My name is John Bokma, and this is my web site. I am a freelance Perl programmer, born in the Netherlands, but currently living with Esme and our daughter Alice in Xalapa, Veracruz, Mexico.
I've been living in Xalapa for over five years now. And in that time I've seen a few times hail falling, but today was the first time I experienced a serious hailstorm. It had been quite warm the past days, so a change was welcome.
A few week backs Esme had decided that she really wanted to learn Dutch. After some Googling she ended up on Laura speaks Dutch. The author of the web site has, at the time of writing this blog entry, fiftyfive podcasts online; mp3 files that one can download, listen to, and learn Dutch.
Esme really enjoys the podcasts, and to help her I had
downloaded them all in one go from the audio folder of the
aforementioned web site using wget.
Today Esme complained that her mp3 player, a Zen Nano, jumped to the wrong podcast. It turned out that an extra leading zero in some filenames messed up the sorting order. Just when Esme had connected her Zen to her Dell notebook, I told her to connect it to my computer, running Linux, instead, so I could use Emacs to rename the culprits the easy way using dired.
When done, I said: that's why I love Emacs so much: it can do anything. Yes, I was exaggerating, but I do love Emacs.
Today I fixed a bug in a Perl program I had written for a customer: the part that handled cell data in an Excel spreadsheet didn't take into account that some cell data could be encoded as UCS2. And hence conversion to UTF-8 was required.
I also received by email a request for the Dell part number of the ATI Radeon 2400 XT video card I have in my Dell Vostro 200 ST. I was able to find this part number on the quote Dell had sent me over a year ago, and decided to post all part numbers on that very quote, and some additional information.
In the evening I tried to create a single PDF file from several scanned comic book pages stored as JPEG files. After a short time I had a working Perl program, which you can use as a staring point for your own solutions.
Today I also finished "The Lies of Locke Lamora", an excellent fantasy story. If you like the work of Raymond E. Feist (Magician), you might like "The Lies of Locke Lamora" by Scott Lynch a lot. Highly recommended.
Even before it was sure my mother would visit us, Esme and I had been thinking about how she would like to walk between the giant cactuses that can be found growing near Tehuacán, in the state of Puebla. And since just before Christmas she arrived in Veracruz, and was still visiting us, we had planned to leave today for Tehuacán, with a short stop-over in Puebla city, because we were sure she would enjoy the handcrafts market, El Parián, and the many nice buildings in the city. And so around half past seven in the morning we took a taxi to the central bus station in Xalapa (CAXA) to take the ADO bus to Puebla city. We had decided to stay for a short while in the city before we took another bus to Tehuacán.
Today, around noon, Esme put Alice's inflatable pool on the roof of our apartment in the shade of a large piece of fabric attached to wires normally serving as clotheslines. She filled the pool with warm water, and some toys, and soon Alice was having a great time under the supervision of her grandmother from the Netherlands. It was good to see Alice happy again, she just had recovered from a nasty infection, probably rotavirus.