September 18, 2001

Choosing jobs, Perl on Win32

Work situation changing rapidly. $COMPANY for which I do most of my consulting work is teetering. I'm doing a project for a local company here (last minute rush to try and build a web app that uses both mysql and DB2 on AS/400 to do medical claims/referrals processing) that might turn into something permanent. Positives: use OpenInteract, work for a single company and see results of projects, become more integrated with project development, maybe help define a new team, decent money (I think). Negatives: in the suburbs, potential dicey office politics, unsure about company status, working by myself again (at least for a time).

Being in the suburbs is a major downer for me. Talking with Barb about it, I realized I've never really had a job with a traditional 30-60 minute commute in a car. It's either public transport or the roll-out-of-bed commute.

Forced to play around with Perl on Win32. With ActiveState and Visual C++ installed, non-PPM'd, non-pureperl modules can actually compile and get installed from the CPAN shell. How cool is that! And creating a PPD file (used in ActiveState's PPM installer/manager) is pretty simple too -- I found a mailing list posting where Ingy specified how to do it, built one and emailed it to the author of Class::Date so maybe he'd post it on his site for Win32 refugees installing OI.

(Originally posted elsewhere)

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