Raining every day for the past week or so

Rain has been falling every day for the past week, week and a half. That's the third (fourth?) successive typhoon that's come to the Philippines. Classes on all levels and government offices have been suspended thrice already these past two weeks.

I hear it's much worse in Taiwan -- Signal Number 5. I've only ever experienced a Signal Number 4, and that was scary even though I was safe at home behind very sturdy walls.

The rain has pretty much destroyed my desire to do anything except curl up in bed with the covers over my head and wait it out. For all that, I was unusually productive yesterday. However that might have to do with the fact that I consider "sprawled on my bed typing on my laptop" to be equivalent to "curl up in bed with the covers over my head".

I've been voluntarily trapped at home these past few days. Trapped, because flooding makes it difficult to go out and move about. Voluntarily, because while difficult, it's not impossible. It should be driving me crazy, but it isn't (see previous paragraph about curling/sprawling/lethargy).

The only really bad thing about this is the power outages. Power went off for a couple of hours last night, forcing me to head to bed at the same time normal people do (of course my situation is vastly better than the situation of those who had to fix it). We also lost power for a couple of hours earlier this week, and have the occasional minute-long flickering/outage, but nothing major other than last night.

I'm thinking of heading back to bed now, and I just got up.

When "return" really does mean "return"

Hahaha, I feel immensely silly right now. I've been staring at parsefeed.pl, trying to figure out how two pieces of date-parsing code were related to each other, and I only just realized that one is Atom-specific, the other RSS-specific, and that if you're in an Atom feed, which is what I needed to look at, then you return before you reach the RSS-specific parsing code.

(I thought that there would be another module for parsing RSS, just as there was for parsing Atom and that a certain block was being called when parsing both RSS and Atom *facepalm*)

I've been looking at this (dumbly) since last night.

On the good side, the reason I couldn't find where certain attributes were being handled is because it looks like these attributes aren't being handled at all (the attributes in question being _atom_updated and _atom_published; only _atom_modified and _atom_created are being processed).

I wonder why the Atom parser doesn't use w3cdtf_to_time. Are Atom feeds guaranteed to more strictly follow a certain format?

Must recheck my results in this request later, but it looks right to me. If it pans out, then RT.

Sometimes, it's the best things that take the longest to complete

I sometimes feel painfully slow when I tackle stale requests (or worse, tackle requests that become stale as I work on them). The user is getting frustrated because it's been over a week and hey, I'm getting frustrated as well, because it's been over a week. And it can't be helped because some things just aren't going to be cracked that easily.

(Still, it is occasionally frustrating when I think about how active I am, and I realize I've only touched one request in the past two or three days. I'm not complaining: It's just that I sometimes get this bug up my spine that tells me that I should be working faster, so I do, but then I grow careless and have to slow down again ;))

Occasionally, I run into something weird, poke at it a bit, leave it alone, and then come back days later and figure out the basic problem very quickly. However, the thing is that in between the time I left it alone and the time I come back, I've been exposed to things that are tangentially related, and those things-in-between are usually what lead my mind in the right direction. Either that, or it's been there in the back of my mind. So even though the total time I spend directly focused on the request may be relatively short, everything in between is necessary.

^This is the only way I have to stave off guilt when understanding hits me and I realize just how obvious things should have been before. (And yes, I know how silly it is to feel guilt over having completed something. Perhaps it's not guilt, but is more closely related to chagrin?)

Back to my original point, complicated issues take time and effort to figure out. People get frustrated all around when a problem takes longer to resolve than expected, and it's understandable -- so that makes it doubly pleasurable to have a request where the user is very patient about waiting, and very gracious with her thanks.

(I will take heartfelt thanks over points any day ^____^ This is an awesome start to the weekend.)

And just to clarify, the request above was not one of those where I poked at it sporadically until inspiration came. This involved digging through things which I knew nothing about until this week (last week?) so I feel really good that it ended so happily.