Perl blog post #53

Friday night I dreamt about time zones ...

This makes sense, as I have finally released an official version of my date module, which you can read all about over on my Other Blog.  So I’ve been drowning in timezone-related minutiae all week, which week I spent at YAPC, which you can also read about over on my Other Blog.  (Basically, I had two things to write about, and neither one was really a full blog post’s worth, so I just did two half-posts.  So to speak.)

As is becoming a (somewhat disturbing) tradition, last Sunday I was engaged in YAPC travel-related activities and completely spaced on the blog post again.  This pisses me off (at myself) because I knew that this was coming, and I knew that I always do this every year, and I knew that what I really needed to do was just write a quick blurb ahead of time saying that I was traveling even though I wouldn’t have been yet because I was writing this ahead of time, and schedule it to be released on Sunday, and then I’d have it covered.  I thought this to myself several times throughout the week, and I promised myself that I would do this thing, and yet I still managed to get caught up in preparing to leave (and also I was a bit under the weather, as my evil family finally managed to get me sick after 2 full weeks of trying) and, once again, totally spaced.  Classic me.

But back to my dream.  You know, often with dream elements, you sort of vaguely know where they come from, or else you have no clue and it’s just a super-bizarre dream that you can’t even remotely explain.  This dream was somewhat unique in that, while it was ultra-bizarre and made no rational sense, it was composed of very distinct and easily identified bits.  I don’t believe there was any deeper meaning in it—it was just my brain taking a bunch of mostly unrelated bits and swirling them together to make an incoherent whole.

In the dream, I needed to use a special timezone (see: date module) to move on to the next day.  I was thinking about writing my own code for this (see: YAPC), but then I realized I could just repurpose this existing code which told the story of The Comedian (see: Steve Agee’s joke on @Midnight, which I binge-watched on my return home: in response to a request for “comic book songs,” Steve quipped “All Along the Watchmen Tower”), explaining the timeline of his death, which would work perectly for my purposes, although my boss might have trouble swallowing it, because he was already suspicious of me for going rogue (see: The Last Coyote, a.k.a. the fourth Harry Bosch book, the audiobook version of which I both started and finished during my travels), and, in fact, I had to figure out which of several different versions of the timezone to use, some of which only covered one hour, but some of which covered several hours, which would of course be more efficient than having to write or rewrite several different one-hour timezones and, as long as it was going to cover the same length of time anyway, why not? and then I woke up and had to pee.  But then I went back to sleep again, and I think I may have had some similar-but-not-the-same dream but I don’t remember.

Anyhow, if you’re not so inclined to pop over to the Other Blog and read either of the two half-posts I’ve provided for you (although I highly recommend the second one, even if you’re not techincally inclined, as it’s a bit of a travelogue and doesn’t have that much technobabble in it), at least you’ve now had a rambling run-on discussion of my latest weird dream to chew on.  You’re welcome.