In Process

It's been a while since the last time Sultan of Brunei went on a hike (almost a year now I think), but we managed to get a quick one in last weekend. We booked a couple of sites at Blind Lake. It's one of the rustic campgrounds out at the Pinckney Recreation Area that you can only get to via the trail system. Rich stumbled across the sites while planning the trip. I've been going out to Pinckney for almost ten years and I never knew that you could book sites there so I was pretty excited to check it out.

Day 1

I've been working on creating a personal financial portal to consolidate any and all of our account balances in one place. I'd also like for it to be real time so that whenever I look at it I know it is as current as possible. To that end I have written the following Perl script that will go out and fetch my current credit card balance. It may work for other account types but I would guess some modifications would be needed. To use the script you will need to have Perl and the necessary libraries specified in the use statements installed.

Generally speaking, the circles of people we know tend to grow out common circumstances. Family, school and work are the hubs of our social activities and consequently are the breeding ground for most our relationships. Think about everyone you know. How many of them are not linked to one of those places? For most of us I think very few. Every now and then though the normal order is momentarily shifted and the entropy of the universe is visited upon us. I recently had the pleasure of experiencing this firsthand

That's what we did yesterday after canceling our weekend hiking trip to Tobermory due to an unexpected snowstorm. When we were trying to think of things to do instead I remembered this site that I had run into a year or so ago and we decided to give the album in a day a try.
We added an additional rule that every person had to play every instrument on at least one track to make things more interesting.
Sultan of Brunei is

• Billy Beard
• Brian Wolski
• Nathan Gabrish
• Rich Wolski

constantly tweaking
molding the outer
to please the inner

This may not be useful to anyone else but I put together some vba code that lets you pass in a hyperlink and it will tell you when the file was last modified.
In my situation I needed to manage a group of reports (in differing formats) that needed to be updated by their owners on a monthly basis. Towards the end of each month I send out a spreadsheet showing who has and hasn''t updated their reports. The spreadsheet I inherited includes links to each document so it made sense to me to have a formula read each hyperlink and return the last modified date on the file.

plates spin atop sticks
a crash wakes the sleepwalker
plates, they need not spin

wet pavement at dawn
traversed by worms free at last
commuting to work

Luckily Jen reminded me that it's Haiku Friday. I have been slacking off this week but it's more a function of being busy with other things than a lack of interest. Anyway here is this weeks haiku

grey clouds open
snow falls from above
distant spring

I've decided that from now on I will post a haiku on Fridays. Why you ask? I sometimes feel I am being bombarded by information from a million different sources. I hope that writing haikus will help me learn to distill the essence of information and present it in an elegant and simple fashion, not unlike the work of Edward Tufte

If you would like a little refresher on what haikus are try this: http://raysweb.net/haiku/

darkness recedes
light penetrates through
day begins