Today I fiddled with a CGI script written in Perl that works with a graphics on the fly program called, well, Fly, developed by Martin Gleeson at the University of Melbourne in Australia. Fly allows you to assemble a gif "on the fly" using commands to draw lines and circles and insert gifs for numeric display, in this case a counter for one of our intranet pages.

I'm not suggesting anyone run out and download Fly, but it allowed me to pry off the top of the CGI bucket today and happily noodle with it, sparking an interest in learning more about Perl. This spark will die, but only after I've had some fun learning how it works and packaging it up so others can use it without a long learning curve. That's success, I guess, noodling at work. I'm noodling now. Instead of thinking about scanning photographs and writing a chunk of undying never to be forgotten prose, I've been surfing Mr. Gleeson's site and going through the free sets of numbers (digits) available on Digit Mania, some of which are messing up my margins at the left. Maybe everybody knows about Digit Mania, supplying number fanatics around the world since Arpanet, thank you very much, but this is new to me and I'm looking forward to using some of them (the more staid and conservative faces) in counters at work.

I've just deleted some paragraphs here that I've been working on for the last couple of hours and getting nowhere with them. Did the same thing last night. Makes for short entries, but better short than wretched I guess. Or is it better they're short when they're wretched? Or both?

One thing that's only of interest to me personally and so I try not to talk about it too much is the condition of my mouth. I had the jaw moved forward, but it's the interior of the mouth and the palate that tells you about it. In the last couple days my mouth has moved from solid rubber to still in the bottle rubber cement. Feels more like a mouth. That's good. Really.