As much as I hate to purchase new books (I'd much prefer the same book at half the price or less at a used bookstore), I couldn't resist getting copies of Amsterdam by Ian McEwen and The Rings of Saturn by W.G. Sebald. My rationalization was that it will be difficult to find these in a used bookstore. The problem with that logic is that it's the same excuse I like to use for stopping at every used bookstore I find, searching out the next hard-to-find treasure.

Reading Picturing Will by Ann Beattie and enjoying it. I saw her read 10 years ago when I was in Charlottesville for a year of graduate studies. It was just after she had published the book. Most of the action happens in and around C'ville (as they say down there), which adds another element of interest.

Spent most of the day writing what should have been a simple perl script to read in lines of data, sort on a column, find like features and compare their attributes. After not having programmed for a few months it takes a while for me to do some of the most basic functions. And with the perl syntax, it's so easy to misuse a brace or bracket when dealing with multi-dimension arrays. Even so, I enjoy the satisfaction of having a program work after many failed attempts. I'm the plan once, compile many kind of programmer rather than one who works it all out first and then writes the code. A couple of sites were very helpful in figuring out how to work with 2-D arrays: Understanding References from the Perl Paraphernalia site, and array tricks from perl circus.
posted by Bruce Wright at 5:27 PM #