So, some time ago I ranted about how happy I was with my Radio RJBS playlists. Basically, I have a playlist that’s always eight hours of three-star music and sixteen hours of four- or five-star music. It’s all “regular music,” which by my definition is something like “not a musical, not noise, not spoken word, not classical.” (My “Classical” genre, I admit, is really more like “music composed before 1900.”) All the songs are selected by recency of last playing: less recently played songs are chosen over more recently played songs.

I really do love my home town, but today it has bugged me.

I decided that my next book would be Orthodoxy. I started in on it ages ago, while we waited for Krispy Kreme to turn on their “hot” sign. (They never did.) The book didn’t really keep my interest, but it’s fairly short, and I want to read it so I can tell my dad why I disagree with it. I mean, I may not be but a few dozen pages into it, but it seems pretty clear from the first few pages that I will disagree with it.

Today wasn’t my best day for coding. On the bus in I got password recovery on Rubric working. That is, if you forget your password you can jump through some hoops to get a new one. It’s not quite working yet, though, and I didn’t feel like working on it this evening. Frankly, it’s not a feature I care about much, as I can just update the database. Some other users, though, want to be able to do this, and it seems like a useful request. It’s at least given me some reasons to do some refactoring (and some work on Rubric, in general), and that’s good.

I’ve been making a nice little dent in my reading list, lately, on account of my time on the bus. Today I finished Eats, Shoots & Leaves. Tomorrow I’ll have to take something else to start, and I’m not super-anxious to spend a lot of time on my current set of books. I think I’ll try to finish Orthodoxy, next.

My first week at the new job went well, I think, although it’s hard to say. It’s been so long since I had a first week that I don’t remember how they’re supposed to go. I felt much less out of it on Friday, though, than on Monday. A lot of stupid little things conspired to make me feel weirder than usual, like emacs showing up all over the place as a default editor, or strange default bindings in zsh. I need to make my CVS’d zshrc more explicit!

Today was my first day at pobox! It was a short day, work-wise, as I basically worked from noon to five. For most of the next two weeks, or so, I’ll be working more like nine to five, which should be good. It should, that is, provide more knowledge-acquisition time.

I should really be trying to uber-prep for the new job tomorrow, but instead I am making the most of my weekend of unemployment.

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.