I thought I’d try out Tau Station for a couple of days and get a quick blog post out of it. That was three months and 11 levels ago. It took 2 months to wind down my obsessive nature and if not for Tau, I could have pushed a couple of new module versions to CPAN by now. That’s rather the reason that I don’t play games in the first place, so I can’t give great comparisons.

To sum up, Tau Station is a web-based, second-person adventure with resource management in real-time: a Choose-your-own-Adventure book crossed with Freeciv. Oh, and it’s free. Well, freemium, but the least obtrusive freemium game I’ve ever seen.

Too fanboy/girl-ish, perhaps?

Yes, I'm well on-trend, by a couple of months. As you see, lockdown has made a hot mess of my blogging schedule. I count myself very fortunate that is the worst effect it's had on me, alongside the gaining of some mass.

WfH WARNING! Watch out for those caramel waffles! A single Stroopwaffle has enough calories to feed a hungry village for a day and are not a sustainable treatment for anxiety. Two kWh per packet, not a word of a lie.

I swear it was Perl 5 just a moment ago. I turned my back for all of 5 minutes ...

I don't need the new features, but I don't like boilerplate and I'm happy to accommodate those who seek progress. Harking back to lessons from the past, SysAdmins of a certain age may remember the venerable a2p program for converting awk scripts to perl and the horrendous (but working) code that it produced. We had one of those running in production less than 2 years ago until I finally decided to re-write it in Modern P…

The title is clickbait. I ran short of time this week and am ~~recycling~~^Wconsolidating comments, replies and thoughts. Let's talk about Books!

I would love a new PDL Book. One that's completely different from the original to maximize the surface of engagement to a new audience. As a "sequel", It would have the advantage of being able to refer the reader to the first book for longer explanations and be able to jump right into how to solve significant problems. brian d foy has just finished his Mojolicious book, so I bet he's got loads of free time on his hands. (although I remember him in the middle of writing it in 2018, so you may have to wait a bit)

A very late comment on a small portion of Brian's remarks to Dave's thoughts on recruitment in December. In a blow to my work productivity, I can now login again so I'll clear out some of the drafts I've had hanging around. I don't need to know why I can now or couldn't before. The Truth is I had real work to do and the Universe was telling me to focus. Collateral damage is unavoidable.

In this post, I make short, tangentially relevant comments on why grabbing Perl mindshare is important and a couple of ways for sneaking it into universities through the back door.

I have no explanation for this

I'm a little concerned that the We have enough is bordering on the complacent. I'm not sure how many exciting COBOL projects are out there. There are enough COBOL programmers and they are paid well, but you'll need a hobby to make life interesting.