This is not a coherent, reflective look back. This is a braindump.

Today was draining, but I think it was also good and productive.

Today was the first day of work on the Oslo QA Hackathon. Lots of stuff went on, and the small fraction I was able to witness was very exciting. TAP seems to be getting a lot of great discussion, and not only are great feature ideas being fleshed out, many of them are then being put aside for thought before being blindly implemented. This is nothing but good.

I haven’t been to OSCON since 2005. It kept getting less interesting without getting less expensive. This year, though, OSCON looks really good – and I’m not just saying that because I’ll be giving my Perl 5.10 talk. There are a lot of talks, both Perl and otherwise, that look really interesting. I’m glad to see that Perl is so well represented this year, with talks about new Perl systems that I know can really improve Perl software development.

A few months ago, Salve Nilsen was asking #perl-qa about interest in a QA and testing hackathon in Oslo. I thought this sounded like a great idea and volunteered a bunch of names of people who I thought would be interested (or at least interesting). I humbly humbly put my own name in that list, and as it turned out, I got connected with a sponsor and I’ll be headed to the Oslo QA Hackathon this week. I’m on ABC Startsiden’s dime. If you haven’t heard of them, you’re not Norwegian. They’re (from my understanding) the most popular site in Norway.

After having this task languish in my todo for years, at least, I have finally reduced my goal to the important 90% and applied some JFDI.

Lately, every time I’m done with work and have some time in which I could be getting things done, I find myself staring at my terminal doing nothing, or at least nothing productive. I’ve barely gotten anything off of my to do list for a few weeks, especially a number of code-related things that I really wanted to have finished weeks or months ago.

The Time Capsule from Apple has been a source of grumbling from me ever since it was announced. I was annoyed that I couldn’t use my existing Airport (even though I have an ancient model that doesn’t do drive sharing). I was annoyed that if I got a Time Capsule, Gloria couldn’t benefit from it because her iBook can’t run Leopard. I was annoyed because I can’t even really benefit from the 802.11n networking on my first-rev MacBook. My TiVo prevents me from using WPA. Grumble, grumble, grumble.

Meteos is a “puzzle” game for the DS. I really don’t like the use of the word “puzzle” to describe the genre of games like Puzzle Quest and Tetris and Meteos, because they’re not so much puzzles, to me, as just games. That’s not the point, though.

I picked up Animal Crossing for the DS pretty soon after getting a DS. It was pretty good, but there were just too many things going against me enjoying it. It wasn’t on a shared system that was sitting around the house (read: the GameCube), so Gloria and I didn’t share a village, which had been one of the fun things of the GCN version. It was just too much a rehash of the GameCube version, really, to enjoy it much more. Also, Animal Crossing is a great game to sit down and play for an hour or three, sort of zoning out and running erands or reorganizing furniture. The DS is much better for games you can play for short bursts. You can do that with Animal Crossing, but it feels weird to close the DS while in the middle of playing a game that takes place in real time.