Memorial Park, Triple Coupons, App Engine, TwitVim
This evening, I visited Uncle's Memorial Cache. It is in the woods of Memorial Park in Oradell, just a short hop (and a 35-cent toll) down the Parkway. Then I went to the Chinese supermarket in River Edge to get a boxed dinner.
Later in the evening, since it's a triple-coupon week and since I'd already sorted out my coupons the night before, I went to A&P to see what I could get. It's actually harder to bag the big discounts now. Coupons are for brand-name items and maybe I've been out of the loop for a while, but that stuff is expensive! Even so, I got $35.90 in groceries for $14.67 and I do now have enough of most items to last well into next week.
Last night, after watching their Campfire One video, I snagged a Google App Engine invitation. Not sure what I would do with it yet. I suppose the main draws are that you can run your web app on Google's dime, and storage and scalability become Google's problems, at least until your app hits the free account limits. One downside, for now, is they only support the Python language and I haven't touched Python in many years. I don't think it'll take too long to relearn, or I could be lazy and wait for App Engine to support Perl.
There was also a bit of hype on the part of Google. They claimed that only the first 10,000 developers would be able to register. Just a short time after midnight, the signup page looked like they had already run out of registration spots, but I put my Google account on the waiting list and got in an hour later. Some Web 2.0 bloggers were still able to register for App Engine as late as this morning, so the "preview release" is really not such an exclusive club.
I did a lot of work on TwitVim, the Vim Twitter plugin, today. I haven't posted the newest version yet because I still have one or two features to add and I need to update the help documentation, but here's a preview screenshot:
TwitVim used to be a post-only plugin, so what I added today was the top half of the screen, i.e. the timeline view. As you can see, items like user names, @-replies, and URLs are highlighted automatically. There are a few other things I want to try to make the timeline easier to read, but this setup already feels like a usable client.
So why use Twitter in Vim?
One reason would be Vim itself. It's a powerful text editor and all of its features, e.g. macros, keyword completion, regular expression searches, are available to you when you write tweets.
Another reason I thought of earlier today is since Vim works just as well in a console/terminal window as it does in a GUI window, a Vim Twitter client would allow you to use Twitter in text mode over telnet or ssh. I probably won't do that myself since 99% of the time I use Vim is on a Windows box anyway, but it may be useful to some folks.
A third reason would be because I'm hardcore. :)