Jay and Alex were here this week. I’m exactly clear on the situation, but it’s something like this: they’re going to be doing development work, but not necessarily Perl stuff, so they’re just minding the shop until Perl people are brought in. Unless, that is, Perl is dropped and no Perl people are brought in. Time will tell!

I spent today running through a lot of the non-rjbs Perl code with Jay, today. Mostly we looked at huge, scary programs written by and for the engineers, and also at the mostly sane characterization code. My belief now is that the Perl I wrote will be discarded or replaced with VB and Access. I think this may well be good for IQE. They can be one big happy Microsoft family, and they can quickly implement good-enough solutions that they’ll never need to extend in the ways they previously demanded.

My hands are hurting quite a lot, again, lately, so I’ll keep this brief.

Today, I was thinking about my long-delayed plan to reimplement the Easterbrooks’ “Catholic Calendar” page, and I got to thinking I should start with the easy bit, the daily Bible readings. I make a little WWW::Mechanize script to TokeParse the daily readings at usccb.org. Their HTML isn’t really super-semantic, though, and I already see some future dates where they do odd things, and while I can handle the special cases, I thought I might as well ask them to be more standardized.

At work, I’m trying to be busy and productive, but it’s hard for a few reasons. I know I can’t finish the current project, so I’m trying to deal with some edge cases, but mostly to write documentation. I’ve written a number of documents for my theoretical successor describing at a glance the state of various projects. Now I’m trying to find all the weird little things I tend to take care of now and then and document those. I’ve called on the staff to let me know what weird things I do, but response so far as been so-so. (I was reminded of a few weird things, though, so that was good.) I’m not too worried, since I imagine that things I forget may end up becoming consulting visits.

Doctor Girlfriend died today at exactly one o’clock.

My job has provided me with a phone for the past few years. It’s sort of a piece of crap. It’s a Motorola i90c, one of the Nextel PTT phones. It’s gigantic and has a really lousy set of features, like most of the Nextel phones. It has a lousy calendar and lousy memopad. It has a stupid Java environment and a stupid little set of network services.

About a week ago, I gave up all hope that our baby guinea pig was a girl. We named him Doctor Girlfriend, anyway.

Jen and Frank’s wedding was really nice. It was on a warm, super-windy beach in Pensacola. The ceremony was really short, but pleasant, fun, and relaxed. The groomsmen all wore Hawaiian shirts and the bridesmaids were all barefoot. It was nice.

Well, after about four and a half years, I am leaving IQE. That’s a pretty impressive stint, I think, for a job I started as a temp. I was hired to make Excel charts, and I ended up sticking around to write a lot of Perl. I had a lot of good time and a lot of bad times, but finally I just needed to get out of there. I think my enthusiasm was gradually ground down to a point from which I’m not sure it could’ve recovered, and I feel that’s it’s better for me to go, now, than to try and stay.