User since: Jan 01, 2001 at 01:14 UTC (24 years ago) Last here: Aug 29, 2023 at 13:45 UTC (2 years ago) Experience: 1013 Level: Friar (9) Writeups: 69 Location: Washington, DC, USA User's localtime: Apr 26, 2025 at 12:43 CEST Scratchpad: View For this user: Search nodes

I got married to Sònia Salas Vilches of Barcelona, Spain, 28 December 2000 (el día de los santos inocentes-- ¡pero no era una inocentada!)

Welcome Home! About zeno...

I founded the Barcelona Perl Mongers. Now I live in Washington, DC.

<s>I also hang out at http://www.javajunkies.org where I'm known as (you guessed it) zeno.</s>

Zeno of Elea was a philosopher who came up with a "proof" that motion was inherently impossible. The paradox figures heavily in one of my favorite books: Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter.

What I was cooking up in perl in 2001:

• yapat - Yet Another Perl Aptitude Test! Tests perlfunc knowledge and teaches useing a weighted scoring system. This is implemented at Yet Another Perl Aptitude Test (yapat)
• A module to update the InterShop 4.2 Sybase database directly (almost done!)
• Spanish Language Stuff:
• A Spanish language module, which would, among other things, return a Spanish text version of any number given to it. This is done, but I need to add an option for gender, and make it a bit more Perlish (I did this in my learning perl phase).
• ...Also, a Spanish regular verb conjugator. This is dead easy. I'll try and extend this to cover common irregular verbs.
• A Spanish verb tester which would give the user a verb root, a person, and a tense, and have the person type in the correct verb form. I saw this in a translator/calculator one time, but I want a smarter one, which records your score and grills you more on the verbs you miss regularly.
• The above Spanish Language stuff in Catalan!
• A program to translate time into Swatch beats (DONE!)
• A junk mail filter-- this is pretty well done, but could be a lot smarter if I could get MIME::tools to work
• Understanding OO (yes, I have the faq).

What I'm reading today

I have this bad habit of keeping four books going at once. This is probably very bad, but I can't help myself. Here it is:

• Ulysses by James Joyce: FINISHED
• Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter: I love this book. I got it when I was 16, when the first edition came out. I've read it all, but never from front to back! So I've decided to try reading it like a normal human being. Update: FINISHED!
• Programming Perl by Larry Wall, Tom Christiansen, and Jon Orwant. Of course.
• Vurt by Jeff Noon (in Spanish): I lived in Barcelona for five years.
• Mastering Regular Expressions by Jeff Friedl
• Weaving the Web by Tim Berners-Lee

Stuff I like:

• Craft.
• Rubik's Cube: I can do it in about a two minutes twenty seconds. I started playing with this when I stopped smoking, and quickly became addicted,
• Geeky t-shirts: I have my periodic table one on now.
• Playing guitar: I've been playing acoustic since I was 11. I like James Taylor, Cat Stevens, CSN(& sometimes Y)...
• Star Trek!
• Speaking Spanish-- I lived in Spain 1999-2004. I want to learn Catalan, too.
• Perl and c++. SVGALIB

About me!

• name: Tim Allen
• 1986 grad of Naval Academy, CompSci.
• 1986-91 Marine Corps.
• 1991-93 US Peace Corps, Seychelles Islands.
• Programmed Visual Basic, then Oracle, then saw the light and started working in perl in 98.
• On Tom Christiansen & Nathan Torkington's scale, I think I am a Perl Adept
• Since 2007 I've been at FEMA. I run a group of statisticians, data scientists, and survey folks there now (2023-08-28)

My Geek Code:

-----BEGIN GEEK CODE BLOCK-----
Version: 3.1
GCS/MU/O/L d- s:++ a+ C++++ UBL+ P+++$ L++ E--- W++ N- K V w PS++ PE Y+ PGP
t+ 5 X+ R+ tv b+++ DI D+ G e++ h---- r+++ y++++
------END GEEK CODE BLOCK------