I was so into reading my book on the T that I completely missed Sullivan Station. When I looked up, the train was at Wellington. So I got to take a different bus home. On the bus ride, I finally finished Mastering Regular Expressions. I'm sure I will be referring to it a lot and probably rereading whole sections as I do more programming. Of course, now I have to find another book to read, and this time it can be fiction. I've got plenty of good ones to choose from, so I'll have to spend some time considering.

Speaking of Perl, I got to use Perl again at work today! I had to come up with some problems where the student is given two sides of a right triangle and has to find the third. They round to the nearest tenth. There's a problem, though, if I do that with certain numbers. Consider a right triangle with two legs of length 3. The length of the hypotenuse is the square root of 18, which, rounded to the nearest tenth, is 4.2. However, if you have the unknown value be one of the legs, the student needs to find it by squaring 4.2, subtracting 9, and then taking the square root of that. (The sides have to be rounded to tenths as well, so the hypotenuse has to be labelled as 4.2 instead of the square root of 18.) That gives us 2.9, which is not the 3 that we want. So I want to find legs that have the same ratio (or approximately the same ratio), since I don't want to redraw the triangle. For example, 3.4, 3.4, and 4.8 work just fine. So, I made a program to take two leg lengths as input and then try a bunch of different numbers, adding 0.1 to the first leg length and then calculating the second leg length using the same ratio. I was very happy with the results, and it even worked right the first time I ran it. I could have made it slightly better, but it was good enough for what I was doing.

Time to figure out what I'm going to do tonight. I suppose I could still work on my freelance writing thing as originally planned, but the instructor is out of town until Tuesday, so we have a bit more time to get those in, and I might use it. Of course, it might be best to just do it now. Of course, it's something that could use a little reflection (coming up with article ideas), so I might actually write some stuff down, think about it, and then come back to it later and send out the email for the assignment. That's not going to take up much time, though. I think I want to spend some more time in my room. And hrafn and I are probably going to spend some time splitting up the books, seeing as she has now found a place to live. And maybe a bath, to ward off the frozen spirits.

No plans yet for the weekend, but that might change. Still, I should have a large amount of unscheduled time this weekend, so I should probably figure out something productive to do lest I spend a bunch of time sitting around watching television or something. Maybe this would be a good time to start writing my one short story for the year. Hearing majes reading his story may provide me some motivation to start writing. And, speaking of majes, I really should do some more editing work for Krayzen. I guess what's been making me put that off is the dread of figuring out all of the style issues and making all of those corrections. I think I might just give it a regular review, not worrying about some of the more nit-picky style things right now (like exactly how multi-category skills will get laid out), just to get this stuff moving.