Tuesday, 26 January 1999:
Mask of the Phantasm
Did I mention that my boss is out on leave lately because his wife had a baby on Friday? We're basically in the middle of a development period, so things are running on autopilot lately, and his absence is not as sorely missed as it might be at other times. I talked to him briefly yesterday, and he sounded pretty dazed. I think the kid is keeping them pretty busy, but I guess that's to be expected.
So I'm plugging along on my big development project, helping out the newer developers as needed, and, well, things are going pretty smoothly. Of course, it's only been a few days, and da boss will be out for a couple of weeks. But I doubt there will be any problems.
Last night after work I went to the nearby theatre to see Batman: Mask of the Phantasm, the animated film from a few years ago. It's better than the Tim Burton/Michael Keaton films, but that's not saying much. Actually, it's pretty good, though there are episodes of the TV cartoon which are better. The identity of the villain is pretty obvious, and the ending is a bit of a letdown inasmuch as we know that the villain (who turns out to be more of an antihero) doesn't really accomplish what he sets out to do (kill a recurring character).
But it's an unusual look at Bruce Wayne's psychology, and pretty good at that.
I also wanted to mention that Stephen Leigh, author of Dark Water's Embrace, has his own on-line journal. Leigh and I have corresponded a bit, and we met briefly at Windycon last year, although my problem with stage fright when talking to "da pros" got in the way of much conversation. I hate it when that happens; I know it's irrational, but it's very hard to overcome.
I'm trying my hand at writing a CGI script - my first one, amazingly enough. It's for the SF3 Web site. All I need to do is have people fill out a few fields (three one-liners, and one "textarea"), and click a button to have the data get mailed to a pre-set address. This turns out to be harder than I'd expected, since after some poking around it appears that in order to pass the form info to a Perl script I need to have a program to parse the form data into variables that Perl recognizes, and I'm not quite sure where to find such a program.
And next I may need to come up with another form that will do the same thing, but will send selected data by e-mail based on which checkboxes a user checked on a form. So far, I have no idea how to do that.
But, considering I've only put about 90 minutes into it so far, and I don't even have a book on CGI scripts (although I do know Perl), I guess I'm not doing so bad. Maybe I'll hit Borders tomorrow and see if Peachpit Press has a book on CGI. I've liked the HTML and JavaScript books I've bought from them (Ceej originally recommended Peachpit Press as a good publisher of computer books, and I agree; they work well as both tutorial and reference, with an economy of verbiage [unlike my own writing ahem]).
Michael Rawdon
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