---
title: "Faster than a speeding bullet point"
date: 2005-02-23T06:45:41-05:00
url: https://blog.lmorchard.com/2005/02/23/faster-than-a-speeding-bullet-point/
author: Les Orchard
---

# Faster than a speeding bullet point

* Morning is not my friend--and I have struggled with this for so long that I have become all but convinced that I'm part of an evolutionary branch of humanity who stayed up late and kept the fire going while the day shift slept.  Sometimes I think I should try making a career out of doing long-distance freelance work for another time zone whose morning starts several hours later than my own.

* I knew that my iPod had a Notes menu fed from the Notes folder, but I didn't know [that it did inter-note hyperlinks][podlinks].  This rocks my book-authoring socks.

[podlinks]:http://developer.apple.com/hardware/ipod/

* The lack of a [decent Python interpreter for PalmOS][palmpy] is making me want to [learn Lisp][lispme] again.

* Taking screenshots of an iPod sucks.  This does not rock my book-authoring socks.

* Have I mentioned lately that I hate, *hate*, **hate** character encoding issues on the web?   Mmm, ISO-8859-1 characters pasted into a file claiming to be UTF-8...

* MJD's [_Higher Order Perl_][hop] is out! And I also just noticed Randal's [_Perls of Wisdom_][perls]  Man, it's been a long, long time since I was last excited by Perl--and I used to *live* in it.

[hop]:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1558607013/102-5871968-7526502
[perls]:http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/tg/detail/-/1590593235/ref=pd_sim_b_1/102-5871968-7526502?%5Fencoding=UTF8&v=glance

[lispme]:http://www.lispme.de/index.html#lispme/index.html
[palmpy]:http://pippy.sourceforge.net/

<div id="comments" class="comments archived-comments">
            <h3>Archived Comments</h3>
            
        <ul class="comments">
            
        <li class="comment" id="comment-221084852">
            <div class="meta">
                <div class="author">
                    <a class="avatar image" rel="nofollow" 
                       href="http://rasterweb.net/raster/"><img src="http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=db0fab74bcb564ebb09295498b892fb6&amp;size=32&amp;default=http://mediacdn.disqus.com/1320279820/images/noavatar32.png"/></a>
                    <a class="avatar name" rel="nofollow" 
                       href="http://rasterweb.net/raster/">Pete Prodoehl</a>
                </div>
                <a href="#comment-221084852" class="permalink"><time datetime="2005-02-23T06:54:54">2005-02-23T06:54:54</time></a>
            </div>
            <div class="content">Back in my college days I had at least one semester where my classes ran from Noon to 9 PM, then I'd stay up until AM and wake up around 10 AM... That was the best schedule I ever had...

And as for character encoding issues, yeah, I hear ya, try dealing with 5 years of 'badly formed content' in files on disk, in a Microsoft SQL database, and from an old HP that's still running. Nightmare, truly a nightmare.</div>
            
        </li>
    
        <li class="comment" id="comment-221084854">
            <div class="meta">
                <div class="author">
                    <a class="avatar image" rel="nofollow" 
                       href="http://www.myelin.co.nz/post/"><img src="http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=475a543984769e9890f8dc0091f602c3&amp;size=32&amp;default=http://mediacdn.disqus.com/1320279820/images/noavatar32.png"/></a>
                    <a class="avatar name" rel="nofollow" 
                       href="http://www.myelin.co.nz/post/">Phillip Pearson</a>
                </div>
                <a href="#comment-221084854" class="permalink"><time datetime="2005-02-23T19:03:09">2005-02-23T19:03:09</time></a>
            </div>
            <div class="content">Which time zone are you in?  If it's PST, try doing consulting for New Zealand or Australian companies.  The exchange rate isn't good for you, so you'll need to charge a LOT to make decent money, but you'll be able to sleep in ...

Alternatively, pretend you're in New Zealand, and work for American companies remotely!</div>
            
        </li>
    
        <li class="comment" id="comment-221084855">
            <div class="meta">
                <div class="author">
                    <a class="avatar image" rel="nofollow" 
                       href="http://www.thok.org/bloggery"><img src="http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=2545d4ff0ba72eb5d5979186f4b02d85&amp;size=32&amp;default=http://mediacdn.disqus.com/1320279820/images/noavatar32.png"/></a>
                    <a class="avatar name" rel="nofollow" 
                       href="http://www.thok.org/bloggery">Mark Eichin</a>
                </div>
                <a href="#comment-221084855" class="permalink"><time datetime="2005-02-23T23:28:53">2005-02-23T23:28:53</time></a>
            </div>
            <div class="content">The lack of a decent python is why my last PDA upgrade was to an (otherwise disappointing) wince ipaq (which will probably get repurposed as a linux box now that I have a Symbian phone with Amaretto and have actually written PDA-class apps with it...)</div>
            
        </li>
    
        <li class="comment" id="comment-221084856">
            <div class="meta">
                <div class="author">
                    <a class="avatar image" rel="nofollow" 
                       href="http://plasmasturm.org/"><img src="http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=e17949267bbfe21a0fadf1bbf00592b4&amp;size=32&amp;default=http://mediacdn.disqus.com/1320279820/images/noavatar32.png"/></a>
                    <a class="avatar name" rel="nofollow" 
                       href="http://plasmasturm.org/">Aristotle</a>
                </div>
                <a href="#comment-221084856" class="permalink"><time datetime="2005-03-02T13:28:33">2005-03-02T13:28:33</time></a>
            </div>
            <div class="content">Have you seen Pugs yet? It's the first Perl6 implementation, written in Haskell, and intended to work out the kinks in the specs for the later real Parrot-based implementation. But it's evolving jaw-droppingly fast. Autrijus started on it a month ago, then the project started picking up members two weeks ago, and it already implements a substantial subset of Perl6. It's like all those years of waiting have culminated in an implementational flashbang.</div>
            
        </li>
    
        <li class="comment" id="comment-221084857">
            <div class="meta">
                <div class="author">
                    <a class="avatar image" rel="nofollow" 
                       href="http://plasmasturm.org/"><img src="http://www.gravatar.com/avatar.php?gravatar_id=e17949267bbfe21a0fadf1bbf00592b4&amp;size=32&amp;default=http://mediacdn.disqus.com/1320279820/images/noavatar32.png"/></a>
                    <a class="avatar name" rel="nofollow" 
                       href="http://plasmasturm.org/">Aristotle</a>
                </div>
                <a href="#comment-221084857" class="permalink"><time datetime="2005-03-02T13:29:30">2005-03-02T13:29:30</time></a>
            </div>
            <div class="content">Hmm, my link was stripped. That would be http://pugscode.org to get the scoop.</div>
            
        </li>
    
        </ul>
    
        </div>