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Not much of a surprise, I have a gallery with more baby pictures. I also put up a couple of one offs to show how big he is at 5 weeks- here and here.

Day 37: Still imprisoned. The giants feed me nothing but liquids- drugged, I think. I sleep but I can’t tell day from night. I can barely hold up my head. No insignias are displayed and I can’t understand their language. They ignore my entreaties. Yesterday they strapped me down in a hooded seat and drove me to an interrogation center where two older giants inspected me and asked my captors questions while a shaggy beast kept guard. If only I could control my hands.

One of my colleagues mentioned that they had their reviewer copy of Damian Conway’s Perl Best Practices, that several other colleagues had contributed, that it was damn good and that it should be company policy to have everyone read it before writing a line of code. Not many technical books get that kind of rave (Hunt and Thomas’s The Pragmatic Programmer is another, if you code and don’t have it, get it) so I preordered.

I’m glad I did. I’ve been understandably busy but I read through it, made my notes, updated my environment and began adopting the advice. It is every bit as good as expected and immediately useful. I was particularly struck by the refinements on building “inside-out” classes (a trick I was exposed to in one of Damian’s courses and similar to the Flyweight pattern in his book Object Oriented Perl) but it’s full of simple and pointedly obvious tips like using the modules List::Utils, List::MoreUtils and Fatal and applying Regexp::Common instead of rolling your own. Not all the advice is easy to accept, and I admit to taking it piecemeal, but it’s a great book.

My reading has been focussed a bit differently lately:

• The Happiest Baby on the Block. Dr. Karp’s techniques for calming a baby actually work, and work amazingly well with our newborn, but you have to get past the overly-folksy prose.
• What to Expect in the First Year.