Kaylyn pointed out this story to me about light posts disappearing in Baltimore. Having lived there for a summer, I can say this is so totally appropriate for that weird city.

One day that summer I was walking across the street and I had a guy crossing the other way say "Hey, Buddy! Want to buy a begonia?" I was dumbfounded and my cold don't-bug-me-I-live-here look evaporated. He was holding a small potted plant in his hand -- probably recently taken from someone's door stoop. "Two bucks," he said. "Uh... no, sorry," I think I stammered. Funniest part was, he was right, it was a begonia.

It's not much, but it is snowing right now. Very pretty. Unfortunately, I learned this weekend that my childhood fire-starting skills have completely disappeared. I lit one of my Estonian birch logs with paper, firestarting sticks, and a combination of the two... with no luck at all. I ended up going back to my trusty Javalog at the expense of my pride. Clearly I was not cut out to live in any age other than one with central heating.

Well, the title more or less says it all. It is getting colder, night seems to be coming before I get home from work, and now that I have a set of fireplace tools (purchased at a huge discount during early summer) I got a biggish pack of firewood at the grocery store this morning. Oddly, it says on the label of white birch logs: "Another fine product from Estonia's forests!" Maybe I'm missing out, but this is my first product from Estonia's forests (or anywhere else in Estonia for that matter) and I'm having trouble thinking of what else these trees can give us except wood. Oxygen? That's going to be a tough sell.

So I'm thinking that my super-secret project really needs to do things the cheap way which means going with open source software for the database and application server. MySQL 5 looks really good and they finally added triggers, views, and stored procedures so that one is an easy choice (although I don't know how anybody ever considered using it at the enterprise level without those features). PHP was the obvious choice for the programming language so I put a book onto my O'Reilly Safari account and spent parts of the last 2 days learning the basics. Well, I am thoroughly disappointed. It is Perl without the power (you need to know how much I hate Perl to understand how damning a statement that is). There is no decent variable scoping (!?!?), no good way to write object oriented code, session management is pathetic and slow (stored in text files? come on!), and it repeats my pet-peeve of Perl being used in a Web environment in that it is simply outputting text that happens to be HTML formatted, not working with HTML (its purpose) to enhance the simple tags that make up the page. Also, I don't see how you can make a passable MVC structure with the language. I'm really disappointed. Either I can use it and write pages I consider to be clunky and not scalable or go with ColdFusion. ASP.NET has its own set of problems so I prefer not to use that. Man, after all the hype I expected much more from PHP than capable but exceedingly basic lameness.

It was a really beautiful day here... I think. I had to spend the entire time inside at work at a workshop we give every year that is held--for some inexplicable reason--on Friday and Saturday. I went last of all so people were tired, hot (the room we were in was fairly uncomfortable), and ready to leave. I think I was up against bad odds, but I'm still not very happy with my presentation: my jokes didn't come off well and there was hardly any audience participation. I've certainly given better lectures. At least it is done, although I wish it had come on a bad weather day, not one of the most beautiful of this Fall.

There's this Web site called Where's George where you can enter the serial number off of a dollar bill, tell where and when you got it, and then send it back into the wild. Well, about a year ago, I got a dollar as change with "Where's George?" stamped on it. That meant that someone had already entered it into the site in hopes that someone else would also enter it at a later time. I dutifully put it into the system and promptly forgot about it. Today I got an email saying that my bill had been found, this time in Salem, Oregon, 330 days after I set it free! Fun. I feel like I suddenly have a connection to this bill and the person who found it. I wonder where or if it will turn up again.