wshaffer

After a bit of research, I found a much better way to do the file name manipulation I was talking about in my previous post.

Basically, it boils down to:

require "pathname"
input_file = Pathname.new(ARGV[0])
new_base = (input_file.basename(input_file.extname)).to_s + "_counts" + input_file.extname.to_s
output_file = input_file.dirname + Pathname.new(new_base)

I used Pathname instead of File because the documentation suggests that it's more robust at dealing with different file pathing conventions on different OSes.

I'm a little dubious about the dance I had to do there of converting path fragments to strings, concatenating them, and then converting back to a pathname, but trying to concatenate the path fragments directly kept giving me extra / in the path.

I met up with an old friend yesterday. Back when we were in junior high, we were Doctor Who fans together when we didn't know any other Doctor Who fans. We'd phone each other up after the episodes aired every Saturday night to share our thoughts. So, when her birthday rolled around in November this year, I sent her a copy of Chicks Dig Time Lords. I wasn't entirely sure what she'd make of it, because, while she still watches the show (and we still exchange our impressions of episodes, mostly over Facebook), she's not really a part of organized fandom.

Happily, she loved the book, and we chatted a lot about it. One thing that I got a big kick out of was her telling me that the book had introduced her to a new term, "gender non-conforming". And that not only had that given her a word to describe her own experience of her gender during her childhood, but also affected the way she saw her son's behavior. (He asked for a Barbie doll for Christmas. She thought, "Fine, he's gender non-conforming," and bought him the Barbie doll. Knowing my friend, I'm pretty sure she would have still bought her son the doll even if she hadn't read Chicks Dig Time Lords, but it clearly meant something to her to have the concept of "gender non-conforming" available.)

It's a neat example of the power of science fiction fandom to inspire discussion. It probably wouldn't have occurred to me to send my friend a scholarly article about gender roles in childhood. Nor am I certain that she would have immediately related to it if I had. But put the same ideas in the context of a fannish memoir about growing up a non-girly Doctor Who fan, and suddenly we're having a conversation that we might not have otherwise had.

I've just spent way too much of my evening chortling over Go Make Me a Sandwich, a blog devoted to humorous critique of sexism in gaming (both computer/console games as well as tabletop RPGs and the like.) I particularly love the posts where the author takes some particularly ludicrous piece of art that violates both the laws of anatomy and physics, analyzes what's wrong with it, and redraws it to be more plausible. Not only are they funny, they're like mini-workshops for artists on how to do the female figure right.

I learned today that the wife of a coworker is a mathematician with an Erdos number of 2. Total fangirl moment.

I have any number of things that I ought to be doing, many of which are fairly pressing, but what my brain really wants me to do is spend the rest of the afternoon learning to write XSLT stylesheets. This would solve no urgent need, but it would:

• Eliminate the need for me to trawl through an ugly XML file for certain necessary pieces of information that I'm referring to fairly frequently.


• Impress the hell out of my coworkers.

This is a nearly unbeatable combination of incentives, but I'm going to try to resist it on the grounds that being Useful is more important than being Really Clever.

I created a Facebook* account on a whim a few days ago. Mostly because I kept coming across little announcements from people saying that they'd created a Facebook group for a podcast I listen to or for fans of the Big Finish audios or whatever, so I joined to see what the deal was.

I'm still not sure exactly what the deal is. Social networking sites perplex me, somehow. Daniel's often theorized that online networking sites are a great boon to those of an introverted geeky bent among us, allowing us to meet compatible people without having to do all that terrible leaving-the-house and making-small-talk that extroverts do. I agree, but it doesn't change the fact that a) when it comes to social networking, the extroverts still do it better and b) my initial impulse in any new and unfamiliar social environment is to hide in a corner, nursing a diet Coke and observing - even if on the internet, no one can see that I'm doing it.

So, about at the point where I was wondering whether to go get another diet Coke, or just bail on the whole Facebook thing, a coworker and an old high-school friend whom I haven't seen in well over a decade found me and friended me. (See my point about extroverts doing it better.) So, I've decided to stick around on Facebook, at least for a bit. I've found one person whom I know in real life, and friended them. Anyone reading this with a Facebook account, feel free to friend away. Or not. Y'know, whatever. Not being pushy. Excuse me, I think I need another diet Coke.

*Yeah, I know, Facebook is so 2006. But look at when I started livejournalling! This is early adoption for me.

I just noticed today that a very large percentage of the new music I've bought in the past six months consists of songs I've gotten hooked on because someone has used them as a soundtrack for a particularly clever Doctor Who or Horatio Hornblower fan vid. This makes for an eclectic batch of songs that would boggle the mind of any radio station programming director. I do find myself wondering what kind of selection pressure "makes a good soundtrack for a fanvid" imposes - aside from the fairly obvious fact that shorter songs do better.

I'm not sure which is more embarrassing: that I just bought Justin Timberlake's "SexyBack", or that I'm so insulated from pop culture that I'd never actually heard "SexyBack" until I stumbled across a Hornblower fanvid using it.

I want Timbaland to do a remix of the Doctor Who theme tune.

The Doctor Song (link goes to Youtube video) is not available for purchase, but I've been thoroughly earwormed by it. (You have to love lyrics like, "I was once a spaceship/My mum's a trampoline/Cheetas like to kill for fun/Ice Warriors are green") Click at your own risk.

I heard Jonathan Coulton's "I'm Your Moon" (a love song to Pluto, presumably from the point of view of Pluto's moon, Charon) on a podcast last week, and it's been stuck in my head ever since. I've now obtained my own copy from iTunes - you can also buy Coulton's music direct from his website, linked above.

I know this isn't the first time I've encountered Coulton's music - I've definitely heard his "Skullcrusher Mountain" before. But "I'm Your Moon" is both geeky and sentimental - right up my alley.