26/05/2002 @22:00:48 ^03:20:18
Hilarious email
I have been watching your blog. No updates for a few days. Are you okay?
Am I okay?? Slightly bruised from where I FELL OFF MY CHAIR LAUGHING - you'd think people were hanging on my every word!!
Oh well, more hits I suppose, but you see it's not like I can be arsed to write millions of updates all the time.
Date format
Having thought about it for quite a while, I've decided to use proper date formats in the blog headers (although not anywhere else; the tracklist is still in my format and it probably always will be)
The following perl regexp, looped over all relevant files, did the job of updating all the previous material.
s|:(\d)/(\d)/(\d{4})|"/".($1+4*($2-1))."/".($3)|eg
In English that means, find everything that looks like a colon, then a single number, then a slash, then another single number, then a slash, and a final number four digits long. Replace with a slash, then a number that is calculated as the second number less one, then multiplied by four, then the first added on; followed by another slash, and the original final four digit number. Ish.
Of course the code was tweaked a little so that new updates use proper date formats as well. I tried doing some other stuff to it but it didn't work. Damnit why can't I program?! That regexp took like all afternoon to construct! Getting the /e modifier ("to evaluate the right hand side of s// as an expression") to do what I wanted was MURDER.
No wonder there's a teacher shortage!
The people who assess the paperwork Sarah has to do for her education course and teacher training and whatever it's called these days, are being really evil. It's like no matter how much work she does there's something wrong with her lesson plans and now it's got out of hand, this bigwig external guy's coming in and all sorts. So she was quite upset when I talked to her.
Hence the title. No wonder they're always on about there being a shortage - it's like the assessor people don't want the students to pass the course, and become teachers.
