Iron Man challenge accepted!

A week or so ago, Matt S. Trout declared an Iron Man blogging challenge (rant, NSFW).  A less inflammatory version was posted on the Enlightened Perl site.  In short -- the goal is to blog about Perl with a rolling frequency of 4 posts every 32 days and no more than 10 days between posts.

I accept!

Now... to write something about Perl other than a meta-post about the contest to write about Perl.

N.B. I set up this blog before I heard about the challenge, but I'll use the challenge for motivation.