[ Still working on getting the new computer just right, but it's not worth posting updates on every little thing every little day yet. ]
I worked from home Friday, which seems like it may be a nice way to balance the owner's desire that things get done in an accelerated way to meet the deadline he apparently has chosen to reveal to himself and no one else, and my desire to not wake up at 6 in the morning for crying out loud. (That's the official name of the hour, `6 in the morning for crying out loud'.) And I have to admit being paid for a five-day week is measurably better than being paid for a four-day week; I leave it to petty Internet squabbles to say whether it's 20 percent or 25 percent better.
In fact, I managed not just to be awake on something more nearly my natural schedule but to get the nominal work done with remarkable speed. I started thinking of ways to tackle the problem as I drove home Thursday, and had what I thought would be the insight for how to do it that evening. Soon I'd run a little experiment showing the principle worked, then wrote a PHP script that turned the whole project from a tedious thing into ... well, take the output from this script and load it as an xml file. So I had finished my day's work before midnight Thursday.
Friday, I may have inadvertently sniped myself; I got to thinking of another nice-to-have-working item and started fiddling with that. I got that solved in principle within a couple hours, so I'd be able to get that working pretty swiftly Monday. On the other hand, this removes something I'd have been able to use as ``let me work from home to solve this problem'' for next Friday, unless I do the dishonorable thing and pretend I hadn't solved it. But there turned out to be enough nagging little unsolved bits that I think I can fairly say I'd do around eight hours' work on that and the problem of chained XSL transformations. I honestly believe I need to chain XSL transformations.
Trivia: The modern, pleated, ``small'' kilt was invented around 1730 by Thomas Rawlinson, an English Quaker from Lancashire. Source: The Invention Of Tradition, Editors Eric Hobsbawm, Terence Ranger.
Currently Reading: The Accountant's Guide To The Universe, Craig Hovey. This is way too self-consciously cute for a book that's mostly showing that one can so do multiple-entry bookkeeping.