Alas, I got sort of bored with the politics.... good thing it only has eleven more months to play out. There wasnt much more to say other than McCain seems sort of broken by the whole process. And I was also very sad to figure out Ron Paul, who talks like someone that actually understands individual rights, is an anti-choice candidate looking to reverse Roe v. Wade. It is hard to campaign on individual rights while looking to trounce them.

What is more important and pressing was this: "Perl: is there nothing you cannot do?"

I have been looking to automate some fetching of some rather ugly web pages. Normally, this hasnt been a problem in the past, but the verizon pages seem to:

• want a whole host of cookies
• want to do https
• want to do html forms
• wants specific browser user agents
• wants to do javascript

I was pretty much able to do most of that on my own with something cobbled together with wget, but something was making it puke... then all of a sudden I found WWW::Mechanize. I just gotta say this library is totally sweet. It makes scripting yourself into a fake web browser a breeze.

So now I can graph my actual usage against verizon's silly monthly quotas. Yes, it always comes down to graphs.