Suns program, it would appear that I ought to be able to see Ikeya-Zhang a couple of hours after sunset, just below and to the left of Cassiopaeia. We'll see.

Cheers...