The Cambridge Cheese Company was out of baguettes. No sandwiches.

Not since I was ten years old, backpacked down Mount Algonquin in upstate New York, and arrived at the ranger station to be told "We only have the minestrone on Mondays. We don't normally serve food here," have I been so disappointed that a food item was unavailable. 21 years later, I turned sullenly away from a case filled with a wonderful assortment of rich European cheeses and muttered to myself "We only have the minestrone on Monday." (I should have been muttering "stupid effing Weight Watchers!" but in my low blood sugar delirium, I blamed the messenger.)

We ended up going to another deli where Susan and I each got turkey sandwiches that we estimated were worth 10 points. But Matt just couldn't let go of the Brie idea. He ordered a Brie sandwich. They didn't have sun dried tomatoes, so he substituted. With prosciutto. We estimated his sandwich at 15 points with its generous load of Brie, but with his massive point savings, he could afford it easily. Susan and I watched jealously as Brie oozed from the edges of his sandwich with each bite.

Cambridge is a college town, and there is an area of technology industry to the north of it. It has a Borders with a HUGE section of computer books. (I was surprised that it was bigger than the corresponding section of the Borders in Emeryville, CA, home to Pixar and a handful of struggling dot com holdouts.) I browsed for a long time while Matt and Susan each consumed two points of skinny-half-caramel-lattes from the Starbucks in the Borders (who's the colony now, b*tch!). I decided that I still had way too much undigested reference material at home to justify buying anything. Besides, I'd realized from the first few days that I was so impressively ignorant that I didn't even know what I should buy. This was made all the more clear when, while leafing through a CGI book, it became obvious that I had just assumed #!/local/bin/perl would allow my Perl script to run. Note to self: ask Prodigy a bunch of stuff about using their server. Do they have a Perl interpreter? Where does it live? Can Schmoe User use it?

For Weight Watchers dinner, Matt made spinach soup with gnocchi. The gnocchi were about the same point value per unit weight as the rice, so we had to have modest servings. We had run out of the Healthy Choice ice cream, our evening standby, so we popped some corn to eat as we watched our movie. The popcorn, not surprisingly, didn't provide the sweet dairy fix that we had grown to expect. Susan went back to use her paltry bank on some low fat yogurt, the poor sack. Matt decided to have the last slice of his birthday ice cream pie, a left over from a golden culinary era before Weight Watchers. He didn't want to spend more than six points because he was still fixated on reaping the Holy Grail of his week long banking effort: a Sunday night cheese plate. Susan and I agreed to let him have his pie for six points; it was his birthday cake, after all. He felt a bit guilty, so instead of a yogurt, I took a bit from the edge of his slice and counted it for two points. I was almost shaking with anticipation, but as I brought my plate close to my face and closed my eyes to bask in the cool presence of the ice cream pie, I accidentally breathed it in. Two points consumed. Two points of real ice cream with butter and cookie crumb crust is nothing.

In the evening, I leafed through my ASP book a bit and realized that a Windows NT server may not have any traditional CGI stuff at all. It could instead have only ISAPI applications running within IIS. (If I understood correctly.) Gotta ask Prodigy some questions!

My biggest epiphany came as I went to bed. I hadn't done anything with ZBServer because it seemed that somehow my web pages were working together on my machine. An href to another HTML file on my hard drive always brought up the the proper page. Why, then, couldn't I do anything with GETs and POSTs? As I was drifting off to sleep, http:// floated through my mind. Href="C:\my_stupid_file" doesn't do any HTTP stuff. It does Windows stuff. There wasn't, I decided (without verifying through any documentation), any "built in HTTP processor" in a basic installation of Windows 95.

Okay, so, if I wanted to test my forms and such on my machine, I needed a way to at least process HTTP requests and probably something to execute CGI scripts. That's what a server does! Aha! So, the next question was, is it possible to set up and run a server application without getting an IP address, designating the ports, and doing whatever one does to set up a server? If I had to deal with that overhead, I probably wouldn't make any quick progress while limited to expensive 56k dial-up service in England. What I thought I needed was a web server emulator. I resolved to find one in the morning.