Hartford, Hereford and Hampshire

It's raining here, but there's no wind to speak of. I've heard nothing from my Cape Cod client, and the last I heard from Block Island was they were shooing the tourists off the island in anticipation of food shortages; evidently rough seas are going to keep the ferries from running for some time.

I feel very tired; I don't know if it's the weather, the crap I've been breathing in the air these past few days, or if I might be coming down with something.

I spent most of today working on an old database project; a Perl CGI script that manages a MySQL music library catalog. The thing is, the new data's full of foreign names, everything from French to Estonian, with all sorts of non-ASCII characters in them, and getting the script to play nice with them is not trivial. It turns out that each table in the database, the Perl script, the connection to the database, the CGI module, and the Web pages all have their own default character sets, and even if they are all set to UTF-8, I still have to explicitly encode every bit of data written to the database in order for it to work. Oddly, it would work with Cyrillic characters out of the box, but not with a name like Sørensen.

My housemate's Zwergpinscher has been unusually quiet today. He's just hopped up onto the couch and curled up against me.