Datatypes, Boniface, commuting and Welsh
I spent today at work working on something that will start to let us add types to the database of user information. Currently there's no type information, which means in particular that we can't tell which data are user IDs and which are actual numbers. So I'm figuring out a way to mark particular fields automatically. (There are several tens of thousands of them, so I don't want to do it by hand.) Tomorrow I'll be working on micro-modules, which is a kind of subroutine in the XML-based state machines that our application is built around. Also, one of my coworkers is leaving soon, and we're having a party for her (but probably not tomorrow).
I went to St Mark's for the lunchtime service. Fr Sean told us about St Boniface, since it's his feast day today, and read us an interesting letter he'd written to St Cuthbert bewailing how everything was going pear-shaped in his diocese and comparing it to steering a ship in a storm (it's letter number 35 on this page). I never realised Boniface was English before. Someone said he had more effect on Europe than any other English person, but I'm not sure how you can quantify that.
Sharon had an interview today to see whether she gets hired permanently to work where she's currently a temp. I hope she gets it, at least partly for selfish reasons: it'll mean I can continue sharing a ride with her to the railway station, and that takes a good half-hour each way off my commute, which would otherwise be an hour on the bus, twenty minutes' wait, an hour on the train, half an hour's walk, and then the same back in the evening. Still, I can often put the time to good use, such as hacking Metacity. Today I'm pretty sure I fixed bug 121603, about the ways to specify the angles of an arc in themes. I haven't yet tested it enough to check it in, though. Excitingly, there aren't that many more things to fix in the theme-2 branch.
I have a cunning plan to make use of my tuition benefit. There aren't too many Welsh tutors in this suburb of Philadelphia, but I thought we could find one who could teach us over VoIP; helpful people asked questions, and now perhaps we have found one. This could be very interesting, and very helpful.