I haven’t been feeling like blogging lately. In November, my mother, the woman who taught me how to program and was for decades my default person to ask complex SQL questions, went into the hospital because she was having trouble breathing. In early January, she died.

I’ve been struggling to deal with my feelings about this, but one of the things that I knew deep in my heart is that she wanted me to return to Perl blogging. If for no other reason than to honor her…

And with the first task being “circular”, I couldn’t help think about Joni Mitchell’s Circle Game. My mother loved folk music, too.

So let’s circle round to Perl Weekly Challenge 316.

I’m not really feeling music recently. I’m not feeling much of anything, but I need to do the challenge. So here’s Perl Weekly Challenge 296.

I was able to work on task 1 on Monday, but I haven’t been able to focus since. Here’s three solutions for task 1 of Perl Weekly Challenge 294.

Don’t wanna discuss it
Think it’s time for a change
You may get disgusted
Start thinking that I’m strange

I mean, I guess I am strange for always wanting to include music in the weekly challenge, but with a first challenge like this, how could I not link to Van Morrison’s Domino.

There’s no need for argument in Perl Weekly Challenge 293.

You didn’t know what the Weekly Challenge was / Until you met a hacker on a Github bus / I got there in the nick of time / Before he got his code across your git commit line…

Yeah, yeah, it’s a stretch, but it’s an excuse to pull out Ian Hunter’s Once Bitten, Twice Shy (yes, Ian Hunter).

So you got the rhythm, you got the speed, you got Perl Weekly Challenge 292.

(sorry I’m only doing one challenge this week; it’s been a rough week)

This week’s Perl Weekly Challenge task 2 is about poker hands, so the musical theme this week has to be Kenny Rogers’ The Gambler.

So ante up and let’s deal out for Perl Weekly Challenge 291.

When I think about the second task and how it jumbled words, my mind immediately went to Lewis Carroll, and that meant that tonight’s musical theme needed to be Jefferson Airplane’s White Rabbit.

So let’s feed your head on Perl Weekly Challenge 289!

So, when someone mentions palindromes, my mind immediately jumps to my favorite book on mathematics, algorithms, music, art, and philosophy: Gödel, Escher, Bach by Douglas Hofstadter. This was the book that introduced me to the idea of a musical palindrome, a piece of music that sounds the same played forwards and backwards, and the author cites J.S. Bach’s Crab Canon as an example.

This week the peek into my brain comes via the first task, Strong Password. Immediately, I thought of David Wilcox’s, Strong Chemistry. Likening passwords to the emotional pull of an ex-lover is probably strange, but, hey, I never claimed to be normal.

With the musical setting out of the way, let’s dive right into Perl Weekly Challenge 287.