Anyway, the point was to learn something. I'd only been working on The Project for a week and already I had learned to spell 'parallel' correctly. It didn't really matter if I ever completed an end to end description of telecom. But after spending a day comparing black tie parties to HTTP, I was disappointed that the protocols page had to get posted when it was still so far from where I wanted it to be.

I heard back from Prodigy, in the form of their Personal Web Pages support guy, Jeffrey. Jeffrey told me what I expected: Prodigy would not allow me to upload executable scripts onto their servers. So much for experimenting with my newly stolen destructive_worm.pl script. I'd just have to download a Perl interpreter and try it out on my machine.

Actually, thanks to "Localhost Jim's" advice, I wouldn't need Prodigy's server to run server-side experiments. On the down side, I wouldn't be able to show them off on the public website. ("See, this is how I triggered the script that emailed obscenities to everyone in my address book and then reformatted my hard drive! Click here to try it!")

But Jeffrey tries to take care of his peeps. He created a CGI script that grabs information from an HTTP POST and sends it in an email. He has a page that shows Prodigy users how they can use it to experiment with forms. So if I got off my extremely industrious butt, I could figure out how to let people send me junk email in new ways. ("You've got 104 new messages. 103 of them say 'I clicked Daniel's button!' One of them is a coupon from Amazon.")

"Broken Link Nick" sent me another email today recommending that I run my pages through an HTML validator or tidy utility, a link checker, and a spell checker. What-EVER! If he neds a spell checker, I'll let him use one.

Weight Watchers meal this night was Eggplant and Zucchini Blob over pasta. I made a chunky blob rather than a sauce because, as per usual, Susan had to eat a free dinner and wouldn't be having any pasta. She had three and a half points left, but she wanted to save them to spend on four points of Healthy Choice Ice Cream.

Matt has a very nifty cheese grater that grates cheese into very thin ribbons. I grated one point's worth of Parmesan for each of us, but it was hard to measure thirds of an ounce on the scale. When I looked at the remaining chunk of Parmesan, I suspected that I had violated the law of conservation of matter again. We each had VERY large one point piles of fluffy Parmesan on our plates. I was thinking of having Susan drive me into Cambridge with the scale so I could demonstrate my cheese division for Stephen Hawking. ("Did you see that, Professor Hawking? There are four fewer ounces of cheese than when we began! What are you chewing?")

Susan and I bounced around an interesting Weight Watchers idea this day. We were eating apples pretty often as a one point snacks, and had just reloaded the fruit bowl with fifteen new apples. There were two apples already in the bowl that were getting old, one Fuji and one Golden Delicious. She set them aside so that we would remember to eat them first.

The problem was the Golden Delicious. It was a small apple. It wasn't minuscule, but, when set next to the Fuji, it was noticeably smaller. If all apples counted as one point, why on Earth would one of us eat the aging runt apple?

The idea hit us both at the same time: discount point rack. Why not take food that was losing its desirability (older fruit, stale light bread, six day old leftovers) and discount their point values? That way, we wouldn't waste anything, and the extra couple of points wouldn't really set us back in the big picture. It seemed brilliant. But quickly, we foresaw a world of intentional over-buying, a world where we would make towering piles of Low Fat Tuna Melts, tuck them in the back of the fridge, and then eat ourselves into the hospital four days later.

Besides, why would Susan need a discount point rack for older food when she was going to DISCOUNT HER FRESH ICE CREAM THAT NIGHT?! But I didn't say anything. (And I ate the small apple, too.)