I've got no time to code Perl (or anything else)

I need a less demanding job.

One that pays what I'm getting paid, but lets me work less.

Yeah, right.

Funny, but twenty years ago, before I had a house and a family, I still didn't feel like coding once I got home from work. I suspect the reason for this is that the job sucks all the code out of me during the day, leaving my brain tired and ready for downtime.

I wish it weren't so.

The only solution is to work smarter, both at work and at home. To develop programming tools which will build a foundation upon which I can do what I want. Tools that can be written modularly, a little bit at a time. Bottom-up programming.

Perl, Javascript, and Traveller

For a couple years I've had a suite of Javascript pages for building stuff for Traveller, 5th edition. They use Traveller's new rules for stacking attributes onto a base item, resulting in myriads of armor, weapons, vehicles and smallcraft.

Very recently, I added a backend Perl component which will email the results to you.  So say you define a fast civilian grav truck which can reach orbit on your iPad.  Just enter your email address and it will email the results to you.

I wrote that bit because I wanted to use my scripts from my iPad, and didn't want to rely on cut-and-paste.

A link to the scripts is here: http://eaglestone.pocketempires.com/scripts/armormaker.html

Bioinformatics and Perl

In order to do bioinformatics programming, you have to know a LOT about genetics.  You have to know the terminology and cell, uh, let's call it 'mechanics' for now, until I know what the official Latin-based fourteen-syllable word really is.

You also have to know Perl.

I know Perl.  Maybe I can learn the language of medical science.  Maybe I can help.

Maybe it will help improve the standard of living for people with special needs.

If you had told me back in 1994 that learning Perl might aid research that could help my daughter, I would have laughed. Perl was a fun hobby. It helped me get write scripts that got work done faster so that I could spend more time writing scripts for Traveller. It was not really practical in a larger sense.