I had two big complaints with Parallels that led me to consider dropping $80 on VMWare Fusion instead of, say, beer. First, it was incredibly slow and resource hungry, and I’d have to quit almost everything to run my Win32 virt. At the very least, I’d have to quit Firefox, which was really annoying. Secondly, the damned taskbar was never visible. Every time I booted, and more, I’d have to go to Start, Settings, Taskbar and hide, apply, show, apply. Augh!

Ugh! Remember that dream I had about going to work at a Windows shop? I don’t know, man. I don’t know.

My previous complaint is really not a big deal, I think. I think I’ve even given up immediate junking for that. However…

Last night, I dreamed that I quit my job to return to work at my previous employer. There would be lots of ups and downs to this, the two most important of which would be that I’d be closer to home and that I’d be developing in Visual Studio and its suite of languages. I got to my office, and it was pretty high-tech. I don’t remember just why, but the computer was running some evolved version of Windows that looked sort of Blackbox-y. (I used to run Blackbox on Win32, there.) My fellow developers and I shared a nice office space.

Sometimes, when I start hanging out in a new IRC channel, or spend some time with programmers I’ve only talked to on mailing lists, I hear people make new cutting remarks about other widely respected programmers. Often, the new group will have some well-established group opinion about someone I respect, and that opinion will not be entirely flattering. This is always a strange experience. I’m usually a bit put off by nasty talk about anybody, especially people whose work I respect. Then again, the criticism is often reasoned and makes me see people in a new light that helps me more critically assess their work and their claims.

A few months ago, I spend a few days (yes, days) rewriting an extremely complex set of procmail programs into modern Perl. Replacing procmail with Moose? Priceless.

Bryan posted his most played tracks to his blog. I used to publish a daily log of what tracks I’d played in iTunes, but its records bugged me and I gave up on it. Still, it seemed like very slightly entertaining information to share. For example, Bryan listened to The District Sleeps Alone about three times as often as the next contender. Either he needs to obsess less or use smart playlists more!

I “run” the local Perl Mongers. All that really means it that I’m responsible for sending out the “okay, remember: we’re going to McGrady’s next week!” email.

Okay, I’m being overly dramatic. MobileMe has been mostly okay to me. It’s nice that it syncs things, and I guess having them pushed over the air is kind of neat. It doesn’t really excite me. I dumped a crapload of my files onto my iDisk and maybe some day that will pay off.

Despite all my attempts to convince myself that it was a bad idea and not needed (I mean, I even tried to solve the problem with XML), I have found myself working on a schema and data validation system.