Two Technical Feats in One Day

At work: I got the damn IP GRE tunnels working between FreeBSD and a Cisco yesterday, but today I got it into a reproducible process that works even if the GRE tunnel goes over a link that isn't up at boot time. Yes!!!

At home: In other news, I eliminated days of programming by finding a web site that will perform the service for us. I was going to spend a LOT of time writing a web-based conference registration system that connects to Paypal. Instead, I found www.MollyGuard.com which will do all our processing for us, and only for $1. AWSOME! So, the problem is that their service doesn't have one feature: extract all data to a CSV file (something you can import into MS-Excell or MS-Access). I wrote to them and they say they will add this feature eventually. Meanwhile, I wrote a program that extracts the data from their HTML "view all data" table and extracts it into a CSV file. The CPAN module is HTML::TableExtract and the author deserves a reward. The entire program that I wrote is 35 lines long. The CPAN modules do all the work for me.

Wonderful Poly Day

Ying had her first day at her new job. So Yang and I surprised her by being at her place when she came home with a picnic dinner all ready to eat complete with faux champaign and everything. We waited for Pang (Yang's house mate) to arrive.

There we were... the 4 people in my chosen family hanging out together celebrating Ying's new job. I love my poly family.

I was fairly proud of how we surprised her. I wanted to be sure she'd be home, so I figured I should talk with Ying's house mate (who I will call YingMate). My ruse was to say, "Yang may be inheriting a turtle. Do you know anyone with a turtle? We have some questions." Well, obviously Ying would recommend that I speak with YingMate, who has a turtle as a pet. "Gosh, I forgot she had one. Can I talk with her?" Later that night I was on the phone with YingMate. YingMate was happy to cooperate, and assured me that Ying would be home by 5pm (she, herself, wouldn't be around).

The funniest part of this was that YingMate decided to continue the ruse and gave Ying a book on turtles to pass on to Yang. When we arrived, Ying had the book and tried to give it to Yang, which prompted me to explain that there was no turtle inheriting. We all had a good laugh.

After dinner we went out to Thomas Sweets for ice cream. I had a mix of chocolate ice cream with "mix in" of almonds and coconut. Yummylishous!